(++++) NOT FOR NAUGHT

The Book about Nothing. By Mike Bender. Illustrated by Hugh Murphy. Crown. $17.99.

Nobody’s Duck. By Mary Sullivan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $14.99.

     You would think that the concept of zero would be a pretty clear and obvious one, but it was not always so: the idea of zero as a digit dates only to about 500 C.E., and the ancient Greeks even argued about nothingness as a philosophical concept. How, they wondered, could nothing be anything? Mike Bender wonders the same thing in The Book about Nothing, but cuts the philosophical Gordian knot by simply asserting that “even nothing is SOMETHING.” The fact that the narrator who makes this statement is a dodo – a bird whose current population is zero – is surely due to Hugh Murphy’s skewed sense of humor, which shows in the illustrations again and again. The interesting thing about The Book of Nothing, the thing that makes it fun, is that it requires young readers to think about what is and is not in an unusual way. For instance, “if you eat all the chocolate chip cookies” in a cookie jar, the jar is not empty but is “chock-full of nothing.” And when you take a bath, what you are wearing is nothing. And in what seems like a second nod to Lewis Carroll – the dodo’s appearance being the first – there is even a suggestion that kids “can get a bunch of balloons and a big cake and celebrate NOTHING,” which seems remarkably like the un-birthday party in Alice in Wonderland except for the fact that all the attendees shown in The Book of Nothing are monkeys. Not everything here is in what adults will consider the best of taste – explaining away a burp by saying it was nothing is one thing, but the toilet humor about what is left behind after flushing (preceded by a panel in which “you forgot to flush!”) is a bit much. Still, there is a nice mixture of the amusing and the thoughtful here – the latter most clearly exemplified by the statement that “with nothing, anything is possible.” Quite so. Think about it.

     And speaking of negatives, Mary Sullivan’s Nobody’s Duck raises the issue of whose duck the title character really is, and what it means to be someone’s duck in the first place. Among anthropomorphic-animal stories, this is an offbeat one: the hat-wearing, travel-bag-carrying duck shows up on the lawn outside the home of a pajama-clad alligator and remains there all night, leading the irritated alligator to come outside the next morning – wearing a tie – to ask, “Whose duck are you?” The duck roots around in his bag, discovers a thinking cap in it (complete with lightbulb), considers the question, and responds that he is nobody’s duck. But “you must be somebody’s duck,” the alligator says, and sets off to find out what is what, pulling the duck in a wagon (the duck’s expression of enjoyment contrasting delightfully with the alligator’s of irritation). At various locations, the duck, instead of speaking, emits excited quacks – leading the alligator to think the duck belongs there. At the library, for example, the alligator asks the librarian (a giraffe), “Is this your duck?” She says no – while the duck gathers books and presents a library card. The duck then sits happily reading while the increasingly frustrated alligator waits. Exactly what bothers the alligator is never clear and is not the book’s point: what matters is all the fun the duck has and the way he pulls the reluctant alligator into it. After the library, as the duck quacks with amusement while reading books in the wagon, the alligator heads for a movie theater, where the alligator asks the pig at the ticket window if this is his duck. The excited duck, meanwhile, is responding enthusiastically to a poster advertising “Dogzilla Strikes Again,” and soon buys two movie tickets for himself and the alligator. They watch the film – both wearing 3D glasses – and then the alligator pulls the duck onward, finding that the duck does not belong with the operator of a Go-Kart track or in a skydiving business. So whose duck is the duck? The answer, of course, is that he is the alligator’s duck – which the alligator realizes, as he thinks back over the day’s adventures, really means he is the alligator’s friend. An amusing final twist, over a couple of stacks of duck-prepared pancakes, neatly wraps up this unusual friendship book in which nobody’s duck is very definitely somebody to enjoy.

(++++) OUTDOORS

Moon: A Peek-Through Picture Book. By Britta Teckentrup. Doubleday. $16.99.

Bob and Joss Take a Hike! By Peter McCleery. Illustrated by Vin Vogel. Harper. $17.99.

