On Bach and fatherhood

It's two lives, really. Or four, to be completely accurate, for Cleo is both a four-year-old preschooler and, by her account, a princess with modest magical abilities. But what I mean is this: at times, I'm completely given over to fatherhood - as this morning, when we played our fishing game and then improvised with her baby dolls, building spaces in which they could hatch secret plans, before taking most of an hour to sketch, with her, developing narratives about spaceships, burning houses and boys eating hot dogs. But at other times - as now, when Cleo and L. are in West Virginia and I'm at home in Baltimore - I'm a part-time academic, working through student essays and writing an introduction to an original translation of a 1741 French text on that year's Salon. How to reconcile, or marry, such divergent identities? Frankly, I don't know. And what's more, I don't know if I need to.

I suppose that one could seek a sort of common ground, allowing one identity or calling to bleed into the other. That, in a way, was the solution that J.S. Bach seems to have pursued. That great composer has been on our mind of late, as we've been listening regularly to a fictional account of his chats with a young American girl who is stymied in her own piano lessons. During their conversations, Bach occasionally mentions his children, citing them as both a joy and a financial burden. And that's likely about right, in his case: after all, he had 13 kids by his wife Anna Magdalena, and those in addition to the four he had fathered with a first wife, and who joined his growing brood in a Leipzig apartment. Consequently, as Hans Fischer has noted in a pleasant overview of Bach's life and career, Bach and his second wife seem to have run a rather frugal household. Still, by all accounts, it hummed; indeed, the Bach household seems to have been - well, to use a musical term, harmonious. And such harmony seems to have stemmed at least in part from Bach's ability to interest (and instruct) his children in his primary calling, music. Fatherhood, in some ways, was merely an extension of his natural vocation.

But even Bach, apparently, had a room of his own: a composing room, which looked our along the city wall toward the west. And perhaps it's there, in that room, that we can find a basic truth. Bach seems to have enjoyed fatherhood - and certainly I can't name many pleasures more simple or more rewarding than simply playing and drawing with Cleo. Nonetheless, it's evenings like this, in which I can let my mind roam and struggle with even more abstract and rigorous ideas, that refresh: that give me a sort of freedom, in turn, with which to give myself over to a game of fishing. One life, in short, creates a space for the other; the two, when it works, are complementary in the best of senses.

Cleo, of course, doesn't have 15 siblings, and I'm no Bach, especially in the realm of translation. Our pink house is no Baroque apartment, and Baltimore no Leipzig. In a very basic way, though, it feels fair, for the moment, to say that both Bach and I manage to live two lives, simultaneously - and to do so reasonably happily.

Get lucky

Sometimes, when things get a little hectic, it's nice to have a reliable, easy source of frictionless happiness at hand. And these days are, arguably, hectic. With snowstorms dissolving child-care networks up and down the coast, with many application deadlines fixed around March 1, and with a stomach virus making the rounds in Baltimore, it sometimes feels as though things are barely hanging together. You may have your own ways of dealing with such stress. But for my part, I simply try to call up an image of the guitarist to Pharrell Williams' left in the video to Daft Punk's wildly popular 'Get Lucky.'

You probably know the song, even if you don't think you do. It's the one that took sports arenas by storm last fall, sustaining fans during intermissions with its infectious and buoyant beat. And while not everyone is a fan, many are: indeed, Daft Punk (two Frenchmen, who have always worn helmets when in public or onscreen) rode the popularity of the song to a raft of Grammy nominations. I can see why: just last night, as L., Cleo and I took in the first half of the final home game of the Hopkins women's basketball season, the song came on during a time out, and I broke into a smile just as wide as the one that the guitarist maintains for most of the video.

So a song, or even an image of a song, can sustain. But then again, I'm lucky enough that I don't even need to rely, at all times, on such a prop. After the melody dissipated, and the referee's whistles called the teams back to the court, Cleo was still wriggling, working her way through the natural hole in my crossed legs that she called a portal to the world of mummy tombs. A minute later, she was giving me and L. quick fictive hairdos, as if we were Cinderella's stepsisters preparing for the ball - and just two minutes after that, she peered meaningfully at the hardwood, and brought forth a vigorous 'Go Hop!' that just barely rose above the echo of the dribbled ball and the squeak of sneakers.

