I'm just back from a trip to Europe, and guess what I encountered there. The good old pink album again!

You ask what is the pink album? The pink album is in RCA Victor LP called "Dance Music of the Renaissance." (VICS 1328) It has a pink cover with a woodcut of artistocrats revelling. I bought this album as an impecunious student in 1968 - after much thought and much scrabbling of nickels from the bottom of my purse.

I loved the pink album. While my contemporaties divided their musical loyalty between the Beatles and Beethoven, I listened to it again and again on the record player (also pink) that I got free from a rich senior. I enjoyed the sweet sonority of the recorder and the strumming of the lute. As for the krumhorn, a predecessor of the oboe which sounds like a duck trying to sing, I was glad the selection was short. The album includes pavanes, branles, galliards, etc by famous editors such as Susato, Attaignant, and Gervaise. Since the music was mostly anonymous, was played widely and long, and would have been played by whatever instruments the musicians happened to own, I consider it traditional music.

Since then I have run into the selections from the pink album rather often. Buy a book of Renaissance tunes, and there will be dance from the pink album. Go to a workshop and attend the student recital, and there will be a song from the pink album. From time to time a CD of traditional music slips in a tune from the pink album for a little variety.

A few days ago I was in Nuremburg (sp) Germany, visiting the house of Albrecht Durer, the painter and woodcutter. When you visit the house, you get headphones, and you hear a tour of the house, narrated in your own language by "Durer's wife." And accompanying the narration was the pink album. Not just the tunes from it - the pink album itself. Believe me, I know every measure of it, and that was the pink album again - after 36 years.

I'm curious. Perhaps some student of music history is reading this and can answer by question. Was the pink album a seminal work which re-introduced this forgotten music to the world, or was it a compilation of greatest hits, pieces which conservatory students have been taught for years?

Thanks to it and to a fellow student who encouraged me to ask for a recorder for Christmas, I have made music, made friends, and found something to pass the weary hours when jet lag wakes me up at 4:30 am.