Save this story for later. When I was a music-obsessed kid, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, I could easily find radio and television shows that purported to explain how classical music worked. Karl Haas genially elucidated form and style on âAdventures in Good Music,â and Leonard Bernstein held forth on PBS about Beethoven. These were late-period examples of a genre known as music appreciation, which peaked in the thirties and forties, when Walter Damrosch, on NBC radio, invented ditzy ditties for the classicsââThis is / The sym-pho- nee / That Schu-bert wrote but nev-er fin-ished . . .ââand Aaron Copland had an unlikely best-seller, âWhat to Listen for in Music.â