In other words: yeah, it's nice to maintain a fixed image of happiness to which one can return, as if to a well. But it's also a wonderful thing to have a little 4-year-old who bubbles over, at most moments, with a natural ebullience that, while it may not win any Grammies, somehow needs no enhancement through production or stage lighting.

The music of chance

Did you happen to see Beth Boyle Machlan's meditation, in yesterday's New York Times, on the durable appeal of radio music? Titled 'Driving to the Music of Chance,' it was a celebration of the sheer unpredictability of the tunes that find their way to our cars' antennae as we drive. In an era where music is often carefully curated by the listener - through ITunes playlists or Pandora cues - the radio forces us to accept a loss of control and an attendant degree of unpredictability: a surrender, as she put it, to contingency - but also, occasionally, to convergence.

Well, that piece made a special sense to those of us here at halfstep, where a scheduled day off, two snow days, a weekend and a holiday have meant that L. and I have spent six straight days with Cleo. And while we've managed to get outside for brief periods - a half hour in the snow, building an igloo and sledding; a short walk to our local elementary school - for the most part, we've been snowbound. Which, in turn, means that we've been doing the parental equivalent of turning on the radio. Sure, we can rely to some extent on familiar, organized activities: a half hour of Tangled, or a good read, or a jigsaw puzzle almost always appeals. And now that the skies have clearer, playdates make sense, too. But, nonetheless, we've also had to simply rely on what comes to mind in passing some of the dozens of hours. And that's resulted in some interesting permutations.

Take, for instance, what we now call the fishing game. Cleo sits on a bed, with a sheet stretched in front of her, like a plane extending a few feet before her lap. You lie, in turn, on the ground just beneath the sheet, and wait for her to cast one of her two lines of soft, gentle white rope. When the line appears, you quickly tie an available toy - a block; a doll's chair - onto the rope, give it a tug, and... the girl reels it in, and soon declares that she has caught an eel, or a flounder. Repeat, and repeat again, and you've got yourself a real game.

In her article, Machlan described two college friends of hers who liked, for a brief moment in the early 1990s, to drive  around Portland, Maine, waiting for the local station to air Pearl Jam's 'Better Man.' "They would never buy the album," she explains, "but on the road they loved to sing the song."

We know the basic sensation, even if it's occasionally been too treacherous, in recent days, to drive. We've played with pretty much everything, but we don't need to buy any games. At home, we love to fish for fish.

Prodigies

Back in October, the Wall Street Journal ran an affecting article on 8-year-old Alma Deutscher, a remarkable English girl who recently issued a CD of her violin music - which she herself composed. But the CD, it turns out, was only the latest in a string of remarkably precocious accomplishments. Before she was two, Alma sang with perfect pitch, and at 3 she had begun to play her first violin. "She's able," said Robert Gjerdingen, a music professor at Northwestern, "to think music."

Here at halfstep, we're pretty impressed with our own little girl. To be sure, though, we haven't seen any signs of such remarkably early development. Like most four-year-olds, Cleo is learning to spell her first words. She can play by herself for sustained periods of time, but still wears a Pull-Up at night. And, like most of her peers, she may not be able to think music, but she can certainly think ice cream.

But from another perspective, it all seems somehow precocious. L. and I still sometimes see her, in our mind's eye, as the tiny baby who struggled to roll over. And so it still feels truly remarkable to see her walking home, alone, from the meadow at the end of our block when, tired of snow, she wants to warm up. I'm slightly amazed when she uses words like confident or unconscious. And I can verge on the overwhelmed when I open the front door on Valentine's Day and discover this:

So, Cleo, you may not have a CD yet. The violin still feels many moons away. But you are, like your entire tribe of little ones, prodigious.

Where's Daddy?