The Digger and the Flower. By Joseph Kuefler. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     The quiet and not-so-quiet events of a typical night are portrayed in lovely pictures and pleasantly rhyming text in Britta Teckentrup’s Moon. This is a “peek-through” book for the simple reason that cutouts in the pages let young readers peek through them at the moon – the differing cutout shapes showing the orb in many of its phases. Or, to put it another way, the cutouts let the moon peek through into the different scenes. The cover cutout is crescent-shaped, and as the pages progress, the moon becomes a sliver, then a crescent again, then a waxing gibbous, and eventually a full and bright circle. And then it shrinks back, page after page, as the cutouts get smaller and smaller. While this happens, Teckentrup’s illustrations show animals in various moonlit locations. For example: “A breeze blows softly across the land,/ Rippling through the desert sand./ A scorpion scuttles through the night,/ Glowing with an eerie light.” These two pages show coyotes, rabbits, a snake and, yes, a scorpion, all amid cacti and sand and with the scorpion having bright blue color highlights. On another page, “Far away, in a land harsh and bare,/ Puffins shiver in the cold night air.” And there are birds flying south – guided by the moon – and other birds, parrots, flitting about a tropical jungle. The full moon shines over “hundreds of turtles [that] swim to land/ To lay their eggs in the soft white sand.” In complete contrast, a new moon provides darkness that allows a field mouse to forage. And so the story goes, in scene after moonlit scene, letting young readers imagine what may be happening right outside their own homes as the moon cycles through its real-world courses.

     Matters are equally outdoorsy, but more amusing and a great deal sillier, in Peter McCleery’s Bob and Joss Take a Hike! The title characters are two typically mismatched friends: serious, easily worried, brown-haired Bob and free-spirited Joss, whose eyes are never seen because his blond hair falls down over them. The story starts with the two boys camping, Joss enjoying himself toasting marshmallows (as a curious bird perches on his head) while Bob paces in a circle complaining about being bored. That complaint turns out to be a mistake, because Joss suggests that the two should take a hike, Bob decides that is a good idea as long as they have a map, and they realize after setting out that Joss, of course, has forgotten the map. The result is a series of misadventures in choosing the wrong trail, going up and down hillsides (elevation figures are provided), and doing a variety of things that make no sense (e.g., dancing and walking in a funny way). Bob becomes increasingly scared – and increasingly insect-bitten. Joss takes everything in stride (despite the fact that his shoes are perpetually untied) and the insects avoid him. The two boys’ differing personalities, and the way Vin Vogel shows their different reactions to being lost, provide the humor in Bob and Joss Take a Hike! For instance, Bob complains that they have apparently been walking in circles, and Joss says, “I don’t think so. It feels more like a rectangle. Or maybe a trapezoid.” Eventually the boys end up on a clifftop with a spectacular view, so the hike has scarcely been a total waste; but their trek then continues to such a point that Bob gets hungry enough to eat a bug. Before he can do that, though (the insect looks distinctly alarmed at the prospect), Joss discovers that he had the map in his pocket all along, and they are close to their campsite. So all ends happily, despite Bob now being completely covered in bites and scratches. In fact, while Joss again has a critter perched on his head (a squirrel), so does Bob (the cricket he was about to eat). It turns out that a good time was had by all.

     Outdoor life gets a different  kind of treatment in Joseph Kuefler’s The Digger and the Flower, because here it initially seems that nature is not to be experienced and enjoyed but to be modified and manipulated. Digger is one of three big trucks – the others are Crane and Dozer – that go out together every morning to build “tall buildings for working.” Focused and industrious, they also create “roads for driving and bridges for crossing,” helping a city grow and prosper all around them. But Digger is a bit different from his colleagues. When they take a break, he rolls over on his treads to “something in the rubble,” which turns out to be a small blue flower that “was tiny, but it was beautiful.” Digger visits the flower day after day, and the scenes of this big piece of machinery watering it and shielding it from wind are charming: Kuefler gives Digger expressive eyes and other sort-of-facial features. Digger even sings the flower bedtime songs – how he does so is unclear and irrelevant – and watches over it until “every space had been filled” in the building of the city, and it is time to fill the space where the flower grows. Digger cannot stop progress, if it is progress, and Dozer plows ahead as Digger sheds a tear for the flower. But then he notices something: seeds! And Digger scoops them up, takes them far, far from the city, and “tuck[s] the seeds into the warm earth.” Then the seeds sprout, and again Digger waters the plants, shields them from wind, and sings to them at night – leading to a final, wordless illustration contrasting the fully developed, stark black-and-white-and-grey city with the small blue flowers dotting the landscape away from the road and the tall buildings. The Digger and the Flower does not suggest that there is anything wrong with cities or with buildings – only that there is, there needs to be, a place for the beauties of the natural world as well. Digger learns that on his own, and his story is a sweet and not overly preachy way of teaching the lesson to children.

(+++) SURPRISES, AS EXPECTED

Bodyguard 7: Target. By Chris Bradford. Philomel. $8.99.

Bodyguard 8: Traitor. By Chris Bradford. Philomel. $8.99.

