Contexts

Oh, you know the feeling: you're driving across the middle of the continent, all alone except for the sunset on your left, and an absolutely sublime piece of music suddenly comes on the radio. Or you're 18 and standing before the Cologne cathedral, and a Peruvian pipe band suddenly plays the most touching composition you think you've ever heard. Or you're at the wedding of an old friend, slightly drunk and thoroughly happy, and you stand considering a standard that the band is playing, and you want to cry.

And so you track down the piece of music that affected you so, and you buy it, and then a week later you play it again. And it's not the same at all. Perhaps it now seems slightly trite, or merely less than exciting - but, in any event, in the duller context of your living room it's lost some of its power.

There must be some nearly essential qualities to music; otherwise it would be hard to explain why the piece that affected me rather powerfully in the car the other day - Handel's Largo, from Xerxes - has been repeatedly placed on CDs bearing rather desperate names such as The Most Relaxing Classical Music in the Universe, and (I am not making this up, as Dave Barry would say) The Most Essential Classical Music for your Baby. It is a calming piece - which makes sense, given that it's an aria sung by a figure thankful for the pleasant shade of a tree. But nonetheless it sounds today (at 6:30 in the morning, with small chores to do) somehow less than, somehow inferior to, the music that I heard as I zipped along the highway. Contexts change and aesthetic effects shift as a consequence.

Well, okay. But we also found yesterday that in babyland the context can stay exactly the same, and responses can differ, too. As you might remember, faithful reader of the blog, I often take Cleo on rather long walks around the Gilman campus and the surrounding neighborhood. All very pleasant, and all very predictable: Cleo's eyes wilt as soon as we start walking, and she then sleeps for about two hours as we roll along. Day after day, it's the same thing, and I've come to enjoy the regularity of it all. Until yesterday, when we got to Gilman, and Cleo simply cried and cried. Wet diaper? Hungry? Disappointed in another poor Pirates trade? None of the above. She simply wanted to play: when I took her out of the stroller, we had a wonderful hour of holding, chatting, and (on her part) gesturing wildly and randomly.

So sometimes the environment shapes our response to music, which thus changes over time and space. But sometimes we grow and grow, and our response to the environment is what changes.

Natural symphony

We spent the weekend in North Carolina (steamy, wilting, nostalgic, slow-moving, good-natured, grandparented North Carolina), and Sunday morning found me walking Cleo across the deserted UNC campus at 7:15 in the morning. Along brick paths; past the iconic Old Well and the various dorms and office buildings where parents once worked and high school friends labored over their problem sets and imagined the trajectories of crushes. A couple walked their two small kids. An image of Norah Jones peered out from the colonnade of the performing arts center. And then we were at the arboretum.

Few sounds, but they were enough to form a small and modest symphony. A distant campus air conditioning unit offered a steady treble drone. One bird chirruped in triads; a pair of birds in a more distant tree echoed each other in two-part calls. Back and forth, back and forth. Then the advancing footsteps of a jogger - a local motif, suggesting a stanza - came and went. A car in the distance offered another variation on the theme of motion. And the regular clack of our stroller wheels and axle as we moved over breaks in the walk.

Cross two state borders; move through the land of your past. Always there is a symphony being performed.

One thing leads to another

So last Saturday Cleo and I made the quick drive up to Towson, to give L a much-deserved few hours on her own and to check out a swing music concert with some friends. In short, a happy evening: a wonderful dinner, friendly hosts, and a bucolic, Huckleberry Finnish walk through fields to a historic plantation house that served as a dramatic backdrop for the gaggle of little girls and rejuvenated oldsters spinning to the music.

But much as fairy tale princesses face serious consequences if the clock strikes twelve, parents of tykes need to keep an eye on the time, too. And in this case, the sheer loveliness of the grounds(which once featured an 18th-century orangerie) proved my undoing; before I knew it, Cleo was wide awake and as hungry as a defensive end after two-a-days. Cry, Cleo, cry: she bawled as we walked - in those terse hurried steps of Parents Who Know Things Are Not Going Well - back to the car, and then bawled some more in the car on the way home.

