The Child and the Book Conference: The Magic of Sound

Kicking off a rather full spring / summer of academic conferences, I attended a The Child and the Book conference May 15 through 17 in Podgorica, Montenegro.

Conference

This was my very first experience with The Child and the Book, an international conference launched in 2004 that provides a forum for the exchange of scholarly research on all things pertaining to children’s and young adult’s literatures. While I enjoy hearing talks on all manner of subjects, as a musicologist in children’s literature conferences I normally have to do a fair amount of sleuthing in order to find presentations that deal, however obliquely, with music. Not so this time, as the theme was The Magic of Sound: Children’s Literature and Music. I had the pleasure of experiencing a wide range of papers on things as diverse as the many musical afterlives of Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky”, musicalizations of masculinities in Disney’s Hercules, analyses of the ear-worm song “What does the Fox say?”, childism in Javanese children’s songs, film adaptations of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a close analysis of Fosse’s picturebook The Fiddler Girl, post-WWII pedagogical texts with fanciful illustrations that mirror (and are meant to teach) sheet music notation, gendered power dynamics in Disney ballroom dance scenes, and the sonic significances of Milton’s Paradise Lost. My own presentation “Casting the Spell: Musicalizing Fairytales and Märchenfrauen in Imaginative Children’s Music” took a look at the overlap in social and aesthetic significance between domestic piano music and literary fairytales, using examples of works by Renaud de Vilbac, Genady Osipovich Karganov, and Hans Huber. It was particularly fun to use a quotation by the indomitable scholar Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and then to chat with her about it afterwards! They also have a great early scholars collective called the Grow Reading Group that did a thoughtful and interesting session that connected academics navigating academia in the beginning stages of their careers.

One of my favorite presentations – “Female Fury in Picturebooks” by Rosalyn Borst – drew a line between the emotional expressivity of punk rock Riot Grrrl music and the Dutch picturebook Sofia en de Leeuw by Pelaez-Vargas, posing questions regarding the limits placed upon emotions, particularly “negative” ones like fury, when it comes to adolescent girls. This talk inspired me to consider whether music exists that offer young children (boys and girls) an opportunity to express their anger, not merely manage it or negate it. In my own research, publishers carefully controlled nineteenth-century piano character pieces to establish appropriate social and moral boundaries in instrumental music that might otherwise give children license for raw emotion; a piece that could be understood as “angry-sounding” due to its key, rhythms, dynamics, etc. would need to be specified through a descriptive title like “The Tempest” or “The Naughty Boy”. Outright naming and expressing fury does not appear to be a theme of children’s music today. Though one avenue seems hopeful: heavy metal music for children is absolutely a thing! A group like Hevisaurus from Finland has a lot of potential for releasing the child’s roar. Can you think of any songs for children that give vent to anger through the lyrics and/or music?

The crowning event took place on the final night of the conference in a crowded downtown bar. There we came face to face with the magic of sound itself as conference organizer and superhuman Svetlana Kalezic Radonjic mounted a stage with her rock band and sang for about four hours without a break. There’s nothing like a late-night rave to shatter your image of academics as boring and stuffy pedants. Dance moves were seen that cannot be unseen! It was an unbelievable amount of fun!

Locale

Another first for me was traveling to the Balkans. I stayed in a hotel called Carine in the middle of town, just around the corner from a wide space called Independence Square and the conference venue, the National library Radosav Ljumović. Although it rained quite a lot during my stay, I took time to explore the city of Podgorica on foot, particularly noting the unkempt, green wildness of nature, which contrasted strikingly with both murals and graffiti. In fact, “contrasts” seems a fitting word for the city’s kaleidoscopic sights as it transitioned almost seamlessly from fifteenth-century Ottoman alleys to Soviet brutalist apartment buildings, and from flowing rivers lined by lush forests to seedy pawn shops. At one point I saw within a single glance a combination of make-shift (aka sketch) carnival rides set up in a parking lot, the eccentric stone towers of an orthodox church, and the distopic shapes of Blok 5. Upon closer inspection of the church, the Orthodox Temple of Christ's Resurrection, I saw the beginning of a wedding taking place, as well as a group of local musicians ready to celebrate afterward with a drum and various brass instruments. The hotel included a generous breakfast – scrambled eggs, cheeses, meats, olives, salads, coffee – and I am now obsessed with a particular type of white cheese that I’ll have to seek out at the European Market here in Rocklin. I ate lunches and dinners out with colleagues from the conference and tried French fries with mayonnaise at the encouragement of a Belgian friend. I won’t lie… I kind of liked it.

I saw more of Montenegro on a cultural excursion planned for the morning following the conference. (Yes, the morning after our late-night rager. Thank goodness things were on “Balkan time” aka “15-20 minutes late” and I made it to the bus!) With the sun finally shining we made our way through the hills to the city of Budva on the coast. As we arrived I was pleasantly reminded of Santa Barbara in the coastal plants, animals, weather, and landscape. We dismounted the bus at a dock and boarded a large boat that took us out to the Adriatic Sea, dazzling us with stunning views of the wooded coastline dotted with stone chapels. It was during this voyage that I took about thirty minutes to carefully debone a fish for my lunch and had my first taste of bambus, a traditional and dubious mixture of red wine with Coca-Cola. I didn’t hate it… We landed at a fortress-port-city called Kotor, which is home to literally hundreds of (well cared for) stray cats, as well as the wonderfully winding cobbled streets of an old city that I adore. Here from the sea the mountains shoot up steeply into the cloudy sky (like Santa Barbara), and perched high above the town sits Kotor Fortress, accessible by a marathon of stairs, which, unfortunately, I didn’t have time to explore this trip. By chance I did run into a street vendor playing a sweet Dorian melody on a frula or wooden flute with the fipple hole on the bottom, resulting in a purchase that has augmented my personal woodwind collection.

International travel always includes adventures in language and I had some great encounters both en route and in Montenegro. I did some research before the trip and found out that the political and ethnic complexities of the Balkan region is in many ways reflected in the generic boundaries of various languages. Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are all basically mutually intelligible languages, although to some the symbolic differences are more important than the linguistic similarities. As you might expect, Montenegrin is the official language of Montenegro (but only since 2008), however I found many more resources on Serbian online, so that’s what I worked on. Around town I was able to give greetings, ask for directions, order coffee, and inquire whether I could pay with a credit card. The most fun I had was with Ljubo, the genial man who ran the breakfast at the hotel; we chatted together about Podgorica, food, language learning, the weather, and California. I also talked a bit with two managers of a bookstore (who assured me that “srpski” and “crnagorski” are the same language) where I found a Serbian version of Hari Poter. It turns out that the Serbian word for Muggles is Normalca [normals]. On the trip back to the western hemisphere, I hung out with a Canadian friend from Norway and chatted a bit in German with the scholarly expert on lying and deception, Jörg Meibauer. I also thoroughly enjoyed watching the 2020 animated children’s film “Wolfwalkers” with music by Bruno Coulais on the lengthy flight home.

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Wonderful trip! The conference was rich with musical ideas and I truly loved reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I’d love to go back to the Balkans again some time (Svetlana said to give her a call) and see more of the countryside. Doviđenja! See you next time in Rouen, France!

Publication Announcement: Textes & Contextes

You can now read another article of mine, a labor of love that’s been in the works for about a year now. It’s through Textes & Contextes, a journal connected to the Interlanguage Center at the University of Burgundy. The theme is “Lullabies: Historic and Cultural Circulations, Transmissions of the Intimate,” and considers the lullaby writ large as a transcultural and mobile expression of intimacy. My contribution to the discussion it entitled “Instrumental Lullabies and 19th Century Representations of Childhood, Girlhood, and Motherhood,” and examines lullabies that have been recontextualized several times over, not functional in their original care-taking sense, and not performed in adult performance contexts as art songs or virtuosic berceuses. These are instrumental lullabies that children practice and perform in their own homes, imaginatively playing out roles of childhood, girlhood, and (future) motherhood. I look at the dynamics of performance as self-regulation, the roles of mothers as domestic teachers, and adult mimicry in musicalized doll play. My final section looks at examples that have more problematic depictions of lullabies, both by female composers from the USA, Florence Newell Barbour and Juliet Adams, aka Mrs. Crosby Adams. The latter is particularly interesting for her pedagogical perspective which she articulated in a wealth of publications, journals, and letters. I’d like to make a larger project of her in the future.

This journal is online accessible so check it out here.

Listen to My Trumpet by Mo Willems: Emotion, Communication, and Relationship

As a parent of young children, it has been a pleasure to fall into the picture books of Mo Willems over the past few years. (As a family we made a tradition of eating pizza on Friday nights during COVID quarantine while watching his HBO special “Mo Willems and the Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let the Pigeon Do Storytime!” (2020). Must have seen it about thirty times!) His works deftly and often poignantly explore the wide range and wild variability of human emotion, whether his subjects are frogs, squirrels, geese, dinosaurs, or (occasionally) humans. Rather than pigeon-hole (pun intended) emotions into strict ethical categories, he incorporates them within a relational narrative in which characters practice inter- and intrapersonal communication, giving voice to the richness of emotional experience.

