Nitty Music plays on Cello, Go Tell Aunt Rhody from Book 01 of the Suzuki Cello Method.
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Cellos from Luthiers Clar.
Ms. Accompanist Piano Accompaniment.
The melody known as “Rousseau’s Dream” is derived from the opening of the “Pantomime” section of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1752 opera Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer).
Sometime in the late 1780s, salon music composers began using Rousseau’s melody for their own songs, usually shortening the original and then adding their own words. The earliest known example is the song Sweet Melissa, Lovely Maiden by J. Dale, published ca. 1789 in London, which uses a version of the tune quite similar to the original.
Apparently, the name “Rousseau’s Dream” was first used in print in 1812, with the London publication of J. B. Cramer’s Variations on “Rousseau’s Dream” (for solo piano). Cramer’s version of the tune contains two slight but significant alterations: the first phrase ends on scale degree 1 (instead of 2), and the second phrase (m.3) begins a third higher than the original. These changes are interesting because they continued throughout the next century, as Rousseau’s dream gradually evolved into the American folk song Go Tell Aunt Rhody.
There are many documented variants of the Go Tell Aunt Rhody tune, but the vast majority of them contain only four bars, repeated again for each new verse. The tune that appears in Suzuki’s books uses the same 12-bar “A-B-A” form as Cramer’s version, making it more accurate to refer to Suzuki’s tune as Rousseau’s Dream.