"¡Yao!": Encountering Q-Pop

After reading this article on BBC Mundo by Alejandro Millán Valencia a few weeks back, I’ve had the pleasure of encountering the musical artist LENIN, stage name of Lenin Tamayo, the 23-year-old Peruvian singer who is at the forefront of Q-Pop (Quechua Pop). Having embraced K-Pop (Korean Pop) as a source of camaraderie as a marginalized youth in school, he now combines that genre’s sounds and aesthetics with Peruvian elements rooted in traditional, indigenous Andean culture: clothing, dance, customs, and the Quechua language.

Photo Source: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/peruvian-singer-aims-to-introduce-q-pop-/7231045.html

According to a 2021 AP News article by Franklin Briceño, the Quechuan language lies at the center of long-standing tensions in Peru that have social, economic, and ethnic ramifications. Quechua had once been the lingua franca of the Incan Empire, but following Spanish colonization it became heavily discriminated against, outlawed in the 1780s following an indigenous uprising and intensely villainized during the atrocious civil war that began in the 1980s.* This prejudice has persisted and intensified to the point at which today Peruvian Quechua speakers have internalized “linguistic shame,” a mechanism that Ingrid Piller states is directly linked to the normalization and acceptance of oppression.** For this reason, LENIN’s macaronic songs, featuring lyrics in both Quechua and Spanish are a significant expression of cultural identity, a counterargument to the current state of the language and culture which celebrates love and fun, self-expression and cultural roots.

The song ¿IMAYNATA? hits a lot of these themes. The verses in Spanish drip with swagger and self-confidence, declaring in a declamatory style, “I live without fear of walking / Only love and freedom,” and “I tell you in Spanish, in Quechua, or in English / the language doesn’t matter one way or the other” (translations are mine or Google Translate). The pre-chorus in Quechua, however, is a slow build in a higher vocal register, resonating with a gnawing doubt, “What are you looking at / When your heart is dead?” The chorus, still in Quechua, has few words, all confidence, answering the question “¿Imaynata? [How do you do it?]” with syncopated exclamations of “¡Yoa!” and “¡Walk!” weaved through a somewhat pirate-esque riff.***

Valencia’s BBC article includes an interview in which Lenin expresses some of his views on singing in Spanish versus Quechua. He says that a language like Spanish is full of innuendo and double meanings, offering more room for hypocrisy. Quechua, on the other hand, has less equivocation and is more direct in the way that it connects the speaker to the world. In Lenin’s view, this means that a Quechua speaker has first-hand contact with emotions and nature. This comes across in the song KUTIMUNI which contrasts distorted, mechanistic, or anxious sections in Spanish with sudden shifts to luminous and tranquil parts in Quechua where one can almost hear the whisper of birdsong.

Photo Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/144071069/Inca-Kola-Murales

Perhaps the most summational demonstration of the message of indigenous cultural revival and celebration is the song INTIRAYMI (which happens to be my childen’s absolute favorite to sing with and dance to). The title translates to “Sun God Festival” and is in reference to an Incan festival that celebrated the winter solstice, which has since been revived in several South American contexts. Lenin taps into the joy of this festival with a rousing Spanish/Quechua chorus: “It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / Because the night is young / Everyone sing / Because life is one / It’s a festival!” His music video goes further with images of the sun / Inti, the offering of sacred cocoa leaves, performances of the ancient scissor dance mixed with modern break dancing, Aya Huma masks, a mural by Adriana Hiromi and Jade Rivera in the Barranco district of Lima that declares “Hagamos un Perú que nos dé gusto [Let’s make a Peru that gives us pleasure]”, and a crowd of young and excited people celebrating in the streets.

I’m still discovering the riches of LENIN’s music and especially look forward to exploring it with my children who can’t seem to get enough… Cuando Estoy Aquí and AMARULLAQTA deserve a listen. It also has me wondering about genre hybridity and minority languages. While a conservative approach to the matter of music + minority language tends to stick to strictly traditional styles, futuristic approaches consider how old and new might be combined to create something thrillingly alive. While some genres seem to require linguistic conformity to English, others seem well suited to and even encouraging of linguistic variety. Afterall, the genre of K-Pop (Korea) interacts not only with Q-Pop (Quechua), but also J-Pop (Japan), C-Pop (China), and T-Pop (Thailand). And heavy metal’s proclivity for sub-genrification and theatricality provides lots of room for linguistic variation; Swiss folk-metal band Eluveitie sings some of their songs in Gaulish, a nostalgically dark / darkly nostalgic act of cultural revivification. Perhaps there are other ways that hybrid genres can encourage singers in minority languages to imagine a future where, to quote LENIN’s song INTIRAYMI, “the sun comes every moment ever closer.”