     Breakneck pacing, an inexhaustible parade of perils, and an utter lack of characterization or humanization – these are the ingredients of Chris Bradford’s Bodyguard series, which now appears to have concluded, maybe, with Target and Traitor. That is, the series may have concluded in the United States – but it certainly went beyond these books in England, where Chris Bradford lives and works. There are six books in the British series: Hostage, Ransom, Ambush, Target, Assassin and Fugitive. There are eight U.S. books, but they only go through the first four British ones, because the U.S. editions split each British novel into two parts, presumably for pecuniary reasons. So Target and Traitor, in their U.S. incarnation, add up to Target in the original British version.

     The publication history is a lot more complicated than the plotting of Bodyguard, which is simply another incarnation of the time-honored “perils of Pauline” approach of multiple threats and constant cliffhangers – all solved by heroic young people, since these are books for young readers. The heroic protagonist of the Target/Traitor duo is a teenage female surfing champion named Charley Hunter, whose assignment is to protect an oh-so-cool rock star named, umm, Ash Wild, who is referred to as “the perfect teen heartthrob.” Bradford, a master of fast-paced, superficial plotting, opens with a bang, or rather with a chomp – Charley saves a boy from a shark attack – and soon gets into the usual training sessions that are de rigueur in books like this, including the obligatory “you’re not good enough and have to go through it all again” scenario. This involves dialogue such as “we’re not playing games here” and “there are no second chances” and “if you get it wrong on an assignment, you’ll be coming home in a body bag.” Other members of Charley’s bodyguard-team-in-training, of course, do not think much of her, and there is some genuinely silly sexism: “What was the colonel thinking when he recruited a girl?” The response to this is some silly reverse sexism: “Female intuition and the element of surprise give us the upper hand.”

     Eventually, these premises established, Target/Traitor gets into the meat of its story, which is rather thin gruel but presented entertainingly enough so fans of lightning-speed, comic-book-style violence will enjoy the tale. The Bodyguard books are aimed at readers ages 10 and up, and as such are full of fight, fire and fisticuffs but no major heavy weaponry, no massive amounts of gore, and no significant sex or other inconveniences to the plot pacing. The threats against Ash Wild are the usual childish stuff, with some references to pig’s blood and a no-surprise play-the-song-backward death-is-coming bit of intimidation. The usual suspects have to be looked at – a disaffected songwriter, Ash’s former girlfriends, a paparazzo in debt to the mob – but of course the plotter cannot be anyone obvious or anyone who could be turned up through everyday channels and procedures. As the plot lurches onward, there are various accidents that may not have been accidents (well, duh), and as Target ends – or, really, simply stops, so readers can start Traitor – the fact that these were not accidents is confirmed, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

     And so the story continues, with Charley learning more and more about celebrity life and becoming familiar not only with Ash but also with movie stars and other entertainment figures – there is plenty of imagined coolness here for readers so inclined. Charley herself also becomes a target of Internet trolling, with rumors that she is involved with Ash leading to problems such as a mysterious threatening message on the mirror in her hotel room. Charley eventually figures out – several hundred pages after readers who pay attention will have figured it out – that “the homicidal maniac was on the tour with them,” and she thinks she knows who it is. That leads to a confrontation scene that, because it happens when there are still plenty of pages to go, readers will know is not the book’s climax or end. In fact, Charley has made a mistake (well, duh, again), but the timely intervention of an expert hacker points her in the right direction at last. Or is it the right direction? There is a battle of bodies that is also a battle of wills, and Charley is again forced to confront the chance that she made an error, until yet another of the deus ex machina events of which Bradford is inordinately fond shows that, yes, this time Charley got it right. Or did she? Bradford does not like to let things go, and has a kind of wheels-within-wheels plot mechanism so that just as readers think matters have been put to rest, something else is pulled out of the authorial hat. And so it is here. There are, in fact, several somethings pulled out of several hats, including one that results in a less-than-happy ending that is by far the most surprising element of Charley’s story. Bradford actually seems to reach for pathos at the conclusion of Target/Traitor, and if he does not quite find it – it is scarcely his strong suit – he does manage, perhaps, to set up future installments of the Bodyguard series. Those already exist in British editions, in fact; whether they too will appear as two-books-instead-of-one versions for U.S. consumption remains to be seen. Or maybe, since Target/Traitor is actually a prequel to the U.S. editions of the earlier Bodyguard books, the bittersweet ending of Charley’s story will have to stand as U.S. readers’ conclusion of the whole sequence. As a song decidedly not by Ash Wild put it back in 1967, “time alone will tell.”