Listen to my Trumpet!

by Mo Willems

Hyperion Books for Children (2012)

Picture: The Elephant & Piggie series (2006–16) chronicles the varied adventures of best friends Gerald the Elephant and Piggie the Pig in twenty-five books. Willems depicts all the characters in these stories in a simple style, replete with circles and ovals, lines and angles, bold outlines and solid colors. Usually appearing on a blank, white page, these characters have a sketch-book immediacy and simplicity, a characteristic that Willems uses to intentionally invite children to participate as co-creators, especially in activity books such as “We Are in an ART-ivity Book!” (2017) and Kennedy Center “Lunch Doodles” on YouTube (2020). Remarkably, the simplicity of these drawings provides the canvas upon which to depict astounding emotional details through facial expressions, body gestures, motion lines, written sound effects, and the size and style of font in the text boxes. On every page, every character is part of the emotional narrative, expressing and reacting to real-time events. “Listen to My Trumpet!” includes only Piggie and Gerald, as well as a golden trumpet and a wooden, three-legged stool. Piggie’s love of her gleaming trumpet is made clear by her ebullient face, quivering excitement, and the loving hug she bestows upon the instrument.

Text: There is no narrator throughout the Elephant & Piggie books, which are driven by monologues or, more often, dialogues. As each character talks, their words appear in a specifically colored speech bubble like a cartoon strip (gray for Gerald, pink for Piggie, etc.). Many pages contain no talking at all, allowing the illustrations to move the story forward, whether the characters dejectedly walk off the page, romp joyfully in the rain, blush with awkwardness, or simmer with jealousy. Willems takes his time, devoting a large number of pages to the moment-by-moment unfolding of the story. In “Listen to My Trumpet!” the dialogue of the two friends begins with generous amounts of exclamation points as Piggie enjoins Gerald to listen to her give a trumpet recital. As the noisiness of her performance crescendos, Gerald increasingly expresses himself through thought bubbles as his feelings of tension and discomfort increase.

Music: The moment that Piggie begins to play her trumpet, Willems gives it voice in the form of brash, orange text bubbles, shaped with sharp edges like fiery explosions, and connected by jagged, lightning bolt shaped lines. Using an enormous, thick, black font that looks as though the letters are being shocked by an electric eel, he presents the clamorous tones of the trumpet through onomatopoeic syllables. Willems’ imaginative “voicing” of the trumpet has a wonderful playfulness to it (reading it out loud to children is a blast!) and puts me in mind of a sort of overlap between the scat vocables of Ella Fitzgerald and the trumpet improvisations of Wynton Marsalis.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Gerald’s reaction to the sound of the trumpet is one of discomfort, a feeling only intensified by Piggie’s continued excitement and belief that her performance is going well. Contrarily, Gerald privately thinks “That is not music” and compares the sound of Piggie’s trumpet to his Aunt Molly with a cold. What’s more, the sheer force of the trumpet’s sound has the ability to physically knock Gerald around, pitching him repeatedly off of his stool and eventually tossing him like a leaf in the wind during Piggie’s “big finish”, a scene as hilarious and overblown as the comedy short “Overly Competitive Trumpeters” by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

This sort of physical buffeting is a common occurrence in the Elephant & Piggie series, however usually the roles are reversed. Gerald, who occasionally displays a rather choleric, irritable disposition, expresses himself through outbursts of emotion and, given his larger size and elephantine resonance, Piggie more often than not is bodily tossed about by Gerald’s powerful sighs, cries, exclamations, and sneezes. Significantly, their friendship withstands such storms, mainly because they give each other the benefit of the doubt and take time to move through uncomfortable emotions towards what is actually being communicated between friends.

But now wielding her trumpet, Piggie turns the tables, inundating Gerald with wave upon wave of powerful sound. Yet, as she makes clear before, during, and after her performance, the forcefulness of her playing is expressive of joy, of wanting to share something special with her best friend. It is this that causes Gerald the most consternation, especially when Piggie presses him for his honest feedback. After demurring several times, complimenting her on the shininess and loudness of her instrument, Gerald chooses to tell the truth, stating, “That was not music… Sorry…”. As explored in my post on “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan, noise is the critical category in which Gerald places this sonic experience; it is all loudness and power, confusing and chaotic, with none of the clarity, beauty, or tunefulness that he expects of musical performance. In fact it is more akin to the trumpeting of a sick elephant… which is closer to what Piggie was aiming at in the first place: “You think I am trying to make music?” she says. “I am trying to speak elephant! I want to be like you.” Her aim was never to make sounds that one would characterize as music, but rather to use an instrument to speak the language of her friend.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

“Listen to My Trumpet!” hangs upon a simple generic miscommunication. Piggie completely disregarded the rules of “correct” trumpet playing from the start, and it is only by working honestly through a variety of powerful emotions (joy, nervousness, fear, confusion, worry, and shock, to name a few) that they discover the richness, the “musicality” of their relationship. Both characters had to figure out how to “listen” and to be willing to co-create new rules for the interpretation of sounds. How is the concept of “listening to music” overly prescriptive, moving too quickly to judgement at the expense of relationship and communication? How could the concept of “music” allow us to discover new ways of “listening” that provide a forum for truly hearing one another?

Publication Announcement: Sacred and Secular Intersections

My latest publication is out! After a bit over a year the edited volume Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall has been published through Lexington Books. The project came about through the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music in a project that sought to consider the “sacred” as a musical topic that crossed historical and cultural boundaries in rich ways. My chapter was entitled “The Sacred Looking Glass: Imaginative Children’s Music as Syncretic Nexus.” First considering the baseline of Isaac Watts’ pedagogical perspective on children’s music as a way to instill doctrine in their hearts and minds, I shift to sacred topics in instrumental children’s music used in domestic settings, which effectively overlapped and complicated the sacred and secular. I analyze a wide variety of pieces by composers throughout the western word (three of whom happen to have the first name Alexander), considering the stylized quotation of sacred songs, depictions of children in the act of prayer, images of church services and ringing bells, and moralized musicalizations of angels and demons. Due to costs, I could not include any sheet music examples in the text, but the majority are quite findable online. The editors, Effie Papanikolaou (Bowling Green State University) and Markus Rathey (Yale University) were great to work with and provided a wonderful place for a wide variety of scholars to add to this conversation; in the words of one reviewer, it’s “a rich feast indeed.”

More information and reviews here.

The Sleepers Shall Rise

This last academic year I have had the personal and professional pleasure of working with Dr. Grey Brothers as the accompanist for Choral Union, the freshman choral group he founded and directs at Westmont College. Years back as an undergrad, Grey was my choir director, voice teacher, and musicology professor, and this year he retires from Westmont to (presumably) spend more time with his impressive collection of berets. In honor of my friendship with Grey and in commemoration of his time at Westmont, I composed a piece entitled “The Sleepers Shall Rise” for Choral Union, which was premiered at the Vocal Chamber Concert in April.

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Lyrics

George MacDonald

For the text of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” I used a four-stanza poem by Scottish poet and mystic George MacDonald (1824-1905):

Illustration by Arthur Hughes of the elder Princess Irene at her spinning wheel for the 1908 edition of The Princess and Curdie.

“The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.

The ocean in music rolls,
And gems are turning to eyes,
And the trees are gathering souls
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
The larks and the glimmers and flows!
The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
And the something that nobody knows!”

— George MacDonald (1883)

This enigmatic poem appears within MacDonald’s children’s fantasy novel The Princess and Curdie (1883), the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin (1870-72). In Chapter 8 “Curdie’s Mission", the young protagonist, a miner boy named Curdie, makes his way to the highest tower of a castle which he knows to be the workroom of the elder Princess Irene, an uncanny and mysterious “wise woman” character who has summoned him. (MacDonald has a penchant for these powerful yet unsettling female figures, from the good fairies of his fairy tales to the Wise Woman of The Double Story (1875) and the title character of At the Back of the North Wind (1868-71).) Curdie finds her at a spinning wheel, which flashes with light as it turns, impressing upon Curdie through its rhythmic movement a soul-stirring, emotional transcendence that he struggles to make sense of.

“Then the lady began to sing, and her wheel spun an accompaniment to her song, and the music of the wheel was like the music of an Aeolian harp blown upon by the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Oh, the sweet sounds of that spinning wheel! Now they were gold, now silver, now grass, now palm trees, now ancient cities, now rubies, now mountain brooks, now peacock’s feathers, now clouds, now snowdrops, and now mid-sea islands. But for the voice that sang through it all, about that I have no words to tell. It would make you weep if I were able to tell you what that was like, it was so beautiful and true and lovely. But this is something like the words of its song...”

