That note

About a year ago, Salon ran an interview with the Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, on his attitudes toward improvisation - a subject that turns out to be centrally important to his musical practice. In it, he mentions a wide range of precedents and examples, and even contends that he feels freer while playing the guitar than he does in ordinary conversation. But perhaps the moment I enjoyed most was his allusion to a single note, in a tune by Hendrix:

I started listening to improvisational music when I was in high school. Before that, I was more interested in composition. I listened to “West Side Story” and Sly & the Family Stone — really listening to their arrangements and how they laid all the melodies. But, in that way, good improvisation has a structure. It has a form. I remember, like many guitarists, being obsessed with Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. It was the record.

I listened to that solo on “Machine Gun” a million times.

With that one amazing note.

Yeah, the note! 

What's that note? Ah, folks: the Internet gives, and it gives some more. But while you're waiting for that solo - "the greatest note ever played!" - you might also mull over the assertion of Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher who keeps a blog on education. "Everyone," she writes, "should have the opportunity to reflect on how the beauty of improvisation can play a part in our daily lives, both personal and professional. Imagine if we could all learn to improvise alone and in collaboration with others."

We're trying, Elizabeth. The last two afternoons, lovely lambent exercises in autumn skies, Cleo and I have simply wandered sidewalks after school, finding impromptu balance beams, studying puddles, and making pretend mint leaves from maple trees. Our notes may not be amazing, to the outside ear, but I'm already looking forward to whatever unpredictable form this afternoon might bring. 

As you were

This morning I came across a wonderfully odd document online: a 1935 master's thesis by a Martha Byrne, who set out to chart the relative popularity of a dozen waltzes among groups of children and musical experts. There are all kinds of methodological problems with the study, including the relatively small sample sizes, but her earnest tone and the sheer idealism of the project (which cites, among other authors, Aquinas: Byrne was at Loyola, in Chicago) make up for most of what it lacks in scientific rigor. And then, on page 159, we arrive at the heart of the matter. "[I]t is true," she says, "too that these young children have marvelous imaginations; they are at an age when it is natural for them to follow a lead, so it is easy for them to allow their imaginations to follow the ideas which the composer puts forth and to let their young minds travel where the music leads them."

Well, amen to that. I've been struck repeatedly, over the past months, with Cleo's sheer aesthetic flexibility. Sure, the girl likes her Milkshake, but she's generally open to other types of music (with one real exception noted thus far), and she admires pretty much any visual art that I show her. And, wonderfully, her tendency to accommodate extends to clothes and to personal appearances, as well: she never seemed rattled by my unkempt summer style, and when we darted into a store, recently, to try to find some new pants, she was a pleasant one-man chorus of ayes and yeses. ("And, Cleo, what do you think of these?" "Good.")

But of course it's not just Cleo: children tend to be accepting in ways that can surprise us. Last night, while reading Rick Bass's Why I Cam West, I smiled when I came to his self-deprecating list of the times that he's mistakenly sprayed himself with the searing hot pepper spray he sometimes carries to ward off grizzlies. the worst time, arguably, was when he mistakenly set the canister off by crouching, while on a walk with his two daughters; the spray covered his groin, forcing him to run for a river, and to seek relief on the long walk home by covering the stained areas of his pants with pounds of moss and lichen.

"Curls of black lichen," he remembered, "protruded from the neck of my shirt ad from beneath the sleeves of my T-shirt. Wisps of black tuft gathered around the tops of my boots, and as I lurched humpbacked through the forest, pausing from time to time to readjust the shifting lichen, I'm sure I looked like nothing less than a werewolf, and it was both alarming and touching at how matter-of-factly my daughters accepted this strangeness."

Waltzes, slacks, lichen-covered daddies: there's a willingness to overlook and to accept, in little girls, that's both disarming and somehow close to holy.

Among other things

To be honest, I don't have a great number of musical memories from my childhood. I remember beating on a drum, happily, during an improvisational session in the Ephesus Road elementary school music room, and I remember a class trip - all of us bearing recorders - to a performance by the N.C. Symphony Orchestra. I think that I remember seeing Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger sing 'This Land is My Land,' and, if you're willing to count my 12th year as a part of my childhood, I recall seeing the Beatles' 'Help' on a big screen.

