"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.