Obscure ways to make me happy

WARNING: EXPLICIT MUSIC GEEK CONTENT FOLLOWS.

So about 10 years ago, I heard a piece of renaissance choral music on the radio. I thought it was pretty.

Then I heard it again a few months later. Wow, I really like this piece, I thought. I wonder what it is?

You know where this is going. Over the years, I kept hearing the thing but never managed to figure out what it is. (stupid not-back-announcing DJ's!) Of course, it became a low-lying obsession to find it. This blossomed into a full-on obsession around last Christmas.

As you may or may not know, there are approximately 1,000,000,000 pieces of renaissance choral music. Between them, there are maybe a dozen titles. It's the equivalent of the Japanese phone book. The only thing I had to go on was it was a sad-sounding piece with a really high note in the middle. Not much, really. The most I could figure was that it was sad when Jesus died, so maybe it was a "miserere" from a mass. You can tell I'm a great Christian, I know. Also, that only narrows the field down to like 5 million pieces.

So, I listened to hundreds of 30-second samples of people singing in Latin. Sometimes they sang in Old German or Old French. This was the most boring thing I've ever done in my life.

I began to lose heart around the middle of January. A few weeks ago, I resigned myself to never hearing the damn thing again and stopped trying to find it.

Ready for the music-geek punchline? Of course you are, my extraordinarily patient friend. It turns out I downloaded the piece in January and never listened to it. I just heard it today. It's the Gregori Allegri "Miserere", for those of you who haven't nodded off from the tedium of this story by now. Oh, and happy birthday, Matt.