It was an accident.

I remember the day my daughter Sofia came home from the nursery school she attended and told me that her teacher played a guitar during song time.“I want to play guitar,” she said. She was 4. I didn’t listen.

Like a lot of us, monkeys generally prefer a Russian lullaby to German techno music. But given a choice between music and silence, the apes opt for quiet. It seems their brains simply aren’t wired to enjoy music or pay it much mind.

“They don’t care about it,” said Vinod Menon, the noted Stanford neuroscientist who’s deeply engaged in research on music and the brain.

San Domenico School’s Virtuoso Program, which will travel from its San Anselmo home to San Francisco for a showcase program here on March 29, goes back to Venetian girls’ orphanages in the 17th century. That, at least, is what the program’s founder, Faith France, told me many years ago. She was teaching music at San Domenico, a small independent school in Marin (which originally opened in Monterey in 1850), when she had an epiphany while visiting Venice.

What do an archaeologist, a lawyer, and a black belt in jujitsu have in common? They may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but in reality they're a sampling of the Bay Area's choristers.

On the day my lifelong infatuation with classical radio died, I hardly realized it would be revived by the Internet just a year later and become better than ever — so exciting that my CDs are quickly becoming superfluous, forgotten on their dusty shelves. Studio recordings simply can't compare to the magnetism of the great live performances on Internet radio. (See a list of recommended stations, below.) When I go to a recordings store these days I find myself going through the motions.