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.