Breathe out

Still no signs of imminent labor, so we're simply trying to remain patient and to enjoy the things that are still so easy in absence of a small one: a spontaneous visit to the pool; a day of writing; the Sunday crossword.

But of course the last few days have also been a quiet lesson in how little control we have over so many aspects of our lives. We've now heard at least a dozen folk remedies for inducing birth, ranging from the traditionally puritanical (castor oil) to the seemingly decadent (Black Russians and peanut M&Ms, taken together) and the frankly weird (Wendy's hamburgers). L.'s followed a couple of other suggestions, but even a long walk didn't bring on any discernible change. So we wait, increasingly aware that this process, even though it's occurring within one of us, isn't up to us.

Which, it occurs to me, is true of my venture into classical music, as well. To a certain extent, I've been trying over the past couple of weeks to control the music I listen to - to give myself (and L., and our imminent daughter) a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven and anything else that seems promising. But simply moving about the city requires one to cede at least a degree of control. Walk into the coffee shop, and hear The Who. Turn on the radio, and it might be Puccini - until it's the news, at 5. Or listen to the news, and suddenly hear a segment of a record that's being reviewed. Try as one might, it's hard to control what goes into one's ears.

All of which must be, at least in part, a result of the rise of recorded music. In the age of Bach or Beethoven, music was only heard live (think about that: it was only heard live!), and was thus a relatively rare and unique experience for most people. Nowadays, though, recorded music can be played so easily and so cheaply that it's everywhere. That's not, by itself, a necessarily good or bad thing; it's just a fact, and a factor in the rise of the diversity that now characterizes our aural environment. It's interesting: recorded music gives us, as individuals, more control over what we hear in private, but it also gives us less control over the music we hear in public.

Is there a moral here? Perhaps there are several, but here's the one I'm interested in. Control can be nice, but it can also work as a reminder that there's a beauty in the uncontrolled. I like pressing play and hearing Beethoven, but the very fact that I can do that makes slivers of unexpected music all the more energizing and potentially delightful. Which is why, in the end, we might resist Wendy's Hamburgers even if we knew that they really do induce labor. There's something wonderful in being taken by surprise.

Taking it all in

Vincent Scully, the architectural historian, once argued that a viewer looking at the 8-columned facade of a Greek temple simply cannot see all eight of the columns as individual parts. Where, in looking at a 6-columned facade, we might feel that we can perceive each of the supports at once, rows of 8 columns force us to see and to think in groups, and they thus introduce a further level of complexity.

I feel the same way about large portions of Beethoven's String Quartet no. 13 (opus 130), which we listened to last night. At points, I can simultaneously perceive each of the four instruments, but inevitably within a few seconds I've lost the thread of one, or two, or even three, and find myself listening to a single element, or grouping the sounds into a cumulative effect.

And, at the risk of over-reaching, might that be what parenthood is like, as well? Sure, we might want to observe or to study each pattern in a child's life - and perhaps for the first few months, it's possible (seven poops; slept for 3 hours straight). In time, though, any life will outgrow the perceptive abilities of any observer, and we end up unable to see, at any moment, all of the forces that make one an individual . Instead, we discern a temple, or a cumulative melody.

Bach effects

Last night we turned to a classic: Bach's Goldberg Variations, played by Murray Perahia. Written as thirty variants on a common theme for a talented student, Bach's compositions were intended for the harpsichord, but are often now played on the piano. Collectively, they're also apparently known as one of the more demanding works for solo piano - and are often associated with Glenn Gould, who released his interpretation in 1955. I don't have the Gould version but the Perahia recording is beautiful, and we wandered through two full listens, sandwiched around the Penguins' satisfying victory.

Brian referred, in a comment following my last post, to the so-called Mozart effect. That's the theory, of course, that exposure to the music of Mozart (or, in some versions of the theory, to a range of classical compositions) can increase the perceptive skills or even the intelligence of young minds - including, possibly, infants in the womb. It's been big business for more than a decade now, but as far as I can tell there's little conclusive research (in one study, listening to Stephen King read a story led to comparable gains). But I can, at least, report on an apparent Bach effect: listening to the Goldberg variations certainly increased my impression of Bach's intelligence. The music has an algebraic clarity to it, and words like crystalline came to mind as we listened.

And did the still-shy baby enjoy it? Well, she was certainly active; hand on L's belly, I could feel all sorts of swells and rolls. The sensation is remarkable: tectonic, aqueous, it's like reaching into an aquarium pool to touch an starfish, or some other resident of that other, watery world below the surface. But I'd hesitate to interpret kicks and turns as solid signs of satisfaction; they can just as often, I suppose, indicate the opposite. So let's just stay on firmer ground, and note that Bach makes this listener happy - if still not quite intelligent enough to figure out most of the available tools on this blog.

