Consonants and Folk Music

Sho' Auntie Di! Some of Tiny Bookworm's tuneless singing can be a bit baffling. I am used to hearing fragments of nursery rhymes, but it took me a while to work out what "Sho' Auntie Di" could possibly be. After a while, however, a fuller version came out, and I realized that the folk music CD in the car was beginning to make its mark. "Sho' Auntie Di, sho' Auntie Di", warbled the child, "Twenty hats and Tor ishen why". Having been listening to the Yetties on practically every car journey for the past two months, it didn't take much to decode this as "Shall Trelawney die? Here's twenty thousand Cornishmen shall know the reason why!"

The initial syllable "tor" of "Cornishmen" is an interesting one, as it is shared not only (as expected) with "tor'akes" (cornflakes: consonant cluster "fl" omitted as too difficult) but also with "tornower" (lawnmower). Most words are now converging on a more standard form, though "lant" has only recently expanded to "elephant", there is still a little confusion over "the hungry callapitter", and the African animal with a long neck is still a "wirarsh".

I'm now just hoping that TB doesn't start producing recognizable sections of some of the other songs on that CD: I'm not sure what the nursery staff would make of "The Foggy Foggy Dew" or "Still her answer to me was No", and though "John Peel" is a piece of English heritage, I'm a bit uncomfortable with humming along "from the chase to the view, from the view to the death in the morning".

I am never merry when I hear sweet music

Music occasionally makes me cry. While I was driving to work this morning, the radio launched into "Scene and Waltz of the Snowflakes" from Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker. 'OK', I thought: we had the suites on record when I was growing up, and I've always liked the music. However, I very rarely hear it, and had completely forgotten how this particular section went. I listened a bit mechanically, noting dispassionately how good an orchestrator Tschaikovsky was, even set against such masters as Rimsky-Korsakov, and enjoying the music's chiffon layers of chuffing flute decoration, which well enough suggested falling snowflakes. But the sudden entrance of the wordless female chorus caught me utterly by surprise and (as they say) "blew me away". It brought tears to my eyes and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It may not perhaps be truly great music, but it is hugely effective, though the image it brought to mind was not realistic falling snow, but the artificial magic of the ballet stage, with the coloured lights, imitation snow, and smiling and gesturing dancers. Maybe that's why the music caught at me so, tapping into hidden memories of seeing Nutcracker on stage in London as a child.

My list of those magical moments when music has made my hair stand on end is thus now extended by one. Others include (in no particular order):

the restatement of the main theme near the end of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra;
the key change near the end of Ravel's Bolero;
the moment when the heroine is presented with the rose in Strauss's Rosenkavalier;
a particular descending melisma partway through Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending;
and the natural trumpet solo in his Pastoral Symphony;
the moments in Borodin's String Quartet when the rising scale passages miraculously arrive at exactly the right note to begin the next phrase of the melody;
the last phrase of Walton's A Spotless Rose;
the "sliding" theme in Nielsen's First Symphony;
the opening of Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2;
and so on.

There are other Vaughan Williams moments: "walk out with me" in Toward the Unknown Region; the "city with her dreaming spires" in An Oxford Elegy; and my title phrase from the Serenade to Music. And there are other moments which may not produce an obvious thrill to the ear, but which are incomparable when you are actually preforming them: unforgettable little corners in pieces like Lotti's 8-part Crucifixus, Barber's Agnus Dei, Pearsall's Lay a Garland, Faure's Requiem, or Harris's Faire is the Heav'n.

It's funny how much of the music I enjoy performing (renaissance polyphony, baroque and early classical choral music) may be the sort of thing I am good at, but is not really what I want to listen to. I can spend a day happily enough working through some chaste piece of Byrd or Bach, but when I get home what I want is to be engulfed in billowing swathes of Bax or Richard Strauss!

Hills, Tents, and the Turning of the Year

Autumn arrived on Friday. It was a nice day, and the trees are still green; but there was just something about the angle of the sunlight slanting across the road at 8 in the morning which said to me that the year had turned. Summer has made a couple of late showings since, but it's on the way out.

