Contexts

Oh, you know the feeling: you're driving across the middle of the continent, all alone except for the sunset on your left, and an absolutely sublime piece of music suddenly comes on the radio. Or you're 18 and standing before the Cologne cathedral, and a Peruvian pipe band suddenly plays the most touching composition you think you've ever heard. Or you're at the wedding of an old friend, slightly drunk and thoroughly happy, and you stand considering a standard that the band is playing, and you want to cry.

And so you track down the piece of music that affected you so, and you buy it, and then a week later you play it again. And it's not the same at all. Perhaps it now seems slightly trite, or merely less than exciting - but, in any event, in the duller context of your living room it's lost some of its power.

There must be some nearly essential qualities to music; otherwise it would be hard to explain why the piece that affected me rather powerfully in the car the other day - Handel's Largo, from Xerxes - has been repeatedly placed on CDs bearing rather desperate names such as The Most Relaxing Classical Music in the Universe, and (I am not making this up, as Dave Barry would say) The Most Essential Classical Music for your Baby. It is a calming piece - which makes sense, given that it's an aria sung by a figure thankful for the pleasant shade of a tree. But nonetheless it sounds today (at 6:30 in the morning, with small chores to do) somehow less than, somehow inferior to, the music that I heard as I zipped along the highway. Contexts change and aesthetic effects shift as a consequence.

Well, okay. But we also found yesterday that in babyland the context can stay exactly the same, and responses can differ, too. As you might remember, faithful reader of the blog, I often take Cleo on rather long walks around the Gilman campus and the surrounding neighborhood. All very pleasant, and all very predictable: Cleo's eyes wilt as soon as we start walking, and she then sleeps for about two hours as we roll along. Day after day, it's the same thing, and I've come to enjoy the regularity of it all. Until yesterday, when we got to Gilman, and Cleo simply cried and cried. Wet diaper? Hungry? Disappointed in another poor Pirates trade? None of the above. She simply wanted to play: when I took her out of the stroller, we had a wonderful hour of holding, chatting, and (on her part) gesturing wildly and randomly.

So sometimes the environment shapes our response to music, which thus changes over time and space. But sometimes we grow and grow, and our response to the environment is what changes.

Natural symphony

We spent the weekend in North Carolina (steamy, wilting, nostalgic, slow-moving, good-natured, grandparented North Carolina), and Sunday morning found me walking Cleo across the deserted UNC campus at 7:15 in the morning. Along brick paths; past the iconic Old Well and the various dorms and office buildings where parents once worked and high school friends labored over their problem sets and imagined the trajectories of crushes. A couple walked their two small kids. An image of Norah Jones peered out from the colonnade of the performing arts center. And then we were at the arboretum.

Few sounds, but they were enough to form a small and modest symphony. A distant campus air conditioning unit offered a steady treble drone. One bird chirruped in triads; a pair of birds in a more distant tree echoed each other in two-part calls. Back and forth, back and forth. Then the advancing footsteps of a jogger - a local motif, suggesting a stanza - came and went. A car in the distance offered another variation on the theme of motion. And the regular clack of our stroller wheels and axle as we moved over breaks in the walk.

Cross two state borders; move through the land of your past. Always there is a symphony being performed.

One thing leads to another

So last Saturday Cleo and I made the quick drive up to Towson, to give L a much-deserved few hours on her own and to check out a swing music concert with some friends. In short, a happy evening: a wonderful dinner, friendly hosts, and a bucolic, Huckleberry Finnish walk through fields to a historic plantation house that served as a dramatic backdrop for the gaggle of little girls and rejuvenated oldsters spinning to the music.

But much as fairy tale princesses face serious consequences if the clock strikes twelve, parents of tykes need to keep an eye on the time, too. And in this case, the sheer loveliness of the grounds(which once featured an 18th-century orangerie) proved my undoing; before I knew it, Cleo was wide awake and as hungry as a defensive end after two-a-days. Cry, Cleo, cry: she bawled as we walked - in those terse hurried steps of Parents Who Know Things Are Not Going Well - back to the car, and then bawled some more in the car on the way home.

Hoping to improve the soundtrack at least slightly, I switched on the car radio, and was greeted with the angelic sounds of a piece I'd never heard - but later learned was Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony. Truly stirring: a choir against an orchestra; lofty vocals against a ground of white motion. A note of grace in a difficult situation; a ray of light in a basement.

Later, I looked the piece up. 1903-9; a pivotal work in the evolution of the English symphony; etc., etc. What I found more interesting, though, was the motivation of the piece, which lay in Whitman - whom Williams had met through Bertrand Russell, in Cambridge, in 1892. Whitman's verse became a pole star for Williams, who carried Leaves of Grass with him for most of the first decade of the 1900s.

And it's in Leaves of Grass, as you may know, that there's a dialogue between Child and Father. One passage leaps out as relevant in this narrative:

Father:
Cease, cease, my foolish babe.
What you are saying is sorrowful to me...

And then we were home, L caught up on duties around the house, breast ready, Cleo home, no need to cry, music still in the ear, night, good night, sweet milk, Behold, says Whitman, the solid wall'd houses, good night.

Theory and practice

So a few days ago the folks in MICA's HR office organized a lunchtime game room. An e-mail went out, announcing that there would be consoles, available to anyone who wanted to stop by, with Guitar Hero, Wi Tennis, and a few other games. With luck, at least one could be played on the big screen in the school's new black box.

