Before launching this blog (seven years ago now!), I spent some time casting about for a title. I wanted to write about music, but not in the way it’s presented most places — i.e., the hottest takes on the latest tunes. I would offer my takes hesitantly at best. How to capture that?

Wikipedia’s glossary of music terminology has an entry for hesitant playing: zögernd. A better title I could not hope to find. The letter z and an umlaut? Sold.

I searched for an example of the direction used in an actual music score, but never found one. What Google did show me, however, was a few recordings of a song whose first line is “Zögernd, leise,” German for hesitantly, softly.

The piece, “Ständchen,” or serenade, was written nearly 200 years ago by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (born on this day in 1797). It uses an alto soloist, four-voice choir, and piano. It’s built around a poem by Franz Grillparzer. As I interpret the text (helpfully translated by Oxford Lieder), the narrator spends the song getting psyched up to serenade a sleeping love interest (“Do not sleep when the voice of affection speaks”) only to chicken out in the end (“But what in all the world’s realms can be compared to sleep?”).

The words are amusing, but it was the sounds that I fell in love with.

Here are some of the most joy-inducing melodies I’ve ever heard. Each time the soloist presents a phrase, the choir yes-ands it, and round and round they go. Somehow what they do is predictable and surprising at the same time. If Schubert were alive today, there’s no doubt he would be producing the most captivating hooks in pop music.

I’ve tried to spread the love for Ständchen in a couple ways. First as the theme song for the short-lived Zögernd postcast, where I had a computer perform all the vocal and instrumental parts using modern-day synthesizer patches.

After that, it was inevitable that Ständchen would become my next bass solo. But I hesitated. It took a few years to figure out how to pay the composition due reverence in my own irreverent musical style.

To put Ständchen within reach of the bass guitar, I transposed it down a perfect fifth, give or take an octave or two, from the key of F to the key of B flat. I also took a few small liberties in condensing material for five voices down to one — allowing the bass (which never needs to pause for breath) to sing both lead and backup. And I enlisted my trusty ICBM fuzz pedal to provide more sustain and a broader color palette than the bass alone.

So far I’ve failed to mentioned Schubert’s dazzling, frenetic-yet-placid piano writing. Surely I couldn’t pull off Ständchen without it, and so the transcription I prepared for the podcast theme became a backing track. But that wasn’t all. Biographers record that Schubert wanted his vocal works performed to a strict beat, so I bet he’d appreciate my modern drum machine treatment.

I hope you’ll agree this is a beautiful, thrilling, distinctive piece of music. There’s a good chance my rendition will not be to your taste, but I defy you to find fault with this one:

It’s one of those classical melodies everyone is familiar with even if they can’t name it.

“An der schönen blauen Donau” (“On the Beautiful Blue Danube”) was written by Johann Strauss II in 1866. Its recognizability over a century later is thanks probably in large part to “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and parodies on “The Simpsons” and elsewhere.

In 2013 I worked up an abbreviated rock instrumental arrangement of Danube for Daniel hales, and the frost heaves. We provided a live soundtrack for a theater production of “Alice in Wonderland.” The director wanted Danube to accompany a scene where the characters play flamingo croquet in slow motion.

Danube would appear to have nothing to do with Wonderland — which is why the Frost Heaves excluded it when we recorded our Lewis Carroll poem adaptations for an album called “Contrariwise.” But in fact we were not the first to make a connection between the two works.

Donovan kicks off his meandering treatment of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (1971) with a not-quite-right excerpt on organ and calliope. And the music folks at Disney in 1947 demoed a version of “Beautiful Soup” set to the Danube melody. The Mock Turtle and his greenish broth never made it into the film, however, and we only know of his song today thanks to the DVD extras.

The version presented here sticks close to my 2013 adaptation, which covers just the first 76 bars of a 420-bar composition. Except now I’ve given the melody to the bass, in the tradition of the other fuzzy interpretations I’ve been recording lately. Daniel Hales returns as accompanist, but switches his guitar for a ukulele to counterbalance the low-end lead.

We’ve altered the title in tribute to the Frost Heaves’ home base, Greenfield, which got its name from a tributary of a certain tinge, and which was incorporated on this day in 1753.

I never delved too deep into classical music. Probably because one of the first classical CDs I ever picked up was Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Debussy. Try and top that!

My favorite piece of the bunch was also the shortest: “Tarantelle Styrienne” (a tarantella dance in 6/8 time named for the Styria region of Austria). It’s also known by the title “Danse.”

Achille Claude Debussy (born outside Paris on this day in 1862) wrote the piece for piano at age 28. Check out Zoltan Kocsis playing it in 1998 — way too fast, in the opinion of some YouTube commenters. Maurice Ravel arranged it for orchestra in 1922, and the Ormandy version was recorded in 1959.

Add to the vaunted list of interpreters me, who, at some point after developing similar treatments for music from “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” decided to do a fuzz bass rendition of “Danse.”

What drew me to Debussy was his lush harmonies, which sometimes seem to prefigure Duke Ellington. To strip all that richness down to a monophonic bass solo may seem counterintuitive. But harmony is only in service of melody, of which “Danse” has enough for weeks. It’s sick riff after sick riff after sick riff.

The point of fuzz bass is to be in your face, loud and snarling. But as I’ve experimented with the medium over the last couple years, I’ve found plenty of dynamic range. Plucked very, very softly, the flatwound strings of my P-Bass bring out of my ICBM pedal a soothing sinewave. Meanwhile artificial harmonics, picking close to the bridge, plucking over the fretboard, and sliding up and down strings with a thumb knuckle contribute to a variety of tone color approaching, if not an orchestra, then certainly a piano.

Although I work at it daily, reading notes on a page is a massive chore for me. My preferred method for learning any new piece of music has always been to pick it out by ear, memorizing in the process. That’s mostly how I learned “Danse,” turning to the score in a couple of places where it was hard to discern the right note or boil down a dense chord. The piece was written in the key of E, but I’ve moved it down a half step to take advantage of open strings in a couple places.

I started learning the piece at the end of January. It wasn’t long before it was all there in my head, but it’s taken all these months to get my fingers to do what I wanted them too. They still don’t cooperate 100% of the time, but this video represents my best effort of many, many attempts over a couple of weekends. A conservatory-trained professional I am not, but I can still have fun imagining Carnegie Hall in my basement.