A friend asked me to read an illustration of God’s faithfulness yesterday morning. Perhaps, you’ve read or heard it. Here’s the start of one version.

A mother took her small child to a concert by Paderewski to expose him to the talent of the great pianist. She hoped as she did to encourage her son in his piano lessons, which he had just begun.

They arrived early at the concert and were seated near the front. Standing alone on the stage was a marvelous Steinway grand piano. As they waited for the concert to begin, the mother entered into a conversation with the people beside her.

Her boy had wandered up to the stage and began to play “Chopsticks” (or “Twinkle, Twinkle” in other versions). Members of the audience called out to get the boy off the stage and asked who was responsible for him, but then Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski hurried out to the piano. He leaned over the boy and whispered, “Keep playing, son. Don’t stop.” The master reached around him and improvised a piece worthy of the concert audience.

The story illustrates God’s faithful encouragement to his people. The version I read was in a Charles Swindoll book, which elaborated on God’s words to us. Keep going. Don’t give up. That’s the part where I teared up.

The story isn’t true, unfortunately. It’s a good illustration and has a bit of the variations you see in common among urban legends. Truth or Fiction says it may have been inspired by a poster for a Polish Relief event, showing Paderewski encouraging a young Polish boy at the piano.

But since we’re talking about urban legend types, you may have seen the one about the guitarist who gave a lengthy solo at the end of one of his band’s regular numbers. Someone began to boo him. The musician challenged this non-fan, saying, “If you think you can do better, come up here and prove it.” And the man walks up to the stage, showing himself to be Eric Clapton.

A bit of the story behind “Do You Hear What I Hear?” It involves warfare and missiles in Cuba.

Autumn always gets me thinking of early America. Maybe it seeps out from Thanksgiving, that thoroughly Pilgrim holiday. So I offer you this music which, though in theme is slightly off-season, in tone is perfectly placed. As Hawthorne said, “She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”

Here’s a recording of crickets, played in two tracks. One track is normal; the second is slowed. The beautiful result makes a good meditation on God’s creative genius. (via Jeffrey Overstreet/Facebook)

Perhaps Alex North’s musical score for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t right for the movie, but that doesn’t change the fact that North put everything he had into that score, working with the belief that it would be used. But Kubrick never intended to use it. He wanted the public domain music he selected himself for the temp track.

North’s daughter-in-law, Abby North, writes, “As all composers know, directors fall in love with temp tracks. It is often next to impossible for even the most talented and skilled composer to replace the temp tracks with new music cues that elicit the same feelings initially felt with the temp tracks. Unfortunately for Alex, Stanley Kubrick loved the grandeur of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and the “poetry of motion” of Johan Strauss’s The Blue Danube in the context of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

For a bit of context, see this piece on Kubrick’s use of European music in The Shining. “[A]lmost the entire score is made up of music by the best European composers of Kubrick’s time,” writes Hope Lies, Béla Bartók’s music in particular.