We're only three days into the week, but it's already been a giving period, in terms of music. Today, a colleague turned me onto the work of James Vincent McMarrow, an Irish singer/songwriter whose gentle melodies and memorable voice intertwine to create a distinct mood - and whom I'm currently listening to on Grooveshark, a music-sharing site that I first encountered on Monday. Indeed, it was on Monday, too, that I learned about the music of Over the Rhine, a Cincinnati band (named for a Cincinnati neighborhood) that has quickly impressed me with a range of beguiling tunes. Three days in, then, but already a bit broader in my sense of the variety of sound.

Learning about Over the Rhine, though, was curious in one sense. For, while they are a contemporary act (indeed, they'll be coming to Annapolis in a couple of months), they're also an established act. They first formed, apparently, in the late 1980s, and began to attract some national attention in the early 1990s - at a time when I was more eager to hear Pearl Jam than female leads. I'm twenty years late to the party, in other words, and wandering through their songbook is thus a bit like walking through a space that offers an alternative to the one through which I moved. Where was I? I was swaying to Seal, and trying to learn some G'n'R on the guitar. But now, wonderfully, I can revisit a very different 1990s.

Or can visit, say, New Year's Day, 2009. L. and Cleo set out today for four days in N.C., and so after a lovely morning with Cleo I'm all alone at home. And that means, in turn, that I can pamper myself: write a blog entry, yes, but also watch the second half of Fruitvale Station, a taut, gripping film documenting the purportedly accidental but undeniably violent murder of a 22-year-old man on a Bay Area station platform just over four years ago. I won't say too much about it, in the hopes that you might enjoy it as well, but I will point out that a good deal of the film focuses on his clearly warm relationship with his 7-year-old daughter. And much of that relationship felt familiar: the impromptu races; the eager anticipation at the end of a nursery school day; the sheer happiness that comes from draping one's daughter on one's shoulders. Which is why, perhaps, the final scene hit me so hard: the daughter, woken up from a sleepover and slowly coming to her sense and realizing that something, something is amiss, pointedly asking, 'Where's Daddy?'

Today, on our doctor's advice, I took Cleo to a radiologist. She'd been suffering from stomach cramps over the past two days, and the pediatrician wondered if the problem might be trapped gas, or a slight intestinal blockage. So we drove up through icy forests to Lutherville, where Cleo donned the robe that you see above, and bravely put on a smile, aware that this was something unusual, but not sure if she ought to be worried or not. As it turned out, she needn't have been: the X-ray machine was more impressive than it was fearful, and Cleo actually giggled before the first image was taken: an image that revealed, indeed, a slight blockage that should give way to a few dried apricots and apples. We're fine, in short - but at least one of us is still slightly haunted by the sheer possibility that things could have been otherwise.

Of course they could have been. Indeed, they always have been. While I was listening to Pearl Jam, the members of Over the Rhine, unknown to me, were earnestly honing their craft. And a young boy in the Bay Area was growing into the man who would eventually lie bleeding and gasping on the unforgiving floor of Fruitvale Station.

Where's Daddy? He's here, thinking of you - whatever here, as you read this, might mean.

Homo ludens

Let's think for a moment about how interesting, or how revealing, it is that we speak of "playing music." Not every language, it's worth remembering, speaks of musical performances in such terms. True, a Frenchman can jouer de la musique, but he can also, if he is operating a stereo, envoyer la musique: that is, he can send it forth. A Spanish guitarist will, I gather,  claim that she likes to tocar her instrument; in other words, she touches it, rather than plays it. Which is not so different, in turn, from a speaker of Swahili noting that he can piga combo cha muziki - that is, can strike or beat an instrument. English speakers may think of music as a subject of play, then, but that's a regional view, rather than a universal one.

