After the instruments that already accompanied my misspent youth, we're proceeding in the chronological order to those acquired for the benefit of our children. The first of which is a lovely xylophone dating from 1992. But you can still get essentially the same model from the maker Sonor, which is another company from East Germany (Weißenfels an der Saale ) that moved westwards to Aue in Westphalia after 1945 (history is here).
The instrument counts as an alto and covers the C major scale from c1 to a2, and we have a Bb and both F# sticks for key changes. It has miraculously survived a sequence of three toddlers climbing over it and ripping off the sound bars, so I can recommend it to any young family.
In the video I've had a go at O du lieber Augustin - a tune we played at a session just this week, and upon looking it up I learned that the original Viennese song is about a bagpiper in Vienna during the Plague, who was thrown into a mass grave by mistake and survived thanks to playing his bagpipes - quite a story. Although the song is standard nursery rhyme fare in Germany, I had never heard the story behind it. I am told the English folk tradition links the tune to the words (strangely rhyming with the Augustin lyrics): You can't put your muck in our dustbin ...
And the second tune is Ganivelle, which we play at the French session.
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