I've had a bad attitude towards classical music pretty much all my life: cold, pretentious music completely lacking in spontaneity that was savoured by people who colonized the planet and invented capitalism.

The exception to my abhorrence of this music is the string quartet. The quartet features two violins, a viola and a cello, and up until Joe Haydn picked up his quill and staff paper in the 1700s the popular style featured the dominant sound of one of the instruments over the accompaniment of the others. Joe unified the players thereby inventing a cerebral yet engaging type of music that takes the listener deep inside its layers and magically reveals new subtleties on repeated listenings.

Made up of four movements of varying tempos and averaging twenty minutes apiece, really listening to and getting to know the eighty-plus quartets that Joe penned would be several years' work or a year's work if you never took the headphones off.

My tip is to start with the six quartets of Op. 76, especially the second one. This music is the soundtrack of walking in a forest on a moonless night, alone, with twigs snapping and owls hooting, but you don't feel scared. Instead a resilient spirit emboldens you that elastic strength we all need to sustain us in life twangs through you from your ears to your crotch.

Joe Haydn and Wolf Mozart jammed together at quartet parties; Joe gave it up that Wolf was a total musical genius. Wolf, who wrote twenty-three quartets, in turn, gave up potential patron loot by dedicating quartets No. 14-19 to Joe Haydn. Mozart's "Haydn quartets," as they're known, sound similar to Joe's stylistically. They are pure melodic liquid, but to be honest, they are less captivating. Wolf stuck with the pretty notes and pretty moods. Even No. 19, nicknamed "Dissonance," is only dissonant for the first thirty seconds, then it is just plain old pretty. Joe allowed himself to brood a little and this mood was carried further by Ludwig Beethoven, Joe's upstart pupil whose first six quartets were sold to a patron Joe was eyeing before Joe could get to him. You'll find that Ludwig's slow movements are the perfect music for watching snow fall on a windless day.

The above epigram by the jazz master himself, Charles Mingus, first inspired me to gamble on a string quartet record many Boxing Day sales ago. The lilting, plucking of the cello during the second movement of the ninth quartet still sounds incredibly modern in this era of getting your rocks off digitally. This is music for the story's climax: the escaped killer tiptoeing with a knife, the priest finally expressing his doubts in God's ability, the lovers letting the pancakes burn.

Ludwig's most famous quartets are his last, Nos. 12-16. They have a legendary reputation for being intensely spiritual and have been called his greatest work. My little box set has withstood thousands of listenings and I know there's still stuff in there I haven't heard yet.

A hundred years after Joe, Wolf, and Ludwig made their ruckus, Bela Bartok walked out of Hungary and into the string quartet arena. You take your life into your hands when you crank up any one of the six quartets he thought up. But if you can get past your initial shock and perhaps repulsion by this harsh, truly dissonant, skin crawling and aggressive music, you will find that hearing it is a totally exhilarating and absolutely thrilling experience like punk was when it was brand new. At the end of Bartok's fourth quartet, that forest Joe brought us into explodes under a salvo of lightning bolts and we are trapped in a dazzling ecstasy of sonic flames. I think baby Hannah liked it!