Can I buy an umlaut?

I love it when my second-favorite magazine meets the interests of my first:

"The young miller is naive, vulnerable and over-enthusiastic, with a poetic imagination, but not psychotic! As to the cycle's ending, his death in the brook makes me think of the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman imagines death as a dispersal into the universe, an absorption into the cosmos, and that's very much the sense we have here."

--Tenor Mark Padmore talking about Schubert's Die schone Mullerin in the November issue of Gramophone.

An object lesson in metaphorical consonance

Dasher, Dancer, Dunder and Jesus

More Christmas sadness--"Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" got temporarily yanked for its "religious overtones." (That must be the Mongolian throat-singing version.)

Star bar

My favorite curmudgeonly critic Norman Lebrecht offers his point of view about the ever-increasing trend toward using stars as critical shorthand:

Of all the devices that devalue the function of criticism, the bar of stars is among the most pernicious. It suggests that artistic creation can be ticked off like a school essay and subjected to a set of SATs, in which the individual, expert guidance of teachers and examiners is set aside for the one-rule-fits-all solution of 21st century politicians.

Teaching Little Fingers to Play

Despite my memories of the very tense Sr. Irene Marie (who, probably to everyone's lasting relief, "jumped the wall," as we used to call leaving the convent in the 1960s), I'm immensely enjoying Tricia Tunstall's Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson (S&S). Noting that "there are very few occasions when a child spends an extended period alone with an unrelated adult," Tunstall's observations flicker between her own childhood piano lessons and those she now gives as an adult. There are plenty of parallels for those of us who go mano a mano with child readers, so check it out.

And, fellow survivors--what can you still play? I still have "Lightly Row," "Spinning Wheel" and "The Juggler" in my fingers.

More Music

Miss Pod is happy that Claire's latest Monthly Special compiles books about music.

And here's an old favorite--one of the best evocations of music I've read is Bruce Brooks' YA novel Midnight Hour Encores (Harper, 1986).

Reading along

Yesterday I was having one of the few unalloyed pleasures of my job, where I was asked to read a book merely for another opinion. We were beyond the yea-or-nay stage of reviewing it--the reviewer and Martha agreed it was really good--and I was just reading it to Keep Up.

See, the problem with being a professional reviewer is that you know that following even the most pleasurable read is a deadline. You have to 'splain yourself, Lucy. It's going to turn into work. And I'm in the camp that believes it's harder to review a book you love than it is one you don't. So the more you love something, the greater the challenge rises (is it because I was reading on a Sunday morning that I'm starting to feel like a Unitarian minister?).

All of this is just preamble to the fact that I like to listen to music when I read "for fun." (Never when I'm reading to review, or when I'm writing.) A psychologist I know says that we never actually do listen and read at the same time, more like one activity takes over during lapses in the other, but I like the landscape the music puts me in. Call me crazy, but I sometimes put music on when I'm going out, ostensibly for Buster's enjoyment but really because I secretly believes it means the house will be a better place for the experience--back from vacation, so to speak,*--when I return.

Dork alert: I try to program music that goes with my book. I have, for example, a cd of music Jane Austen liked that's good for when I'm reading her. Villa-Lobos for magical realism. Elgar for epics of Empire. Tense mysteries get tense music. Spy stories set amidst neo-Nazis in the Antarctic--you'd be surprised how much music the cold continent has inspired.

I had read a bit of my assigned-but-no-strings book already, and I remembered that it had lots of eccentric characters, an elliptical narration, and not much of a plot--in other words, it was Canadian. So I cranked up the Gavin Bryars only to realize the novel was in fact set in Australia, and that Bryars himself is only marginally Canadian, so my theory of geographical affinity went completely to pot. So As African American mezzo Shirley Verrett said, upon walking down the hall of a music school and hearing what she thought was a black singer singing spirituals "like she was from deepest Mississippi" only to open the practice room door to see a Korean girl going phonetically through "Deep River," "there goes that."

Having now finished the book, Judith Clarke's One Whole and Perfect Day (Front Street), I see that I should have gone with Mozart. Bee-yoo-ti-ful counterpoint, and it's a book about happiness.

*(For an entertaining take on this very notion, look for The House Takes a Vacation, a picture book by Jacqueline Davies and Lee White, published this month by Marshall Cavendish.)