ABSTRACT
Many of the classical music performers grew up spending years apprenticing with master musicians, feeding an appetite for music making that was gloriously insatiable. They quickly grew to relish great artists and works from the past few centuries in classical music and the past century or so in jazz. The attraction was as inevitable as it was natural. Those two eras, after all, coincided with the development of extraordinary compositional and performance technique and produced musical works (and performances) that revealed moments of profound splendor and brilliance. The fact that the increasing virtuosity and complexity of the music genres coincided with their slowly decreasing popularity within the general public this past century did not seem so much a fault of the music as a testament to its increasing sophistication.
