Summer daze

So you begin this blog, you know, on fatherhood and music and the various connections between them, and you work on it for TWO YEARS, and you touch on classical music pretty regularly and all, and then you qualify for the Jeopardy! auditions in D.C., and you make it down there, and you even review your presidents and Oscar winners, and then suddenly you're asked to name, well, you're asked to name the composer of La Traviata.

And, somehow, after 225 posts on music, you actually don't know the answer. And you end up writing Rossini. Even if it was, in fact, Verdi. Giuseppe Verdi.

Oh, it's enough to hurt a man, it is (although, really, the abysmal, Rasputin-like initial photo and a clear lack of telegenic effervescence - for some reason, I just can't SHOUT my answer to How are you today? - had surely already doomed me). But will such a mistake erode, as it probably should, my blog readership, as well? Who wants to read musings on music by a man who doesn't know his music?

Well, perhaps you do. After all, here you are. But perhaps, if we're being honest, you really came for the photo of the adorable toddler, rather than the thoughts on music. And, if so, I'm feeling chastened enough to accommodate. Photo above, y'all. Enjoy.

Fond farewells

Well, since a dearheart of a reader just sent me a Starbucks gift card, in anticipation of Father's Day, and since pretty much everything I write is powered by coffee from that joint, this blog is back in business.

And, since it happens to be May 20, the day of Clara Schumann's death in 1896, let's think for a minute about goodbyes. Cleo will soon be leaving for a summer in South Africa, and yesterday was her last day at the house of her buddy Quentin - who, in turn, is moving to Dallas. So we spent a few moments trying to explain - not easy, to someone with no command of the future tense - that she likely won't see the apartment in which those two have spent many days again. A few goodbyes were said: bye-bye, windows. And then we were off, to less ceremonial activities of the sort that are actually much more meaningful to your average toddler: pushing strollers, flirting with rope swings, and so on.

But those of us who have said goodbye before, many times, found ourselves, nevertheless, in a slightly nostalgic mood. And why not? Moments of farewell remind us of the fortuitous, chancy luck that brought us together in the first place. We'd never met Quentin and Stephanie before, when we first got together to discuss the possibility of sharing a nanny. And now it's hard to imagine the last year without them.

The last music that Clara Schumann heard, before expiring, was her husband's.

Liszt and Cleo

All right, then. With my other writerly duties temporarily fulfilled, it's time to get back to the thick of things: to a certain monkey, that is, and her ongoing attempt to teach us the rudiments of toddler logic.

So: did you know that, in July and August of 1847, Franz Liszt was invited to Istanbul, where he played repeatedly at the Tchirigan Palace, before Sultan Abdul-Medjid, and was decorated with the diamond-encrusted Order of Nichan-Iftikhar. Big deal, right? Admittedly, Liszt was not the first Westerner to play in the Ottoman court; after all, the sultans had long been interested in, and alert to, European tastes. In fact, while in Istanbul, Liszt was hosted by Giuseppe Donizetti, an Italian bandmaster who had served as the Ottoman instructor general of music since 1828. But, still - the leading lights of Istanbul rarely got to listen to a top-flight performer, and Liszt clearly thrilled them.

You could think of Liszt's visit, I suppose, in several ways: as one in a series of cross-cultural encounters that occurred regularly in the Ottoman capital; as a symbolic cessation, in artistic circles, of ancient animosity between Hungarians and Turks; as an intriguing late moment in the touring life of Liszt, who traveled less ambitiously in later years. But today I'm enjoying thinking of it as a simple ambassadorial moment between two very different cultures. Liszt, the technical virtuoso, his hands dancing on the keyboard, playing for the so-called Sick Man of Europe - and yet marveling, reportedly, at the fact that he could, simply by turning his head while playing, see both the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. What he could offer, they had never seen, and what he saw there struck him as wonderful.

Cleo is Liszt; I'll be the Ottoman court. I don't always understand the phrasings, the references, the cadences - but I've been around long enough to know that what I'm seeing is special. And Cleo, meanwhile, marvels at what I now merely take for granted: moving ants on the ground in this direction, and a pile of sand over there, in that.

Caca

For months and months, you control most of what goes into your little girl. Sure, there are occasional moments where the grocery store's music system play an Eighties ballad that you'd just as soon your little baby never heard. But, still, you decide whether she'll eat squash soup or peas, and you decide when she's ready for Dr. Seuss. And that first sip of chocolate milk? The choice is all yours.

Until it's not. L. and I spent a little time this weekend trying to write down all of the words that Cleo uses, on an ordinary basis. It was a surprisingly interesting task: we came up with around 210, and they grouped themselves neatly into a number of categories (animals, of course, and foods, and parts of the body, and colors). Helicopter and octopus stood out as the most complex. And it turns out that you can successfully navigate this world for 23 months without knowing how to say either American Idol or It is what is is. But what was perhaps most notable about the list was that we'd taught her every word but one.

Which one? Well, that'd be caca, which she usually says in rapid combination with pee-pee and poop, when she decides to report on (usually falsely) the condition of her diaper (or, sometimes, on the whereabouts of a parent). So, we wondered: whence caca? And the answer, in turn, took form: from the mother of Quentin, Cleo's playmate, who speaks to Quentin in French, and who thus uses the neat Gallic equivalent for poop. You say po-tay-to; I say po-tah-to. Poop, caca. No big deal - aside from the fact that Cleo's now saying words that we never taught her, and that we never use.

And that, in turn, is a jarring fact. Just this morning, I was reading a book about modern Arab art, and I came across a candid passage by the Palestinian artist Tayseer Barakat, who was commenting on the fact that easel paintings were entirely foreign to most Middle Eastern artists, before around 1900. "We, as Arabs and Middle Easterners," he wrote, "did not know this [easel painting]... We were not accustomed to a hanged painting on a wall. From its foundation, this idea which is based on something not Arabic not Easterner, demolishes the whole creative act for us."

References to caca don't quite demolish our entire creative act. To the contrary, in fact, they usually make us smile. But they do contain, I'd hold, an element of the foreign, or the imported, and thus of the unheimlich. Cleo is almost entirely, thus far, made of what we've given her. But, more and more, she'll be made of what she encounters on her own, without us: an amazing, but also unsettling, prospect.