Although I quickly found classical music boring and the violin passé, I enjoyed learning about things like sharps and flats and quarter notes. And listening to the classical music we performed and the records our music teacher played helped me form, by the end of sixth grade, a theory of musical history that spanned the ages. It went something like this: Until rock ‘n’ roll came around, people all over the planet labored to create good music, and while all of them failed to produce anything exciting, credit should be given to all the musicians who preceded rock ‘n’ roll. After all, they made sure that music continued to exist until, finally, in the late ’60s, immortal musical icons like the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix delivered full-scale sonic annihilation, which was the apex of civilization. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it quite like that, but basically that was what I thought.