I have been tied up with music for about as long as I can remember. By the time I was four I was picking out little tunes my mother played on the reed organ in the living-room. ↗
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level. ↗
My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage. ↗