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.

What it's like

Well, if you read the last post, then you know some of my current hesitations about blogging. Calls for permanence and indelible records be damned: there should be a spot in our hearts for the brief, the fleeting, the ephemeral, as well. Take, for instance, the popular website Incredibox, which allows you combine various beats, musical motifs, and effects to create a tune that is, within certain parameters, all your own. It's a fun, flexible tool - and, Cleo, you're just about ready to give it a whirl. But notice, while you're busy dropping beats, that there's no save function. The music you make here is as music always was, before the advent of recording technology: a product of the moment in which it is made, and no more.

Again, though, I'm also sympathetic to calls for some permanent records of our graceful moments. We're the better, you might say, for being able to hear Maria Callas' voice, even if we can't see her live. And I remember a remarkable wall in an old family home on the Eastern Shore, on which the evolving heights of a gaggle of sons and daughters and cousins were marked in pencil, until the whole surface was a dense network of lines and dates: a cumulative reminder of a family's growth.

This blog is not that wall, quite. But it can be, and occasionally should be, a helpful record of sorts. And so, Cleo, here's a condensed summary of some of the patterns that currently govern our lives, as you take the turn from four and a half towards four and three quarters:

Your day usually begins at about 5:45. We can hear you sing and babble briefly, and then you often put a CD on, and take your pull-up off (and deposit it in the trash can: thanks!). You generally show considerable patience, too, in waiting until 6, which is when you're allowed to wake us up (although a couple of days ago you wandered into our room, asking, loudly, "Is 55 7 much before 6?"). We then wander downstairs, make you a blanket chair, and settle in for your only video of the day: typically, these days, a 25-minute stretch of a movie such as Ratatouille, or The Lorax. Then it's time for your breakfast, which generally means yogurt and honey, and your homemade granola with milk. You can get yourself dressed, and today I found you laying out clothes and remarking on how you would look, in a given combination, like a maiden. And by 7:50 we're out the door.

What do you do at school? It's largely a mystery to me. There's circle time, and you've clearly learned some songs there; Miss Winnie likes to call you a super listener, as well. I suppose that you typically play some princess games with Justice and Nia, and perhaps you also draw alongside Forrest, Jasper (who has been sending you roughly drawn missives every few days), or Mo. In this cold, your class doesn't tend to go out, but there are rotating stations, and when I pick you up I usually find you at an art station, drawing and writing (as today, when you designed a handsome card for Mom), or busily changing into a costume in dress-ups.

Then, of course, it's home, unless we stop for a bagel at Charmington's. It's a 13-minute drive to get Mom, and about 12 minutes from there - meaning that you can get through about half of one of your Classical Kids CDs. At home, you like to eat a few nuts and to play with a toy or two, before asking for a story. We chat as we get dinner ready, and tonight we also executed a Lite Brite pattern of a shark. And then, since you've been up for about 13 hours, you've been getting tired, suddenly and visibly, at about 6:45. We brush; you shed a tear or two but hold up; you wriggle into warm pajamas. A story or two - or, recently, a mere fraction of a graphic novel such as How Mirka Got Her Sword - and it's lights out.

Until we get up and do it all over again, with variations.

Knowing how way

So, yeah, we seem to have been abruptly transported from Baltimore to some spot distinctly north of Edmonton: for the past week, we've only poked our heads above freezing once, and falling veils of snow have been about as frequent as brief bursts of sun. The wind chill tonight is forecast to be around -18, and buckling straps or undoing Cleo's car seat often requires some hand blowing, where it might have been unthinking just ten days ago. But that didn't prevent us from having a relatively nice weekend. Indeed, we had good reason to move Cleo's car seat, as L. organized a trip with friends to the Visionary Art Museum, and also took Cleo to a JHU women's basketball game, to Bonjour, our neighborhood French bakery, and to swelling, bustling Harbor East. As a result of her creativity and energy, I had time to do some real reading, and read both avidly and widely: from Plutarch's life of Pericles, for instance, to a portion of Sherry Turkle's widely discussed Alone Together.

Turkle's book is certainly interesting, and provocative: deeply concerned about our increasing reliance on robotics, and troubled by what she sees as a further corrosive reliance upon hand-held technologies, she offers something of a manifesto, in which she documents the shifting behaviors of American teens and yearns for what she terms authenticity. But of course that term is problematic, and in fact many of her assertions, while memorable, seem to unravel when placed under even slight pressure.

Take, for instance, Turkle's claim that "The digital is only ephemeral if you don't take the time to make it permanent." The sentence appears in a section of the book that describes her rediscovery of a series of letters that she wrote to, and received from, her mother when in college: a real treasure, argues Turkle, of the sort that will simply evaporate in this era of texts and Tweets. On one level, I concur: there is an obvious and abiding beauty in documents composed in the past, especially if they involve handwritten sentiments. At the same time, though, her plaintive tone seems almost naive. After all, it's clear that digital data quickly forms a record in its own right: I've talked to two lawyers who have had clients exonerated due to their passive digital traces, and you've probably read stories about Facebook walls that prove troublingly durable, rather than evanescent. Indeed, embarrassing circulated JPGs and video files are constantly reminding us of the potential inevitable permanence of digital data. Remember Romney, speaking in what he thought was an unrecorded setting about the 47 percent? Savvy citizens of the digital world usually assume, unlike Turkle, that they are always being recorded - not that they have to take the time to record themselves.

