Hello all, I'm very glad to see the forum's mended and I can finally sign up
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I haven't been a great fan of Classical Music as presented by TV and radio, which could be in part due to their rather limited repertoire - e.g. Holst's
The Planet Mars, Vivaldi's
One Season and
The Star Wars Theme 
. I've mostly been listening to the more experimental types of rock, but in 2016 while looking into the rock music of 50 years previously and finding very little of interest, I started wondering what else would have been available at the time and actually went as far as to check out a couple of composers claimed as influences by rock groups - Stockhausen and Ligeti - which led to a pair of very enlightening compilation CDs. To my great surprise I discovered a lot of the sounds and techniques I enjoyed had been used by classical composers back into at least the 1950s, and also realised that "Classical Music" is not a particular sound but rather
anything produced by composers trained in classical music. Since then I've been exploring a bit further and my favourites so far have been two large box sets of Pierre Henry, a couple of CDs of Ligeti, a few of Xenakis' electronically processed works and a complete works of (the not very prolific) Varese. Within the last month I've stumbled across
The Avant Garde Project - a large collection of free downloads on archive.org - and have so far been listening to several compilations of 1950s-70s electronic music, a bit more Stockhausen and Xenakis, and am just starting to work through it all from the beginning. I had to give Varese a few listens but I now quite like nearly all the orchestral and operatic works, not just the electronic productions, so am feeling quite hopeful that a whole overlooked world of music could be out there waiting for me to wander through at leisure
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