Musical Discovery

Among her other Baby Einstein videos,* Sadie has Baby Bach, Baby Beethoven, and Baby Mozart.  Getting lots of these has been partly to keep Deb from getting totally bored by lack of variety.

There is a song I heard at a friend’s wedding that was hauntingly familiar, but I couldn’t place where I had heard it or what it was.  It drove me crazy.

I recently heard it again.  On the Baby Bach DVD!

That led me to figure out which piece it was from the liner notes, which divide the video into segments and list the music in each segment.  In this case, the seven segments are named Marching chickens, Toys in Motion, Gentle Motion, Robots Awake!, Clucking Chicken, Goldberg Suite, and End Credits.

My piece was in “Gentle Motion.”

Since there are only two pieces of music in that segment, and it’s obvious where they begin and end, and where the segments before and after begin and end, I learned that my haunting piece of what was now known to be Bach was “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring.”

Probably no surprise to some of you, but in some ways I am culturally challenged.  Looking online, I found that piece identified with wedding processionals, and Ode to Joy used in wedding recessionals.

I poked around looking for a good MP3 of the Bach music.  I got some, but none as good as I might have liked.  Still, they’ll go in my big playlist of everything I enjoy listening to repeatedly.  Which has other recent, unexpected editions, like a catchy, almost bagpipe-like song played on hurdy gurdy called Dining Table.  I was unaware until recently (thanks internets!) that the hurdy gurdy was an instrument, rather than a funny term, made famous by Donovan Leitch, for a traveling minstrel.  But I digress.

I meant to share this unlikely discovery sooner, but I forgot until moments ago.  Serendipity is cool.

* Sadie’s complete set of Baby Crack Einstein so far includes:
Baby Bach
Baby Beethoven
Baby Mozart
Baby Noah
On The Go
Baby Wordsworth
Neighborhood Animals (video rather than DVD, a hand-me-down, in kind of rough shape)

1. I KNEW which one it was before you even named it.

   The Jesu is one of my own favorites, and was indeed the processional at my wedding

   Email me if you’re still looking for a good mp3 and I will send you the one I have (assuming I can find it)

   Posted by caltechgirl  on  01/18  at  08:32 PM

2. Hi Jay!
   I have a dear friend in VT who actually has a hurdy gurdy, complete with playlist and a stuffed monkey. I have every intention of going to visit him just so I can hear it up close and personal!

   Posted by  on  01/18  at  10:26 PM

3. It’s not mp3, but sometimes Best Buy has these no-name classical CDs for between $0.99 and $2.99 and well, some of them are actually really good recordings. So, you can get the CD cheap and make your own reasonable quality mp3s.  That’s how I started my classical collection.

   Posted by beth  on  01/19  at  08:45 AM

4. Lurking…

   Posted by Dax Montana  on  01/19  at  08:29 PM

5. Über-commie-folkie Pete Seeger performed JJOMD on the banjo, under the title of “The Goofing Off Suite”. It was one of the first pieces of classical music I came to know. Never heard it performed at a wedding, mostly because I’ve attended so few. The ones I’ve been to were either little private ones or featured Freebird in the playlist.

   Posted by triticale  on  01/21  at  04:25 PM

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