Baby Music

There is a line of withering criticism in Harold Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers that has been scarred into my memory. Short and pungent, Schonberg's line writes off the entire twentieth century musical movement of minimalism—the movement that gave us Philip Glass and John Adams—as little more than (*gasp*) a "kind of baby music."

This line caused me instant grief and dismay, when I first read it. Because of course, I loved the first Philip Glass piece I ever heard, and have loved every other one since. How delightful!, I had thought. How palpably recognizable as music! If only all art compositions were this accessible. What an oasis we have here of simple repetitious pattern-making, after the great desert of 20th century atonal, twelve-tonal whatnot. 

Schonberg's phrasing therefore cut me to the quick. I had been called out. Here I was learning for the first time that it was precisely this music's accessibility that rendered it suspect, in the eyes of the true aficionados. And it was accessible to me precisely because I'm a nincompoop. 

But Schonberg's remark was also not wholly without its uses, as events ultimately proved. Because there I was, tasked this late morning and early afternoon with finding some way to entertain my infant nephew (Beethoven had a nephew!, I think, irrelevantly—Schonberg on the brain). And after trying all of the usual colored patterns and crinkly papers and lick-able picture books, I was out of ideas. 

I therefore decided to turn to music, but I struggled to find something on my phone that would be classical enough to be edifying, but have a straightforward-enough melodic through-line that a baby nephew of mine could rock to it in his carrier and eventually drift off to sleep. 

At first I tried some Khachaturian, who is catchy enough, to be sure, but a little too dramatic to lead into some shut-eye. I couldn't think of anything else, until it came back to me: Schonberg's line! The baby music!

I therefore opened the YouTube app and started us off on the ten-minute Akhnaten overture—some of the very Philip Glassiest of all Philip Glass music. 

It worked like a charm. My nephew was cratered before the opera's first spoken line could be uttered. With the words "Open are the double doors of the horizon," he was already fast asleep. 

So baby music or otherwise, I will keep my love of minimalism. The world needs baby music too. Particularly if one is in the company of a baby.