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*Briceño’s article mentions an interesting incident in which Peruvian Prime Minister Guido Bellido delivered a speech to Congress in Quechua, prompting some strong reactions from those in power who largely could not understand him. Translated, his message was equally stinging: “We have suffered for five hundred years. We walked slowly through hills and snowy peaks to arrive here in Congress, and have our voice heard… It’s time to change. It’s time for all of our country’s residents to look at each other as equals, without discrimination.”

** This pattern of dehumanization is all too common in historical narratives of colonizers attempting to erase the culture of the colonized, often through linguistic shame taught to children in (often forced) school settings: Scottish Gaelic in the UK, Tahitian in French Polynesia, all Native American languages in North America, Spanish in California, etc.

***This is the song that instantly became a favorite of my kids as the chorus is very easy to sing and has such a sweet groove. Plus the Quechua word for “walk” is “puriy,” which we initially mistook for “booty,” and who wouldn’t want to shout that out while driving in the car as an elementary school kid?

The Sacred Music of Harry Potter: III. Ghosting Music

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! As you can see from part 1 “The Hogwarts School Song” and part 2 “Recorder Squeaks,” the technique of analysis I am borrowing from the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast can lead in unexpected directions. Within the fictional world of Harry Potter, music lies on both sides of the Muggle and magical worlds; it is simultaneously ordinary and enchanting. In this post we encounter the familiar scene (if only from period movies) of an instrumental ensemble playing ballroom dance music for an old fashioned party… but with a twist.

Human / ghost ballroom overlap in “Once Upon a December” from Fox Studio’s 1997 movie Anastasia with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.

Once again I will examine a musically descriptive text from the Harry Potter series using a modified lectio divina sacred reading technique as outlined below:

1. Context: What is happening in the story when this excerpt occurs?

2. Musicology [NEW]: What might this music sound like and what ideas are associated with it?

3. Metaphor: What imagery or associations does this excerpt suggest?

4. Personal: What personal memories does this excerpt recall?

5. Action: What does this excerpt motivate you to do in your life?

Today’s passage is as follows:

“As Harry shivered and drew his robes tightly around him, he heard what sounded like a thousand fingernails scraping an enormous blackboard. ‘Is that supposed to be music?’ Ron whispered."

“The Deathday Party” by Dan Waring.

1. Context

We are now on pages 131-132 (US version) of the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter Eight, “The Deathday Party.” Harry, Ron, and Hermione have been invited by Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington (aka Nearly-Headless Nick), the ghost of Gryffindor Tower, to attend a party in honor of his five hundredth deathday on October 31.* Harry had felt compelled to accept this unusual invitation in light of the events of the previous day in which Nick, whose pride had been wounded by a rejection letter from the Headless Hunt, helped Harry out of a spot of trouble with Filch, the cantankerous caretaker. The next day Harry (bound by his promise), Ron (reluctant and hungry), and Hermione (enthusiastically inquisitive) walk past the doors of the Great Hall and the sumptuous smells and lively chatter of the Halloween Feast and make their way down into the dungeons. With every step they take, the temperature drops, engulfing them in an icy chill, their cloudy breath illuminated by ghastly black tapers on the walls which burn with a pale, blue light. They are greeted at the door of a large dungeon by Sir Nicholas himself, who solemnly ushers them into an incredible sight: “The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly-white, translucent people, mostly drifting around a crowded dance floor, waltzing to the dreadful, quavering sound of thirty musical saws, played by an orchestra on a raised, black-draped platform.” In addition to this unusual ensemble and the spectral ballroom dancing, there is also a large table spread with a tombstone cake and rancid food. While overwhelmingly nauseating for the humans, ghosts can only hope for a mere suggestion of taste from this noxious fare as they pass their bodies – mouths agape – through the serving table. Lastly, perhaps most uncomfortable of all, this party has smalltalk!

