Do musical composers ever feel, as I do, as a new father, a deep and baffled astonishment at what they have created?

Here's what I mean. In certain ways, Cleo seems like my child. She sleeps well. She's generally rather serious, as babies go. And she exhibits, often, a sort of Celtic determination, which is only occasionally interrupted - when she is frustrated - by familiar and dramatically Mediterranean appeals to injustice. In all of these ways, I can see myself in her.

But at other moments, she does things that seem so sheerly unlike me, or so simply individual, that I am reminded all over again of the wide differences that can separate generations. These moments are most obvious, perhaps, when she absorbedly plays on her own. While she usually refers to me every minute or so, occasionally she becomes so wrapped up in a self-assigned task (putting a toy bug in a toy car trunk; emptying blocks from a cannister) that it's impossible to think of her as mine. Instead, she's all hers. And the effect is both disorienting and exciting: it's a proof, all over again, that L. and I have truly created a new life.

Could this combination of partial recognition and surprise be, then, something that composers sometimes feel, as well? I think it is. In a 2003 book of contributions by composers, David Gillingham wrote that "My greatest joy as a composer has come from those particular moments when I have realized that I have created something that I know couldn't have possibly come from my head... but has come directly from my heart."

I think that's it, more or less. And so maybe the awe that we feel at watching our children is thus the awe of the head, watching the heart.