It's against a relatively thin tapestry, then, that I recall, in rather vivid terms, the Schoolhouse Rock musical that focused on the means by which a bill becomes a law. The bebop jazzman Jack Sheldon singing about the legislative process? It's hard to forget, once you've heard it.

And, indeed, the tune crossed my mind the other day, as Cleo and I walked across the National Mall after a good spell at the Air and Space Museum (that's Cleo, above, in the cockpit of a Cessna) and the National Botanical Garden. It was a beautiful day; the capitol building shone brilliantly above the sweet cut grass, and a few tourists walked lazily around the reflecting pool whose surface was pierced only by a few ducks. Inspired, I gestured to the building, and told Cleo something like this: "That's an important building, sweetie. You know how we live in a country called America? In that building, people make decisions about America. They decide things like - and here I paused, suddenly daunted by the task of explaining Medicare to a three-year-old - things like where to build roads, and when to build buildings."

Cleo took it in. She thought for a second. And then she asked, reasonably, "And is that where they decide where to make syrup?"

Traces of travel

In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn traveled to Scotland - and began to develop the ideas for a symphony that he eventually completed in 1842. Mendelssohn sometimes referred, later in his life, to the piece - opus 56, in A minor - as his Scotch symphony, and musical historians often agree that both the opening theme of the first movement and the finale reflect (or echo, or betray, depending on your their exact position) the influences of Scottish culture on the young composer.

For, after all, who can travel and not be affected by what they see, and hear? Travel alters our mental set, giving us new schema and points of reference - which we then employ in making sense of future experiences.  Durer's works, after his 1495 trip to Italy, imply the influence of Pollaiuolo; Ibn Tulun's time in Samarra may well have resulted, decades later, in the spiralling stair of his Cairene minaret. In moving from zone to zone, we are not empty beakers; rather, we carry what we have learned with us. And, for a family who recently spent two months in South Africa, the phenomenon is sometimes crystal clear.

Yesterday, I took Cleo down to D.C. for a short overnight with old friends, who have a two-year-old named Harper. At one point, I was at home alone with the two girls, for about 15 minutes; in that time, Harper began to wonder where her mother was, and peered out the window. "Don't worry," said Cleo, trying to be helpful. "Your mommy will be here now-now."

Now-now? It's a wonderful South Africanism that L. had first taught me, several years ago. In the relaxed tempo of Africa, now typically implies, as a future marker, slow eventuality. If someone promises to send you that letter now, you might get it in a week or more. Just now, meanwhile, implies a heightened urgency: it's on my mind, friend. And now-now is truly emphatic: it implies real imminence. It's what nursery school teachers, for instance, will say to calm crying children who wonder when their mommies might pick them up.

Which is how, more or less, Cleo explained her use of the term, after I asked her about it. "They said that in Sugar and Spice," she told me. Yes. And those passages in Mendelssohn? They played those, or their close cousins, in Scotland.

For the first time

Came across an especially engaging post on Reddit a couple of days ago: a reader who was congenitally deaf and whose hearing aids had given him only the roughest sense of sound was given new, state-of-the-art aids. He was immediately startled, as he walked across the floor of the doctor's office, by the noise of his shoes on the carpet - a sound that he had always assumed was inaudible to all. When a friend came to meet him, the poster was surprised to find that his friend's voice was slightly raspy - a detail that he'd never been able to perceive. And so, that same evening, his friends set about giving him a new musical education, playing Mozart, the Stones, and Sigur Ros in an effort to show him how beautiful, how moving music can be. So, the poster asked the Reddit community: what else should I listen to? What music would you recommend?

It was a twist on a familiar question: if you were consigned to a desert island, which songs would you want to have along with you? Here, though, the idea of a limit was inverted: really, it was as though someone raised on a desert island had returned to the mainland, discovering a wealth of culture to which he now had access. (Or, as one reader observed, it was vaguely comparable to an alien, just arrived on earth, asking for our recommendations). And Reddit responded: with over 14,000 comments, the original post sparked one of the more popular and involved threads I've ever seen online. You can follow them here.

But of course the basic premise of the post - what to teach a neophyte? - isn't really that remarkable at all, from the point of view of a parent. I've already written a couple of times, in Cleo's three years, about the raw opportunity that a child offers, in terms of musical education. Sure, a toddler's responses aren't usually as rapt or as articulate as those of a grown man hearing a symphony clearly for the first time. But, still, there's something both disarming and affirming in hearing Cleo ask, from the back seat, for some Motown.