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*As I began writing and researching this post we passed through October 31, Halloween, or, to use its rather older name, Samhain (pronounced [ˈs̪ãũ.ɪɲ] in Scottish Gaelic). Marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, this Celtic festival is also considered a threshold day in which the veil separating this world from the Otherworld was at its thinnest, allowing for a brief connection between the living and the dead.

2. Musicology

Photo of Marlène Dietrich playing Jacques Keller’s toothless “singing blade” around mid-1950s. She started playing the musical saw while shooting the film Café Elektric in Vienna (1927).

The musical saw is literally a hand saw, a sheet of tapered metal with a handle. This tool is transformed into an instrument when a sawist clamps the handle between their knees (teeth facing towards them), grasps the small end with the fingers of one hand or by means of a specially made handle, and draws a violin bow across the flat edge.* That’s the general idea, but to make the saw actually “musical” is a whole different story. To make a specific sound, the saw must be bent into an S-shape, which dampens the frequencies of the curved portions while isolating the frequencies made by the flat stretch or “sweet spot” in the middle. By bowing in just the right position, the result is a warbling but piercing tone that is often considered voice-like yet disembodied. By manipulating the saw into a larger or smaller S-shape and moving the sweet spot up or down to thinner or wider portions of the saw, a skilled sawist can produce higher or lower pitches. Here is Brigid Kaelin giving a great tutorial from start to finish. Because the saw can be bent at extremely small increments, the instrument is capable of playing a continuous glissando, a smooth gradation of pitches much like a human voice.** This means a musician must overcome the rather daunting task of learning to know precisely where their desired pitches lay within this smooth and unmarked continuum.

The musical saw seems to have begun first as a folk instrument (South America? North America? Scandinavia? who knows?), later entering into more widespread use around the turn of the twentieth century. It appeared in popular contexts such as vaudeville shows in the US, movie sound effects such as the song “Give a Little Whistle” from Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), and USO concerts during World War II. Additionally, classical composers took it up beginning in the 1920s, where it could function as a dramatically unsettling sound effect, as well as an instrument whose glissando allowed it to play experimental, quarter-tone music. In the former case, it appears as spectral wailing in the séance scene from Franz Schenker’s (1878-1934) opera Christophorus oder Die Vision einer Oper (1925-29), grotesquerie in Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906-1975) satirical opera The Nose (1928),*** and the otherworldly ascension of the dying Sphinx in George Enescu’s (1881-1955) opera Œdipe (1936). In the latter case we have pieces such as De Natura Sonoris, No. 2 (1971) by Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020), Divination by Mirrors (1998) for saw and two string quartets tuned a quarter tone apart by Michael A. Levine (b. 1964), and Dreams and Whispers of Posideon (2005) by Lera Auerbach (b. 1973). The delightful dancer-turned-sawist Natalia Paruz seemingly straddles all genres, performing in concert halls, recording movie sound tracks, and busking on New York City subway platforms.

Flier for the 7th Annual New York City Musical Saw Festival (2009).

In general, musical saws are performed soloistically, either alone or with the accompaniment of different instruments, expressing a single, disembodied voice. But in the story, what really set Harry’s nerves on edge was the sound of thirty saws playing together, producing a multi-layered chorus of disembodied voices that create a shimmering wall of wailing sound. There are only several contexts in which we might encounter this unique phenomenon. One of those is at a festival, such as the 2009 New York Musical Saw Festival. At this event they set a Guinness World Record when fifty-three sawists performed Schubert’s Ave Maria. As you can hear, the players and the sound are enthusiastic and gregarious. Another method is virtually through digital duplication and layering, where a single sawist records themselves multiple times and layers the tracks together to make an orchestra. Examples include Chili Klaus, a Danish chili pepper connoisseur, performing a schnazzy duet of “When You’re Smiling” with himself, and Brigid Kaelin making a recording of herself thirty times over playing an arrangement of “Happy Birthday.” This last example was made specifically with Nearly-Headless Nick’s Deathday Party in mind, and is perhaps the closest thing available to get a sense of what the children heard in that dungeon.

