Mozart – Turkish March – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – The “Rondo alla Turca” is the finale of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331, published in 1784. It imitates the sound of Ottoman Janissary bands, which were hugely fashionable in Vienna at the time. This video covers its famous opening: the…

Beethoven – Minuet in G – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – Beethoven wrote six minuets for orchestra around 1795 and later arranged them for piano (WoO 10). The second, in G major, became one of the best-loved pieces in the student repertoire. It is a graceful courtly dance in 3/4. The Minuet sings with dotted…

Bắc Kim Thang – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – “Bắc Kim Thang” is one of the best-known children’s songs of Southern Vietnam. Its playful, nonsense-style lyrics follow a chain of images: a bridge made of a pumpkin vine, the oil seller tumbling off the bridge, the frog seller left behind, a duck beating a drum,…

Christ Liveth in Me – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – In 1891, Daniel W. Whittle wrote the words under the pen name “El Nathan” and James McGranahan set them to music. The hymn first appeared in Gospel Hymns No. 6. The verse opens with a gentle leap and settles into long held notes, and the…

To God Be the Glory – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – Fanny Crosby wrote the words and William Howard Doane wrote the tune in 1875. Ira Sankey’s campaigns made the hymn famous in Britain in the 1950s, and Billy Graham’s crusades then brought it back to the United States. The melody moves mostly in steps…

EN: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel is one of the oldest songs still sung at Christmas time. Its words come from the medieval “O Antiphons”, chanted in monasteries in the last days before Christmas, and its melody was found in a 15th-century French manuscript. In 1851 the English priest John Mason Neale translated the Latin…

EN: Arirang is the song every Korean knows by heart. Its refrain, “Arirang, arirang, arariyo”, tells of a loved one crossing the Arirang pass and leaving, and it carries a feeling the Koreans call han: longing, sorrow and quiet hope all at once. Countless regional versions exist, and in 2012 Arirang was added to UNESCO’s…

EN: ‘O Sole Mio (“My sunshine”) was written in 1898 by the Neapolitan composer Eduardo di Capua, with lyrics by Giovanni Capurro. The words sing of a bright day after a storm, and then of a “sun” even more beautiful: the face of the one you love. Made famous by Enrico Caruso and later Luciano…

EN: Silent Night was born in a small Austrian village on Christmas Eve 1818. The young priest Joseph Mohr brought a poem he had written to the schoolteacher and organist Franz Xaver Gruber, who set it to music for two voices and guitar that very day. That night it was sung for the first time…

EN: Con thuyền không bến (“The boat without a harbour”) was written in 1941 by Đặng Thế Phong, a young painter and composer who died of tuberculosis the following year at only 24. Though he left just three songs, this one became a cornerstone of early Vietnamese modern song (nhạc tiền chiến): a drifting boat…