Music in the Weeds

Usually, what happens to me while I’m weeding is that a tune sets up in my head, something random, something that I’ve heard recently: Emmy Lou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball,” a Bach partita, the song about cocaine with the interesting harmonies that my young cousin’s bluegrass band did.

Harmonies, of course, are hard for one person to sing, unless that person happens to be a certain kind of Buddhist monk. But I can hear them in my head. It’s called audiation — hearing music in your head when there isn’t any sound. A friend of mine, a composer, said that he was a lousy conductor because he heard the music, not as it was being played by the orchestra, but as it was in his mind. He was glorying in the perfection of his imagined performance while the orchestra was fumbling, uncoordinated, completely missing his intent. Too bad he couldn’t just beam what was in his head into the concert hall.

For me, the ability to audiate (if that’s the verb) is a definite advantage. It is, in fact, a gift for the world at large. No want wants to hear me sing, not even me. Even the shower, that acoustical marvel for the amateur voice, does nothing for the increasingly wobbly aging voice. Whistling is an alternative, and I can do that reasonably well, but why compete with the birds out in my weed patch when they do it so much better?

Writing about music is just as hard as reproducing it. I don’t know how the critics do it. Except they don’t, really. Like wine tasters, they talk about the mellow tones of the woodwinds and the full-bodied (or not) string section. They consider interpretation and whether the musicians got it to the reviewer’s taste. Opera reviewers have it easier. They can talk about costumes, sets, and characterization. But they can’t really make us hear the music. And if it’s a work that we haven’t heard, we haven’t a clue. "Bartók's references to Hungarian folk music give the work an undercurrent of, at one and the same time, exotica and humanity which enrich the listener’s experience, while speaking poignantly of his love for his native land… blah, blah, blah.” Well, that tells us something intellectually, but it doesn’t really let us in on what the music sounds like. And isn’t that what we really want to know? If we’re lucky enough to be able to bring up some Bartók out of our mental playlist, it may help. If not, we’re out of luck.

Here’s a test. See if you recognize this piece that I downloaded from my cerebral iPod the other day:

Brrrrrrm; Baa deee dum duh duh; Ba da brrrrrr didlyumpum dee dum. It repeats, going a bit higher: Ba da brrrrrr didlyumpum dee dum. Got it? Clearly, it’s not “Happy Birthday” or “Yankee Doodle.” It’s unmistakable in the full rendition — magisterial, mysterious, with lush orchestration (there’s the music critic language). I’ll give you a hint. It starts with a drum roll, and after a while a piano comes in.

Still haven’t got it? Don’t feel badly. It’s impossible. It’s been scientifically proven to be impossible. No one can figure out what piece of music another person is thinking of just from a crude verbal interpretation on the page or even vocalized. (It’s almost as difficult, if you know the tune, not to give some tonal inflection to those nonsense syllables. Try just saying “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you” without giving away the melody.)

So that’s why we have special musical notation. And Youtube. And the answer to the quiz: the opening of Brahms' piano concerto #1 in D minor, Opus 15. Here, it's performed by Bernard Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam with Artur Rubinstein, pianist. As the critics would say, the orchestra is rich and passionate, the soloist typically lyrical and, well, Rubinstein.

But it's better to listen.

The Venery Game

Let’s first get this straight. Venery has two meanings. One has to do with Venus and thus sex and by the extension of a few letters, a sexual disease. Sorry, that’s not the one I’m going to talk about.

The other meaning comes from Latin and Old French, to hunt, and also refers to the beasts that are hunted, their individual names and their names in groups.

The proper naming of groups of animals is an ancient art. Although it wasn’t solidified until the great blossoming of the English language in the 15^th century, Merlin probably taught it to King Arthur (along with the more dramatic parts of Arthur’s education that we know about — or think we know about thanks to T.H. White). It was important, sitting at the Round Table after the hunt, for a knight to know the proper names of the beasts that he had met during the day. And important to respect the beasts sufficiently to give them their appropriate names.

So, lions (although unlikely to be found in the English countryside) come in prides. Crows come in murders. Foxes are grouped in skulks, geese form gaggles, and fish are well schooled.

A book by James Lipton on the naming of groups of animals, first published in the late ’60s, was titled An Exaltation of Larks, and invited readers to play the game of making up names for a host of groups (there we go again — many things can be grouped in hosts), from aardvarks to yuppies. We might, for instance, say a coolness of yuppies, an incision of surgeons, a mess of adolescents, a didact of deans, and so on. It becomes addictive once you start. There’s an old saw about two Oxford dons walking down a street and passing several ladies of the night. One calls them a platter of tarts, the other, an English literature specialist, pronounces them a volume of Trollopes. And so it goes.

Lately, I’ve been concerned with weeds. Relentless, ubiquitous, and thriving: gout weed, knot weed, dock weed, and five-leafed akebia. I hear that this cool and rainy spring and summer of 2009 have been good for plants. They’ve been especially good for weeds — encouraging them, egging them on in their nasty scheme to take over the world — or at least my piece of it. I pull them and they come back. Some are masochists. “Oh, do it again,” they shriek and grow faster, bigger, higher. Some, like poison ivy, are sneaky. They hide and run underground only to pop up somewhere else, having grown four feet of vine under cover. It took me three years of summer weekends to get rid of the poison ivy in our front bed. And still, each summer a few stems pop up and thumb their noses at me.

Determined — that’s what they are. A determination of weeds.

Introduction

I do a lot of weeding. It doesn’t require much concentration unless you’re skirting poison ivy. My mind wanders. What’s on my mind? Lots of stuff. I could call it “Beyond the Marketing List.”

I guess I’m eccentric — geeky, even. You won’t find much pop culture here. I read, listen to NPR, watch virtually no television, and have a 60-hour-a-week job.

From gardening to geopolitics, the mundane to the arcane, I’ll talk about whatever seems interesting on a given day.

Oh, and a gallimaufry? It’s a kind of stew — a mixture of a lot of stuff.

Here are some possible ingredients:

• Getting Shorter: From Fielding to Twitter
• I-95 and the Garden State Parkway: Columbus Boulevard — perfectly suited to more traffic?
• The Great Cape May Cat Debacle of 2007: One man’s vendetta
• Education on the Assembly Line: A rant
• On Venery: A Game
• Immigrants from Asia: A guide to relentless vines
• Three Revolutions: From Socrates to Gutenberg and beyond
• What’s for Dinner? Encounters with the deer family
• A short course in weed ID

Tune in.