Highly influenced by German Romanticism, MacDonald writes in a way that is simultaneously overwhelming, musical, childlike, and even alienating. The first stanza uses metaphors of spinning and weaving – a folk culture activity with enormous symbolic capital in Romanticism – and metaphorically connects them to the shifting, spinning, swirling phenomena of stars, clouds, and suns. The spiritual import and mysteriousness of nature continues into the second stanza as MacDonald anthropomorphizes the ocean, gems, and trees who are in the process of developing, growing, evolving. Actually it is unclear whether it is the natural world that is “becoming” or whether Curdie is merely becoming more aware of something that has been there all along. In the third stanza, MacDonald the preacher comes to the fore by focusing the processes of growth within the human soul, with a nod to the restorative Psalm 126:5 (“Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy”), and a characteristic emphasis on the holiness of laughter. In these first three stanzas, the final line speaks of the time or day “when the sleepers shall rise”, which reminds me of one of the central themes in MacDonald’s last major work of fiction, Lilith (1895). In the final stanza the poem erupts into a childlike list of objects; while it appears almost nonsensical, it can be interpreted as vitally meaningful, suggesting deep connections in a series of evocative images. The poem remains open-ended to the end, replacing the last line about waking from sleep with a “something that nobody knows”. (This reminds me of German poet Friedrich Klopstock’s Das Rosenband (1752) which states “I felt it well, and knew it not” [Ich fühlt' es wohl, und wußt' es nicht.]). As the narrator of Curdie and the Princess states, the words of the poem are a pale reflection of the deeply affective experience that Curdie is having in the presence of Princess Irene, and their literal meaning is almost ancillary to the expression of their power.

My Additional Stanza

My setting of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” includes an additional stanza inserted between MacDonald’s third and fourth verses, which I wrote myself:

“In the rainbow’s nest lies the key of gold
To the land of the shadows grey.
Oh, dear brothers, oh sisters, love is the whole
For those who believe and obey.”

I sought to match MacDonald’s elusivity, in part by stitching together several themes from his other writings. The reference to the “rainbow’s nest”, the “key of gold”, and the “land of the shadows” come from one of my all-time favorite MacDonald fairy tales, The Golden Key (1867), which begins with the simple lines: “There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt's stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.” From this simple beginning, MacDonald sends two child protagonists into a dazzling world of mystical symbolism that moves beyond time and space.

The line “love is the whole” was lifted from the first line of Love is Home (1855), a five-stanza poem which rhapsodically addresses Love, finding it everywhere, particularly the diversity of nature and the longings of the human heart. The first stanza begins, “Love is the part, and love is the whole; / Love is the robe, and love is the pall; / Ruler of heart and brain and soul, / Love is the lord and the slave of all!” Again, we see MacDonald’s penchant for uniting dichotomies: part-whole, life (“robe”)-death (“pall”), heart-brain-soul, lord-slave.

Lastly, for MacDonald the concept of “believe and obey” was vitally important, though perhaps easily misconstrued. In many ways they signal his view that true maturity or progress necessitated a return to the simplicity of childhood, to a state of being that merely believed in the reality of a loving God and that merely obeyed whatever “still, small voice” prompted actions that brings that love to space and time. Such an idea crops up often in his children’s fantasies and pseudo-autobiographical novels, and is presented on the one hand scathingly in his Unspoken Sermons (1885), especially “The Truth in Jesus” from Series Two, and on the other hand in a disarmingly elementary dialogue in the poem Willie’s Dilemma (1855).

Illustration “Foamless Sea of Shadows” by Ruth Sanderson from 2016 edition of MacDonald’s The Golden Key.

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Music

Folklike Tune

I wanted the music to have a face-value simplicity to it, but in a way that leaves the door open to mystery and suggestibility. Each verse therefore makes use of a lullaby-like tune in 6/8, which appears with subtle variations each verse. For all the MacDonald stanzas the tune is in the Dorian mode, minor and with a rather Pirates of the Caribbean-esque lowered seventh, but shining with unexpectedly bright major IV chords like flashes of light glancing off of Princess Irene’s spinning wheel. It is at the penultimate verse (of which I wrote the poetry) that the mood of the piece changes, as though a key has been turned and the rainbow is shining with new, never before seen colors. Here I use the warmer Mixolydian mode, nestling the melody in the altos before fragmenting with staggered entrances at the words “Love is the whole”. The final verse shifts back to Dorian, but now modulated up a whole step and delivered in a more pressing and rhapsodic manner.

Spinning Wheel

The image of Princess Irene using her spinning wheel as an accompaniment to her singing provided inspiration for my conception of the collaborative piano part. There is a rich history of pianistic depictions of spinning wheels, such as Franz Schubert’s 1814 Lied “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, Albert Ellmenreich’s pedagogical standby “Spinnliedchen” (ca. 1863), and Scottish composer Erik Chisholm’s “Spinning Song” from his 1944 collection of preludes “At the Edge of the Great World”. At the onset I imagined the wheel oscillating as if in slow motion, drone-like open fifths rocking slowly between the right and left hands. The writing becomes more dynamic in subsequent verses, with rolling eighth-note arpeggiations in the second verse, and dizzying sixteenth-note filigree in the third. In the fourth (Mixolydian) verse the piano shifts from spinning motion to static blocks: pillars of sound that take Ossian-like strides to new vistas. The final verse returns to the energy of a spinning wheel in full force, the open fifths of the beginning now “power chords” that pound out the “something that nobody knows”.

Gaelic Waulking Song

I have a deep appreciation for folk musics, and decided to intersperse my music with a Scottish Gaelic song entitled Mhòrag ' s na horo gheallaidh [vo:rag sna horo ʝauLɪ]. (Here is a performance by Clannad. Note the variations in words.) This is a waulking song, a work song typically performed by groups of women who sang it while sitting in a circle beating and rotating newly woven tweed against a table to shrink it and make it waterproof. I saw the song as a fruitful connection to MacDonald’s Scottish provenance and complimenting the symbolism of Princess Irene at the spinning wheel as another example of music and storytelling through pre-industrial, female labor. In general waulking songs are highly rhythmic so as to coordinate the movements of the workers, feature vocables such as “horo” or “him ò”, and are sung in Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) with solo verses and group refrains. The lyrics of Mhòrag as they have been written down are enigmatic, describing cattle herding, lamenting separated lovers, and possibly signaling an encoded reference to Prince Charles during the Jacobite Uprising. For this composition I used only the refrain – or sèist – working off of a 1998 edition from a collection by Deborah L. White. The melody appears between verses in “The Sleepers Shall Rise”, coalescing from fragments in the piano to a stirring choral rendition after verse three.

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It was a joy to create this piece, and to work with Grey and Choral Union to bring it to life! I uploaded a full performance of the piece from the Vocal Chamber Concert to my musicking page. Enjoy!

Publication Announcement: GKJF "Klänge"

This autumn you’ll be able to read my latest peer-reviewed publication in Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung [Yearbook of the Society for Children’s and Youth Literature Research]. The journal’s theme is “Klänge” which translates to “Sounds” (and also happens to be the title of an important 1913 poetry + woodcuts book by Wassily Kandinsky), and provided the perfect context for presenting my research on the socializing pressures of imaginative children’s music. My article is entitled “The Guiding Hand: Hidden Adult Authority in Children’s Piano Music” (pp. 51–65) and provides cultural context and analysis of pieces by Robert Schumann, Cornelius Gurlitt, and Théodore Lack. I here extend ongoing research that I first presented at the IRSCL Congress in Stockholm, particularly in consideration of the pianistic dramatizing of the French bogeyman figure Croquemitaine. Because it is accessible online, we were able to include links to performances so you actually hear the “sounds” of the music.

Read here!

The Arrival by Shaun Tan: Musical Walls and Bridges

Attending the 2019 Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature was an utterly amazing experience. Both Stockholm itself and the Congress located in Norra Latin—a historic high school now turned conference center in Norrmalm—offered me a continuous deluge of warm collegial camaraderie, stunning urban and riverside views beneath an overcast sky, scholarship that advocates for the marginalized in all its forms—and coffee, lots and lots of coffee… There were so many things about the trip that offered me a chance to feel at home. Yet, of course, I wasn’t home, and the trip also constantly reminded me of my foreignness, from pedestrian-car interactions (no stop signs!) to prices in krona, and from the sight of cathedrals and cobblestones and the letter “å” to the unremitting child-consciousness of Swedish culture. This is why for my first post-Stockholm post, I decided to explore a children’s book that deals more intensely with the concept of foreignness.

The Arrival

by Shaun Tan

Hodder Children’s Books (2006)

Text: None! This is what one might call a wordless graphic novel, each page filled with pictures in various orientations. I had heard of this book before, though never read it, and then it came up in a keynote presentation on the second day. While browsing a book display during one of our frequent fika coffee breaks, I saw the recognizable cover picture accompanied by a single unexpected word, “Ankomsten”, the Swedish translation of “The Arrival”. For a moment I felt like the quizzical man on the cover, staring at a little alien creature, considering the odd mixture of familiar and unfamiliar that a foreign word can conjure.

Picture: The pictures are arresting, powerful, and intricate, rendered in muted tones and depicting a fantasy/futuristic setting that nevertheless references turn of the century America, specifically the experiences of immigrants passing through Ellis Island. The basic idea behind the book is that there is a man who leaves his family and travels to an entirely new metropolis, a place where absolutely everything is unfamiliar, strange, and foreign. He—and we as readers—struggle to make sense of this new place as the character seeks food, shelter, work, and above all human connection. Gradually and with the help of kind people he comes to understand the ways and codes of this place, reminding me of a George MacDonald quote from Lillith: “The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.” It is a timely, challenging, and moving book, important for children and adults alike to engage with.

Music: This book entrenches readers in the complex and painful process of learning, specifically of learning to navigate through and within an unfamiliar culture. Music, as an expression and carrier of culture, appears twice in the book and vividly communicates this shift from confusion to understanding. The first picture below depicts the arriving man’s first encounter with this new world. 

