Pacing

I have a confession: over the past few days, while holding Cleo, or playing with her, it's occurred to me that I might be able to speed up her development in certain areas by prompting her. If I hold her so that her feet just touch the ground, for instance, might she be walking at 11, rather than 12, months? If I were to recite the numbers 1-10, again and again in as we amble about the lawn, might she develop prodigious mathematical talents? Could a baby's neck be strengthened through three sets of six reps?

These are just passing thoughts; for the most part, we're thrilled (to the point of boring our friends, no doubt) with her small, natural signs of progress, and need no designed program. But of course such thoughts do open onto an entire industry, calculated to play on parents' fears and ambitions. Play Spanish tapes to your baby while she's still in the womb! Infant massages may stimulate muscle growth! And of course you'll need the entire line of Baby Einstein products.

How to resist the desire to keep up with the crowd, or to create a superbaby? Here's one way. I mentioned yesterday that I've been listening to the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. I've got the well-reviewed version by Vladimir Horowitz, and so yesterday I found a few minutes to read a rather famous 1992 discussion of Horowitz by Tim Page, who won the Pulitzer Prize five years after that for his music criticism. In the 1992 piece, Page argues that, while Horowitz was certainly technically proficient, his interpretive skills were not always strong. A master of control and as fast as any pianist, Horowitz can be seen as lacking, in other words, a certain subtlety or sophistication of feeling.

Such claims can feel subjective, to be sure. But Page wasn't alone in his feelings. In fact, he ends the piece by quoting a portion of a letter that Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote to a young Horowitz after hearing him play in the 1920s. “Mr. Horowitz," wrote Rachmaninoff, "you have won the octaves race. Nobody has ever played them like you. But I will not congratulate you because it was not musical.”

And that, friends, is how one resists the urge to speed up Cleo's natural clock. She'll crawl, in time. She'll read, in time. But no need to hasten. Instead, let's only try to make sure that, when she does so, she does so musically.