One final detail complicates this musical event: the orchestra plays not as concert music or as background music, but as accompaniment for ballroom dancers. They are specifically performing a waltz, a type of dance that has become inextricably associated with formality, grace, and prestige. Countless ballroom scenes in movies – from The Great Waltz (1938) and Cinderella (1950) to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and La La Land (2016) – create such an atmosphere as the dancers elegantly move in time to the steady 1-2-3, 1-2-3 of the music. Yet it is precisely the need for that steady rhythm that makes an orchestra of musical saws problematic. Unlike an instrument such as a violin or piano (which are both capable of sharp attacks when a thin string is set in motion by, respectively, a bow or a felted hammer), the musical saw has a slow attack and a more gradual blossoming of sound as the energy of the bow must travel the width of the metal sheet. I am doubtful that a musical saw could play with the kind of rhythmic precision necessary for a clear and crisp waltz. I am even more doubtful that an orchestra of thirty saws could do it, given the coordination required. Yet rather than point out a flaw in the story, I find this detail particularly interesting in light of my chosen metaphor…

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*Handsaws have also been used in other musical genres, notably ripsaw or rake n’ scrape which originated on the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Bahamas. In this instance, the player scrapes the serrated edge with a metal object (usually a screwdriver or a butter knife), creating a rhythmic grating sound that can be altered by bending the saw. Here is musician Lovely Forbes giving an explanation and demonstration. And here’s the band Bo Hog and the Rooters playing rake n’ scrape music with saw performed by Crystal Smith.

**Other instruments developed in the twentieth century also employed this continuous glissando effect, and likewise filled a sort of experimental-novelty-otherworldy-spooky sound niche. Most notable is the theremin, an electronic instrument developed by Russian inventor Leon Theremin in the 1920s, and which is the de facto sound of spooky aliens and ghosts, as well as appearing in orchestral pieces, and covers of jazz standards. More recently, sound designers have Frankensteined new instruments such as Mark Korven’s Apprehension Engine that uses continuous glissando among other effects (such as the woeful tone of the hurdy-gurdy!) to create truly nightmarish sound worlds.

***In the score, Shostakovich indicates the use of a “Flexatone”. There is some question whether he and other composers from the 1920s onward meant a musical saw, which was understood as an instrument capable of “flexing or bending a tone” or a different tremolo-producing percussion instrument that was patented around the same time called a Flex-a-Tone. See the Shostakovich link for a fuller explanation.

3. Metaphor

I read the theme of dissociation in this excerpt.

Death is one of the most ultimate forms of detachment. Through death a profound and deep rift is driven between those who have died and those who continue to live, separating us from engaging in those activities that engender relational meaning in life – shared time, shared space – leaving us with fragments and echoes, memories, photos, recordings. While the Harry Potter series devotes a good amount of energy into grappling with the reality and finality of this mortal rupture, the ubiquitousness of ghosts seems to overcome it with magical nonchalance. Ghosts – pearly white, cold to the touch, able to float through walls – are everywhere in Hogwarts, and interact as a matter of course with the living, enjoying both cordial and heated conversation (Sir Nicholas and the Fat Friar), delivering deathly boring history lectures (Professor Binns), maintaining secrets (the Gray Lady), and engaging in warfare (the Headless Hunt).* It would seem that the presence and behavior of these ghosts go far in negating Death’s Sting.

But what exactly is a ghost?

A scene from “The Innocents” (1961), an adaptation of Henry James’ 1898 horror novella Turn of the Screw, where ghosts and childhood innocence spell disaster. “He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.”

In the fifth book (Chapter Twenty-Eight “The Second War Begins”), Harry, consumed with the desire to circumvent death and reunite with his godfather Sirius Black, corners Sir Nicholas and strives to understand: “You died, but I’m talking to you… You can walk around Hogwarts and everything, can’t you?” Sir Nicholas, hesitant and shamefaced explains that “Wizards can leave an imprint of themselves upon the earth, to walk palely where their living selves once trod… But very few wizards choose that path.” Instead, the majority will have “gone on”. He continues, “I was afraid of death… I chose to remain behind. I sometimes wonder whether I oughtn’t to have… Well, that is neither here nor there… I fact, I am neither here nor there… I know nothing of the secrets of death, Harry, for I chose my feeble imitation of life instead.” The ghost Sir Nicholas, and by extension every other ghost who attended his Deathday Party, avoided the painful and frightening mystery of death. They opted for an existence of numbness, a feeble imitation that grasps for the faded shreds of life’s familiarity, yet continually (eternally?) fails to hold on to anything of substance. Ghosts are the embodiments of dissociation. And the details of this Deathday Party bring this strikingly to the fore.