The man is confused at this point in the story, and we are thrust with him into the middle of an alien world. The invasive protocols of immigration services, the goings-on of bustling people in the streets, the appearance and behaviors of new animals, everything is overwhelming to his senses. The street musicians appear ominous: rendered in very dark hues with dower faces and surrounded by rat-like birds, the otherworldliness of the instruments they play—which include a space-age violin and an accordion with a serpentine tuba bell—is palpable. The concept of “noise” is useful here, as is an oft quoted definition by Anna Tsing: noise is the “awkward, unequal, unstable creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (Tsing 2004, 1). The oddity of the picture and the imagined music—some of which seems to be visibly shooting up out of the tuba bell into the sky—is meant to create a wall of noise. Unsettled by difference, the man has no opportunity to come to grips with its discomfiting significance.

[Aside: Tan’s imagined world of organological difference is actually remarkably similar to our own world. Modern western culture has a very limited notion of what instruments are “normal”, and in the margins of time and space lie instruments that display the human capacity for imaginative music- and/or noise-making. Below: A) a French piano accordion from 1880s on display in MIM Phoenix, B) John Matthias Augustus Stroh’s mechanically amplified Stroh violin invented in 1899, C) Adolph Sax’s trombone à pistons from 1876 on display in MIM Brussels, E) a ca. 1900 harp-guitar by Cesare Candi of Genoa, and F) Linda Manzer’s 42-string Pikasso guitar of 1984.]

The next musical encounter in The Arrival offers fresh possibilities for the newcomer on his journey towards musical and cultural understanding. After befriending a family and learning their own traumatic story, he is invited to dinner. Shared food, conversation, and laughter lead to an after-dinner musical concert, and a new relationship to this culture’s music. We see each member of the family happily contributing to this delightful Hausmusik experience. The father plays a miniature version of the street musician’s trumpet accordion, the mother plays a turnip-shaped ocarina with glowing orb of musical warmth, and the son sings—with his Pokémon lizard!—while strumming on a four-stringed circular guitar reminiscent of a Chinese ruan. 

The newcomer’s relationship with this family offers him a bridge toward understanding the meanings of music in this foreign place. Within the safety of a warm domestic setting he is able to draw near enough and to sit still long enough to listen with open ears and to ask questions of the performers in order to approach understand. Tan’s two images of music in The Arrival illustrate the contextuality of whether we interpret something as noise or as music. Relationship opens the door.

Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis: Satie and Time

I’m starting a new series of posts dedicated to exploring references to and uses of music within children’s literature, specifically picture books. Music functions richly within the intermedial dynamics of picture books, which Perry Nodelman describes as an art form demanding constant alteration between two modes of communication—visual and textual— and “as a result of these unusual features, [they] have unique rhythms, unique conventions of shape and structure, a unique body of narrative techniques” (Nodelman, 1988, viii). Adding music to this unique textual and visual genre provides yet another mode of communication, which both compliments and complicates an already wonderful genre. Let us begin!

Du Is Tak?

by Carson Ellis

Candlewick Press (2016)

Picture: This is a visually gorgeous picture book. Ellis frames up an insect-sized scene of an old log, and lingers there for the entirety of the book while seasons shift, adventures ensue, life is lived. The passage and cyclicality of time are of foremost importance: a single green plant provides the dapperly dressed invertebrate characters with many opportunities to experience the gamut of life’s emotions (puzzlement, excitement, leisure, horror, joy, letting go); a flamboyant caterpillar disappears into a cocoon in the first pages, metamorphosing near the end, and is followed by a second caterpillar at the close; and shifting seasons bring about changes to the foliage and landscape, most dramatically in the cleansing blankness of a winter’s snow.

Text: Ellis pairs these pictures with a delightfully innovative conlang (constructed language) of her own devising. (It appears to be nominally Germanic in syntax and phonology.) Readers are invited to speak “nonsense words” that are given meaning by the pictures. This technique highlights the nonverbal (shall I say “musical”?) power of communication through such things as gesture, intonation, addressee, and context.

Music: The bulk of the action happens in scenes of daylight. Yet three panels present us with a nocturnal version of the world: muted and dark colors, a starry night sky, and an absence of all characters apart from a single grasshopper perched upon a branch of the log directly over the caterpillar’s cocoon. In his [four] arms he holds a violin, which he plays introspectively, head bowed, eyes closed. Ellis employs a common technique: a string of musical notes emanates from the instrument and into the air. Remarkably, the notation symbols are not random (most examples are!). In the first two night scenes Ellis uses an eight-note rhythmic pattern made up of grace notes, eighth notes, quarter notes, and half notes that then repeats. Additionally, she provides a general melodic contour that gives enough information to show us that the notes are a quotation of a real piece of music: Gnossienne No. 1 by Erik Satie.

The second night scene with grasshopper and Gnossienne No. 1.

Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a French composer who was influential for his avant-garde experiments that modernistically challenged musical tradition and expectations. (He wrote minimalist background music which he termed musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”), included cheeky/ironic/impossible/overly dramatic narrations (in-score texts) in his music, and took as his programmatic subjects such things as the social lives and adventures of sea cucumbers.) Satie constructed his own cryptic term “Gnossienne” in three (perhaps seven?) compositions that share several generic characteristics: slow tempos, no barlines (known as “free time”), unconventional forms/melodies/harmonies, and strange in-score texts.

In the first two night scenes, Ellis’ grasshopper plays the opening theme of Gnossienne No. 1. I find the music hovering, yet heavy, improvisatory, as though playing with and reacting to half-remembered fragments. Follow along to a recording with sheet music performed by Klara Kormendi.

1. The third night scene directly follows the second. In the face of the decaying flower, we witness the dramatic release of the transformed caterpillar, which bursts out of its cocoon as a dancing moth. Eyes closed, she is the introspective one now, absorbed in the soaring exuberance of her dance. The grasshopper is on his feet, leaning forward eagerly, eyes wide and fixed upon this wonderful sight. He continues to play, but his tune has changed to match the sweeping gestures of the moth: twenty-five eighth-notes concluded by a dotted quarter note.

The third night scene with grasshopper/moth and Gnossienne No. 3.

Again, Ellis quotes Satie, this time Gnossienne No. 3. The third theme (fragment?) of this piece builds up momentum in a cascading sort of way, and bears the mysterious in-score text “Munissez-vous de clairvoyance” (“Acquire clairvoyance”). The grasshopper seems to be in the process of “seeing clearly”, standing as it were upon the overlap between life and death, gazing at the resurrected Muse, reifying the power of the moment with music that is both free of time and full of repetition. Listen to the performance by Daniel Versano starting at 0:35.

Ellis masterfully communicates through the richness of the picture book genre. Her static frame allows us to notice fine details and dwell upon growth and decay, life and death. Her invented language prompts us to find significance within/beyond/despite words. Music is hidden in this picture book, frozen as a string of symbols leaping from a grasshopper’s violin, yet the quotations of Satie’s haunting compositions, once deciphered, invite us to imagine unheard melodies that bind together memories, emotions, and meanings in new ways. May we all have eyes to see clearly and the courage to play our song in all of life’s seasons.

Hallå, Sverige!

This summer the Roys will be saying “Hallå, Sverige!”—pronounced [haˈloː sværjɛ], we will have to practice!—as we travel to Sweden. I submitted a panel proposal to the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 2019 Congress and it was accepted! I and two other musicologists who are doing pioneering work on music and childhood/children will give papers on the theme of “The Sounding and Silencing of Musical Childhoods;” more on that soon!

Princess Tuvstarr in the Field (1913) by Swedish illustator John Bauer.

I am getting more and more excited about this trip, not just because the IRSCL will undoubtedly be an amazing experience, but because I know very little about Sweden and it gives me a wonderful opportunity to delve into its music, language, literature, and myths. By far the most compelling thing I have found recently is Rosenbergs Sjua (Rosenberg’s Seven), a musical ensemble comprised of four female vocalists and a string quartet. Their second album, R7 (1999) consists of arrangements of Swedish folk songs that are singularly riveting and haunting.

Vocal Polyphony

The driving force behind Rosenbergs Sjua is Susanne Rosenberg: singer, composer, musicologist, and professor in the Royal College of Music, Stockholm. Her arrangements for R7 reflect her mastery of an eclectic variety of singing styles ranging from Swedish folk to Baroque to jazz, as the singers create amazing textures ranging from playful to epic to lyrical. The sixth track “Pris Vare Gud”—a nineteenth-century hymn text written by Johan Olof Wallin—begins with a layering of an improvisatory motif that creates a sort of drone for the mournful melody. Alternately track two “Min Bröllopsdag” alternates between tight harmonies in homorhythm and polyphonic scatting.

Kulning

Another sound that adds a certain northern wildness to R7 is kulning, a vocal technique practiced since ancient times in Scandinavia—primarily by women—as a means for calling livestock in from their grazing pastures in the mountains. Different melodic shapes and timbral colors echo and clash with high-pitched intensity throughout track seven “Jorid Lockrop” and offer a visceral example of female vocal power. This is apparently the function of kulning in Karin Rehnqvist’s composition for two singers and percussion, Puksånger/Lockrop (1989), which Rosenberg premiered. (The link in the recording is not professional, but the rawness speaks for itself.)

