This year for the first time we attended the Sunriver music festival. This event featured a series of concerts offering classical music – hosted in Bend as well as in Sunriver. We had the opportunity to listen to a concert called “The Leipzig Connection” which included pieces from Schuhmann, Mendelson and Bach – all of them associated with the city of Leipzig during their careers. Having grown up in East Germany – the former G.D.R.- we were familiar with the composers and even some of the pieces played. They were featured prominently in our music classes throughout the general school education track. In fact, I even had an exam in 10th grade in Music and sure enough drew the ticket on Bach’s Fugue in the section of Music theory. Admittedly I have forgotten what makes up their unique structure. At the concert Brett Mitchell, the music director and conductor of the orchestra for our concert gave very well elaborated introductions to the pieces the orchestra was playing – one fun fact was him welcoming the grand-grand-nice of Robert Schuhmann in the audience (I may be missing one grand statement here!). These introductions really helped with the setup and directed the focus of the listeners to the different sections and in addition to unique elements of the interpretation of the original piece by the orchestra. Still, I was surprised, when Brett introduced probably one of the most famous pieces by Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor and postulated that while people in the audience might not be recognizing the name that we all should recognize the piece. Reason for his assertion was his belief that we likely all had heard it before. People were still puzzled, so he disclosed that this composition by Bach was used in the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia. Nodding and approval by a good portion of the audience was the response. I will note that I had not seen that Disney movie, but I actually did know the piece from its true origin – we had learned about it in school after all, and we had heard it played on an organ in various churches on a number of occasions. This incidence would be another example where a reference to a famous historical piece is anchored on reasonably modern culture – here a Disney movie – and the chicken-and-egg metaphor I discussed some time back for the comparison of Orangutans and Tarzan. Since my earlier observation I have done some more thinking and am willing to accept these initially odd-looking connections – because after all they help to educate people and establish valuable connections that they will hopefully carry throughout their lives. Ultimately, I hope that this new knowledge will expand people’s admiration of the human and the natural histories that are so incredibly rich!