Damn right! That's the kind of news that can get new parents out of the house. So we readied a few air guitar chops, packed up the stroller, and headed out.

Sure enough, there were several games up and running: one staff member was dominating the virtual court, and several students were engaged in mortal combat on a television screen that had been wheeled in for the afternoon. And in a conference room to the side, a pristine projected image of Guitar Hero, with three supplementary discs at the ready.

Now, I'll admit that I'm far from a basement-made guitar hero. That said, I did have a homemade axe for years, and played it long enough to feel I oughta have some kind of edge heading into a video rendition of Poison's Talk Dirty to Me. But I stand corrected. Turns out that Guitar Hero doesn't resemble actual guitar playing very closely at all. Instead of strings, there's a rather weird plastic toggle. And instead of fretting strings arranged vertically on a fretboard, one simply presses the five childishly colored buttons. It's more like a limited version of Whack-a-mole than playing the guitar.

Which is probably just another way of saying that our assistant registrar beat me by something like 8,300 points. But at least I didn't leave Games Day without a larger lesson, as well. In thinking about Guitar Hero over the next day or two, I realized that it's something like the various books on parenting that we've been reading. Like Guitar Hero, such books offer a version of an experience - and, in that sense, they can be really involving. But it's only when you've actually had the experience that their limitations come into clear focus. Sure, "a baby may be distressed by the exposed feeling of nakedness" (Penelope Leach, Your Baby & Child, 135). Or you may have a Cleo, in which case you can throw that concern out the window.

Dada

Hugo Ball recommended cutting out words from the day's paper, placing them in a bag, drawing them at random, and setting them down into a poem that lay beyond one's control. Arp dropped cut-out forms on a ground, and affixed them; Duchamp dropped a one-meter-long string onto a surface and adopted the resulting serpentine form as a template.

On Sabina Avenue, our methods for generating chaos are simpler still. We lower Cleo into her shallow, battery-operated jiggle chair, place it on the picnic table, and watch her go. Just follow her right hand for a minute, and you'll see what seems like pure chaos. It's at her ear; it's at her side; it's clutching her blanket; it's twisting in space.

And yet it seems too easy to call the movements purely random. Is there a system, an aesthetic, a motivation behind them? Today I imagined that I was watching the formation, as she moved, of a crazed skein of neurons that will govern future motions. But I also thought, in turn, of the 1948 Soviet critic who saw the atonal compositions of Schonberg as "confused, neuropathological combinations that transform music into cacophony, into a chaotic conglomerations of sounds." Is it necessary to point out that in time, listeners found an order in Schonberg, as well?

Pure chaos is remarkably hard, it turns out, to generate. And beneath it often lies a larger order.

Discoveries

Our well-used 1997 copy of What to Expect in the First Year (in which the month-by-month developmental milestones were dutifully checked at some point in the past by the parent of some apparently precocious child) curtly announces, at one point, that there are six conditions in which an infant may find herself. Deep sleep - that fleeting promised land - is one; light sleep another; passive wakefulness is a third. But my favorite is alert wakefulness.

The other morning I got to hold Cleo on the porch after she'd woken up and fed, and she was full of energy and curiosity. She's currently learning to hold her head up, and to turn from side to side; at the moment, both are still rather risky undertakings, and as a result she often looks like a drunken spectator at a tennis match as she throws her whole torso into the effort of moving her head. At other times, she recalls Ace Ventura in some of his more energetic moments. In any event, it's quite moving to watch, as she's occasionally thrilled with the results, and occasionally simply frustrated or worn out.

Is there a musical analogy to this process? There must be a few, but the one that comes to my mind - my obviously 1980s-colored mind - is a tune by Rush. Now, I know as well as the next guy who once wore a Distant Early Warning tee-shirt to the bowling alley that it hasn't been fashionable to quote Rush since the first Bush presidency. But, still: do you know the song Discovery? Part of a concept album that describes a dystopic future world from which all music has been banned, the tune describes - in musical and lyrical terms - the moment in which one man stumbles upon a guitar. Picking it up, he strums it; pleased with the sound, he begins to experiment with it. He finds the harmonics; he learns a fifth; he begins to develop chords and to play more agitatedly.

You can look up the rest if you're curious - or, if you're lucky, you can dig out your own dusty copy of 2112. Either way, you'll experience - like me - the vicarious thrill of watching someone make a series of revelatory discoveries.

Maturation

Since we forgot the camera as we shunted what felt like our life possessions into the car for the Big Trip to Hagerstown and Parts Beyond (diapers? check. changing pad? check? Baby Bjorn? check. And so on...), we'll let this photo of a few of the ripening tomatoes in our southern garden plot stand for a big day of maturation.

Maturation in that Cleo crossed her first state line (into West Virginia, where she witnessed a round of miniature golf and saw most of the greater metropolitan area of Paw Paw) and attended her first baseball game (a 4-1 affair in which Greenville shut down host Hagerstown, largely on the strength of a classic minor league second inning in which the Drive scored three runs on zero hits).

But what I really wish Cleo could remember about the game was the young woman who sang the national anthem. Maybe 15 years old, she stood just shy of the pitcher's mound, surrounded by players who were probably wondering why they were even on the field at 11 a.m. (Camp Day at the ballyard!) and hundreds of wriggling campers in matching oversized tees. To this uncaring audience, she sang heartfully, and while not quite able to hit every note, stayed as true to the tune as she could, as dignified and as professional as any girl her age should hope to be. Listen, Cleo: that rendition of the anthem is the sound of growing up.