Hoping to improve the soundtrack at least slightly, I switched on the car radio, and was greeted with the angelic sounds of a piece I'd never heard - but later learned was Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony. Truly stirring: a choir against an orchestra; lofty vocals against a ground of white motion. A note of grace in a difficult situation; a ray of light in a basement.

Later, I looked the piece up. 1903-9; a pivotal work in the evolution of the English symphony; etc., etc. What I found more interesting, though, was the motivation of the piece, which lay in Whitman - whom Williams had met through Bertrand Russell, in Cambridge, in 1892. Whitman's verse became a pole star for Williams, who carried Leaves of Grass with him for most of the first decade of the 1900s.

And it's in Leaves of Grass, as you may know, that there's a dialogue between Child and Father. One passage leaps out as relevant in this narrative:

Father:
Cease, cease, my foolish babe.
What you are saying is sorrowful to me...

And then we were home, L caught up on duties around the house, breast ready, Cleo home, no need to cry, music still in the ear, night, good night, sweet milk, Behold, says Whitman, the solid wall'd houses, good night.

Theory and practice

So a few days ago the folks in MICA's HR office organized a lunchtime game room. An e-mail went out, announcing that there would be consoles, available to anyone who wanted to stop by, with Guitar Hero, Wi Tennis, and a few other games. With luck, at least one could be played on the big screen in the school's new black box.

Damn right! That's the kind of news that can get new parents out of the house. So we readied a few air guitar chops, packed up the stroller, and headed out.

Sure enough, there were several games up and running: one staff member was dominating the virtual court, and several students were engaged in mortal combat on a television screen that had been wheeled in for the afternoon. And in a conference room to the side, a pristine projected image of Guitar Hero, with three supplementary discs at the ready.

Now, I'll admit that I'm far from a basement-made guitar hero. That said, I did have a homemade axe for years, and played it long enough to feel I oughta have some kind of edge heading into a video rendition of Poison's Talk Dirty to Me. But I stand corrected. Turns out that Guitar Hero doesn't resemble actual guitar playing very closely at all. Instead of strings, there's a rather weird plastic toggle. And instead of fretting strings arranged vertically on a fretboard, one simply presses the five childishly colored buttons. It's more like a limited version of Whack-a-mole than playing the guitar.

Which is probably just another way of saying that our assistant registrar beat me by something like 8,300 points. But at least I didn't leave Games Day without a larger lesson, as well. In thinking about Guitar Hero over the next day or two, I realized that it's something like the various books on parenting that we've been reading. Like Guitar Hero, such books offer a version of an experience - and, in that sense, they can be really involving. But it's only when you've actually had the experience that their limitations come into clear focus. Sure, "a baby may be distressed by the exposed feeling of nakedness" (Penelope Leach, Your Baby & Child, 135). Or you may have a Cleo, in which case you can throw that concern out the window.

Dada

Hugo Ball recommended cutting out words from the day's paper, placing them in a bag, drawing them at random, and setting them down into a poem that lay beyond one's control. Arp dropped cut-out forms on a ground, and affixed them; Duchamp dropped a one-meter-long string onto a surface and adopted the resulting serpentine form as a template.

On Sabina Avenue, our methods for generating chaos are simpler still. We lower Cleo into her shallow, battery-operated jiggle chair, place it on the picnic table, and watch her go. Just follow her right hand for a minute, and you'll see what seems like pure chaos. It's at her ear; it's at her side; it's clutching her blanket; it's twisting in space.

And yet it seems too easy to call the movements purely random. Is there a system, an aesthetic, a motivation behind them? Today I imagined that I was watching the formation, as she moved, of a crazed skein of neurons that will govern future motions. But I also thought, in turn, of the 1948 Soviet critic who saw the atonal compositions of Schonberg as "confused, neuropathological combinations that transform music into cacophony, into a chaotic conglomerations of sounds." Is it necessary to point out that in time, listeners found an order in Schonberg, as well?

Pure chaos is remarkably hard, it turns out, to generate. And beneath it often lies a larger order.

