[Caveat emptor: This was written very quickly and very late at night. I haven't had two seconds to tie my shoes let alone proofread today, and it's this or nothing. You have been warned!]

In my last entry, I briefly mentioned my bike trip, as I had just returned from it and was in a state of virtual collapse and great stinkiness. A long, hot soak in the tub cured both ailments, fortunately for the rest of the family.

It�s been a long time since I�ve done a good long ride like that. I used to go often. There was a time, when I was living in Hyde Park and was trying to exorcize a few personal demons, that I rode to Evanston and back about three times a week. But I haven�t done anything more than 20 miles or so since I had AJ. There is something incredibly satisfying about going somewhere fairly quickly under one�s own power, watching images and scenes move past you, feeling your understanding of what you have seen a few strokes beyond it, merging senses with one another so the picture includes sounds and smells as well as sights. And there were many sights to see, hear, smell (mostly good, aside from some weird factory in Carpentersville that smelled like car air freshener and gave me a headache). Some of the trail ran through woods, some through small river towns � we rode through a weekly farmer�s market and the 80th Annual Fireman�s Carnival in a couple of different towns. And some of it ran along people�s backyards. We saw kids playing in pools and menacing each other with hoses shooting streams of cold water. We saw some kids setting up a dunking booth in their yard, testing it out with ropes and tightening screws. We rode past an artist painting an incredible mural, his paints laid out in neat rows on the grass (the sight of this last one nearly caused a wreck as all three of us narrowly averted slamming into a gate after taking our eyes off the road). We rode past many very beautiful gardens of both the floral and vegetable variety. We rode by a wedding, the couple standing nervously by the riverbank, the robe of the minister fluttering in the breeze. We watched large families reuning under sagging banners and deflated balloons, a few unsavory uncles leering at us over their plastic cups of beer.

Throughout the ride, I found myself thinking of Smetana�s" Vltava," better known as "The Moldau" (from Ma Vlast). "The Moldau" will always be, to me, the definitive example of program music. For those who might be unfamiliar, program music is the term that is used to describe pieces of wordless music that tell a narrative of some sort. Such music is intended to invoke the visual imagination as well as the aural. Although there are numerous examples of program music. "The Moldau"�s story has always stuck with me, ever since I was first introduced to it in music class in the fourth grade. In the case of "The Moldau," the story is one of the river itself. It begins with a quiet bubbling motive at the source and follows the river past a variety of scenes of rural life, each depicted by an appropriate musical motive. The river itself has the dominant theme, rendering the whole piece a sort of modified rondo structure (ABACAD etc.). As the river progresses, it broadens. The river�s expansion is depicted in music by the increased instrumentation and volume and the slowing of tempo in the iterations of the main theme. The work concludes with the entry of the river into the city of Prague. The theme is all flash and grandeur. It has lost all guises of its sprightly beginnings and sounds old and dignified. I suspect the music for The Fox (or, as my husband likes to call it, The Mighty Fox) would be somewhat different, and surely the section entitled The Entry of the Fox into St. Charles would bear no resemblance to The Entry of the Moldau into Prague. To keep my tired legs moving on the way home, I was envisioning a parody work that included a few of the scenes we passed: the drunken riverside barbecue, the canoe fishermen, the Elgin Casino, the crowing rooster. I�m thinking the orchestration might need to include a banjo or two with that list. I wonder if there�s a way to turn this into an assignment for the program music section of the class I�m teaching next year.

A friend of mine uses Frank Zappa�s �Jonestown� to introduce program music in his classes. He was concerned that too many of his students were unable to understand the philosophical shift required on the part of audience members to think of musical abstraction as having narrative potential, thanks to the near-constant association of the visual with the musical these days. Jonestown is a really weird sounding piece, all electronic thorns and hardly a place to grab hold in order to get your head around it. If you don�t know that it�s Zappa�s interpretation of the Jonestown mass suicide, then the music is downright alienating. It starts to make sense in the context of the narrative. Then it�s terrifying.

