Something really weird happened today.

I was listening to CD 41, grooving on the string quartets, and my wife called from Niagara Falls (some 400 miles away) where she was visiting her brother in Canada. I had my hands-free buds in while I chatted with her.

Suddenly, she said, “That’s the song playing in the Firefly episode “Shindig.”

“You can hear that?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That was the music playing during the dance scene in ‘Shindig’,” she said.

I looked at the back of the CD sleeve and read off the title of Track 8, which was Movement IV (“Alla danza tedesca: Allegro assai”) from String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat Op. 130. (It was composed in 1825; Beethoven was 55.)

“Well, it is a dance number,” I allowed.

“It’s the same song,” she said.

We chit-chatted a bit more and then we hung up.

I immediately Googled “Firefly Shindig Music” and discovered she was right.

If she and I hadn’t been speaking at that very moment, if she hadn’t heard the music I was playing in the background, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. (My memory is not that good.) So, a serendipitous conversation, at precisely the right moment, lead me to discover something I never would have known. How she heard it, and how she remembered incidental music in a TV episode we hadn’t watched in a year or two, I have no idea.

As for today’s CD, it begins with Continue reading →