LOL @ Pachelbel! 

posted by McD at 10:33PM CST on December 27

It's Johann. 

posted by natedogg at 02:42AM CST on December 28

An excerpt from the wikipedia page on Pachelbel: Pachelbel's music was influenced by south German composers such as Johann Jakob Froberger and Johann Kaspar Kerll. ... During his early youth, Pachelbel received musical training from Georg Caspar Wecker, organist of the Church of Saint Sebald (Sebalduskirche) ... Wecker [was] trained by Johann Erasmus Kindermann, one of the founders of the Nuremberg musical tradition, himself a pupil of Johann Staden.

Johann Mattheson, whose Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte (Hamburg, 1740) is one of the most important sources of information about Pachelbel's life, mentions that the young Pachelbel demonstrated exceptional musical and academic abilities. ... Pachelbel in 1670 became a scholarship student at the Gymnasium poeticum at Regensburg. His teacher was Kaspar Prentz, a student of Johann Kaspar Kerll.

In 1673 Pachelbel moved to Vienna. ... Several renowned cosmopolitan composers worked there, most of them contributing to the exchange of musical traditions in Europe. In particular, Johann Jakob Froberger served as court organist in Vienna until 1657 and was succeeded by Alessandro Poglietti, and most importantly, Johann Kaspar Kerll moved to Vienna in 1673. In 1677 Pachelbel moved to Eisenach, where he found employment as court organist to Johann Georg I, Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. He met the Bach family in Eisenach (which was the home city of Johann Sebastian Bach's father, Johann Ambrosius Bach), becoming a close friend of Johann Ambrosius and tutoring his children.

In June 1678, Pachelbel was employed as organist of the Lutheran Preacher's Church (Predigerkirche) in Erfurt, succeeding Johann Bach, the eldest son of Hans Bach. The Bach family was very well known in Erfurt (where virtually all organists would later be called "Bachs"), so Pachelbel's friendship with them continued here: Pachelbel became godfather to Johann Ambrosius' daughter, Johanna Juditha, and taught Johann Christoph Bach. Pachelbel['s] son, Johann Michael, became an instrument maker.
...
One of the last middle Baroque composers, Pachelbel ... did influence Johann Sebastian Bach (indirectly: the young Johann Sebastian was tutored by Johann Christoph Bach, who studied with Pachelbel), but although JS Bach's early chorales and chorale variations borrow from Pachelbel's music, the style of northern German composers (Georg Böhm, Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Adam Reincken) played a more important role in the development of Bach's talent. Composer, musicologist and writer Johann Gottfried Walther is probably the most famous of the composers influenced by Pachelbel. 

posted by mrflip at 12:58PM CST on December 28

The Spazmatics do a similar bit in their shows, but they don't reach quite so far back into music history. 

posted by doncarlo at 04:09PM CST on December 28