Associations

On this rainy morning, as the waters of the Jones Falls flirted with the Kelly Street bridge, Cleo and I drove over to the mill complex to gather ingredients for cookies - and to have a look, over coffee, at the gripping adventures of Odysseus, as interpreted by Hugh Lupton, Daniel Morden, and Christina Balit. Soon enough, we'd left the rain behind, and were instead sailing with the hero's crew as we approached the Sirens. And we listened to Odysseus describe the music that drifted toward him, across the water:

'In the song,' he remembered, 'I heard so many sounds: the beating of a swan's wings, the hiss and drag of sea on sand, the moan of the wind as it blows across the broad face of the world, the rhythm of the passage of the seasons, my wife singing - and all the sounds I heard were in harmony.'

Well, now. Back home, as we mixed our cookie dough, I pulled out a CD by a woman whom the author David Bret once referred to as a 'voluptuous siren':

We stirred, and we listened, and after a couple of arias I asked if Callas' voice reminded Cleo of anything. Remember Odysseus, I asked her, saying that the song of the sirens recalled the sound of water on sand, and the voice of his wife? Does this music call anything to your mind?

Cleo paused, thought - and then, tiny literalist that she is, answered as best she could. 'It reminds me of Beethoven. Of the sopranos, remember?' Well, yes I do: you're thinking of a moment in Beethoven Lives Upstairs, the Classical Kids CD in which a group of tittering divas pass by the great composer. But I'm impressed for other reasons, too. For while Callas wasn't singing Beethoven, she certainly is a soprano. So much, then, for the beating of a swan's wings - but score one for early childhood music education.

And yet, a few minutes later, as our cookies baked and I washed the dishes, something else happened. Callas was singing a passage from La Boheme - tu, tu, piccolo Iddio - and I looked up to see Cleo, hands in the air, posing formally and about to dance. She noticed me looking, and smiled. 'It's like Mulan,' she said, alluding to a Disney film for reasons that still aren't clear to me. 'Can you play it again when it's over?'

Sure we can. All the sounds, after all, were in harmony. And so we did.