Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

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IT’S EVENING NOW. Some fine fleshy clouds. I’ve squandered an hour setting Lewis Carroll’s “Soup of the Evening” to music. My mother used to read that poem to me and laugh and say how good it was, and it is awfully good. My tune may be marginally better than the one that Willy Wonka sings in one of the movie versions of Alice in Wonderland , and then again it may not. And the question is, Do we need another musical version of “Soup of the Evening”? I’m soaked with sweat.

All songs are protest songs, as somebody once observed — was it Bob Dylan? Every song presupposes enough peace and quiet that the song itself can be sung, the guitar strummed, the words heard. There’s no way people can be dancing if there are explosions and cries of anguish outside. In fact, most people are peaceable most of the time, regardless of what they say. Yeats says, “Our master Caesar’s in the tent, the maps are all outspread. His eyes are fixed upon nothing, his hands under his head.” Something like that. In other words, Caesar is lying very still. He may be planning mayhem and flank attacks and organized massacre, but he needs quiet while he strategizes. The poem is called “Long-Legged Fly.” If you’re a stop-lossed land warrior getting drunk in your Humvee listening to “Beer for My Horses” to get hepped up for a retributive foray into some tiny dirt-poor village in Afghanistan, you’re just a person sitting in a Humvee while that song is playing. Even if you’re the biggest, meanest, tattooedest thug of a bar-brawling jackalope who beats up defenseless people every other night, even if you hate music and never listen to it, you need to eat and sleep and recover from the cuts and bruises on your knuckles and regain your pointless rage. You are nonviolent except for the brief periods when you’re violent. For what that’s worth. I called Tim and tried this line of reasoning out on him and he wasn’t terribly impressed. He’s gone hyperpolitical because it’s an election year.

He said, “Why don’t you write a book about trying to write a protest song?”

“I guess I sort of am,” I said.

I’m having problems writing lyrics. They’re either too simple, or too clever-clever, or too sexual. It’s reassuring to go back to listening to dance songs, because usually there are very few words. In one of Paul Oakenfold’s songs there are five words at the beginning, shouted by a television preacher: “I said praise the Lord!” After a while there’s a recorded outgoing message from a woman from 976-4PRAYER. That’s it. And it’s a good song. A good protest song.

I DON’T WANT TO GO TO BED YET. My piano technique is getting a little better, I think. I learned to play piano on our beat-up, difficult-to-tune Chickering, with carved floral decoration. Some of the keys had cigarette burns or missing ivories or both. I took lessons with Mrs. Trebert, who explained to me that her name was unusual because it was the same backward and forward. Bach would have liked her name: it was a backward canon at the unison. It was her husband’s name, actually. He was very sick and pale and quiet. He sat in a warm, dark room while Mrs. Trebert listened to me play Bach and Béla Bartók. My favorite piece was by Bartók, in A minor. The left hand went back and forth between two notes, an A and an E, and the right hand played something equally uncomplicated. Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer who was hired by Koussevitzky to write a piece for orchestra that has a gigantic solo for three bassoons. When Bartók was in Europe he wrote dissonant, despairing pieces, but for Koussevitzky he wrote something sunny and accessible and immortal.

One week, when I went to have a lesson, Mrs. Trebert said her husband had passed away. She cried and I felt that I was shrinking to the size of a cashew in the presence of such unfathomable unhappiness.

My failure to practice also made her sad, and only six months after her husband died I told my parents that I didn’t want to have piano lessons anymore. Instead I learned to play the bassoon. I learned a lot of terminology, like “senza vibrato,” which I thought meant “with vibrato” but actually means “without vibrato.” Vibrato is just when you add a wobble to a note. You can wobble the note by making it louder or softer, say with your diaphragm if you’re a singer or a wind player, or by moving the pitch up and down slightly with the rockings of your abused fingertips if you’re a string player or Segovia. Electric guitar players get to use a special twanger to stretch the strings and produce vibrato, which is how Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Opera singers sometimes use too much vibrato and it drives everyone mad.

What is a note? A note is a sound represented by a black blob on the page. Notes can be long or short, and in real life they are always bending up and down like flexible claymation figures. I had a bad dream once in which I was a successful composer of scores for horror movies. I’d written a very frightening and suspenseful track for a chase scene where a man tries to protect a woman from a disfigured eyeless monster — or so I reconstruct the setting — but the movie that I’d scored so well was never released and the chase scene music had nowhere to go, and was condemned to wander the world pursuing people. In the dream I woke up, and in the dimness of the room I saw the chase scene music there hovering at the foot of my bed — a shadowy humanoid made of writhingly alive notes like long black water balloons. It had found me. I got up and tried to touch the notes and that made them angry. The chase scene music began chasing me, with terrible violin-harmonic screeching sounds and glissandi from the double basses. The music could find no peace. It was an awful dream. Fortunately I don’t have nightmares that often.

So a note can be long or short. When Paul McCartney sings, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” the “of” is a slide upward. It could be written as two notes on the page, but it’s sung as a single upward-swooping sound. When Marvin Gaye sings “bay-eee-eee-bee-eee” in “Sexual Healing,” there are five distinctly audible notes, and yet nobody is counting them because numbers have nothing to do with sexual healing. Each of the “notes” has been healed by being annealed, that is, by being melted into the next note, and you can hear that Marvin Gaye knew that this song, cowritten with an admiring journalist, was going to be an enormous hit, bigger than anything else he’d done, even though his life was sliding downhill.

Sung notes are always sliding uphill and downhill into each other because it’s not possible for a human voice to leap from one note to the next instantaneously. But why are they called notes? I don’t know. I guess a note is a little memorandum to self, a way of remembering a melody. A melody is a tune — something you can hum — like a move in chess. You can hum a tune but you can’t hum the harmony underneath a tune, and you can’t hum a clever sacrifice in a chess game, even though you can write Bxd6. If you look at old musical scores, from the fifteenth century, they write the notes as little diamond shapes on a stave. Meanwhile the itinerant jongleurs were singing and clapping and writing nothing down. Having assignations in the beer pantry.

What’s a stave? Ah, the stave is the set of five lines onto which you hang the notes. There’s the E line, the G line, the B line, the D line, and the F train. I was taught a helpful mnemonic: Every Good Boy Does Fine. It’s not true, though. Some good boys do not do that well in school. Or in life. There’s also Elvis’s Guitar Broke Down Friday, and Earth Girls Blow Dairy Farmers — no, I made that last one up. You’re putting the notes out for display on the staves. You are in fact espaliering the notes like a pear tree on a wooden frame. If you put the note up here on Friday, it’s going to be higher in “pitch,” meaning higher up on the pitch of the slope. And if you pin the note on Elvis down here, it’s going to be lower in pitch, because up is vocal constriction and tension and upwardness and mountaintops, and lower is moon river and the bass singer in the Four Tops.