Earlier this year, my piano teacher—by my side through the years I spent inching through “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” treating Bach’s counterpoint like moral instruction—sent me a lullaby she had composed for my daughter, who was not yet born. The audio arrived by text message one morning. She wrote that she had been thinking about the baby and kept returning to the interval of the minor third: small, close, easy to sing. From that, she shaped a melody, added simple harmonies, and set it in a moderate tempo: enough movement to hold attention, but not so much as to disturb stillness.
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