And yet, it would be folly to pretend that one could be truly exhaustive. Holst in the background, while we play? Okay, sure, perhaps, from time to time. But I have little interest in trying to offer Cleo a strict musical program.  And, anyway, there will soon come a moment when she discovers compositions about which I myself know nothing - and perhaps plays them for me. In other words, the moment in which one first hears, clearly, beautiful music is clearly remarkable. But so too is the moment in which one shares it with someone else.

In practice

Cleo knows, as your Jewish great-uncle might say, from dancing. She can curtsy with the best of them; she knows how to pirouette and spin; she'll sometimes suggest a game that revolves around suddenly stopping, en pointe. In Cape Town, she liked to visit a frozen yogurt store (banana and honey smoothie, please) that played mellow house music, under lights that warbled through a range of pastel colors: typically, she'd start swaying at some point, and her two little arms would become aqueous, expressive tools in the service of dance. Heck, the girl likes to wear tutus in her down time: she loves, like so many kids her age, not merely dance but also the trappings of dance.

Does the video above, taken at Port Discovery last week, show Cleo dancing? Not in the formal sense: there's no routine, no given series of steps. And there's no accompanying music; Cleo's simply moving across a pad onto which are projected images of a lily pad, of fallen leaves. But I'd argue that formal distinctions don't, in fact, make much sense here. The generic background noise of parents, toddlers, and air conditioning units is a sort of music, and Cleo's elliptical orbit, if not precise, is certainly expressive. At 3, in short, Cleo is still at the age where dance and life and music are still seamlessly integrated in both principle and practice. The definitions of the aestheticians will have their day, in time: for now, words, activities and spheres overlap.

Before six

Much excitement, little energy, less time. That's been, more or less, the state of things over the past week, during which we took two intercontinental flights, enjoyed a stay in Olympic-saturated Winchester, arrived home in Baltimore only to watch some of our closest friends move to Wisconsin and Vancouver... and, yes, rose with Cleo for three straight days before 3:30 a.m., in a punishing vigil organized by the priests of jetlag.

But now things are beginning, beginning to feel normal again. Cleo slept until 5:45 yesterday, which felt more than civilized, and while L. tackled the mountain of tasks that had piled up on her work desk, my daughter and I enjoyed a relatively easy summer day in Baltimore. We fed sparrows flecks of bread on the docks, we played Yahtzee over frozen yogurt, we waded in the Hampden swimming pool, and Cleo rediscovered her watercolors, and produced a touching composition for her mommy. Heck, by the end of the day the lawn was even mowed. So, no, we're not Olympic athletes, but after 19 hours of flying we're still standing, and ready to embrace a steamy August.

But we're also slightly different, in a range of ways. L. is aware that she likely won't lead the Cape Town trip next year, and so she's beginning to reframe her view of her job - beginning with an upcoming fall talk on the subject in the Bay Area. Similarly, with my book coming out in less than two months, I'm feeling about for promising new directions - and wait, relatedly, to hear back from Nka about my first piece of criticism on sub-Saharan African contemporary art. And Cleo? Well, she seems to have suddenly grown into a pleasant and relatively well-mannered little lady - who acquired, somewhere in the past two weeks, a new voice that is definitely less squeak than speaking style.

Here's what I mean. Did you see, in a June New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones' characterization of Norah Jones' voice? "Jones," he wrote, "has one of the most textured and tactile voices in pop - it has real heft, even when played at low volume on laptop speakers. Her vocals are a cottony mix of breath and surprisingly low pitches; the voice reassures even before her lyrics sink in." That's about as effective a description of a voice as I've seen, and of course it celebrates one of the most popular voices in contemporary song. I won't try to echo it, then, in describing Cleo's - but suffice it to say that my little girl has recently been speaking in a slightly raspy, reedy, husky voice that seems both to imply an arrival into a new maturity and the residue of life in a continent that left all three of us, at points, a bit feeble. Cleo seems to be in good health - no worries there, we think - but I take the recent change in her vocal tone as governed by something akin to recovery. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote that "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Yes, I think: and it's that persistent strength in Cleo's voice that I heard today, at 5:11, when she strode into our room and said, confidently, "Um, Mommy? Today I slept until six." Such a voice, too, can reassure even before the content sinks in.