For the humans, this congregation of ghosts is sensorially overwhelming. They are too cold to the touch. Too busy for the eye. Too nauseating for the nose and tongue. And too discordant for the ear. Harry describes the sound as “a thousand fingernails scraping an enormous blackboard,” a simile that is both tortuously chilling and vindictively intentional. Yet from the perspective of the ghosts, their dissociation from existence has numbed them. In their “feeble imitation of life” they seek extreme stimulation in an (ultimately futile) attempt to reconnect. For all their intemperate frigidity, they remain unable to feel and be felt. For all their glowing luminosity, they remain transparent and insubstantial. For all their noxious and putrid food, they experience not one soupçon of flavor. The orchestra of musical saws serves a similar function.** For all the wall of wailing sounds, perhaps the ghosts only catch the merest whisper of a melody, only feel the merest trace of a waltz rhythm. And for all their dancing – without touching one another, without feeling the connection of their feet to the floor – the delight of dance fails to enliven their souls. Ron’s question “Is that supposed to be music?” goes beyond his signature petulance at encountering the unfamiliar, and rather prompts us to consider whether music – those creative acts that bind humans into relationship with one another – is possible for ghosts.

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*Ghosts are one thing, but people living beyond the grave in the form of portraits is another! Also, are the pictures in the Chocolate Frog trading cards sentient?

**It is possible that the pomp and circumstance of this party, including the musical saw orchestra, are also performative and symbolic. Sir Nicholas seems to be painfully desperate to appear like a successful ghost: prestigious, influential, learned, frightening. Even the physical characteristics of a musical saw speak to his desire to influence perception: music played by thirty serrated, toothy cutting tools certainly contrast sharply (pun intended) with the blunt axe that produced his botched beheading five hundred years earlier.

4. Personal

My current music room with Bruser’s book on the music stand. Ample opportunity to notice struggle and choose connection.

I am prone to dissociation. I learned from an early age that complex emotions and experiences could be dealt with through a certain level of psychological separation. As an adult I’ve come to realize that this strategy no longer suits me; as Brené Brown states in The Gifts of Imperfection (2010), “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” Knowing this about myself, I have ample opportunities to notice my avoidant reflex, and to consider truer and more whole-hearted actions. One such opportunity in which this happens is in my relationship to making music. I have been musicking in many ways over decades now, and while I can attest to what I would call a “golden thread” of genuine love between myself and my music making, there have been times when dissociation – from the music’s demands, from my emotional states, from life’s circumstances, etc. – have been a large part of my motivation. I can remember sliding onto the piano bench in order to create a wall of sound that signaled my familial or social unavailability, producing less of a musical experience and more of an accumulation of notes detached from meaning, my mind and body elsewhere.

It was not until later in my twenties that I came upon The Art of Practicing (1997), a book written by pianist, educator, and author Madeline Bruser that takes a soulful approach to exploring the potential for numbness. In the book she speaks about the musician’s propensity to valorize struggle. Playing music always involves eventual frustration, and many of us meet that frustration with the idea that we simply need to knuckle down and practice more, an activity characterized by repetitiousness, regimentation, and joylessness. Bruser wonders why we think such an arduous and authoritarian approach to music making in practice sessions ought to produce a musical performance filled with freedom, openness, and vivacity. Rather, she advocates for treating all musicking as an opportunity, first to notice our reactions to struggle. Do we move towards the mask of 1) overstated passion, 2) controlling aggression, or 3) expressionless avoidance? Second, we can take the time to pause, feeling the uncertainty and anxiety, and recognizing them as signs of our deep connection to ourselves as artists and as humans. And third, she suggests reengaging with openheartedness, vulnerability, and presentness. I very much appreciate this approach and its reminder of the value of music making as a profound act of connection, to the music, to ourselves, and to others.