The idea of an extrinsic idea as an organizer of an artwork was a much bigger break in musical protocol than is usually discussed. And strangely, we seem to have a perverse association of narrative with not-very-good art, at least when it�s removed from those arts that are defined primarily by words (poetry, prose, playwriting). Program music is often dismissed as overly facile, catering to an uneducated audience where it should be lifting them out of their intellectual stagnation. My husband and I got into a heated discussion over the over-exposure of the graphic novel today, in the wake of today�s Sunday NY Times Magazine cover story. My husband, a writer, thinks of the column inches devoted to the graphic novel as yet one more sign of a continuing decline, the dumbing down of society. �It�s easier to look at a picture than to read a book,� he said. �It depends on the picture,� I replied. I have not yet seen a graphic novel that has challenged me in that way (although I can�t pretend to be a connoisseur of the genre), but I don�t know why one could not exist. My husband adamantly disagreed.

Program music has suffered a similar fate. It is often perceived as cartoonish, as a pathetic attempt at pandering to an audience either ignorant of or unwilling to accept a fundamentally abstract art. I think, though, that this says more about the program music that has been written and that gets performed than about the potential for such a medium.

After all, narrative itself has the potential to be challenging, to be layered and multifarious. And where lyrics are involved, narrative is no longer a problem. It�s an asset (well, I suppose that depends on the lyrics). No one, for example, would think to criticize Wagner for telling a story in Tristan und Isolde. The problem exists merely in the translation of media.

But what makes words inherently smarter than music or visual art media? Words are not nearly as helpful to me in keeping up my biking rhythm as music. And in fact, a musical setting is the best way to get me to remember a story. I�d like to think this is due to something other than my inferior intelligence.

I think the thing that stands between me and a love of program music is a feeling of being manipulated, not of being patronized or talked down to. When I listen to a piece of music for the first time, I don�t tend to think about it in terms of anything particularly effable. I am affected by the work�s era and genre � these things give me certain types of expectations drawn from years of critical listening and general music consumerism. But I try to go in with an open mind and see what my ears can figure out. With program music, the composer seeks to tell the audience how to listen and to what end. It removes a level of audience participation. While that may make it easier for some to listen to, it severely limits response. As an erstwhile composer, what interests me most, aside from the actual sound patterns I create, which are their own satisfaction, are the different ways people hear them. I have no particular desire to tell anyone how to listen to my music (not that I let to many people hear it), although I don�t go so far as to object to the writing of program notes as some of my composer friends do. But my notes tend to tell you more about how the piece was written, not how to hear it. Sometimes that kind of information affects the hearing, sometimes not.

Is there a way to present a purely musical narrative without making such dictations to your audience? In order for that to happen, there would have to be a way to communicate the narrativity within the music itself, without reliance on program notes or the composers listening guidelines. At this late hour, I can only think of two ways that could work. One would involve many references to real-world sounds, sounds that would be obvious cues to the audience for types of activity. Certain pieces of musique concrete (tape manipulation music) have done this fairly successfully. Steve Reich�s "Attica" comes to mind as a particularly simple yet compelling example. A perhaps better known Reich piece, Different Trains, uses a mixture of tape and string quartet playing train-like sounds, but also something that goes beyond mimicry to tell the story of two trains, one a train in the American golden age of railroads and other on its way to Nazi death camps. Both of these, however, feature a small amount of text, although it is substantially altered and abstracted to have the meaning somewhat separated from it via the tape manipulation process. The only other approach I can think of is one that would involve a narrative that can only be told through music. And this is really just another way of looking at abstract music. The sonata form, for example, could be conceived of (and has been) as musical narrative.

I have wandered far afield from my biking expedition. See what happens when I try to get out and enjoy a nice summer day? There is actually much more narrative to come on my weekend adventures, including the requisite photos of AJ on his first sentient visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo.

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