Discoveries

Our well-used 1997 copy of What to Expect in the First Year (in which the month-by-month developmental milestones were dutifully checked at some point in the past by the parent of some apparently precocious child) curtly announces, at one point, that there are six conditions in which an infant may find herself. Deep sleep - that fleeting promised land - is one; light sleep another; passive wakefulness is a third. But my favorite is alert wakefulness.

The other morning I got to hold Cleo on the porch after she'd woken up and fed, and she was full of energy and curiosity. She's currently learning to hold her head up, and to turn from side to side; at the moment, both are still rather risky undertakings, and as a result she often looks like a drunken spectator at a tennis match as she throws her whole torso into the effort of moving her head. At other times, she recalls Ace Ventura in some of his more energetic moments. In any event, it's quite moving to watch, as she's occasionally thrilled with the results, and occasionally simply frustrated or worn out.

Is there a musical analogy to this process? There must be a few, but the one that comes to my mind - my obviously 1980s-colored mind - is a tune by Rush. Now, I know as well as the next guy who once wore a Distant Early Warning tee-shirt to the bowling alley that it hasn't been fashionable to quote Rush since the first Bush presidency. But, still: do you know the song Discovery? Part of a concept album that describes a dystopic future world from which all music has been banned, the tune describes - in musical and lyrical terms - the moment in which one man stumbles upon a guitar. Picking it up, he strums it; pleased with the sound, he begins to experiment with it. He finds the harmonics; he learns a fifth; he begins to develop chords and to play more agitatedly.

You can look up the rest if you're curious - or, if you're lucky, you can dig out your own dusty copy of 2112. Either way, you'll experience - like me - the vicarious thrill of watching someone make a series of revelatory discoveries.

Maturation

Since we forgot the camera as we shunted what felt like our life possessions into the car for the Big Trip to Hagerstown and Parts Beyond (diapers? check. changing pad? check? Baby Bjorn? check. And so on...), we'll let this photo of a few of the ripening tomatoes in our southern garden plot stand for a big day of maturation.

Maturation in that Cleo crossed her first state line (into West Virginia, where she witnessed a round of miniature golf and saw most of the greater metropolitan area of Paw Paw) and attended her first baseball game (a 4-1 affair in which Greenville shut down host Hagerstown, largely on the strength of a classic minor league second inning in which the Drive scored three runs on zero hits).

But what I really wish Cleo could remember about the game was the young woman who sang the national anthem. Maybe 15 years old, she stood just shy of the pitcher's mound, surrounded by players who were probably wondering why they were even on the field at 11 a.m. (Camp Day at the ballyard!) and hundreds of wriggling campers in matching oversized tees. To this uncaring audience, she sang heartfully, and while not quite able to hit every note, stayed as true to the tune as she could, as dignified and as professional as any girl her age should hope to be. Listen, Cleo: that rendition of the anthem is the sound of growing up.

Musical cycles

There was a creative piece in yesterday's Times honoring the retirement of Casey Kasem (the king of the long-distance dedication, and also - didja know? - the voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo). After a few notes on Kasem's work, the paper printed the top five songs on the American Top 40 list from the week of July 17 at five-year intervals, covering Kasem's 39-year career.

An amazing list, really, for various reasons. With the Jackson Five holding down the second spot in 1970 and Miley Cyrus at number 4 in 2009, the appeal of feel-good pre-pubescent pop seems demonstrably consistent. Donna Summer, with two songs in the top three in 1979, emerges as a star even larger than I'd have guessed. But what really struck me was how few of the songs I knew - and, more specifically, how I could roughly chart my interest in pop music through my familiarity, or unfamiliarity, with the songs.

