A different focus

If you've waded through a few of my previous posts, you know that over the past few months I've been listening - often with Cleo; often, in fact, with a sleeping Cleo in a car seat - to a good deal of classical music. And while the pieces I've been listening to - Schubert's lieder; Satie's piano compositions - are hardly obscure, they're also not exactly the big men on the classical campus. If the canon of classical music is a country, I've been visiting pleasant towns, and well-preserved regional cities.

Until a recent afternoon, that is, when I was suddenly thrown back into the capital city. Driving home from lunch with L., and with Cleo nodding off behind me, I turned on the car radio and suddenly heard the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth.

Wow. I'd known the piece, of course, for years - everybody's known it for years. But when I'd heard it in the past, it was usually against a more chaotic and clamorous backdrop: it competed, implicitly, with anthems by Guns 'n Roses, and the brassy theme to NFL Today, and the blips of PacMan, and all of the other jangling sounds that make up the soundscape of a teenaged boy, or a 20-something still partly convinced that he's a teenager. But now, hearing it against my recent memories of Satie's subtle variations and Schubert's delicate, wistful odes to winter, I was blown away. Beethoven's reputation suddenly made sense; so, too, did the alleged drama of Romantic music. Placed in a fairer context, the music's original boldness suddenly stood out in high relief.

Is it a stretch to say that that, in a sense, is how I feel about babies now, as well? Six months ago, I saw babies as babies: as tiny little folks whose evolution was unclear to me and whose varied appearances, abilities, and moods I barely registered as I walked past them on sidewalks or in coffeehouses. I had other things on my mind, and saw them through broader frames. But now, with an infant of my own, I suddenly see them through a narrower lens: through, you might say, a more baby-appropriate lens. And suddenly the myriad variations are much more apparent. The baby in the Baby Bjorn at Whole Foods is so small that she has yet to unclench her fists. The baby in the stroller on Roland looks to be about nine months old; she's probably learned to sit up, on her own. And the baby in the back seat of our car? Well, we just learned that swinging her in a large arc while making a staticky sound can make her giggle.

Viewed against the wild variety of the world as a whole, music, and babies, and all things, are seen only coarsely. Viewed within their class or genre, though, their contours become much clearer.