Effing the ineffable

It’s been a day of oddities: I’ve been trying to think of a name for them. It’s a bit like that sensation of a hint of cardamon or cumin in food where you weren’t expecting it.

• I turned the radio on, and as LBC have moved Nick Abbott to saturday night, there’s no longer any reason to listen to LBC before 10p.m, so I try radio 2, wondering whether ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ still serves the same kind of musical pudding . Now I’ve often wondered what music must sound like to cats, given that (as far as we know) they just can’t process music like we can. Well, that’s what it sounded like. It was something to do with Carousel and Gordon Langford, but it was such an excess of orchestration over content, that for almost a minute, it made no musical sense to me at all. In fact, it made no auditory sense whatsoever. When it finally did, I hated it.
• Having said cats can’t process music, Lala (cat 1) seemed to be rather perturbed by Scottish traditional music played on the fiddle, which was the next thing on Radio 2.  I had never really noticed before how cat’s ears are just like satellite dishes, they rotate in response to incoming waves. What did she make of this celtic stuff? She didn’t seem to like it much, because she soon went into the garden instead. I guess I’d go into the garden if I thought I had more chance of some effing, rather than a monodiet of the ineffable à la Effie.
• I wrote ‘Tara de boom-de-ay’ at the end of an e-mail today, and thought how odd it is that this very old song should have stayed around so long. Once it had got into my brain, I suddenly realised that it’s almost an identikit picture of ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ but with different rhythming of the notes. This is one in a line of instances where I have noticed that pitch similarities between tunes are less potent as triggers for recognition than you’d think. In other words, how could I have gone so long without seeing the similarities between the two songs, when they’re almost identical in terms of pitch structure. And in more other words, rhythm must be terribly important to the way we process tunes. So much for Schenkerian voice-leading, eh?
• In the middle of re-drafting a music course, I pondered the implications of the idea that human musicality is of an order and category that people can have it in expert amounts at any stage in life, even if it hasn’t been processed into the ability to read music or play an instrument. We don’t find that idea strange with art – millions of people enjoy and appreciate art and visual beauty without being tested on their ability to draw in perspective, or do a portrait in oils.  And then at once it struck me that many conventional tests of musicality or musical awareness (including judgements made about dancers when people talk about DANCERS’ COUNTS) are bizarre considering what we know about musical processsing ability: we pick some skills at random, like clapping rhythms or understanding compound metre in time signatures by which to test something as complex, nuanced, human and personal as musicality. It would be like judging the contestants in Strictly Come Dancing on their ability to notate a kick in Benesh.