Born in 1970, I started when Kasem did, and so it's natural that I don't know many of the hits from his early years on the show. Even as late as 1979, I was clearly more interested in Nerf footballs and Atari than in pop music; the songs on that year's list don't ring a bell. 1984, though, turns out to be my wheelhouse: all five songs from that year are, for better or worse, engraved deeply into my musical memory. And yet, by 1989 I'd clearly begun to seek alternatives on the dial, or on my stereo: I remember listening to a lot of Talk Talk (not on the list), but not much Martika (number 2 on that year's July 14 countdown). The summer of 1994 - which I remember in musical terms as the season in which Kurt Cobain died - turns out to have been, for many Americans, a summer of rather lush ballads. And from that point on, the list just grows more and more foreign to me. Hoobastank, the band with the top song in 2004? I've heard of them, but barely. And I don't think I've ever heard of Shinedown, who currently hold the top spot.

It occurs to me that most folks would probably describe a similar arc of familiarity with pop. As children, we may move against a barely sensed background of such music, but of course we don't know the names of the singers, or the titles of songs. It's when we become young adults, though, that we begin to form an interest in music - and pop has always offered one of the easiest and most conventional paths of entry. Just as we often leave home at around 18, though, we begin to branch out musically, too, finding our own voice and learning our own tastes. And pop becomes an afterthought - a teen crush to whom our thoughts might return occasionally, but rarely in any serious manner.

What's neat about all of this, though, is that there's always someone nurturing the crush. I don't know The Fray (currently number 5), but I'm sure that there's a 13-year-old somewhere who's written the lyrics onto a Trapper Keeper. And that 13-year-old may never know the power of The Reflex played at a roller skating rink in 1984, but I remember it with delight. Or am I just overcomplicating things? Perhaps, although the names of the bands and songs change, we do know each other's experience, for it's simply the experience of growing up.

The unspecifiable

Turning the pages of a fascinating 1948 issue of Life magazine recently (nominally for the roundtable discussion of modern art, but as much, in the end, for the cigarette ads, as well), I came across Clement Greenberg's response to a painting by De Kooning. “It is like," said the dean of American art criticism, "a Beethoven quartet where you can’t specify what the emotion is but are profoundly stirred nevertheless.”

Ah, but I think I know what he means. The pleasure of looking at your own sleeping child evokes the same.

Bleary

Supposedly a friend of the idiosyncratic composer Carl Ruggles once stopped by the old Vermont schoolhouse that Ruggles used as a studio, and found Ruggles playing a single chord, again and again. After a while, the friend shouted, "What are you doing to that chord? You've been playing it for more than an hour now!" Ruggles, in turn, shouted back: "I'm giving it the test of time."

Today, I gave Satie's ethereal Gymnopedies the test of time; as Cleo and I rolled around the huge Druid Hill reservoir, weaving slowly among morning cyclists and strolling housewives (and the occasional bit of colorful dialogue: "I want to fight her every fucking time I go there" was all I heard of one conversation), I played the three piano compositions twice, and then a third time, and then a fourth. Music like beads on a string.

When cracks appear in a surface, sometimes the underlying material proves more interesting than the known veneer. L and I found our world slightly cracked last night, by a baby that didn't want to, or know how to, sleep. Those of you with children already know this vocabulary: bleary, barely coherent consultations between parents; a midnight walk with the screaming infant; and, at some point, exhaustion that becomes sleep, without our noticing the transition. But today was thus like the beach after a heavy storm: clean, bright, improbably beautiful. Cleo, yesterday's demons now behind her, seemed angelic. And Satie played on, and on.

Distractions

So maybe you happened to see the cartoon in the June 22 New Yorker that showed a camper approaching a boy strumming a guitar on a log, gesturing warmly towards a gathering in the distance, and saying, “Come on, we’re all going to sit around the campfire and play our iPods.”

Or maybe you caught Dan Barry's brief cultural history of the Walkman in this past Sunday's New York Times, and perhaps you were struck by his claim that “today, of course, the ocean of humankind is cluttered with solitary islands of disengagement, thanks to the iPod, the iPhone, and so many other devices that say I.” Reading further, you learned that he feels that we are all "stuck in pause, still listening to glorious Pavarotti but also blocking out the aural serendipity of our existence – the chance conversations, the songbird trills, even the bleats of car horns.”