5. Action

“Ghosting” in many ways feels like a proper response to a world that seems oversupplied with stimuli. The exhaustion that we all feel after years of doom scrolling through constant political infighting, environmental catastrophes, global diseases, social injustices, and mindless violence is truly real, to the point that researchers have coined the term Social Media Fatigue (SMF) in order to study it more closely, and papers are constantly being written on burnout in mothers, activists, educators, nurses, etc. How do we stay connected, yet protect ourselves from becoming overwhelmed? How might we utilize Bruser’s method for musical connection to carve out a selful and safe place for ourselves in other areas of our lives? How might we use this to cultivate wider networks of connection with others that bring music – both actual and metaphorical – to the world?

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NEXT: Phoenix Song I…

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!

Holiday Blessing: Samin Nosrat, Good Tidings, and "Feuch"

The holidays are here, and with them are all the familiar sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Between last weekend’s pre-Thanksgiving hosted lunch with my parents (lemon chicken, roasted potatoes, green beans, cranberry relish, herb rolls, and pumpkin pie), the bags of aromatic delectables from Apple Hill sitting here on the counter (fritters, donuts, and Fujis), and Jess and Kathy brainstorming potential dessert and vegetable options online (I believe a pumpkin pie à la Zoe Bakes is in the works), I’m feeling the love. Because I’m off from work this week, my mind seems particularly open, and I made a wonderful connection about three seemingly unconnected things.

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Samin Nosrat

Jess and I have been enjoying Berkeley-based chef Samin Nosrat immensely. Jess has her cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, on the shelf (which strives for a freeing sense of wabi-sabi through Wendy MacNaughton’s hand-drawn illustrations), and the Netflix documentary of the same name provided a beautiful, inspiring, and informative investigation of her four foundational cooking concepts. She contends that mastering salt, fat, acid, and heat is not merely a matter of following a recipe, but part of a larger practice of learning to hone and trust your senses.

Samin Nosrat cooking while smiling! Yum!

An interview she gave on Discourse entitled “Engaging the Senses” extend this idea into her philosophy of cooking, in which she sees the kitchen as a place where all people can be welcome because everyone can use their senses.

I think it’s about engaging the senses. That’s something my cooking really focuses on: using your senses to become a better cook. Cooking really does engage all of your senses — at least, good cooking does — but for the most part, I feel like I’ve spent the last fifteen years honing, above all, my senses of taste and smell. —S.N.

Because everyone has the capacity to improve their senses, Samin contends that anyone can cook. This viewpoint transforms the kitchen from something potentially shameful to a place where humanization and amateurism invite participation from all. I love this idea and see many parallels to the ways that I understand musicology, language learning directing choirs…

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Good Tidings

My Providence School choirs are in full Christmas music tilt. I’ve taken the traditional “Nine Lessons and Carols” service that has been done in the past and changed it to allow for more instrumentalists and different choral repertoire. I’m calling it “Come to the Cradle: A Service of Lessons and Carols”, and the great majority of the music focuses on various aspects of the postpartum manger, especially the visitation of the shepherds.

Christina Saj, Shepherd

This had me reading through the second chapter of Luke for inspiration; if you’re familiar with Linus’ King James monologue from the Peanut’s Christmas Special, one scene goes something like this:

8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

However, I tend to read the Bible in different translations, especially non-English ones; I find that this sort of alienated reading is a practice that breathes new life into old stories in humbling and challenging ways. As I read through Luke 2:9-11 in my Scottish Gaelic translation, a certain word popped out at me…

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“Feuch”

The Gàidhlig translation that I own, Am Bìoball Gàidhlig 1992, is written in a somewhat archaic style (both ABG and KJV begin almost every sentence with the word “and”/“agus”), and the imperative verb “feuch” (pronounced IPA: [fiax]) pops up twice in that section of Luke 2, corresponding to the KJV “lo” and “behold” that I underlined above. I looked the word up in the LearnGaelic Dictionary and found that it is particularly rich in meanings:

1 feel! (test by feeling)
2 taste! (test by tasting)
3 try, attempt!
4 test!
5 behold, look, lo!
6 reconnoitre!
7 rummage!

The spirit of this word extends far beyond the observational (and archaic) sense that I get from “lo” and “behold”. “Feuch” is dynamic! It involves the senses of touch, taste, and sight; it is messy and exploratory; and it implies a learning curve without any actual guarantee of success.