Due date

L's theoretical due date is today, although it looks like it'll still be a few days before she enters actual labor. We're just taking it easy: spent some of yesterday afternoon floating in a pool, with friends, and today's for reading, writing, and maybe a movie. The sense of imminence, though, is almost palpable, and the days thus have something of the quality of Ann Beattie's wonderful story "Waiting." All of which is to say that I've had a little bit of time to pursue rather obscure questions like this: how has the world of opera traditionally viewed pregnancy and childbirth?

Not too favorably, I'm afraid. A quick Google search of "opera synopsis and pregnancy" turns up a few relevant hits. Gounod's Faust is well known, but most of the examples were comparatively obscure: an apparently didactic bio-opera about the Prohibition advocate Carry Nation, for instance, and a Chinese opera called Madame White Snake. And while I've certainly heard of the Czech composer Janacek (and, in fact, took a tram to work past the Brno theater named for him almost daily in 1992-3), I didn't know his opera Jenufa, which seems to have settled into a comfortable reputation as a second-tier work(available on ITunes, but only in two recordings).

In any event, a quick look at summaries and libretti revealed that pregnancy, in each of these examples, leads to real problems. In Faust, Valentine, felled by Faust in a duel, manages to curse Faust and his pregnant lover before expiring. In Carry Nation, our virtuous heroine is pregnant when she asks her husband to quit drinking; he doesn't, and she's soon single. In Madame White Snake (who is a sort of Asian Little Mermaid, as far as I can tell), Xu is horrified to learn that she's pregnant. And in Jenufa, the unmarried title character conceals her pregnancy and then gives birth in secret - only to be given sleeping medicine by her foster mother, who drowns the baby boy.

Not exactly an inspiring set of exempla, then. But why would pregnancy be seen so consistently as the source of difficulty? Well, several responses come quickly to mind. Certainly, composers need narrative conflict, and pregnancies can provide that - a successful pregnancy, after all, is an uneventful one, and that would hardly please a dramatist. And of course operas can be seen as part of the vast artistic machinery that reinforces social norms; viewed from such a perspective, Jenufa served as an advertisement for conventional marriage. Or this: childbirth was commonly dangerous in the cultures in which these operas were first produced; most listeners, I presume, would have had some experience with loss in that direction.

But I wonder if there might also be another, psychological reason. As many writers have pointed out, writing and composing are not unlike the process of pregnancy: one grows fecund, and then produces a sort of surrogate child, on the page. Could these pregnancies gone wrong be a sort of protective hedge against unsuccessful artistic labor, then? By imagining a misdelivery, perhaps Janacek and Gounod hoped to forestall actual difficulties.

I certainly can't prove that, but it made some sense as L and I sat down this morning to listen to a portion of Jenufa - to the aria, that is, in which she awakes from the spell of the sleeping elixir, complains of a sore head, and then begins to wonder where her lover and her son are. It's a sad moment, to be sure, but I hoped that listening to it might prevent, in some mysterious way, problems of our own in the coming days.

"It was my father's world..."

I've been thinking about music and infants - sometimes together, and sometimes separately - pretty consistently over the past few weeks. As the due date of our daughter approaches, and our excitement mounts, I've found myself switching away from the preset stations on our car radio and seeking classical music on the radio. As I did so, though, I was never sure exactly why: the pull of string concerti and quiet, informed announcers just felt somehow appropriate. Wondering if there might be a larger reason, though, I was happy to come across a passage in Dave Hickey's enjoyable Air Guitar this past week. In it, he's explaining his deep affections for jazz music, and he remembers that it was jazz that always played on his father's old turntable. As he puts it, “It was my father’s world, and I remember it today with the brightness of a child’s vision.”

I can't say that I remember the precise form of the music that my own father played when I was little; most of it, I'm sure, was classical, and I think there was a heavy tilt towards Bach and Mozart, but most of the melodies are now lost to me. But the feel of the music, and my sense of the living room in which he played it, is still very strong, three decades later. Order, composure, weighed emotions: the effects of the music meant things, in ways I think I could sense but barely articulate. Above all, though, it meant home, and Dad.

And maybe that, then, is why I keep slipping towards the low end of the dial when driving, or why I bought my first Eric Satie compositions earlier this week. About to become a father, I think that I'm seeking out one of the symbols that signifies fatherhood. Of course, I'm wholly aware that I understand the compositions that I hear about as thinly as I comprehend what it means to be a good parent. But I'm ready to learn about both, and if they overlap at all, then all the better.