Macaroni is something good to eat with cheese. Tomaso Albinoni was a prolific, but not so famous Baroque composer. After listening to his music for several days, it's amazing to me that he's not a "famous Baroque composer".
He actually was famous in his day. And more than likely you are very familiar with his music. My hometown of Enterprise, Alabama promotes its "world-famous Boll Weevil monument." The monument is not only literally central to downtown Enterprise, but it's central to the city's identity. But "world-famous"? I doubt that many people in Milan or Tuscany know much about it. But it's famous nonetheless.
If you have heard of no other music by Albinoni, I would bet that you are quite familiar with his Adagio for Strings and Organ in G Minor. When I heard it just now I thought, "How do I know that? Where have I heard it?" I heard it just a few weeks ago during the movie Manchester by the Sea. It has been featured in several other soundtracks as well. Other movies where you'll find him are Rollerball, Flashdance and Show Me Love. Albinoni has been featured in many TV series including Six Feet Under, Cosmos, the Sopranos and Scenes from a Marriage. So if his music is this "popular", you ask, "then why have I never heard of him?" I majored in music, why had I never heard of him?
There's a very interesting back story to his Adagio in G minor. It's very interesting to me, anyway. Part of this is my own story, but most of the story has been hanging around for years waiting for me to find it. My story is that when I was listening to his Adagio before I knew anything about him, I thought it was "Romantic" music. Romantic in music, as you probably know, is not about sexual attraction, it's about a specific period of music. As a refresher starting in the sixth century, Medieval music bled into the Renaissance which became Baroque and then the brief Classical period became Romantic. Romantic music brought us to 20th Century and now we're in the Modern period. So as I was listening to this Romantic music I Googled Albinoni to discover that he was a Baroque composer and not a Romantic. I pride myself on figuring out who composed the music I'm listening to. If I can't figure that out, I at least recognize the time period it belongs to. I had missed this music by a whole era and more than 100 years. But then I read on.
Remo Giazotto (1910-1998) was an Italian musicologist, critic and composer. He spent most of his life recovering and cataloging the music of Tomaso Albonini. He said that he reconstructed Albonini's Adagio for Stings and Organ in G Minor from fragments he discovered. He published the piece in 1958 and it was an immediate popular success. But here's the kicker. Six years later he recanted and said that it was his music. He said that he had composed all of it. At this point the critics and scholars didn't know what to believe. Over the years it has become widely accepted as Giazotto's composition and not Albonini's. So my original assessment of Romanticism was still over a hundred years off, just in the other direction.
Johann Sebastian Bach sets the standard for what it means for music to be Baroque. A criticism of Baroque music is that it is rather "ornamental and exaggerated." As much as I enjoy listening to Bach, I will admit that it can be rather mechanical and mathematical. As I listen to Albonini's music, the music that he actually composed, it sounds like none of those things to me. It is melodically, harmonically and rhythmically rich, full and vibrant generating an aura of intrinsic beauty. Is this description starting to read like a bottle of Chianti? I'm not throwing any shade Bach's way, I'm just saying that for Baroque, this music is refreshingly different. So why is J.S. Bach a household name and nobody has ever heard of Albonini? Especially considering his IMBd. I really don't know. I do know that Albonini had at least one admirer in his day--J.S. Bach. Bach even used some of his themes for his own compositions.
According to Macaroni and Cheese Facts, macaroni and cheese is the number one cheese recipe in the United States. About half of the children in the United States will eat macaroni and cheese in any given twelve week period. Kraft sells over one million boxes of macaroni and cheese every day.
It's world-famous.
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