Fiddling/Riffing

The string section of R7 simply rocks! In addition to several instrumental dance tracks (four “Artos Julpolska” and thirteen “Nattöga”) which feature a wealth of idiomatic ornamentation, many of the songs are grounded in heavy, syncopated riffs worthy of a metal band. Listen to the first track “Leja Tjänstepiga” or the epic tenth “Balladen Om Liten Karin”. (The whole effect reminds me of the amazing instrumental arrangements of folk songs by the Danish String Quartet in their Woodworks (2014) album.) The contrast between voice and string in R7 —both equally strident at times—has a sort of hi-fi brutality that I prefer when it comes to modern arrangements of folk music.

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Your suggestions for further reading/listening as we look forward to Sweden are welcome! Ha det så bra!

Baby/Piano Juggling: One-Handed Music, Pt. 1

Felix, my robust five month old, is quickly exceeding my ability to hold him with one hand. For the first few months I could easily tuck him into the crook of my elbow and sit quite nicely at the piano doing what any pianist-father would do: play piano music using only my left hand! Now that my son is healthfully growing (97th percentile), I fear for the muscular integrity of my spine in such a position, so I’ll reminisce about my brief stint in this interesting category of music.

Life-size Felix…

According to Dr. Hans Brofeldt’s exceedingly informative website “Piano Music for the Left Hand”, this kind of music rests upon several interesting cultural factors. First, the invention of the sustain pedal allowed for a single hand to sound like several; technology opened up new musical possibilities. Second, the impetus for writing music of this sort could either come from the physical loss or injury of a hand—such as Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961) who had his right arm amputated after sustaining a bullet wound to the elbow in WWI—or from what Brofeldt calls “musical-intellectual gymnastics” in which a composer simply limits their composition to a single hand to see what is possible. The two pieces that I’ve enjoyed are from the latter category.

Scriabin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2

Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915) wrote Opus 9 in 1894 and it consists of a Prelude and a Nocturne for left hand alone. I was drawn to the Nocturne for a variety of reasons, such as the piece’s remarkable playability with a single hand, the lavish beauty of the Romantic style (Scriabin, like many Russians, was simply gaga over Chopin), and the (impassioned) lullaby mood which perfectly suited the lulling of an infant. But most of all, at the time Felix cried consistently at a steady Ab pitch, which happens to be the first note of the piece! (My friend Alissa Aune—who has perfect pitch—suggested that I get him up to A-440 with a little pinch… I would not recommend this. It does not work!) I like this rendition by Martina Filjak that I found on YouTube. The camera starts in a way that really has you wondering how many hands she is actually using. It’s only when it moves later on that you see the left hand’s dexterity (pun intended).

Reinecke’s Sonata

Carl Reinecke ((1824–1910) wrote Sonata für die Linke Hand alleine, op. 179 in 1884. Out of the four movements I was most attracted by the second, marked Andante lento with its tuneful melody interspersed with pianistic filagree. Reinecke wrote the words “Ne menj rózsám a tarlóra” at the start of this piece, the title of a Hungarian folk tune. (Reinecke’s setting of the tune is looser than, say, Bartók’s grammaphone recording, which is pretty standard as far as nineteenth-century folk song use goes.) Takeo Tchinai plays the whole sonata, with movement two starting at 4:45. Once again, the melody starts on my son’s Ab! (Check out lefthandpianomusic.org for more quality recordings of interesting pieces, including a one-handed fugue by Kalkbrenner!)

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My resilient first-born, Penelope, with her own baby at the piano bench. Scriabin sheet music on the stand.

I’m finding these pieces to be a really boost to the left hand ego… A real shot in the arm, so to speak. #toosoon Has anyone had experience working on these? If so, what have you been doing with your free hand?

Winter's Lullaby

Yesterday the stillness of Santa Barbara, wrapped in the brisk and earthy air that follows a bout of rain, was punctuated by the sound of the pounding rotors of military helicopters. Every hour or so one would thunder across the blue, winter's sky. And every time we were brought back to the present reality of shock at the terrifying events that have come to call this season.

In the first weeks of December, California's largest wildfire on record came plundering across several counties, engulfing homes, causing massive evacuations, and sending up sun-choking clouds of smoke that descended upon our cities with ghostly blankets of ash. From San Louis Obispo where we escaped to keep our children out of the fumes, we received word that the evacuation zone had reached our house; I drove back that day, the yellow-dead sky thick with quiet urgency, and loaded the car with a hasty selection of valuables, closing the door on the rest for perhaps the last time. The smoke followed us north and eventually we decided to seek hospitality from relatives further afield, ending up in Roseville, above Sacramento, checking the news compulsively only to hear that the fire would likely burn on until Christmas.

Our house survived. We returned from a month spent in other people's guest rooms to a home that seemed odd in its familiarity. We spent the holiday in Pasadena, driving past hills that looked moon-blasted, charred trees blackening both sides of the coastal 101 highway. When we returned to Santa Barbara I spent an hour in a breathing mask with a push broom, scrubbing away the soot that covered our walkway and carport as we moved towards life shaken and hopeful.

Two days ago it rained. In the middle of the night avalanches of turgid mud tore through the hills of Montecito. Houses, streets, cars, people, gone, replaced by wreckage and sludge. Highway 101 closed. Westmont College evacuated. The sight of first responders and rescue dogs and muddied survivors and devastation vivid on the news. And helicopters, rumbling piercingly through the sky, bringing in supplies, transporting the injured, and seeking out those still stranded before the chill night. 

Those are streets I have walked many times, now impassable wastes. Those are people I have conversed with, now drenched with devastating loss. Those are people I have known, now missing in the dark.

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This was not how I envisaged this season. The warming, lulling carols of Advent and Christmastide were conspicuous in their absence, save in the form of the Quadriga Consort's two winter albums as the soundtrack to my solitary return to Santa Barbara. Late at night in northern California I found myself mulling over one of my favorites, a Scottish Gaelic carol sometimes known as Tàladh Chriosda or Christ's Lullaby. Its melody rises and falls with a comforting ease and stark beauty. Its words describe Jesus from the point of view of his mother, Mary. This imagined mother's perspective is conspicuous for its unremitting combination of intimacy with awe, circling around the mystery of the incarnation just as Mary cradles and fondles the Holy One of Holy Ones in her arms. But she also expounds upon the experience of the Holy Family, a harrowing story of tumult: a mandatory relocation issued by the ruling colonial authorities, rejected from familial hospitality, Mary delivering her first child alone and friendless in a barn, and later a midnight escape from the genocidal soldiers of a malicious tyrant. This is no idealized cherub-Jesus, no placidly docile, haloed caricature of infancy. This is a baby born to the life-threatening and heart-breaking challenges of human existence.

"O hard-hearted Herod / Your plan will not be victorious / Many are the mothers you left wretched / When you vehemently pursued the death of my little one."

This is a mystery to me. I walked around the block today with 3.5 month old Felix in the front carrier as black helicopters fly desperately and purposefully in the distance.  I thought about Jesus born to the rush and tears and pain of homelessness and rejection and devastation. Of the fragility of his existence, the vulnerability of mortality, the tears and words and sighs and laughs and cries that would accompany his short life. I picture him walking beside me, hand shielding the wintery sun from his eyes. Or him knee deep in mud, keenly following a rescue dog into the wreckage of a house. Or him at a counseling center, anguished people haranguing him for news, screaming directly into his face until they are hoarse, or crumpling into sobs across from him at a card table.

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Not One Is Alone / Shepherded by Beth Allen. Her stirring art can be found here.

I do not know if this is comforting to me. Perhaps it is too soon for comfort. I do know that it is something deep and close and fervent. I cling to that.

"Neither holy angels nor men will understand / Until the last day of the world / The extent of your mercy and love / Coming to take a human body."

Welcome home, Felix!

One week ago today witnessed the birth of my second child, Felix Leander Roy. This is the first time that I have written out his entire name. Ever. There have been many "firsts" happening in my house over this past week, some enormously beautiful, others incredibly challenging, all precious.

There's also a lot of learning going on. While Felix himself grows an alarming amount of neurons every hour or so and tests out thing like sleeping, yawning, grasping, and crying out, the other members of his family have countless opportunities to express and process the familial recalibration prompted by his arrival. Everything is washed with the sunlight of newness.

His birth was highly anticipated in our family, especially throughout the month of September. Beaches were strolled. Conversations were had. Massages were given and received. Stairs were climbed. Hot salsa was consumed. Songs were sung. I've included one such song below, which I wrote with a little help from my friends... Welcome home, Felix!

A Parent's Guide to 'A Young People's Guide to the Orchestra'

Perhaps you haven't heard... toddlers have some pretty strong opinions! Lately my two-year-old, Penny, has been weighing in on everything from who gets to screw on the lid of her water bottle (her), what we should eat for dinner (strawberries with yogurt), where we should go for an afternoon outing (Target), and who should sit in her car seat (me, but eventually her, but then she gets to put on the shoulder straps and buckle the top clasp no matter what!). It makes sense—her world is daily expanding through new experiences and experiments, which means this young person is in a state of continual boundary creation, testing, and maintenance. Sometimes all at once. No wonder she tries to up the number of bed time books to six!

