I’ve mentioned before that C’s resting face is pretty stoic. He kind of takes everything in. Its a look he’s had from day one: eyes focused, mouth closed, intently staring at the most interesting thing in the room. There is a sort of wisdom to how he looks at the world (at least I think so, but I’m biased). Lately that steely gaze has been interrupted more and more often by some tiny smiles. I say “tiny” only because he’s such a small guy, but those smiles have power beyond his wee face.
Now before we go any further— I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with his smile. Quite the opposite actually, its a great smile. But he’s picky about who he gives it to, picky in a pretty gendered way. I get some pretty big grins, but I’m dad, its only natural. Other men might warrant a smirk. Any random woman makes eye contact with him and, BOOM, out comes the charm. My son is a shameless flirt. Literally, he has no shame, has no idea what shame is. Part me wants to give him a high-five, to pump a heteronormative fist in the air. Right on C, starting out early. Thankfully the rest of me catches up quickly and I avoid an embarrassing moment. But the tension is there. Today he is as innocent as can be, his smiles are smiles in the truest sense. He has moved past basic mimicry and I get the sense that his smiles are in response to some sense of shared humanity (as much as a baby can do that sort of thing). How long can that innocent smile last? Certainly for quite some time, and hopefully for a lifetime. Will I need to encourage him to be a bit more fair with his smiles? What can I do to help him out?
The world is not such a good place to grow up in if you want to avoid objectifying other people, if you want to maintain a healthy relationship with shame, with human attraction, with innocence. Its certainly a bit early to start worrying about most of this stuff. We’re doing the best we can, and he’s going to be who he going to be. But I know that I will be implicated in his becoming, in how he learns to treat people. That’s heavy. For now I’m just going to keep trying to get him to smile. Because its a pretty fun thing to do.
Since I am getting a Ph.D. in music education you might assume that my days are filled with rehearsals, practice rooms, my nights with exciting concerts. You’d be wrong. My days are filled by staring at this laptop screen, reading obscure academic texts about music, and my nights are filled with more of the same (though recent nights have been more taken up with baby time). This is a shame as we have an incredible music scene around here. Sunday afternoon was a rare moment, I actually went to a concert. It was a trio of Tuvan musicians called Alash.
Do you know about Tuvan music? Tuvan throat singing? Have you heard about Tuvan throat singing in a non-ironic way? (An unnamed family member of mine mentioned that she knew about the style thanks to the Big Bang Theory… no comment.) The idea of Tuvan throat singing has always appealed to me, and I had heard cross-over recordings in the past. But this was my first chance to really sit and take in an entire concert of Tuvan music. Whoa. I was not prepared. Throat singing is thrown around as a novelty, something obscure to impress people in a bar conversation. This was no novelty. It was beautiful. It was incredible. It was an experience.
Here are the guys:
And here’s a bit of what they do. Do yourself a favor, stay on board at least until past the minute mark. Better yet, plug in some headphones and watch the whole thing.
Those voices. Did you just listen to just the droning notes, or did you follow the “whistle”-like overtones they produce? How did you react to the sounds themselves?
I’ve been in music long enough to get past the initial discomfort that can come from encountering unfamiliar sounds. We (the largest we, everyone) don’t all agree on what “sounds good”. Alash’s website explains a little bit about the various types of throat singing common in Tuva, with notes about what each can be representative of. I was struck by how the sounds of the instruments so perfectly complimented the various vocal styles. Of course it makes sense, you would want the instrument to complement the voice, and the voice the instrument. But how did these particular sounds come to be central in Tuvan music? The romantic/structuralist in me wants to see these music sounds as sonic markers of Tuvan environment and social norms. Take for example the kargyraa, which their website describes as “a low pitched style with a growling undertone below the fundamental pitch, as well as higher overtones. Suggests the howling of winter winds or the cries of a mother camel after losing her calf.” (emphasis added) They said it, therefore I’ll believe it. With apologies to actual anthropologists/ethnomusicologists (and any Tuvan readers), here’s my brief, humble, and hopefully unoffensive attempt to contextualize some of these structural links.
