Music

The title of Bryant’s book is borrowed from Messiean’s best-known work, the “Quartet for the End of Time,” which he wrote while in a prison camp for French soldiers captured by the Nazis during World War II.

That’s Maurice Sendak, who wrote the libretto and narrates this Klezmatic version of Sergei Prokofiev’s classical standard. Sendak has renamed it Pincus and the Pig, and the music is provided by the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra.

We have just listened to the grandchildren of the legendary singer and musician, Robert Clancy of the legendary Clancy Brothers.

That’s part of the lovely Andantino from Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. You can hear the rest of this gentle reverie on a new CD called In Utero, for parents and their as yet unborn but still attentively listening little ones.

By any chance does this sound a little “hobbity” to you? It’s from the final movement, called “Hobbits,” of Johan de Meij’s Symphony No. 1, which was inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and which premiered in 1988, some 30 years after the Ring books had been published.

That’s the opening for Erik Satie’s first Gymnopidie for piano.

That’s the theme song, sung by Taj Mahal, for Peep and the Big Wide World, a new animated television show for preschoolers that is meant to introduce them to some basic scientific ideas and practices.