Musical preferences are no less subject to the toddler's strong opinions. By and large my daughter's tastes tend toward "children's music": a fluid genre that includes, among other things, African American spirituals, nonsense songs, English Puritan nursery rhymes, anti-war songs by Pete Seeger, Japanese folk songs, and newly-composed works about everything from public transportation to families of ducks, and personal hygiene to lovable arctic aquatic mammals and their daily schedules. This music is characteristically catchy, repetitive, and singable (and on many occasions has miraculously deescalated tantrums during long car trips).

Penny playing impromptu side-table "drums" on clearance at Target, her favorite store in the world.

Penny feels much differently about "daddy music", by which I basically mean "classical" (though there's also a good mix of Gaelic EDM, Hungarian folk bands, and whatever freaky magic Matthias Loibner does with his magnificent Drehleier). Often the act of turning on flute fantasias by Telemann in the car results in a flurry of protestations from the back seat followed by heated negotiations. Indeed, "classical music" tends to be a hard sell for toddlers; very broadly speaking, the sort of musics that fall into this category tend to be long, developmental, enigmatic, and played on a wide range of old instruments.

This is not a post about the aesthetic merits or shortcomings of "children's music". It's also not about the "Mozart effect" and scientific or pseudoscientific arguments for guilting parents into playing more Eine kleine Nachtmusik. It's not even about how Raffi is somehow still recording and performing, and how his eponymous "Down by the Bay" is a song that maddeningly straddles realism and nonsense! This is a post about how I shared something I love with my two-year-old daughter, something that, because of a little parental participation, she has come to enjoy. Here's my guide for engaging your toddler with "classical music".

I started with a specific piece of music: A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra or as I call it in this post YPGO written by British composer Benjamin Britten in 1945. Despite the clear appeal to children in the title and Britten having written it on commission for educational purposes, it seems unlikely that my daughter would choose it over, say, Elizabeth Mitchell's "Little Bird". At face value, YPGO sounds "classically" complicated: it's a twenty-minute series of thirteen variations and a concluding fugue based on a rondeau by seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell written by a twentieth-century composer performed by a room filled with about twenty-five different types of acoustic instruments under the leadership of a stick-waving interpreter!! Sheesh... #canibeexcused

Take courage! What I discovered with Penny was that those very complications listed above which seem to discourage toddler (and sometimes adult) involvement are exactly those things which can hook the young person's interest. You could say that this piece of music has a lot going on. Rather than be intimidated by that, try to see that as the very point of the game. Here's how:

1. Active Participation or Make it fun! The first thing to do is ditch the audience etiquette we associate with "classical music" concerts, namely, sitting silently in a darkened concert hall in detached cerebral contemplation waiting for the right moment to applaud. Rather stifling, even for adults. My solution is to hold off on the live concert experience and instead find a high-quality video of YPGO online to watch at home. This way you can interact with you child and the musical experience with as much enthusiasm as is necessary to keep things interesting. Penny sat on my lap, I opened a YouTube window, and these are the ideas that I kept in mind to actively participate with my daughter and the concert.
2. Performative Listening or Use your eyes and say what you see! I developed this idea from teaching "Music Appreciation" to undergraduates at UCSB [link to post]. An orchestra is such a visual experience: bows gliding up and down, gleaming metal surfaces, dancing fingers, crashing cymbals, gesticulating conductor. It's well worth drawing attention to these things as the camera pans around the ensemble and focuses in on a particular section. These observations do not need to be particularly profound or insightful. Penny and I talked about how some instruments were big and some small, some performers had curly hair and some wore glasses, how some instruments were brown or silver or gold or black, and how some instruments are tucked under chins or held between legs or laid upon laps or held in front, etc. etc.
3. Physical Mimicry or Use your eyes and do what you see! Who doesn't love to "air guitar"? #bohemianrhapsody Observations of how performers hold their different instruments easily morphs into a game of charades. All it really takes is for the parent to initiate by moving their hands and arms or with the use of a prop like a pencil or spoon. Moreover, the panning of the camera to different instruments will keep the game fresh and dynamic as you and your toddler quickly switch positions from sliding trombones to transverse flute to sawing violin to enthusiastic xylophone.
4. Intuitive Listening or Use your ears and say what you hear! I also developed this idea from my collegiate teaching. The human auditory system comes prewired to detect even the smallest changes in sound. It's how we detect sarcasm in a person's speech patterns, the location of someone talking in a building, the presence of an ambulance. In the case of music, "classical music" in general is known for wide variation, often utilizing every shade of fast-slow, up-down, loud-quiet, happy-sad, etc. Once you notice a change (and in YPGO they are rather blatant) describe it using whatever words or phrases you can. It does not need to be technical. It can simply be descriptive. Or emotional. Or pictorial. The cool thing with watching a video of a concert is that often when there is an important change in the music the cameras will highlight the source of the sound giving a visual correspondence to an aural event. Here's some examples from my time with Penny:

"Wow, that sound was high like a bird!" [Camera focused on piccolo.]

"Those ones play very low because they are so big." [Group of double bassists.]

"They are going a lot faster now!" [Bows jerking up and down quickly.]

"Those ones play loud and strong!" [Group of brass players.]

"This part is very quiet. I wonder when it will get loud again." [String players motionless.]

"It's like they're swinging on a big swing!" [Clarinets alternately playing up and down.]

"I think it sounds like galloping horses." [Trumpets and snare drum clipping along.]

"I'm lost at this part. It sounds like lots of people whispering at the same time." [???]

That last example is extremely important. Whatever you do, don't make it seem like you are only participating in this experience because you have complete confidence in what's going on at all times. In fact, it's best if you aren't for the sake of your toddler. Sometimes the music will sound vague or overly-complicated and you will get lost. Own it! Show your toddler that it's ok to be lost. It's musical hide-and-seek! It's part of the game!

Below is the video I used with Penny. The music starts at 2:00 and they didn't get as good a shot of the percussion section in action as I would have liked, but besides that, I would highly recommend it! Good camera work, lots to see and hear, and very well played. If this one doesn't strike your fancy, find your own, for whatever reasons suit you.

My hope is that this approach to listening to "classical music" with a toddler sounds doable to any parent out there. You don't have to be a musicologist to do it. You don't even need to know the names of the instruments. Or the form of the piece. Or the socio-historical context of YPGO and its meaning for England at the close of WWII. All you need to do is actively participate with your toddler on a visually and aurally interesting journey. If you don't know the way, be attentive and courageous in the face of the unknown and point out all the things you notice. Show young people that life is full of wondrous and exciting things and that given a context of safety, curiosity, fun, and empathy, everyone is equipped to make something of it. #babysteps

My LEGO Rant

Whenever my wife and I are fortunate enough to walk through the air conditioned aisles of a Target (most recently on road trips between Santa Barbara and Sacramento in an attempt to lull our five-month-old to sleep) there comes a moment when Jess, without even looking at me and in her off-handed way, asks that I spare her the ritual of "my LEGO rant". Since I've subjected my family and many of my friends to this particular topic to no avail, I've now decided to unleash it upon the Internet, that rollicking sea of discursive opinion.

(The embryo of this rant already appeared in a previous post entitled "The Merest Set of Blocks" where I hold LEGOs up as an example of "life creating" play. The current post takes its departure from this idea, problematizing current trends in LEGOs and drawing out some criticisms and observations.)

Here it goes: LEGOs are a type of toy that allows the literal construction of Tolkienesque co-created worlds. Yet as I roam Target (Jess is probably meanwhile looking at patterned workout pants), I become concerned by what I see as a development in LEGOs that would seem to fundamentally limit the toy's creative power. I'm talking about the overwhelming presence of specifically marked, franchise characters and worlds. In other words, why all the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Marvel comics?

I see these sets as a problem when I compare them with more basic, unmarked sets from the 90s: City, Space, Medieval, Pirates, etc. These older genres seem to offer the perfect balance of marked specificity and unmarked generality. They have enough connection to a widely-known and accepted, constructed world to give basic parameters for play, basic rules and norms. But at the same time the genres are loose enough to allow for the widest possible variation and manipulation.

Take for example the following, common City character: Body design (black with pockets and silver badge), face (smile with black shades), helmet (white with clear visor), and vehicle (white motorcycle with radio antennas and "police" on the side). All these things mark this figure as a police officer on a motorcycle. Certain generic rules come into play as soon as this concept is accepted: the "good guy" role, power relations to "bad guys" and "innocent City dwellers", the narrative of the "high speed pursuit", etc. But these rules can easily be bent, challenged, or otherwise problematized. Is he the hero? The sidekick? A husband? A father? A son? Happy with his job? Overworked and mentally unstable? Does he have a dark and obscure past? Does he have a criminal brother who pits family against justice? Is he a cop by day and freelance web designer by night? There's nothing to stop you from pretending that the cop is really a criminal in disguise. Or he's in a Halloween costume. Or he's a displaced cyborg from the future. Or a displaced knight from the past. It can be almost whatever you want! You could even insert him into another context; with a little imagination and the addition and subtraction of a few choice pieces he could be a Scout Trooper on a Speeder Bike. (I may or may not have done exactly that as a child...)

