Books, books, books

One of our friends got married last weekend and we sent Will off to the States for the great event (and to do a little shopping!). To help out while he was gone, two very good friends (one my twin) split up the week and flew over to help out. Not only did they share the baby joggling, they entertained C, helped keep the flat clean and gave me a great excuse to go exploring everyday. Now they are gone and I'm a little lonely. But I do have some compensation in front of me. See the stack? Those are the books that Will brought back with him from the States when he came home yesterday. New reading material, hurrah!!

An Equal Music

The smell of rosin on a bow, the satisfaction of slow scales played with a partner, the sleepy somnolence of working a piece through in your head just before sleep - I miss these things. I forget them too. Viktor Seth lent them back to me this week, in his novel An Equal Music.

I’ve read An Equal Music before, quickly. This read, with bed rest time to spin through, I read it page by page, at half tempo. It was delicious. Seth recreates the world of a violinist in a string quartet, bringing in the human element of chamber music, and, more bravely, the music. Music is frustratingly difficult to write about - what seems glorious to experience becomes trite on a page, or simply does not show up. But Seth does it well, mixing chewably real details with tone poem text to help you hear the music.

Or almost. After the first few pages, when he really started to dig into the sound, I had to stop reading and start looking up pieces so I could hear them too. Some of them I've played and know well, like Mozart’s Sonata in E Major, and the Prelude to Bach’s Partita for Violin No. 3. Others I could only find as snippets on iTunes and Amazon. A snippet wasn't enough, but I didn’t want to download entire albums (classical music used CDs have a higher sound quality and are cheaper than buying digital). After a day of searching the web for individual pieces, I thought of YouTube.

Not all the music mentioned is there, but about half of it is, and I made up a list for anyone who needs to hear, straight away, some of the music in the book before they can locate a CD. And as an extra bonus, the old recordings of players like Nathan Milstein, Jacqueline du Pré and Glen Gould are remarkable in their own right, not just as introductions to the music in the book.

Ralph Vaughn Williams: "The Lark Ascending" Janine Jansen

Mozart: Sonata for Piano and Violin in E minor, K. 304, Hilary Hahn

J.S. Bach: The Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus 1, recent Glen Gould and younger Glen Gould, slightly out of tune but also beautiful.
Partita for Violin Solo No. 3 in E BWV 1006, Preludio, Nathan Milstein

Beethoven Piano Trio in C Minor, op. 1. no. 3, Allegro Con Brio, Isaac Stern, Eugene Istomin, piano, and Leonard Rose on cello.

Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A, "The Trout"
For a complete recording, follow the movements through this link. To see one of the most famous concerts of the Trout, featuring Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline Du Pré, Zubin Mehta and Pinchas Zukerman, try these excerpts: cello snippets; 3rd movement; 4th movement; documentary of concert.

Word I-Spy

Word books for kids? Given the choice between taking or leaving 'em, I use to leave them every time. We have a few for their pictures, or because Caroline became desperately attached in a book store and the alternative was Barney, but once they joined her bookcase, I avoided reading them as much as I could - no plot, no quick page turning, nothing to sing or rhyme, horrors!

Then C and I discovered word I-spy. Word I-spy works like this: we pick a page from a word book and I’ll say, "I-spy a word that starts with a 'b' and ends with a 'k'." Caroline, most slowly and dramatically, will swirl over the page with her pointer finger until she finds the word. "Aha! b, double o, k. Here it is!" If the word is short enough, she’s started sounding it out too, "Buh oo k, book!! Okay mommie, my turn - can you find a word that starts with the letter..."

We’ve played this game every night for the last week or so, extending it into the early evening now that I’m sentenced to rest half the day and can’t run around as much as usual. Besides the thrill of hearing Caroline figure out words, word I-spy is also a great game, and it has the unlooked for advantage of keeping a new book novel for much longer (a page or three a night? fantastic!).

Tonight we finally finished Maisy’s Amazing Big Book of Words. The last page was all about Bedtime. I closed it with a satisfied thwack and started contemplating our other word books, "Hm, Richard Scarry or that slightly wacky English/Czech dictionary, then there is the photo book of words..."

But the choice for tomorrow had already been made. As Will picked up C to carry her off to bed, she yelled over his shoulder as they passed through the doorway, "Night night Mommie, we’ll wake Maisy up first thing tomorrow!"