http://www.mediafire.com/?ttmzl0nczcd

Download for the album with the coveted song on it.

A

It reminded me of something that I read years ago, but I couldn’t remember any details – just that sense of grief when transcendent beauty goes away, and of needing to try, however imperfectly, to hang on to any little shred of it.

I finally found it today – it’s from the biographical introduction to _The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson_. This is the passage I dimly remembered:

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There is an unconscious pathos in Stevenson’s fondness for his flageolet. He played it so badly, so haltingly… Looking back, I can recall how constantly he spoke of music. He would recur again and again to the dozen or so of operas he had heard in his youth, repeating the names of the singers … in a zest of recollection; and he would talk with the same warmth and eagerness of the few great instrumentalists he had heard in London concerts. And it was always, of course, with an air of finality, as of a man speaking of past and gone experiences that could never be repeated.

He bought an extraordinary amount of printed music — Chopin, Grieg, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — and would pore over it for hours at a time, trying here and there, and with endless repetitions, to elucidate it with his flageolet.

…

To-day when I see on every side those wonderful mechanical devices for the reproductions of vocal and instrumental music, I feel an almost unbearable regret that they have come too late for Stevenson… and what a surpassing joy and solace they would have been to him.

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Long time listener, etc. Thank you so much for these. My life is a little bit better because for five minutes every so often I get to be informed, entertained, and moved by your work.

Well, Lancelot, if that is indeed your real name (and, if that is indeed your real name: way to go, Mr. and Mrs. Hogben!), the song is “A Girl’s Tool-Box” by a band called Tattletale