Taking shape

As the tomato vines on the western side of our house grow, and spread, and as the teams in the National League begin to tend towards their various destined positions (welcome to the cellar, Pirates! what took you so long?), babies born last summer also sprout, in ways that could also be called inexorable - if only vaguely predictable.

A year ago, of course, the idea of tiny Cleo ever walking seemed ludicrous to us. How could such a small being ever even learn to hold her head up, let alone to stand? And yet, just as the books said she would, she learned to look about, and then to sit, and then, on a February day, to crawl. Now she climbs the 14 stairs of our staircase with little trouble, pours water as though she were a Bernini triton, and totters around the edges of tables, and cabinets, and bathtubs.

And her friends? They, too, have sprouted. One, whom we met for the first time last week, just started taking her first free steps. Another June baby, down the street, now enjoys slow walks around the block, with her parents ambling nearby, and holds up a steady finger when asked how old she is. And a third, with whom we played on Friday, loves pushing carts, and plastic trucks, and hampers about the room. Each child's an individual - that much is clear, even after a few minutes of observation - but each seems to obey, too, a larger logic, an invisible pattern of growth.

In the November 11, 1911 issue of Musical Times, Ernest Newman wrote that "All really good form has the air of an improvisation, like a flower or crystal; the moment you can detect the joins in a piece of music, or see the reflective, deliberate processes by which a given section of it has been built up, all illusion as to its being an organic growth necessarily vanishes." If we agree with him, we might also say that parenting an infant is like listening to a musical composition with an excellent form. The child grows, and gradually develops an arsenal of abilities, and habits. But at no point are the joins garishly exposed, or baldly visible. Instead, they simply happen, as though destined. One day, you hold a wee swaddled, inert infant in your arms. A year later, she scoots across the room towards you on hands and knees, pulls on your pant leg, hoists herself up, and looks at you, expectantly.

Full speed ahead

Too fast, too fast. You put down your blogging pen for a couple of weeks, and before you're back, your only brother is married, the class of seniors you just spent four years with is graduated, the summer school course you're teaching is halfway over, and the Nationals have fallen from first to last. And - oh, yeah - your daughter just turned one.

It's been a busy, busy half month, but also a beautiful one. Cleo, it's true, has often been more consumed with her new favorite toy - a plastic graduated cylinder - than with her surroundings. But even she presumably noted, on some level, the sublime and peaceful beauty of the Tuscan-like valley against which her uncle wed a lovely bride. And perhaps she took in, in those rare moments at the swimming pool when she was not dribbling water out of one end of her cylinder, the silken softness of late-afternoon June sunlight in the Chesapeake watershed. And maybe, just maybe, as she cavalierly ignored the two perfect cakes that L. made for her first birthday party and petulantly insisted, instead, on a dinner of garlic beans and peas, she realized that all of the generous folks gathered in our lawn were there at least in part on her account.

Maybe, maybe not. Turning one doesn't automatically bring, I don't suppose, a sophisticated awareness of beauty and generosity. But it does, at the very least, bring one clear thing in these days of fears regarding allergies: a green light, for the first time, to eat peanut butter. So full speed ahead, Cleo: we're behind you all the way.

Do musical composers ever feel, as I do, as a new father, a deep and baffled astonishment at what they have created?

Here's what I mean. In certain ways, Cleo seems like my child. She sleeps well. She's generally rather serious, as babies go. And she exhibits, often, a sort of Celtic determination, which is only occasionally interrupted - when she is frustrated - by familiar and dramatically Mediterranean appeals to injustice. In all of these ways, I can see myself in her.

But at other moments, she does things that seem so sheerly unlike me, or so simply individual, that I am reminded all over again of the wide differences that can separate generations. These moments are most obvious, perhaps, when she absorbedly plays on her own. While she usually refers to me every minute or so, occasionally she becomes so wrapped up in a self-assigned task (putting a toy bug in a toy car trunk; emptying blocks from a cannister) that it's impossible to think of her as mine. Instead, she's all hers. And the effect is both disorienting and exciting: it's a proof, all over again, that L. and I have truly created a new life.

Could this combination of partial recognition and surprise be, then, something that composers sometimes feel, as well? I think it is. In a 2003 book of contributions by composers, David Gillingham wrote that "My greatest joy as a composer has come from those particular moments when I have realized that I have created something that I know couldn't have possibly come from my head... but has come directly from my heart."

I think that's it, more or less. And so maybe the awe that we feel at watching our children is thus the awe of the head, watching the heart.

Zoe and Cleo

In our experience, becoming new parents has seemed to involve a sort of magnetization, through which we suddenly attract, as if were polarized, a band of objects generally related to infancy. Of course, this is due largely to the generosity of family members, of neighbors, of friends, and of co-workers - but the effect is the same. We are ships at sea, in a stormy and uncharted ocean, trailing a wake of plastic toys, pink, foot-high sweaters, and board books.