At the same time, though, there are the complex ethical questions that surround any attempt to record life. Turkle admits to occasionally snapping surreptitious screen shots of her daughter as they converse on Skype - but, in so doing, she's arguably violating a basic principle of recording. The core issue has long interested photographers and musicians, but is now more generally applicable: do we have a right to record, without the consent of a subject, his or her actions? This blog, of course, isn't the place in which to answer such an issue, but it's clear that many people feel less nostalgic, and more ambivalent, than Turkle does about the potential value of creating lasting records. Even as we sense that we are likely being filmed by security cameras, and even as we know that our movements are being recorded by cell phone towers, we can still forge a personal ethic that moves beyond a merely self-interested series of stolen photos.

Again, this blog is not really an appropriate forum for such a discussion. But in one sense, of course, it is also the perfect exemplum of the quandary in which we now find ourselves. Closer to Turkle than to Cleo in age, I've done exactly what she is recommending, in fashioning this blog: it's the result of time invested, with the partial goal of rendering the transient permanent. (Indeed, over the years L. has given me five hardbound volumes of posts from this blog: standing on the bookshelf, they form a resolute proof of our interest in permanence). And yet, at the same time I worry about the lack of Cleo's consent in all of this. Will she mind, someday, that her childhood habits and comings and goings were made potentially permanent, or globally visible? Or will she, like Turkle, leaf through the books with a warm sense of appreciation and nostalgia?

I don't know. Perhaps both. Which feels appropriate today, as the momentary sun looks down on snow that has covered our city for days, but that will eventually give way, inevitably, to a greater warmth and to a basic law: the fact, that is, that everything, viewed broadly, is transient.

Pandora's box

Do you know about Pandora? Not the Greek antiheroine, mind you, but the website: a music site that allows you to enter the name of a band, or composer, or tune - Chopin, say, or Megadeth - and that then plays an infinite playlist of roughly comparable pieces of music. You're into Bebel Gilberto? Pandora will play her for you, along with some equally cool-cat pieces by Stan Getz and Nara Leao.

Here at halfstep, we've known about Pandora for the better part of a decade - since a hip art school student told us about it, in fact, as we fumbled through YouTube before a lecture in search of some vaguely atmospheric music. But it's really only in the last few months that we've begun to take our relationship with Pandora seriously. We've come to love, of late, the surprising associations that she draws (is Tom Petty really in the same genre as Bruce Springsteen? We like learning new tunes, and, to that end, we also like how Pandora always gives us the artist and title. She's no reticent d.j., that Pandora. And let's be honest: since L. linked a tablet up to our gourd speakers, ceding our musical curating to Pandora is as easy as pie. Plain and simple, we're hooked.

But I think that there's also a more basic reason that Pandora has made especial sense of late, and it's that our play rhythms often now approximate her apparent selection strategy. I don't mean that too ambitiously, for in fact the folks at Pandora are almost laughably specific in discussing their "Music Genome Project," the fruit of the work of a "team of musician-analysts"), where our approach to play with Cleo is, if anything, studiously anarchic. But I do think that there's often a loosely comparable associative logic in the order of activities that lead us from afternoon to evening in the pink house. Take today, for instance: on a snowy day, I picked Cleo up at 1, and we trundled home, stopping for a brownie and then imagining that we could take magically light footsteps that left no trace in the snow. When we arrived at home, it was time for a couple of Greek myths: not Pandora, today, but Apollo's conquest of Delphi and Orpheus' visit to the underworld. That gave way, in turn, to some wrestling of almost mythological proportions, as L. and Cleo tackled, grappled, and played. But the gods and the heroes, of course, are only part of the equation, and in the next hour we played with a doll house and Cleo then assumed the role of house mother, putting me to sleep and encouraging L. to do her home work. Finally, L. had the bright idea of playing charades, and we enacted zebras, snakes, and cows on the play room floor. And now they're making jambalaya, as I type away.

There's nothing consciously scientific about such a process of play, and indeed I suppose you could fairly doubt that there's really any process of pattern at all. But as we moved through a wide arc of imaginative activities that ranged from physical to recumbent and from active to passive, it did feel as though there was some semblance of an underlying thread. And yet, at the same time, we never knew what was coming next. Sometimes, it simply seems to happen, based on the whims and needs of three involved players.

After all, the monsters in Pandora's box were not unrelated. They may have been chaotic and diverse, but they belonged to a common species. As do our games, and the music that sometimes accompanies them.