Great. Valentine's Day approaches. Those of you happy souls, who, with starry eyes, gaze into the velvety adoration of your one and only, a stare that exists outside the mortal constraints of time and space, only broken by the promise of greeting supple lips in an expression of love whose ardor brings you to the brink of your soul, well, freaking good for you. more ›

Even if you've never been to a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you're familiar with the piece. At some point, and probably recently, you've heard the finale's "Ode to Joy" theme, the initial fragment from which Beethoven developed his last symphony. It's been used everywhere from the Olympics (performed at most Games since 1956, including as the temporary national anthem of the unified German teams of the 1950s and 1960s, the unified post-USSR team in 1992, and, for a half dozen years, of Rhodesia, until it became Zimbabwe in 1980); to church services (the hymn "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee"); to movies ("A Clockwork Orange," "Help!," and "Die Hard," to name a few). Parts of the rest of the symphony pop up in similarly varying locations; samples from the Scherzo appear as a stock sound in Microsoft XP and as introductory music in "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" (which itself is a tribute to the excerpt's use in "The Huntley-Brinkley Report"). more ›