That said, it's also a view that comes rather naturally to us as halfstep these days. In fact, for better or worse our days are largely comprised of what games: playful momentary role plays or scenarios, that is, that turn everyday interactions and passages into something a bit more rich, or dimensional - or simply silly. In fact, over the past few years Cleo has developed a sort of shorthand terminology with which she refers to, or requests, such games. 'Let's play,' she proposes, 'the leg game,' and clambers onto my crossed leg, for a brief and unsteady ride. Or perhaps she opts, instead, for the bully game, in which we pretend that we are travelers in a distant land and are forced to appropriate a car or house (which, inevitably, turns out to look a lot like our own). Then, too, there's the sleeping game, in which I pretend to slumber as she, a fairy or a mother, leaves small gifts on my rising and falling chest or attends to my perceived needs by preparing food. But don't get that confused with the sleep game, in which I while, driving, implore her to stay awake while she playfully and happily pretends to fall asleep. Correspondingly, there is also a talking game, a barber game - and, well, the list goes on, but the point is that Cleo knows from games.

Indeed, she's getting pretty good at devising, or playing along with, rather complex games. We often play hide and seek, and although the nooks and crannies in our house are limited, she has honestly stumped me a few times of late, forcing her tiny body into spaces that I don't even consider potential refuges. Yesterday, she beat me fair and square at Triominos, which is a relatively complicated game of numbered triangles, and she's always up for a raucous parody of a karate bout. Too, she can invent games, weaving lengthy princess narratives that inevitably involve anyone who happens to be in a 50-foot radius. And she can forge simple silliness: the other day, for instance, she wandered half-undressed into our bedroom in the morning, and jokingly taunted us by trying to wiggle her angelic little bottom in our direction, while making loopy sounds. L. and I both broke out laughing, as her small arms worked back and forth and her rear end somehow remained remarkably static. 6 in the morning, and play was already fully underway.

Was the sound of our laughter, or the rhythm of her mild taunts, music of a sort? I'll leave that for the philosophers of music. But I will point out, before they pick up the question, that our very language implies that it may have been. After all, Cleo wasn't touching her caboose, or beating it. She was, we would say, playing it.

Vulture wings and other beginnings

Supposedly, Heinrich Heine once claimed that "where words leave off, music begins." Viewed from that perspective, it's apparent that words left off - if, indeed, they even existed in any modern sense - tens of thousands of years ago, for in 2008 German archaeologists working at a site called Hohle Fels discovered a Paleolithic flute that has been dated, with little controversy, to roughly 35,000 years ago. Last year, moreover, a sophisticated re-dating of two flutes found in another German site indicated that they might be up to 43,000 years old. In short, it's clear that music began long, long ago.

And, as it took shape, it did so in a remarkable number of forms. Indeed, over the years almost every imaginable material has been bent, cut, stretched or generally turned towards a musical end. The very early German flutes are made of swan bone, vulture bone, and mammoth ivory: materials that seem simultaneously pragmatic and exotic. But of course our later uses of brass, or cherry wood, or cat gut might well have struck a Paleolithic musician in the same way. And that's to say nothing of electronic keyboards, or of the Norwegian ice instruments featured in a recent NPR story. Indeed, given the base strength of the human impulse to create sound, perhaps we should simply accept that no material employed in the production of music is really exotic at all.

But they can certainly seem exotic - even when they're comparatively simple, or domestic. Cleo, for instance, was struck by the beguiling simplicity of Incredibox, which I mentioned in my previous post. Can we really create music simply by clicking and dragging? Or, by the same token, can people really create such a diversity of sounds simply by using their own voice boxes? Indeed they can. And, indeed, even Cleo is learning that her own body is a musical instrument of sorts. This past week, she learned how to snap, generating a tiny but nonetheless distinct and consistent sound with her thumb and middle finger. (She's better with her right, than with her left). And she also produced, rather of a sudden, a truly weird guttural sound in the back of her throat, whose origin I simply can't understand and whose like I've never heard - but which I now request about once a day, for sheer entertainment.

And when she obliges (and she always does, at least twice), I suppose that we're not unlike our Stone Age ancestors, gathered in the Hohle Fels cave and entranced by the noises of the flute. We are silent, and we listen. Words leave off. And music begins.