An illustration by Scottish-born artist Jessie Marion King (1875–1949) from the book The Fisherman and His Soul.

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The angel commands the shepherds to “feuch”, to engage deeply and bodily with the good news of the Savior’s arrival, pushing the boundaries of the known and hoped for. Luke the narrator challenges his readers to “feuch”, to rummage and reconnoitre through their minds to understand the palpable intensity of a supernatural encounter that entered reality from seemingly nowhere. And Samin reminds us to “feach”, to seek our way towards a sensitivity to the smells and sounds of cooking and the human connection that such an activity brings.

This holiday, may we all be present to what is immanent, simple things, true things.

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."

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

Gaelic Advent Treats

My thanks to Daily Gaelic - Gàidhlig Gach Latha for a little season's cheer this year in the form of an emailed virtual advent calendar. There's something thoroughly enjoyable about an advent calendar, about the anticipation, the mystery, the big reveal. It's about unwrapping a present.

Edinburgh, Scotland gripped in the icy embrace of Cailleach Bhèara, the Hag of Winter!

[Cue pivot chord modulation]

Orthography can be a bit like unwrapping a present. (See what I did there? :)) And sometimes that present seems to have been bound together with layers and layers of duct tape! The relationship between written letters and spoken sounds is not always straightforward even in English, and the rules of the game in other languages has the ability to cause quite a bit of consternation. Scottish Gaelic is notoriously baffling to the neophyte, owing largely to the fact that 18 letters are used to make some 60+ sounds (depending on how you count).

I found the  particular Gaelic advent gift particularly challenging and therefore all the more satisfying after unwrapping; I opened the virtual door to find these words: "Teóclaid teth". Here was my process in unwrapping just the first word.
 

1. The "t" is next to a slender vowel "e" which means that it is pronounced like "tch" [tʃʰ].
2. Because there's an accent over the "ó" the "e" is silent and we get a nice long "o" sound [o:].
3. The "c" is hard [kʰ].
4. The "l" is beleaguered by broad vowels on either side "ó...a" so it is technically a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, aka a sort of throaty "l" [ɫ] like in "Allah".
5. The "a" is silent as it's only there to satisfactorily surround the "l" with broad vowels.
6. As the vowel of an unstressed syllable, the "i" is a short, humble, little "i" like in "fish".
7. The "d" is next to a slender vowel "i" which means that it is pronounced like the end of "fridge" [ʤ].

Put that all together and you get something like this [tʃʰo: kʰɫiʤ] or (since IPA tends to be just as confusing as Gaelic) approximately "tcho-klidge".

Now repeat it a few times.

"tcho-klidge"

"tcho-klidge"

"tcho-klidge"

...

Still need a hint? Look at this picture:

Photo credit: me. My wife enjoying a cup of Hot...

Chocolate!

Add "teth" ([tʃʰɛ:] or "tcheh") to the end and you've got "teóclaid teth" or "hot chocolate". I think there's something so satisfying about deciphering this mystery word. I found myself immersed in the raw musicality of the Gaelic language, riding the waves of half-understood orthographic rules, and found myself surprised by the recognition of the familiar in the midst of the strange.

In the midst of an all-too familiar holiday season, perhaps we could remember to accept the traditional as well as the unexpected. And we could have more hot cocoa! :)

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.

The Music of Language: Gaelic Summer

Summer is for many things—for getting much needed rest, for enjoying the sun, for catching up on all the reading that has been put off, and for rediscovering one's hobbies. One of the passions that I will be pouring myself into during the coming months is language learning, specifically investing some time into my old friend Scottish Gaelic or Gàidhlig.

I've been attracted to Gàidhlig for a long time. I'm sure it has a lot to do with learning to play the tin whistle in elementary school and watching Braveheart in junior high. There was just something about the look of the words, the melodious guttural sounds, the familiar and unfamiliar patterns and structures. I can remember eagerly scouring the internet in my father's home office for lists of phrases and vocabulary, dutifully drilling myself on grammatical constructions with James MacLaren's Beginner's Gaelic (1923) during lunch breaks as a sales associate at Border's Books, and struggling through Prof. Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh's complex phonological analyses at Fuaimean na Gàidhlig.

