“I believe it’s possible for someone with no formal musical education to be thrilled by even the most dense and supposedly inaccessible music. I have a fantasy in which I lock one of my best childhood friends – an imaginative and compassionate person who unfortunately has no interest in classical music – in a closet with nothing but a bag of sandwiches and a recording of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet, forcing her to listen to it over and over. It might take a while, but I’m certain that she would emerge, blinking in the light, metamorphosed.”  — Caeli Smith

During her spring break, Caeli wrote an essay about what it takes to love classical music. It was originally for her blog, The Sound Post. It was just the perfect length for a newspaper opinion piece, so I suggested she send it to the Philadelphia Inquirer– to get a larger audience for her message. Here it is, in today’s paper.