The box cover of LEGO Speed Trackers 6625. Photo courtesy of Brickset: the millennial's one-stop nostalgia pit! 

Specificity meets possibility. LEGOs and genre at their best!

Not so, I argue, with the franchise sets. Everything here is heavily marked. The "Indiana Jones" figurine isn't just any "good guy". He's Harrison Ford. He's a specific persona built upon a solid and controlled tradition of movies and books and video games. He has his own soundtrack. He has specific catch phrases, personality traits, and accouterments. He comes preloaded with certain relationships towards women, snakes, Nazis, his father, America, collegiate teaching, epistemology, mysticism, the use of force, etc. 

Similarly, whoever "Malekith the Accursed" is (I say as I walk through the LEGO aisle in Target perusing the available sets), he obviously has unique characteristics, a specific story and a point of view that puts him into relationship with other characters within his world. If one is unfamiliar with these things, there is a risk of using him "incorrectly". (A lesson I learned with certain "Ninjago" figurines while playing with my nephews.)

I'm not arguing that specificity is in and of itself negative. J.R.R. Tolkien, Stan Lee, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and others have all created rich worlds that have had a lasting effect on our culture in important ways. I'm also not saying that the mixture of genres (eg. "Indiana Jones" having tea with "Darth Vader" in a "castle" with "Iron Man" playing saxophone in the background) is impossible or undesirable or bad. The LEGO Movie in particular uses genre mixture in a particularly powerful, Bakhtinian, carnivalesque way, that reveals the need for reassessment of meta-narratives both in fantasy and reality. I am saying that the specificity of this overly-marked characterization limits the possibility inherent in LEGOs as toys. Their worlds are pre-constructed and much less open to manipulation. And this manipulation is what truly makes LEGOs great.

Co-creation vs. participation. Light generic marking vs. meta-narratives. Open vs. limited.

Obviously any rant is fraught with loopholes and problems. Perhaps I betray my ignorance of the Marvel multiverse, or my dissatisfaction with Peter Jackson's adaptation of LOTR. Perhaps I see limitations where others see potentialities. Perhaps I betray my jealousy of today's purple bricks, the pre-made "Darth Vader" helmets (I had to use the visored knight helmet for that character), the cannons that actually shoot. ("Today's youth don't know how good they have it!" says the old man.) But, also, perhaps I've touched upon something that speaks directly to the fundamentally different ways of viewing the world.

What do you think?

Baby Songs

Today my daughter, Penelope, turns four months old. Many life-changing things have happened since that day — for instance I am currently writing this post with my left hand alone, a skill I've become somewhat proficient at, as my right hand is preoccupied with calming an infant whose sleep regression threatens to startle her awake.

Photo taken by sister-in-law K8 Weber at Hendry's Beach—the same beach Jess and I walked for months while Penny was cooking.

Milestones like this allow the opportunity to consider the passage of time. Time with an infant is complicated, demanded, constrained, but also expanded, inverted, and even negated. (Parents will understand what I mean.) As music is a temporal art form that moves through time, it's interesting to note what being a new father has done to my perception of and dealings with music. I'll keep my musings limited to music directed at Penny, to infant music, specifically the what and the why.

What: We sing to Nelly. (Yes, she has at least three names and a variety of nicknames.) What we sing most is a variety of nonsense songs with simple, metrically regular melodies taken from just about anywhere (SpongeBob, Protestant hymns, Spice Girls, Mexican folk songs) or improvised. The words, when they make sense at all, are topical and specific to the moment ("Who's got a wet diaper? It is you! Who's got a wet diaper? It is you! etc."). I also find delight in singing songs from a variety of sources that I have come across and enjoy for a variety of historical, linguistic, or musical reasons. True to my form, they are mostly not in English:
 

• Italian arias like A. Scarlatti's "Già il sole dal Gange"
• Eighteenth-century German Lieder such as Zelter's setting of Klopstock's "Das Rosenband"
• Knipper's "Polyushke Polye"
• Selections from Schumann's Liederalbum für die Jugend ("Frühlingsgruß" and "Schlaraffenland")
• The medieval chant "Ave Maria"
• French marching songs like "Au jardin du mon père"
• Selections from Gay's The Beggar's Opera ("Oh, what pain it is to part")
• And several Gàidhlig songs such as "'Illean bithibh sunndach," "Fear a' bhàta," and "Tha mi sgith".

Why: What is our purpose for singing to our four-month-old? Cognitive development? Language acquisition? Enculturation and socialization? There are a lot of literatures and opinions out there about what music for infants should be about, what is appropriate and what is not. As a music scholar I find it all rather daunting, and as a parent I find it downright overwhelming. So I've come to my own personal conclusion that the reason I sing to my infant daughter is simply because I enjoy it. It's fun! Singing marks the passage of time with an immediacy and vivacity that we usually don't notice in the daily humdrum of life.  Singing is about making time intentional and noting its preciousness. It pauses "ordinary time" and enters into "special time."

It's also communicative. This may seem counterintuitive; I do realize that Penny understands neither the nonsense songs, nor the foreign language songs, nor the English ones for that matter. She can't speak. But because she can't speak, it's all music at this point: melody and rhythm and consonants and vowels. And what I believe comes across through music's sheer musicality is simply a parent's affection for their child. Without words to get in the way, I believe that Nelly can somehow, on some level, be aware of my fatherly affection for her. This is why instead of singing songs that have at some point been categorized as "children's songs," I sing songs that I enjoy, like Gàidhlig folk songs or Soviet era pseudo-folk songs. I enjoy these pieces, they fill my heart with joy, and by singing those sorts of songs to my infant I practice sharing a deep part of my soul with her. In pouring forth my voice, I expose her to my vulnerability and enthusiasm and desire to connect at simple yet deep levels.

I'll end by saying that Penelope has recently begun to "vocalize;" she sings back to us. Sometimes her songs communicate specific desires or needs, but other times she seems to be singing for the sheer fun of it. At these moments she sounds like a tiny, shrieking Nazgûl, but I'm guessing something more joyful is in her heart.

One Moment to Breathe

Today a year ago my wife and I discovered that we were pregnant. Forty-some weeks after that Jess birthed our sweet, little wonder, Penelope, a healthy, feisty, strong infant with bright, blue eyes. In the three and a half months since we brought Penny home, Jess and I have been privy to a constant spectacle of discovery: smiles, car rides, lip-quivering cries of fear versus ear-splitting cries for attention. Jess and I are both more exhausted than we have ever been and we are grateful to those who have helped us and stood with us through this challenging, life-transforming time.

The Family with Penny in her (daddy's) favorite TMNT onesie. #wishihadone Photo probably by sister-in-law K8 Weber.

I am hoping to have some time this summer to write more often. Penny's arrival came at the very end of a year-long battle with COMPS, and actually overlapped with me creating and presenting a "Music Appreciation" course for a summer session at UCSB. There hasn't been much time. :)

Next time I will be continuing my coverage of my adventures in parenting by talking about music for infants. What is its purpose? What type of music is preferable?

See you then.

"The Merest Set of Blocks"

It has been a while since I have written on this blog. The wonderfully fruitful collaboration with the Subverting Laughter Project as well as a little thing called "PhD musicology grad student, Year Two" have taken precedence over my time and creative energies. After such a hiatus, coming back to a project like this can feel a bit daunting: creative ideas need to be dusted off, intellectual tools taken out of the shed, logistical plans redrafted. To build and to rebuild is to strike off into the potentially frightening zones of the unknown. (But really, who would have it any other way?)

In the spirit of adventurous rebuilding, and in celebration of the imminent release of the Lego Movie to DVD (a veritable nostalgia-explosion for people of my generation), I present to you a meditative constellation. First, some sociology of childhood from Roland Barthes' Mythologies (1957). Here he is decrying the blatant socializing impact of toy culture in France. In his view, specialized toys (such as plastic telephones, model Vespas, or "diaper dollies") constrain children to passively and automatically reenact miniature versions of the adult world:

• The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all... the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. He is turned into a little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality; they are supplied to him ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish. [However,] the merest set of blocks, provided it is not too refined, implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have an adult name; the actions he performs are not those of a user but those of a demiurge. He creates forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property. (Cited from Jenks The Construction of Childhood, 1982)

In a similar vein, C.S. Lewis, in an attempt to develop a theory of literary reception, highlights the importance of active and imaginative utilization in both religious ikons as well as children's toys. He states:

• A particular toy or a particular ikon may be itself a work of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better toy or a better ikon. They may make it a worse one. For its purpose is, not to fix attention upon itself, but to stimulate and liberate certain activities in the child or the worshiper. The Teddy-bear exists in order that the child may endow it with imaginary life and personality and enter into a quasi-social relationship with it. That is what 'playing with it' means. The better this activity succeeds the less the actual appearance of the object will matter. Too close or prolonged attention to its changeless and expressionless face impedes the play. (Lewis An Experiment in Criticism, 1961)

Retro LEGO add from Fat Brain Toys

Now to apply these criticisms and insights to the realm of music: How does music "literally prefigure the world of adult functions?" Does it have a "changeless and expressionless face?" I would say that both these questions bring up issues of canonicity. Any musical genre establishes its foundations as a socially meaningful activity or object upon some sort of musical canon, typically an established (changeless and expressionless?) and hierarchical list of (adult-approved?) exemplars, be they composers or artists or recordings or techniques or rituals. Consider Katherine Bergeron's chilling insights into the proscriptive implications of canon:
 

• Indeed, once a principle of order is made into a standard, it becomes all the more accessible; translated into a "practice," its values can be internalized... [implying] a type of social control—a control that inevitably extends to larger social bodies as individual players learn not only to monitor themselves but to keep an eye (and an ear) on others. To play in tune, to uphold the canon, is ultimately to interiorize those values that would maintain, so to speak, social "harmony." Practice makes the scale—and evidently all of its players—perfect. (Bergeron and Bohlman Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, 1992).