I’m an ancient Tuvan.I’m chilling, figuratively and literally, in my yurt listening to the wind howl. Its an especially bad winter, the herds suffer and calves die. I mourn with them. I start to sing, I sing with the animals, joining in their mourning song. I sing against the winter. I bow my igil in time with my singing, atune my voice with the cries of my herd, with the wind whistling through the walls. I press deeply into the strings, all the sounds groan together, rising and falling as each moment runs its course.
Over the years this sound continues takes shape, other voices raise with mine, individual sounds are lost within a broader fabric. Eventually the shoor and igil blend perfectly with the overtones of our voices, harmonics of all three ring together to create resonant tones– notes that no one person is playing. This reflects the life beyond the sound. Our lives revolve around shared efforts, not only of people but of horses and livestock as well. Collective life is more than the individuals who make it up, the social system grows beyond itself, takes on a life of its own, yet could not exist without the efforts of the individual member. Life and music are shaped by the environment, thus we respond and mirror our conditions within our songs.
We hold to the sounds passed down to us, but the land and life is changing. Our influences are changing. Horse meets jeep, the yurt has wi-fi now. Blues musicians have come to sing with us, instruments pour across the borders. Yet we still hold to our roots, we maintain our connections to the land, to those who have gone before. The structures of our society, our histories, our views of the world are present in the sounds and songs that we raise.
That’s the impression I got from watching Alash, the story that they were attempting to tell. Videos ran behind several pieces, showing the sweeping and varied landscapes of Tuva, the celebrations and lives of the Tuvan people. It was a convincing story. But I think I would have been convinced even without the translation and videos. The sounds themselves were so interesting, so evocative, it was hard to not see a structural connection to some way of life. Perhaps I’m reading into things too much though. These are professionals, great musicians and performers. Their job is to spin a convincing yarn, and for those 90 minutes I was tied up in it. It may also be that I need to get out of the house more often…
Or maybe there’s another way to analyze this whole thing. We all create our own stories in their telling. How does Alash craft the story of their people in sound? Next post I’ll deal with that other analysis, and riff on some thoughts I’ve been wrestling with lately: seeking a sense of home in a globalized, cosmopolitan world.
Wednesdays are made for adventure. At least thats how they feel around here. Wednesday is the one day that Dr. E has to drive solo to her far-off university, leaving C and me to fend for ourselves. Luckily the number 4 bus runs twice an hour less than a block from our house! Preparing for the bus is a whirlwind affair. Usually I am having to cram in at least one more chapter as I rush around making coffee, getting C dressed, walking the dog, or any of the hundred other tasks that must occur before we can strike out on our own. And, as the Irrational Law of Parental Departures (ILoPD) declares, the amount of time between a given “now” and the precise moment that you need to leave the house is negatively correlated with the number of tasks that you must complete in that same time period. Combine the ILoPD with Murphy’s law, which holds sway in our heavily Irish household, and things get quite interesting. The final factor that comes in to play in this stressful period of time is the Inopportune Crying Clause (ICC)– that a baby will cry loudest when that crying will produce the most stress in the adults in the room, and when those adults are least able to comfort said baby.The fact that any of us ever leave the house is a mystery that no branch of modern science has yet to solve. But! In a stroke of victory, we have yet to miss a bus since school started. (I’m currently seeking funding to research this apparent paradox, though I’ve received cease and desist letters from several of the more stodgy scientific think tanks. It seems that raw power contained in these irrational moments of parental success, if fully understood, would radically change the face of scientific inquiry and could possibly solve the energy crisis for good).
