For the first time

Came across an especially engaging post on Reddit a couple of days ago: a reader who was congenitally deaf and whose hearing aids had given him only the roughest sense of sound was given new, state-of-the-art aids. He was immediately startled, as he walked across the floor of the doctor's office, by the noise of his shoes on the carpet - a sound that he had always assumed was inaudible to all. When a friend came to meet him, the poster was surprised to find that his friend's voice was slightly raspy - a detail that he'd never been able to perceive. And so, that same evening, his friends set about giving him a new musical education, playing Mozart, the Stones, and Sigur Ros in an effort to show him how beautiful, how moving music can be. So, the poster asked the Reddit community: what else should I listen to? What music would you recommend?

It was a twist on a familiar question: if you were consigned to a desert island, which songs would you want to have along with you? Here, though, the idea of a limit was inverted: really, it was as though someone raised on a desert island had returned to the mainland, discovering a wealth of culture to which he now had access. (Or, as one reader observed, it was vaguely comparable to an alien, just arrived on earth, asking for our recommendations). And Reddit responded: with over 14,000 comments, the original post sparked one of the more popular and involved threads I've ever seen online. You can follow them here.

But of course the basic premise of the post - what to teach a neophyte? - isn't really that remarkable at all, from the point of view of a parent. I've already written a couple of times, in Cleo's three years, about the raw opportunity that a child offers, in terms of musical education. Sure, a toddler's responses aren't usually as rapt or as articulate as those of a grown man hearing a symphony clearly for the first time. But, still, there's something both disarming and affirming in hearing Cleo ask, from the back seat, for some Motown.

And yet, it would be folly to pretend that one could be truly exhaustive. Holst in the background, while we play? Okay, sure, perhaps, from time to time. But I have little interest in trying to offer Cleo a strict musical program.  And, anyway, there will soon come a moment when she discovers compositions about which I myself know nothing - and perhaps plays them for me. In other words, the moment in which one first hears, clearly, beautiful music is clearly remarkable. But so too is the moment in which one shares it with someone else.