The Order of Things

Most of us, I think it's fair to say, learned much of what we know about the history of music in a haphazard and largely inefficient way. We listened to the radio when we were 13, and perhaps a D.J. emphasized the importance of the Beatles, the band who'd performed the song we'd just heard. Or perhaps a friend told us that Miles Davis was a monster on the trumpet, and that he'd done some really important work in the 1960s and 70s. Or perhaps, in perusing the liner notes to the used copy of Beethoven's Ninth that we'd just bought for two dollars, we learned that he is generally viewed as a Romantic composer.

We learned, in other words, in bits and pieces, slowly forming a sense of the whole from the many disparate parts. Eventually, perhaps, we took a class in music history, or read a book that outlined the connections between West African music, the blues, and Elvis Presley. And, as we grew older, the music that was produced in our time eventually became a part of music's history, too: anyone older than 35 has at least a sense of the trajectory of Michael Jackson's career, from energetic cherub to a eunuch in the weird court of megacelebrity. But, for the most part, most of us still assembled, I think, our understanding of music's vast past from a patchwork of fortuitous mentions, incidental references, and educated guesses. Schumann? Jelly Roll Morton? Canned Heat? They all fit in there somehow, although their precise place probably differs considerably in most of our mental maps.

I'd always hoped, before becoming a parent, that I might give my children some help in drawing their own chart of the land of music. Wouldn't it be nice, for instance, to give your 10-year-old son a copy of Abbey Road, and then to follow that up a few months later with Exile on Main Street? To explain, during a long car trip, how Mozart borrows from, and departs from, Haydn? I never wanted to be overbearing about it, but hoped simply to offer some basic orientation, to point out some major signposts in the history of the subject.

But. But that was us, Cleo and L. and I, listening to some randomly chosen Venezuelan folk music last night. And then to Chopin's lovely Raindrop Prelude today. And, just as likely, to some Dead Can Dance in the car tomorrow. Who knows if Cleo really registers any of it? If she does, though, she might well be completely confused, as there's no order, no sense, in what I'm playing at the moment. It all fits together, kid, but you're gonna have to figure out how on your own.

Of course there'll be time, in years to come, for more useful conversations about such links and connections. But for now, it strikes me that in fact much of infancy is characterized by more or less random stimuli. Here, Cleo is a mobile. Okay; now here's a plush pig. And now I'm going to place you on your back. And now into the car. Hey, there's Mommy! From our point of view, of course, there's an order to it all; we try to give Cleo toys when she's alert; we try to read her signals, and to put her to bed when she seems tired, and we pick each other up at work. But one could easily argue that there would be more useful, or thoughtful ways of ordering the activities: after Cleo stares at the high-contrast cat card in her playroom, I could carry her over to the real cat in the house.

Maybe so. And maybe radio stations could play tracks in historical order, for a day or two, so that we could view influences in a more direct way. But maybe, just maybe, there's something to be said for a lack of complete order, too. The present is never quite as ordered as it might be, whether we're infants or adults. Maybe the past should thus always seem slightly jumbled, as well.