Palette of sound

With L. out for drinks with a friend the other night, and Cleo upstairs dreaming her dreams of sea monsters, I plopped down and gave myself over to episode 3.07 of Breaking Bad. That's the episode, for all of you connoisseurs, out there, in which Hank takes on the cousins - or, in more abstract terms, it's 45 minutes of t.v. that boils down to one painfully attenuated and exceptionally violent minute in a box store parking lot.

After the climactic scene, wanting to know more but finding myself with no more episodes on hand, I began to trawl through the extra features on the DVD. I heard the director relive the series of compositions in the 2-day shot that yielded that one minute of action; I watched a few outtakes. And then I stumbled on the short documentary devoted to the show's musical choices and compositions. Want to know more about that lilting, heartbreaking tune that accompanies the demise of the r.v.? You've come to the right place, pardner: it turns out it's a tune by Los Zafiros, a Cuban outfit active in the 1960s. But I was just as interested in the composer Dave Porter's explanation of the music that he'd drawn up to accompany the ominous cousins. At the very outset of the season, he said, he had tried to create a palette of sounds that would accompany the two men. And over the course of the season, he then toyed with this palette, isolating, juxtaposing, stretching - and, in 3.07, recombining, in a soundtrack that is something of a televisual tour de force.

A palette of sounds. If only we all had a composer working behind us, developing the motifs, the entrances, and the falling diminuendos that might describe and heighten our day. But then, of course, perhaps we do: it's us. Take Cleo as an example. She begins the day, typically, with a few elastic variants of a siren's cry: "Da-a-a-a-ad," we hear, from down the hall, in a voice that's just below a shout. When I fail to answer - a cue that it is probably about 5:17 a.m. - she slowly transitions into a playful laboratory of faint whoops, sirens, and words that sound like arabesques, or recall treacle in their flexibility. And then, in a firm, confident, jubilant voice - the voice of a scientist, who has isolated a resistant element, after months of work: "It's SIX! Guys, it's six."

On, then, to the rest of the day, and its widening palette. Surprisingly heavy footfalls in the hall, as she speeds towards us. The gurgle of her straw in her empty sippy cup, as she drains a cup of milk while watching (in recent days) a Disney Silly Symphony from the 1930s. Soft whines, percussive laughs, and then we're off to school. The bold color of her voice as she enters the Yellowbird room and announces to her teacher that she has brought a rubber turtle to class. And next, from my point of view, the staggeringly disarming whisper in which she tells me, at 4:20 on a Friday, that "I was hoping you would come." Home, then, to another field of sounds: the quiet intensity of Cleo at play, packing a small bag with items for an imagined trip, which recalls to me the focused, reverent gestures of a priest during the waning moments of communion, or the small clicks and shushes of woodland mammal cleaning, or feeding. Loud, coarse boasts about her skill at Candy Land; the bright energy of Motown, when L. gets a dance party going in the living room; her weary, schoolmarmy tone of correction, when I misread a passage in one of her Angelina books. The whiny protest, when it's time to brush teeth, and the miraculous return of energy, as she runs from the bathroom with her towel wrapped like a wedding dress about her.

And then, finally, the regular rise and fall of her chest, and the strong rhythm of her night breathing, as another day gives way to night.