Overheard this morning in the Harriet household:

AJ: Daddy, let's play soccer!
Husband: Okay. Let's do it. (Gets ready to kick the ball)
AJ: Okay. Now you can drive me to soccer practice and watch me kick the ball.
Husband: Oh.

AJ has apparently figured out the world order.

This morning, as I emerged from an overly-long and blissfully steam-filled shower, one of my favorite character pieces was on the radio, Samuel Barber's Overture to the School for Scandal. I love this piece for its contrast of excited and exciting orchestral passages alternating with a gorgeous, poignant melody that first appears in a somewhat mournful version by a solo oboe before being picked up more joyously by the rest of the orchestra and dismantled and accelerated back into the opening excited passage, taking it somewhere new and winding it up even more. This "development" crescendos and slows into a rhythmic horn motive before a recap -- it's actually a pretty tight variation of sonata form.

The thing I've always loved about Barber is the way he pulls the harmonic rug out from under you every now and again. He's a sucker for a good melody, and he's written some beautiful ones (the aria "Must the winter come so soon?" from his opera Vanessa is another one that comes to mind). But his harmonies are fascinating. He works in a tonal idiom, but the chords don't move in traditional fashion. There are chains of parallel chords, sequences that don't stop where you expect, and surprising shifts in and out of dissonance which often has the effect of changing the relationship of the melody to its harmonic underpinning, sometimes eclipsing the tune altogether.

I haven't ever done a real analysis of any of Barber's music, but I suspect this is a case where a systematic attention to detail would reveal some of the nuts and bolts that cause my emotional response to the music. I am learning that I seem to equate these breaches in harmonic protocol with a sort of emotional freedom -- fewer rules, less regulation. Or something like that.

When I first started taking my music study really seriously, I focused my attention on music theory -- the analysis of the musical components. But I came to realize that what I really wanted to know was what made music effective, what made it important, what made it meaningful. I am still convinced that the answer, at least for me, lies in the nuts and bolts of the music, but I am no longer willing to divorce these components from their cultural context. To use an overly simplified example, to what extent does Grieg's "Dawn" from Peer Gynt sound like morning and to what extent does it sound like morning because we've seen one too many Bugs Bunny cartoons? It's a question of the intersection of nature and culture. How much is psychology and how much is conditioning? It's these questions that have made me gravitate towards the study of film music recently. Here is music that explicitly focuses on the psychological, but it generally does so by exploiting cultural associations.

But back to Barber. Is it possible that what I'm hearing is not something inherently beautiful but a fairly simple aural metaphor? Is a sense of freedom so important to me that the mere setting up a set of expectations and then violating them using a sort of counter-logic resonates with my need for more openness? Is the music suggesting a sort of revolt from within? It wouldn't be the first time such a possibility had been suggested for music. Think, for example, of Soviet music restrictions or Nazi era directives on art.

I have been thinking about this a lot because AJ is spending a lot of time trying to define various emotional qualities in classical music. He thinks, for example, anything slow and/or in a minor key is sad. In his mind, all lullabies are sad (actually, some of them are downright tragic -- think of "Rock-a-bye baby" or his favorite, "The Coventry Carol," which in between choruses of "By by lully lullay" tells the story of King Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents)).

But AJ's drive for defining the emotional content in music is also being spurred on by assorted music games aimed at children. This week we checked out a book for his LeapPad that included among its many activities a page titled "Emotional Music Theater." The picture shows Mozart conducting a small pit orchestra while on the stage above, five or six children act out various emotions (each is labeled so you know what is what). The game then asks the child to listen to a piece of music and then click on the emotion the piece represents. The thing I find odd about this is that there are right and wrong answers. An excerpt from "Primavera" from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is defined as "happy" (AJ got that one right). "Mars, Bringer of War" from Holst's The Planets is "angry." But AJ keeps getting one wrong. The piece is Johann Strauss Jr.'s "The Skater's Waltz." AJ wants it to"silly." When AJ clicks on "happy," a patronizing voice comes on: "Hmm. Interesting choice. Why don't you try another emotion?" How can any of these be right or wrong? This isn't about emotion at all. It's about cultural conditioning.

I was talking with a friend a while back about how someone should do an ethnography of Gymboree, taking a long hard look at the way such programs set up parent-teacher-child interaction, how they communicate ideas about music and culture. I still think it would be an interesting project. I was pleased to receive an email this morning about ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, who does really interesting work on the intersection of sound and culture (Highly recommended: Urban Blues(1992)). He's apparently in the process of putting together a book on children's music and the importance of teaching music to children. The website he's put together in advance of the book, Born to Groove reads more like an activist's manual than a work of scholarship. But given his past scholarship, I'm hopeful that some interesting things will come of it. The way we teach music to our children is long overdue for some attention.

So why do most programs, games, what have you, that focus on music for young children seem to concentrate on emotion rather than something else, say, structure? Is it that we prioritize emotion? That we think of music as aural emotion? That we wish to teach our children how to hear in that particular way? That structure is too hard for children to grasp (a fallacy)? Is it about emotional control? Can emotion be taught? I have no answers, only questions.

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