Month: April 2015

Les Bergeres (The Shepherds) L.C. Daquin (1668–1733) “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” Andante M. Lithgow (1735-1792) Louis-Claude Daquin was a French composer of Jewish ancestry, and a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist. He was born in Paris to a family originating from Italy, where his great-great-grandfather took the name D’Aquino after converting to Catholicism…

Andante (K616) for Mechanical Organ W.A. Mozart (1756–1791) An ‘automaton’ is a mechanical device (no electronics!) that generally does something humans would normally do. The word first appears in Homer in the 5th century B.C.E. (referring to automatically opening doors), and the ancient Greeks were quite adept at designing and building machines, including siphons, a…

Symphony No. 40, 1st mvt. W. Mozart (1756-1791) arr. Ulrich & Horn Steffi’s Undoing W. Zeitler Slavonic Dance Op.72 No.2      A. Dvořák (1841-1904) If you wanted to hear a piece of orchestral literature before 1877 (when Edison invented the phonograph) you had to live in a city large enough to support an orchestra…