No smaller interval

In his sprawling, engaging - and very, very French - book The Arabs: Their History and Future, written in 1960, Jacques Berque devotes a few pages to a consideration of the differences between Arab and European musical traditions. He quickly realizes that longstanding Arab musical scales are more subtle than their Western counterparts. Or, as he puts it,

Our scale recognizes no smaller interval than a semitone. It climbs the ladder of sound by degrees which shock the Eastern ear by their crudity.

That is, to a Baghdadi or a Cairene raised on the airy, snaking melodies of an oud, or used to the winding rhythms of the muezzin, even the leap from a fourth to a fifth can seem coarse, or overstated. And yet, Berque insists, this should hardly be read as a criticism of Western music. One adapts to the system at hand, and symphonic composers, he writes, have used rhythmic discoveries to perfect the Western octave, as an instrument. Arab music, he's happy to admit, is wonderfully subtle. But if major and minor scales can support a Mozart, then they are probably also sufficient.

Such an observation's been on my mind of late, as Cleo has started to bloom as an artist. For most of the past year, her drawings and paintings have consisted of roughly controlled and seemingly randomly applied marks. Left hand, right hand: she didn't seem to care, and the joy of applying color seemed to be enough. In the past month, though, she's begun to articulate a style, and then to work representatively, rendering forms that clearly convey intent and even meaning. The painting above, for instance, is one of several in which she left a half of the paper - a diagonal wedge - unpainted, while sparsely filling in a lower corner. Such images suggest, to me at least, an interest in compositional balance - even as the brilliant blue mark upsets any easy symmetry. Just yesterday, though, she stunned me by dragging a magnetic drawing board out of a thrift shop bin, and by drawing a series of motifs clearly identifiable as figures. Here's one of them:

Sure, I couldn't tell if it was Daddy, or Mommy, or Cleo, or Joe: only she seemed to be aware of the figure's particular identity. But look closely, and you'll see, next to the toy car, a dominant head, four limbs, hair, and two eyes.

Berque, of course, could say that such an image shocks us with its crudity. But I think that he would add, again, in a subsequent sentence, that Cleo is learning - slowly, perhaps, but learning - to perfect the coarse magnetic pen as an instrument.