And so, with these images in your head, maybe you strapped your own IPod on before heading over to the Gilman School for this week's lambent morning walks with Cleo. And as the summer campers slowly coalesced, and as the sun rose over the woods to the east and poured down on the campus, you selected the Indiana University School of Music's rendering of Smetana's Die Moldau (absolutely free on ITunes, for reasons that will become clear below), and hit Play.

One of six symphonic poems written in the 1870s by the Czech composer, Die Moldau recreates, in evocative fashion, the course of the river Moldau (the Vltava, to the Czechs): gentle strings suggest the origin of the river, in its two springs; the river wanders by a peasant dance in south Bohemia; horns suggest the grandeur of Baroque castles; and a series of rippling motifs and a final crashing chord suggest its union with the mighty Elbe.

As you push Cleo around the roughly mile-long oval, does the lush music in your ears render you, as Barry would have it, an island of disengagement? Well, perhaps at least a bit. It occurs to you that the roughly mile-long oval upon which you walk is river-like, and you imagine passing through beautiful Cesky Krumlov as you round the baseball diamond. The football players in the middle distance acquire a sublime grace when their motions are set against the music. And the rush hour traffic on Northern Parkway simply melts away.

But then - it's at the 8:49 mark - a man coughs. And then he coughs again. And suddenly you are removed not only from the environment in which you move, but also from the music itself. Is the man one of the musicians? Is he an aging Bloomington resident, who may be in poor health? Is his wife embarrassed? And suddenly you are blocking out the aural serendipity of Smetana, and speculating about the man's search, in his jacket pockets, for a cough drop.

Divorced from the grass upon which you stand, distant from the Vltava, removed from the music that pours into your ears, far from Indiana, you suddenly realize exactly where you are: with a baby before you, on the 8th of July. And, thus returned, you begin all over again.

Rulebound

In his new book, American Parent (click here for yesterday's New York Times review), Sam Apple describes his attitude in the months leading up to the birth of his first child. He felt, he writes, that "if I looked into enough theories, explored enough trends and spoke to enough experts, I would be able to find order in the chaos that new parents face in the months before and after the birth of a child."

If only. Apple tries hard, chatting with various specialists and even accompanying, at one point, a nanny surveillance unit on a stakeout, but in the end realizes that even the most conscientious preparation, in this case, can't prevent a sizable degree of unpredictability. Parenting, it seems, ain't quite like chess, or baking muffins: variables just seem to come with the territory.

Which is perhaps as it should be. If it could be regularized, parenting would surely also become routinized, or industrialized. It it could be systematized, furthermore, it wouldn't require the same degree of constant involvement and spontaneity. Raising a newborn can be vexing, but that's where much of the delight lies, as well. Managing to get your month-old to sleep in your arms, after a series of experiments and adjustments, can feel temporarily sublime. Managing to program the clock on your dashboard after consulting the owner's manual is, well, nice.

Certainly, I understand the appeal of predictability. Reliable systems make life easier, and they present huge opportunities for profit. But aren't there at least a few regions of our lives in which we're happier with something less than reliability? Applications like Pandora's Music Genome Project are fun, but there's also a part of me that feels happy that they can't predict, with total success, what I'll like. And, by the same token, I'll take a tiny daughter who occasionally refutes the schemata of the experts. Or, as the writer Samuel Butler once claimed, "Life is like music. It must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule."

Criteria, standards and benchmarks

One of the oddest things about being a new parent is the fact that while your central concern is now the welfare of a baby, it's nevertheless rather hard to gauge that baby's health. Even the most alert four-week-old infant won't offer much of a response to the sincerest "How are you today?" Instead, what you get is a series of indirect signs and clues. And so every new parent becomes a sort of diviner, staring at the poop in a diaper or listening to the pitch of a cry with all of the focus of an ancient Babylonian priest trying to interpret the internal organs of a sheep.