Squirmle I is now eating raspberries, and we're trying to stay cool about his general faddiness (and aversion to vegetables). Squirmle II is trying to drink Mummy dry. We all had a great day on Bank Holiday Monday, with a picnic on the hills and a shared mint choc chip ice cream.

Our day trip to Greenbelt was also a success, though I think I only got to one complete talk, and spent much of the time chasing the Squirmle. I'm now catching up by listening to MP3s. I have again got the feeling that Greenbelt speaks more directly to me than any other religious gathering in my experience: its openness to discussion of practically any issue, its willingness to accept a huge range of liberal Christian viewpoints (and agnostic and non-Christian viewpoints), and its refreshing debunking of all the kinds of Christianity with which I have little or no sympathy.

Idylls of the Dad

Thursday was marked by one of my best moments since the day we were first sent home with a small pink alien. The weather was my favourite kind: a sunny day with a few clouds in a blue sky, and a decent breeze to make the trees wave and keep the temperature comfortable. I took Squirmle I up to the swings, a walk which started extremely slowly as we ambled along, pushing the empty buggy and inspecting plants, stones, and lamp posts. Eventually he tired of this, and requested a ride. We had an energetic swing in our favoured fashion (with me holding the swing back and counting to the requested number before letting go). As is now usual, this was followed by a short walk through the woods to the railway. As we reached the fence by the track, I noticed some discarded fruit on the ground, and a tree hung with small round yellow things. I thought it might be a crab apple, and sauntered over in case it would be a useful source for jam-making. It turned out to be laden with small yellow plums, just ripening, and twined below with a lethally spiky bramble, also just coming into season. Somewhat to my surprise, the Squirmle (whose unvarying response to raspberries and strawberries is to say "Daddy eat it") consented to accept a proffered blackberry and gingerly nibbled his way through it. He wasn't even perturbed by the deep purple colour of his fingers after this process. I ventured to offer a plum, and he solemnly ate that too, while I munched my way through about four, all the while watching him nervously hoping that he wouldn't swallow the stone. We were greeted by a friendly passing spaniel, whose owner said that he had played there as a boy and was off to look for his former den. And we saw five trains, including a goods train.

Gone Already

My latest gadget is a thing that lets my iPod play over my car radio. Thanks to I.B. for telling me about this gizmo, and also pointing me towards the first thing I have tried out on it: a downloaded Greenbelt talk by John O'Donohue, poet, mystic, and ex-priest. Having listened to him three times this week, I was surprised and saddened to discover that he died over a year ago. Of course, I couldn't find his poetry in the bookshop -- bookshops are full of such dross nowadays! -- so I'll have to resort to the Interweb. His sonnet on the Nativity is one of those poems that pulls a cord somewhere inside.

He is one of those people who can induce a kind of passive faith, like passive smoking, by the way he talks, not about "God" (which is a difficult word, twined around with unhelpful brambles) but about people -- or, as he whimsically calls them, "humanoids". There is something to think about in his paraphrase of Meister Eckhart, which I have added to my Words of Wisdom.

Jam and Pyjamas

The garden continues to produce: sour cherry jelly has been followed by blackcurrant jam and gooseberry chutney (to a wartime recipe), and as the loganberries ripen I'm stashing them in the freezer for a future jam-making session. The white agapanthus is starting to open, and some anonymous blue flowers (Brodiaea?) have sprouted in one of the bulb pots.

We're trying not to make too much of it, but we were very pleased by Squirmle 1's success in doing a poo in his potty. He has also helped to make flapjack and produced some enthusiastic paintings. He drives us mad by trying to treat everything as a game in which Mummy and Daddy have to chase him, wielding toothbrush, trousers, shoes, sun-hat, or whatever. Meanwhile Squirmle 2's progress in sleeping has suffered a setback caused by a cold, but he has now learned how to grab things, and can shove himself a fair distance along the carpet by lying on his back and pushing with his legs.

All the people my own age are older than me!

My college recently held a summer garden party for alumni, and we went along. Not many of my contemporaries were there, but meeting the few that had turned up did confirm the validity of a perception that has become increasingly clear to me in the last few months: at the time of life that I have now reached, all the people my own age are older than me!