Credit: Joe Fox, A82 Bi-lingual Scottish Gaelic English Road Sign Scotland Uk
Link.

As enjoyable and useful as these endeavors were, the approaches all suffered from the same drawback: they all took reading and writing as their starting point. For Gàidhlig this poses a particular challenge due to the complex and seemingly enigmatic relationship between the way the language is written and the way it is spoken. As I learned, I would continually find myself put in the frustrating position of either learning to speak phrases or words incorrectly, or of tiptoeing through a dense thicket of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) rules. It would begin to feel less and less like learning a vibrant language, and more like doing calculus or pitch-class-set analysis. There had to be another way!

I think I've found another way.

I've written previous posts about a language learning technique called "shadowing". It involves immersing yourself in a language's sounds in real time, internalizing its vocal patterns, rhythmic cadences, and phrase structures. Shadowing is essentially about the music of language; at its base level it allows you to engage with the raw sounds of a language freed from the distractions of writing, semantics and grammar. This is not to say that those aspects of the language are unimportant, but rather that the initial focus upon the musical characteristics of music engages your brain in a unique and powerful manner. It's a way of establishing a strong foundation upon which the rest of the language can confidently stand.

Here is my summer plan:

• I am shadowing with Litir Beag, a podcast by Roddy MacIean on BBC Alba, the Gàidhlig language branch of the BBC. These "little letters" are for intermediate learners and Roddy specifically speaks the words slowly and clearly—ideal for shadowing! I do not read the Litir Beag transcripts, nor do I read the English translations—not yet. This stage is all about engaging with the sounds. Already I have noticed two interesting developments:
  • I can match sounds with much more accuracy and fluency in Gàidhlig than in a language which I know much better. Shadowing in German, for instance, is more overwhelming because my mind not only listens to sounds while speaking them back, but additionally keeps busy parsing grammatical functions, imagining written text, and visualizing descriptive or narrative meaning.
  • I can begin to intuit meaning through musical and contextual patterns in the recordings. Strings of numbers or dates have their own particular sound and cadence. Also phrases such as "he said" or "she said" stand out loud and clear because of the way Roddy performs the narrative dialogues.
• I have just begun to shadow to another program on BBC Alba, Beag air Bheag, an educational website. Geared towards absolute beginners, this program takes you "bit by bit" through graded lessons, each unit ending with a conversational dialogue that sums up all the main points of the chapter. Again, I am avoiding reading the transcripts and the translations for the time being. The back-and-forth format of these simple dialogues allow me to intuit conversational characteristics such as questions, answers, frustration, incredulity, and affirmation.
• The next stage in my plan involves carefully introducing the transcripts and translations to my sound world. The music of the language and the sounds that I've already internalized should continually act as the foundation. As I slowly look through Litir Beag and Beag air Bheag texts, I hope to continually say, "Oh! That's how you spell it and that's what it means!" and not "Oh! That's how you pronounce it!" There should be little to no renegotiation of the spoken sounds, though some tricky ones (such as the hurriedly spoken definite articles "an" and "am") which were unclear in the recordings can now be solidified. The point is that the writing should further illuminate and give definition to the sounds that I already know, not visa versa. 
• This method should result in the following improvements and opportunities by the end of the summer:
  • I will have spoken a lot of Gàidhlig sounds, continually intuiting its musical patterns, cadences, and rhythms.
  • I will have a better chance of understanding the writing system and its correspondence to the sounds. Now the two can work in tandem rather than in tension and I can begin to read books with confidence.
  • I will have enjoyed myself, succeeding at doing something difficult that I love!
• Perhaps by next summer I could be in the position to actually speak Gàidhlig with living people. It would be somewhat challenging given and sparsity of Highland villages in Southern California. :) But who knows? Skype has opened up the doors to exciting new communication opportunities, and institutions like Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and Colaisde na Gàidhlig provide plenty of pedagogical resources both through distance learning and on-site visits.

Credit: Steve Greaves, Scottish Highlands
Link.

I am very excited about this plan and think that it will prove very helpful. By engaging directly with the sounds, I will have more confidence as I move into the more theoretical and structural aspects of the language. Let me know if these ideas are inspirational, confusing, or if you have other techniques that work for you. Bottom line, I am enjoying myself and my summer. I hope you do too!