It was one of the most sensible resolutions I have ever made.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 139.

Extracurricular life was enjoyable enough. The prefab didn’t last long: after a term or two I was moved into a funny little rickety cottage in the back quad, opposite the Library, where I had two rooms of my own which I loved and which were far better for entertaining friends and—a growing passion—making and listening to music. The year 1950 saw the introduction of the vinyl Long-Playing Record—which had a far greater impact than the later tape cassette or the CD, freeing one as it did from the drudgery of changing those heavy, fragile 78 rpm records every three or four minutes, endlessly sharpening or renewing the needles. The twelve inch classical LPs were expensive—thirty-nine shillings and sixpence each—which meant that one treasured them, playing them again and again. It was at Oxford more than anywhere else that I got to know the classical repertoire; but I never ventured very far outside it. Isaiah once confessed to me that he drew the line at a 1900 birth date; to composers born before then he was delighted to listen, those born afterwards bored him to death. I am prepared to make an exception for Benjamin Britten—who was born in 1913—but I otherwise feel much the same. For years I tried, spending countless hours at concerts of modern music and a small fortune on records, always hoping that the curtain would lift; but it never did, and on my fiftieth birthday I decided to give up. After all, there was far more music of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries that I could hope to enjoy in my lifetime; why waste any more time and money on that of the twentieth? It was one of the most sensible resolutions I have ever made.