ABSTRACT
As a young child being raised in a small rural midwestern town, there were few opportunities for hearing classical music. I looked forward each day to the music broadcast from the state college’s radio station just before it went off the air at sundown. I was particularly drawn to the program’s theme song. I never discovered its title nor composer until some years later when, as a teenager, my piano teacher assigned the piece which I recognized from my youth. It was Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante defunte (pavane — a slow stately sixteenth-century dance—for a dead infant).
