It's been a while since I actually paused and listened closely to some music while holding Cleo. And so yesterday morning, with our tiny daughter sacked out in the Baby Bjorn after a walk to Mount Washington Village, I was actually pretty excited to cue up a CD that arrived recently, via the Mom Mailing Network. Classics for Babies: a 1999 disc featuring 13 famous classical excerpts arranged for music box "and gentle orchestra."If we can measure the intensity of earthquakes, if there is a term (smash factor) for the ratio of the ratio of a golf ball's speed to clubhead speed, if we can seriously say that Johnny Carson's Q score now stands, posthumously, at 32, then there ought to be a rating for The Usefulness of a Particular Piece of Music in Lulling Babies to Sleep and in Keeping Them Asleep. And, if there was such a factor, I can now vouch that Classics for Babies would merit a pretty perfect score. I stood and swayed and listened to nearly half of the CD, and Cleo slept on; I ambled into the office and fired up the computer, and she continued to snooze; I put her in a swing in the dining room, and with a music box version of the Moonlight Sonata playing beyond us, she woke not. Cheers, Mom.
There are, though, only so many things one can do while holding a baby, and so, while listening to the CD, I started looking more closely at the packaging. An intriguing document! Turns out this CD was part of a 12-CD series; an insert urged me to "collect all twelve," but I'm not really sure that we need Baby Cowboy quite yet. Or that I could afford it: a sticker on the back of the jewel box of our CD referred to a suggested retail price of $49.99 in Canada. Wow! I handled the liner notes with heightened care and looked more closely.
It was produced, I learned, by one Andreas Lonardoni. And what's his story, you ask? Well, he's also the member of an eponymous group that released, in 2006, a driving industrial track called Techno Metal. Damn right! That was Andreas, beleaguered, on the phone a few years ago telling his tattooed techno friends that the Classics for Babies disc was almost a wrap, and that he'd get to rehearsals in the warehouse as soon as he could.
But perhaps it's too simple to assume that Andreas saw the Sweet Baby Music Collection as no more than a way of paying the bills. After all, the liner notes note that "great care was taken to monitor the tones, beats per minute and structure of the chosen melodies." Moreover, while some of the choices of tracks on our CD are rather obvious - the inclusion of Peter and the Wolf will not surprise many students of two-month old consumers' habits - Andreas did not simply rely on the tried and true. For example, our CD includes a string quartet by Luigi Boccherini. He was a relatively little-known 18th-century composer, whose stylistic similarities to a much more famous composer prompted a contemporary to label him "the wife of Haydn." Boccherini! One imagines Andreas, exhausted after a night of trance music, slowly walking into the Sweet Baby Music Collection main office at 10 a.m., distractedly holding a cup of coffee, trying to decide if a Boccherini quartet could hold its own on Classics for Babies CD. And would the quick strings be too much for a baby? Would the longish composition fail to hold the attention of your average infant?
No worries, Andreas. You did your job well. Now fire up those soundboards and effect pedals.
It was produced, I learned, by one Andreas Lonardoni. And what's his story, you ask? Well, he's also the member of an eponymous group that released, in 2006, a driving industrial track called Techno Metal. Damn right! That was Andreas, beleaguered, on the phone a few years ago telling his tattooed techno friends that the Classics for Babies disc was almost a wrap, and that he'd get to rehearsals in the warehouse as soon as he could.
But perhaps it's too simple to assume that Andreas saw the Sweet Baby Music Collection as no more than a way of paying the bills. After all, the liner notes note that "great care was taken to monitor the tones, beats per minute and structure of the chosen melodies." Moreover, while some of the choices of tracks on our CD are rather obvious - the inclusion of Peter and the Wolf will not surprise many students of two-month old consumers' habits - Andreas did not simply rely on the tried and true. For example, our CD includes a string quartet by Luigi Boccherini. He was a relatively little-known 18th-century composer, whose stylistic similarities to a much more famous composer prompted a contemporary to label him "the wife of Haydn." Boccherini! One imagines Andreas, exhausted after a night of trance music, slowly walking into the Sweet Baby Music Collection main office at 10 a.m., distractedly holding a cup of coffee, trying to decide if a Boccherini quartet could hold its own on Classics for Babies CD. And would the quick strings be too much for a baby? Would the longish composition fail to hold the attention of your average infant?
No worries, Andreas. You did your job well. Now fire up those soundboards and effect pedals.
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