Given this aura of uncertainty, visits to the pediatrician's office become, as academics like to say, overdetermined. The baby's placed on a scale, a weight's announced, and suddenly you can think of the baby's progress in concrete terms. But it's not done there; the doctor then quickly graphs the weight, and announces a percentile; now you can compare Cleo to all of the other month-old children out there, as well. It's an exhilarating process if it goes reasonably well: all of the hard work of several weeks of parenting can seem validated by a few numbers. And if the numbers are less than positive? I imagine that that might feel devastating, even if the baby seems to be quite happy in other directions.

So while a visit to the pediatrician does put a temporary end to all of the fretting and self-doubt that occurs in a normal week (Does the baby sleep too much? Is she eating enough? Should she be raising her head by now?), it's something of a double-edged sword. And, in thinking about that over the past few days, I realized that visits to the pediatrician are something like essays by aestheticians who try to establish firm criteria in discussing works of art. For example, take Bennett Reimer's essay "Criteria for Quality in Music," which is relatively typical of its field. It's a well-intentioned piece that tries to cast aesthetic judgment as consisting of four basic decisions (involving craftsmanship, sensitivity, imagination, and authenticity). Reimer is like the parent, in other words, who tries to think of the health of a baby in simple, quantifiable terms.

And perhaps it's meaningful, therefore, that such essays usually leave me cold and unconvinced. Certainly sensitivity and imagination must be related to our concepts of quality. But I never feel, after reading such essays, that they've gotten it exactly right. Kant's notion of the beautiful is stimulating, but it doesn't quite explain what I feel when I look at a Titian. And Joseph Margolis offers interesting reflections on aesthetic judgment, but his terms always feel a little too stiff, a bit too clinical.

In short, perhaps the beauty of a sonata and a baby's health are simply more complicated than a few pages can accommodate. We may desire, occasionally, the pat approach, and I'm sure that percentiles have their place in generally estimating a baby's physical welfare. But let's don't rely too much on them. Happiness, happily, cannot simply be measured in ounces, or inches.

Baby talk

In 1971, in the hopes of attracting some younger customers to their classical offerings, Deutsche Grammophon turned to some contemporary slang. The result was a now-infamous ad: “We’d like to turn you on,” it read, “to what we consider some of our best albums. We have a full color catalogue that’s outta sight… Just walk into your local records store and say ‘Hey, how about laying that new Deutsche Grammophon catalogue on me?’”

I think about that ad occasionally when I talk to Cleo. Everyone has, it turns out, their own style of baby talk. For some, of course, it's a sort of cooing, in an elevated voice; for others, it's a velvet chant, full of w's and z's. For some, it seems to center on straightforward compliments ("look at your blue eyes"); for others, it involves coy comments of a jokingly conspiratorial nature ("aren't we naughty today?").

Mine turns out to be - and it seems that we don't have a lot of control over our baby voices; they just emerge - a rather odd combination of gentle intonation and idiosyncratic observations about the complexities of the world that comes across as something like a combination between Mister Rogers and Werner Herzog, minus the heavy Teutonic accent. Speaking without edge, without sarcasm, without any exclamation points, I lead her through simple sentences about colors and cars and neighborhoods.

Does style matter, though? Probably not much, to month-old ears that can't distinguish words from birdsong. But to the weary parent, a little bit of variety can make a familiar walk fresh. Which is why I was delighted to find, in this month's chapter of What to Expect..., a handsome spread on "How Do You Talk to a Baby?" Some of the advice was rather stock (sing a bit, or read, or raise your voice) but some was new to me: pronouns, for example, are confusing to a listener who doesn't even know what a person is, and so sticking to firm nouns can help a baby's comprehension. And those long explanations of the history of medieval Italian painting? Shelve them for now, for "a young baby doesn't have a memory for the past." Instead, stick to the present tense.

Okay. Perhaps we really can help a baby's comprehension along by avoiding complexities. But the Deutsche Grammophon ad is valuable, too, in reminding us that efforts to modify our voice too much can also backfire, and sound ridiculous. Thinking about a baby's linguistic abilities can lead in some interesting directions. But is telling a baby that she;s a wittle wascal really very far, in the end, from asking a 1971 teenager on to lay some Schumann on them? Only, I suspect, in the thankful sense that the baby won't yet sneer and point out our ridiculousness.