"Young Beckie" by Rackham. I'm sure the swarm of rats is only playing with that rascally rogue, Beckian...

One the other hand, how is music about creating "life, not property?" How is it the activity of a "demiurge?" How does it "stimulate and liberate?" We do after all play music: homo ludens (see Johan Huizinga, 1937), ludus tonalis (see Paul Hindemith, 1943), prelude (see J.S. Bach, Frederic Chopin, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Vsevolod Zaderatsky, etc.). Is there room in canonical works by canonical composers for childlike play? Or are the barlines of a notated score literally prison bars that constrain both performers and listeners to proscriptive, ready-made conclusions?

Regardless of your music of choice, these issues remain. Have you experienced either of these reactions? Let me know what you think!

Apples Falling From the Baum

Amidst TAing an “Enjoyment of Music” summer session at UCSB and preparing to teach “Survey of Western Music” at Westmont beginning next week, I’ve been getting in a little last-minute reading. This summer has been an enthusiastic adventure through a variety of books concerning fairy tales: from Propp’s morphological theorizing and Todorov’s definition of the “fantastic” to bios of George MacDonald to fascinating contes by seventeenth-century, female, French writers like d'Aulnoy and l’Héritier, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s bizarre Der goldene Topf. I recently finished a book entitled Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France, a collection of essays by prominent fairytale scholars, which gives a wide swath of perspectives and analytical positions to consider and apply in my own thinking. I’m having fun!

With this exploratory thought-lust in mind, I’ve made some preliminary observations concerning one of our read-out-loud-while-my-amazing-wife-prepares-dinner books: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Since I’m currently diving into a chapter entitled "Inverting and Subverting the World with Hope: The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde and L. Frank Baum" by Jack Zipes, which is sure to give me a lot to think about, I’d better get out my initial perspective out now before anything else happens.

Illustration by W.W. Denislow

What initially struck me was Baum's introduction, a short one-page disclaimer in which he advocates for fairy tale modernization (particularly doing away with old European motifs, characters, and gruesome scenes) and aims at creating stories of pure, juvenile entertainment (Dorothy's innocence is a constant theme throughout the book). This strikes me a a pretty gutsy and bravura move and it brings a lot of questions to mind:

1. Does Baum succeed in divorcing himself from European tradition? His narrative structure seems particularly Proppian; his characters, though packaged differently, function much like those from a stock fairy tale; and the amount of gruesomeness tends to rival that found in some Grimm stories, for instance Dorothy viewing a decomposing corpse upon entry to the Land of Oz, as well as frequent and well-nigh habitual decapitation and dismemberment by the Tin Woodman's axe. Even as I write this, however, I wonder if there is a symbolic gesture involved in the violence. What if the Wicked Witches of the East and West somehow stand in for European tradition itself, something that Dorothy's purity must somehow (effectively yet simultaneously innocently) eradicate, both by the fall of the house (building something new over old foundations?) and through the cleansing power of water...

2. What about the dialectic between childish entertainment and moralizing symbolism? Baum's self-conscious story advocates for the former, but his pugnacious introduction, seemingly directed at adult purchasers/readers complicates matters. It makes me critical of the fantastic elements in the story as I attempt to understand their potential purpose and position. It seems like the fantasy can act in at least three ways:
     A. As pure childish fancy: primary colors, glittering objects (so much you have to wear protective eye-wear), wondrous exoticisms, delicious fruits, soft sheets... in effect anything that gives a sense of delightfulness and potency as wonder-inducing symbols for youth. Seen in this light, it would seem that Baum's choices are nearly random. Does it matter that the Munchkins like blue and the Winkies like yellow? Why a Stork? Why Wolves and Bees? Why this appearance of symbolism, of potential? Why does unmasking the power structure (the Wizard as a humbug) accomplish so little in the paradigm of the story?
     B. As cultural critique: I read somewhere that Baum may have had a "yellow-brick road = money power structures" vendetta. Maybe also an American/democratic, anti-monarchical message? But in the end, despite the Wizard's banishment, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Lion all become monarchs... I don't have any biographical knowledge that could enrich this idea as of yet, plus ideological application is so tricky.
     C. As a tongue-in-cheek, adult-directed message: the brainless Scarecrow a great thinker, the heartless Tin Woodman constantly crying and sighing, the frightened Lion facing death to protect his friends. Where is Propp's Lack? Where is the real problem that must be fixed? Also, the use of "magic" seems extremely complicated: sometimes mere smoke-and-mirrors; sometimes, genuinely borrowed from Europe (Dorothy's silver slippers and petit Poucet's seven-league boots); and sometimes so random as to appear ridiculous (the Good Witch of the North balancing her pointed hat on her nose and counting to three, as it turns into a writing tablet)... Does magic exist here or not? Is it powerful or not? Does it matter? Who makes things happen? Who has power?

3. Lastly, why has it become such a powerful American cultural symbol? The MGM movie, The Wiz musical, Wicked the book and the musical? Does it contain something potent after all it's deconstruction?

What do you think? What pops out at you when you experience this story? What do you like, dislike, not understand? Why did they change the color of her slippers in the movie!?!?

Two Observations on Plato, Aristotle, and Harry Potter

I'm taking a Dramatic Theory seminar through the Theater Department this quarter. In addition to the outrageously comfortable conference room chairs and meeting a new group of colleagues, Dr. David King has us wandering through an etymology-strewn, philosophy-riddled history/mind/soul-scape including the Caves of Lascaux, Nietzsche, Horace, Ruth Padel, Benjamin, and so many others. We have one session a week, almost three hours long, after which my sluggish mind, waterlogged with knowledge and hopefully a little wisdom, wants nothing more than to go home and read Harry Potter out loud (lautlesen) as my wife makes dinner. Yet, you can't really halt rumination, and here are two small connections that cropped up:

Aristotle and Plato from Raphael's School of Athens probably deep in conversation about why Harry decided to wear the horcrux around his neck rather than put it in the mokeskin pouch around his neck. 

1. The word mimesis is outrageously difficult to define. It can imply imitation, or representation, but also ideas like copy, translation, invention, illusion, or lie. It's often used in dramatic theory to talk about the theater as a crossroads of reality and fantasy, not only in terms of whether or not the plot is historically accurate or realistically feasible, but whether or not one thinks of the actor as actor or as character, the prop or the object. At one point Plato, who has an extremely complicated view of theater, uses mimetic in conjunction with the word diagetic to talk about ways of delivering a text. A diagetic delivery involves simple reading of the text, word for word, in your own natural voice; to read in a mimetic manner means giving different characters different voices. Essentially the former is Madeline L'Engle in her audiobook for A Wrinkle in Time (quite monotone), and the latter is Jim Dale reading the Rowling's Harry Potter series or Phillip Schulmann reciting C.S. Lewis' Narnia books (inflected, character-full voices galore). While one is not necessarily better than the other, I am definitely of the mimetic cast, a trait I inherited from my father's inspired readings of Verne, Lewis, and Twain when I was a child. In my mind, it's simply a lot more fun! However, Plato adds an aspect to mimesis that has some of that ancient world magic to it: the mimetic reader, as they invoke the voice of the character they are portraying, will actually, in a way, become that character and even feel what that character feels. A powerful idea! What do you give of yourself when you enter into a part? What might you receive? I caught myself thinking of this as I spoke Voldemort's "high, cold voice" and in a way count myself thankful that I got through it alright.
2. A smaller observation stems from the intensely etymological exegesis of Dr. King. Two words: splanchnon and peripateia. The first, dealt with extensively in a reading we did by Padel, is regularly translated as stomach or guts. For the ancient Greeks this is the place of emotions, of black fear, of the touching point between mortality and the divine. (Next time you get stressed and feel your stomach clench, that's your splanchnon ringing with the sound of eternity!) The second word, peripateia, is dealt with by Aristotle when he's laying out the proper disposition of a theatrical plot. It involves the moment of a plot's change of direction or reversal or twist, and constitutes an extremely important, catharsis-rich moment in a performance. After reading the Poetics and basking in the import of these two ideas, my eye was quick to pick up on a passing, but perhaps pivotal moment in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: literally, Harry's "stomach turned over!" There it is! His splanchnon peripateia-ed! Blammo! ... (This is when Jessica shrugs her shoulders and allows me a moment of intellectual nerding-out, before we continue the thrilling saga and and she resumes crafting our dinner (which will soon end up right in my splanchnon!!!!))

Here's to the beginning of Week 6. Cheers!