WGBH: Music Unfiltered

If it sounds like the music you love, then it sounds like WGBH. As a major presenter of music in New England and the rest of the world, WGBH is dedicated to bringing you your music in its purest, unfilered form — without commercial interruption.


Submit your story, and you’ll be entered to win:

• $100 discount off new membership to Zipcar
• Season Pass of Culture — tickets to musical and cultural events around Boston*. In November, WGBH Radio hosts will feature a selection of your stories and music on air!

We asked some WGBH Radio hosts and correspondents to tell us about a piece of music that made them fall in love with music.

Maria Hinojosa
Host, Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One
"I first started to appreciate music Sunday mornings at home when my dad would turn up mariachi and the Trio Los Panchos. But, at the same time, I was listening to Motown, the Jackson Five, and Marvin Gaye, and my sister was listening to the Beatles. It was a jumble, but in a good way! I learned to love all kinds of music. I can't even say that I have a favorite musical artist because that would limit me. Music is all about freedom."

Cathy Fuller
Host, Classical Music
"When I was very young, I remember feeling that Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit was like magic seeping out the doors of the piano room. It’s an incredibly virtuosic piece in that it makes the piano sound like something completely different. You can’t hear the hammers, you can’t hear the mechanisms of the piano, and the piece just has this eerily beautiful sparkle."

Ming Tsai
Host and executive producer, Simply Ming
"Blues -- it's the heart and soul of all music. Dear Mr. Fantasy by Traffic reminds me of my youth. It always puts me in a good mood, and I can listen to it again and again"

Marco Werman
Host, The World
"I fell in love with jazz with an album that my parents had lying around by Cannonball Adderley, called Them Dirty Blues. First, I heard it as blues, and then as it started to wash over me, I heard jazz and improvisation. Up to that point, I think I was only paying attention to melody. I was 7 or 8 at the time. When I finally had my own record player, it was the first LP my mom gave me, and I was so psyched. To this day I still play this album, and I still turn people on to it."

Brian O'Donovan
Host, A Celtic Sojourn
"The piece of music that made me fall in love with classical music, but really made me fall in love with music in general, was the Little Fugue in G minor by Bach. When I heard it in the ’60s on television in Ireland, I was transfixed. It seemed to me that the piece ran away with itself and fed back on itself in intriguing ways, attracting me into the whorls and complexities that I didn’t understand at the time, but in ways I remembered afterward with a lot of affection."

Nate Ball
Host, Design Squad
"I'm pretty sure it was Jesus Christ Superstar, which I would listen to as a 4-year-old while trying to break dance. When I got a little older, it was listening to funk and jazz that kept me practicing piano -- I loved playing classical, but hearing swing music was the first experience that made piano 'cool' to me."

Steve Schwartz 
Host, Jazz from Studio Four 
"For me, it was 'Earth Angel' by the Penguins when I was 15. This was a West Coast doo-wop group — only it wasn’t called doo-wop in those days, it was R&B. I heard the voices and the harmonies, and the music just seemed to speak to me."

*Prize package includes tickets to the Boston International Fine Art Show and performances by Boston Lyric Opera, the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Celebrity Series of Boston, Handel and Haydn Society, Huntington Theatre Co., Opera Boston, and others.

From our listeners

"I was a sophmore in high school in 1958 over at my friend's house. My family was working class, and I had never heard classical music in my life. My friend and I were up to no good in his cellar when I heard, loud and clear, this fantastic sound! "Dum dum dum dum." What is that, I exclaimed. "I don't know," was the reply, "my big brother Jim just got a new stereo set, and he's trying it out". Stereo was the newest thing at the time. In any event, we went upstairs and Jim explained that this was a symphony (No. 5) by Beethoven. We continued to listen until the end of the LP's side. Subsequently, Jim took John and me to see the Cleveland Symphony play Beethoven, and I have been a classical music lover ever since. We have season tickets to the ballet and take in chamber music events from time to time. I have a library of over 500 CDs. This was one of those events that one never forgets because of the major impact that it has had on your life." - Theodore in Georgetown, Massachusetts

"As a 7-year-old, I had a 78-rpm recording of the Waltz of the Flowers. I had no idea it was ballet music from a larger work. All I knew was that it was the most beautiful music I'd ever heard. I could see those flowers whirling and whirling. I wanted to be a ballerina and dance to the waltz forever. Since I had no toe shoes, I wore plastic glasses on my feet and danced away. Although a dancer wasn't born, a musician certainly was. But even now, when I hear this glorious music, I am a 7-year-old ballerina." - Kathy in Providence, Rhode Island

"It was 1997, and I had just completed two years in the Peace Corps, teaching English in the Russian provinces. I wanted to experience some beauty after two years in a grim and depressed post-Soviet place of concrete and rust, so I stopped over in Prague before I flew back to an uncertain future in Boston. I remember wandering around the lovely city with its Gothic spires and drifting into a church in the Old Town for a concert, feeling melancholy and restless, mourning the past, fearing the future. I had no idea what I was going to do in Boston. There was a quartet playing Dvorak's American Symphony, and I was only half-listening until the cello entered with that gorgeous and bittersweet note in the Lento section. It seized my heart and just summoned all that I was feeling in this cosmic and cathartic way, and I wept silently in the pew. Afterward, I felt comforted in a way. It was like the music delivered me from this emotional chaos that I was feeling. That piece will always be special to me." - Linda in Lynn, Massachusetts

"Though I've listened to classical music for many years, I'd never heard this piece. Hearing it for the first time touched my soul and moved me to tears, also a first. I felt so inspired by this piece and Bell's performance, that at the age of 48 I started learning to play the violin with the ultimate goal of playing this piece. That was eight years ago. Though I still have a long way to go to achieve this goal, playing the violin has opened a whole new dimension to my life. For example, I regularly play in a church orchestra, and this has introduced me to some wonderful people whom I would not have met without the violin." - Dave in Fishers, Indiana

"In my freshman year at New England Conservatory, I was required to to take a survey of Western music class. Coming from a jazz/rock bakground, much of the music was new to me, and the pieces ranged in their impact on me, mostly from boring to somewhat interesting. One day, we were assigned to listen to Ives ... from the opening seconds, I thought I had the wrong album. 'What was that?' I thought. It completely blew my mind, I had no idea what I had just heard ... so I listened again, and again, and spent the next few hours listening to it over and over ... at least 20 or more times that day, and many more the following days. That piece changed my entire outlook on art and music and was the reason that my career has gone in the direction it did ... from that moment, all I wanted to do was experimental music. After that moment of first hearing, everything was different — I knew the path and the tradition I had to follow." - Charles in Redding, Connecticut

Comments (1)

chris 10.23
I have a cardinal who wakes me up at 650 every morning .He is the brightest red imaginable. His tone is absolutely scarlet. His call and his songs reach into me and organize molecules. When i was six i walked what seemed many miles through the woods with my older sister to a nice old womans house for her piano lesson. I stood and listened for a while and the teacher taught me to do a glissando with the back of my thumb, jerry lee lewis style, then had me go out side and wait. This was my first musical experience. As i stood outside under the pines, the cardinal sang its song to me so clear and clean. It showed me pride and compassion. This was my second musical experience and i will never forget. From then on throughout my childhood my favorite color was red. I have since been through shades of jasper and orange and even grey for a while. But the cardinal is back with more lessons to give concerning blood and the inside of a pomegranate and a bright red guitar with which I make my humble living.