I was introduced to the music of living American composer Daniel Dorff by my (young) children, of all people.

If you have kids, and you have a car, you’ve probably been there. A long car ride (and by “long” I mean “more than 30 seconds”), and the whining begins: bathroom, bored, s/he touched me, hungry, s/he wiped boogers on me. So as the parent, you learn important skills in distraction, and put together a literal bag of tricks in an attempt to retain not only a sliver of sanity, but also your will to live. In my trick-bag are many CD’s of music; many of them are just slightly less annoying than the sound of whining children, but hey, the lesser of two evils, right?

Then there was a Daniel Dorff CD: a handful of children’s tales set for narrator and orchestra. How wonderful to find something that the kids and parents could enjoy together?

While I don’t really know him personally, I admire Dorff because, while his music has been played by major orchestras and ensembles (thinks global), he’s a guy who clearly does not suffer from a big head (acts local.) Besides composing, is vice president of music publisher, gives lectures, plays clarinet, volunteers for professional guilds, helps to develop music software, among (I imagine) many other things. And his list of compositions shows that he is writing for people he knows, rather than untouchable superstars (though his pieces have been played by them as well.) So, it turns out that famous composers can be normal, nice, people!

Here’s a short movement of a different piece that I believe captures Dorff’s sound and writing style.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of those amazing people who are so amazing, that the more you learn about them, you become more and more amazed at how amazing they are, and you realize that, at first, you didn’t truly know the depth of their amazingness.

I’m guessing that Bach is the second-most-written-about composer (first would be Beethoven) – but this is largely because Beethoven was a wild personality, while Bach was a very normal person. The worst things Bach did was not show up for work for a couple months (after a self-extended vacation in Lubeck), and pull a sword on a bassoonist (and really, who hasn’t done that?) He had a job, and children, and drank coffee and beer. This is not the stuff of scathing biographies.

But his music is insanely amazing (I’m sorry to say, way beyond anything Beethoven wrote). It’s lovable at every level. The untrained ear will enjoy rich harmony, florid melodies, and an expressive depth of emotion. The moderately trained ear will notice intricate repeating patterns – how he could take a single four-note-idea and develop it into a massive work – like making a life-sized cathedral out of just 5 different types of Lego blocks. The trained ear starts to find deeper layers of complexity in his music, hidden messages, numerology, key symbolism, among other things. And all the while, it just sounds great.

Here is his Orchestral Suite in b minor, for flute and strings.

Yup. I’m a Beliber.

The violin family of instruments reached a point of perfection around the year 1600; modern violins are virtually the same as the instruments made 400 years ago. Whenever humanity produces a new musical instrument (or any worthy invention, for that matter), humans go and push that instrument to the extreme. Enter Franz Biber.

Biber’s contribution to music includes a variety of choral and instrument music, sacred and secular. But mainly, he is remembered for his wicked violin skills, employing double stops and alternate string tunings (scordatura).

Just like Bieber, Biber had some legal issues, but no model-worthy mugshots. The Bib just skipped out on his employer, prince Karl II, for a better gig elsewhere (musicians were servants, and could not leave their royal employers without permission).