And so we strike off into the unknown, with the fabric of reality somehow still intact. C in his stroller, replete with adorable blankies, fuzzy creatures, and, occasionally, some pretty sweet shades. The number 4 is remarkably predictable, in the sense that it is guaranteed to arrive precisely at a moment that it is not scheduled to arrive. Thus, we wait. Cars rush by, off to wherever it is that people rush off to. Kids wander by on their way to the school a few blocks north. And I stand, reading a book/laptop in one hand (I’ve got to stop that), and rocking the stroller with the other. C watches the various passersby, cars and kids, and generally takes in the world. Its incredible to see him so intently observing his surroundings. He can still see the world in a way that we have forgotten, everything is still a mystery to him, still holds excitement. We should probably view the world through the same eyes, after all, we really don’t have things figured out as well as we’d like to believe. But those thoughts are fleeting in light of the still-as-of-yet unfinished chapter in my left hand. Still we wait. Waiting is good for us.
The bus arrives and I try to let everyone else on first. Maneuvering his behemoth of a stroller into the bus is always a challenge, luckily he enjoys being jostled around. Here’s where it gets tough for me, where humility forcefully enters the picture. I didn’t grow up with public transit. Getting anywhere useful required at least a 10-20 minute car ride. I thought that public transit was for those who couldn’t afford the car ride; moving to this town showed me how much I was missing. The bus is civil society, a very visible public sphere governed by the necessity of getting through life with one another. People are kind on the bus, people look out for each other. This hits me in the gut as we roll down the aisle looking for a place to park. There are two front benches on the bus, benches that lift up to accommodate persons in wheelchairs… or strollers. I’m a stubborn human male, in a rather gender normative sense. Asking someone to give up their prime location for me and my kid doesn’t come naturally. But I seldom have to ask. Usually I just have to say “Thank you” and smile, a genuine smile, as some kind soul voluntarily hops up and lifts the bench for us. No questions asked. No awkward exchanges. Just humbling recognition of our need. I wrangle the stroller over into the now empty space and wedge myself behind it, trying to take up as little room as possible while festooned with various bags, satchels, and instrument cases. Finally the bus rolls on.
A baby is a baby. People smile at babies. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, what you think about the world, who/what you pray to; people love babies. Perhaps more importantly, babies love people. Doesn’t matter who they are, where they are from, what they look like; babies love people. C is a pretty observant kid, always has been. He came into the world sporting a stoic, knowing stare. Lately that focused gaze has been quick to break into a smile that is powerful beyond its tiny size, its pretty freaking great. This past Wednesday we were especially wedged in and a nice older lady was sharing my leaning pole. She smiled at C, he smiled back. A big smile. For the rest of the ride the three of us were bonded, speaking about her children and grandchildren, sharing stories of birth and growth, stories of hope. Maybe that’s really what a baby is. Hope. The wheels on the bus kept rolling, people got off and on, including us. C and I got off at the same stop as our new friend, though we struck out in different directions. We crossed the quad to meet C’s sitter at church. I rushed off to class, still trying to finish that last chapter. All the while the wheels on the bus kept rolling, gathering more people, beginning new adventures, generating more connections, more moments of humility, organizing instances of shared humanity in this busy and buzzing world.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I love lullabies. Not even just songs that are traditionally considered “lullabies”, but anything that a loved one sings to a child in the quiet of the night. There’s something incredible special about those moments. The songs we choose tell our stories, share our hopes and dreams. Even when they aren’t quite so nostalgic or emotional, even when they don’t have words, the sound itself lets us connect in a way that only music can.
My own repertoire is pretty limited. Right now I sing C a lot of old hymns– Rock of Ages, Be Thou My Vision, Amazing Grace– along with a folk tune or two. In a recent search for new lullabies I ran across this album on Spotify. Track 4 is a favorite, its a setting of “Watt’s Cradle Hymn” to the tune “Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy” or something closely related. Its on my list of things to learn. I want to expand that list, hence the Lullaby Project.
What lullabies have been a part of your life? Again, it doesn’t have to be something traditionally considered a lullaby, just a song that is connected to bed time in some way for you. Something sung to you as a child, something you sing/sang to your children. Please share a couple of tunes and/or stories in the comments!
Dad School/Grad School 