All of these nifty objects have been something of a revelation to me. I was dressing Cleo in a summery top the other day, and finally figured out - I'd never quite thought to understand it - how women's blouses with crossing spaghetti straps - work. I can now speak with some clarity about the history of popular children's books (from Pat the Bunny to Eric Carle's serialized productions), and I could, if anyone actually cared to listen, discourse on the relative time involved in changing disposable and cloth diapers.

One of the most appealing things to find its way into our childproofed house, though, has not been intended for Cleo. Rather, it's about Cleo - at a certain remove. We've been given, over the past few months, two volumes of collected Baby Blues strips. Started in 1990, Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman, the comic focused, in its first few years, on Wanda and Daryl, thirtysomethings who become new parents when their first daughter, Zoe, is born.

I don't want to argue that it's the best-drawn daily strip out there, or that its humor is especially sublime. But I will say that, when read at the end of a long day of Cleo-sitting, the familiarity of certain themes of the strip - Wanda's exhaustion; Daryl's naive enthusiasm; Zoe's relentless energy - rings absolutely true. Parenting an infant, in the pages of Baby Blues, is hard work, but also regularly punctuated by moments of grace, and humor. And, occasionally, the strips also touch me with their relevance. I recently blogged about Cleo's tiny, brightly-colored piano, and if you look back a few posts, you can watch a brief video of her playing on it. Which is why I smiled a little more fully when I came across this 1996 strip by Scott and Kirkman (you can click on it to enlarge it):

Michael Haydn

I'd never heard of - let alone heard music by - Michael Haydn before 8:25 a.m. last Friday, when I was driving a snoozy Cleo home, after dropping L. off at work. Under a tentative sun, I turned on the radio and heard the final few minutes of his Concertino aus Sinfonia in B Flat. Very, very pleasant music, it offered something of the delight of a busy, well-ordered town square.

Which, perhaps, makes sense. The younger brother of the much more famous Joseph, Michael was born in 1737, in an Austrian town called Rohrau. Raised by a female cook and a wheelwright who was also a talented folk musician, he followed in his brother's footsteps, earning a post as a chapel master and then marrying a singer named Maria Lipp. And, in 1770, he became a father, to a young girl with the undeniably Hapsburgian name of Aloisia Josefa.

At that time, Haydn was living in the lovely town of Salzburg, where he was employed by the cathedral. It's been 21 years, now, since I was in Salzburg, but I still remember its seductively Baroque tone, and hilly contours. And, yes, its squares: on a summer day, they're full of cafe tables, oversized chess games, and tourists looking for traces of Mozart.

I wonder, then: did Michael ever take Aloisia, when she was 11 months old, out for a walk? And, if so, might they have seen a view something like this?

Musical ambitions

So Grandma and Grandpa were in town briefly last week, and as they drove north, after a night's stay, we bobbed in a lambent wake of baked goods, North Carolina collard greens, gently used infant books, and a couple of awesome new used toys for Cleo. One, as you can see in the following, is a neat little piano that employs wide keys, saturated colors, and sturdy hammers to make itself playable by even the smallest hands:

It's been a ball to watch Cleo play with it. Although her performances never last more than, say, 20 seconds, they add a measure of directness that's not involved when I play guitar near her, or when she depresses a button on one of her battery-operated noise toys. This is, by contrast, the real thing: the strength of the note is a direct function of the force of the finger. And, given that the stainless steel construction means that it never goes out of tune, the result is actually rather listenable.

There's something in many of us, I think it's fair to say, that deeply enjoys the story of the child virtuoso. The toddler Mozart, playing before some Hapsburg emperor, or the young Esperanza Spalding, listening to her mother grow frustrated while trying to master a piece, and walking over to the piano, and playing it perfectly at first effort: such stories seduce, with their promise of natural genius. Today I read of a Russian father who spent considerable sums in hiring tutors in music, and chess, and mathematics (the Russian trifecta!) for a son, and thought, how natural. We imagine uncovered talents to lie in our children like flecks of gold on the floor of a river.

But, honestly, while listening to Cleo pound her piano, I can't say that I've hoped that she turns into a graceful Schroeder. Really. That's not to say that I don't have ambitions for her, but I'm learning that they're both simpler, and more abstract, than a revelation of musical genius. That is, some of them are born of simply observing the small frictions of her current life. I hope that she learns to climb down a step without fear. I hope that she learns that when L. or I leaves the room, we will never be gone for long. And, at the same time, some of them are simply inchoate. I wish her the sense of exhilarating freedom that I once felt, alone, somewhere south of Cicmany.

Sure, it would be stunning to find that one's child possessed a rare and valued talent. (Doubly stunning, really, given my total lack of musical ability). But it's also stunning, in a different way, to realize that one's child - only recently unable to hold her head up - can see a miniature piano, and crawl towards it, and understand that gestures can bring forth notes.

A short video...

...in which a certain little girl demonstrates the accuracy of a central assertion in our last post.