(+++) AGING WITH ENLIGHTENMENT

The End of Old Age: Living a Longer, More Purposeful Life. By Marc E. Agronin, M.D. Da Capo. $27.

     The Age of Enlightenment, roughly coinciding with the 18^th century in Europe, was a time in which reason and rationality came to dominate intellectual and philosophical thinking, overcoming the emotion-and-religion-driven thinking that had largely dominated earlier discourse. Now, argues geriatric psychiatrist Marc E. Agronin, we are in need of enlightenment of a different type and for a different purpose: it is time to realize the many positive elements of growing old and to use the rational understanding of those elements to overcome ageism in society and allow older people to be happier, more productive and more respected right up until life’s end.

     This is a somewhat utopian viewpoint, but it is certainly well-meaning and, in The End of Old Age, often well argued – although the book’s title is a bit of a problem, since many readers will likely (and understandably) think the end of old age is simply death. What Agronin really wants is the end of a certain type of thinking about old age, just as 18^th-century philosophers wanted a change in thinking about life and humanity in general. Agronin takes nearly as broad a view in his field as those philosophers did in theirs, stating that the issue of aging is no less than “a question that taps into the meaning and mission of our life.” He includes a wide variety of arguments for a more-meaningful old age, and to his credit does not omit quotations from various scholars, ethicists, doctors and others who primarily see the inevitable losses of old age and the shrinking of the world as one’s abilities and health diminish. Yet Agronin ultimately discards those views of old age as, in Shakespearean words that he does not include, “sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything.”

     Agronin cites evidence that “people with positive self-perceptions about aging…demonstrate median survival rates 7.5 years longer than do those with negative self-perceptions,” but this is scarcely surprising. Yes, there may be causality here: psychosomatically, the mind can and does influence the body, and ongoing mental positivity has a salutary effect on one’s physical being. But the reverse is also true: a generally healthy body leads to an improved mental/psychological outlook. So it is reasonable to assume that people whose physical condition predisposes them to a longer, healthier life are more likely to have positive self-perceptions about aging. In other words, it may be that the perception influences life length, or it may be that those whose lives will be longer develop more-positive self-perception. Incomplete arguments and citations like this one undermine some of Agronin’s generally thoughtful discussion about the aging process.

     Where that discussion works best is in the author’s attempt to connect it with the life-cycle theory of Erik Erikson. Originally an eight-stage construct, this was changed to a nine-stage one in an attempt “to capture this final stage of life.” And it is this ninth stage that Agronin explores and suggests his readers explore with him. He argues, for example, that far from inevitably diminishing with age, creativity can increase because “with life experience, we accumulate facts about multiple situations and familiarity with how to deal with problems.” This makes sense – although applying one’s creativity requires an understanding of context, and while, for example, many corporations might agree that older people are a source of great knowledge and theoretical problem-solving ability, they might also say the elderly lack the high-tech training and super-fast response times needed to implement their knowledge in a contemporary context.

     Likewise, Agronin talks about people in the ninth stage of life becoming “seers,” with “extraordinary vision and insight, although not for what will be but for what could be.” And he approvingly cites the example of the spiritual leader of “a close-knit group of Hasidic Jews,” a man with significant infirmities but “so revered by his followers that his very presence was transformative,” a man who “could still place his hands on a supplicant’s head and emote a blessing, leaving the person nearly ecstatic.” Some readers, however, may think this scene smacks of cultic adoration rather than a positive attitude toward old age – and certainly the response of the supplicants can be scientifically explained by the placebo effect, which often (although not necessarily always) comes into play with the laying-on of hands.

     Again and again, Agronin makes points about the positive elements associated with Erikson’s ninth stage, and again and again he brings his philosophical arguments down to earth by citing examples – both positive and negative – of people whose aging has gone very well and others whose older years have brought unhappiness and even clinical depression. Some of the latter are Agronin’s patients, and part of what he tries to do in The End of Old Age is to show how he managed to help them turn around their attitudes toward their older selves and thus turn around the negative elements of their lives. These are positive and often uplifting stories, although their usefulness will depend on the extent to which individual readers see themselves and their lives paralleling those of Agronin’s patients.

     Agronin eventually arrives at a prescriptive chapter called “Redefining and Re-Aging,” in which he recommends a five-step process of what he labels Reserve (“fully appreciate the scope of your wisdom”), Resilience, Reinvention, Legacy and Celebration – the last of these being done after “you’ve reexamined your own aging in a positive light.” This formulation can be a useful starting point for a better attitude toward aging, and the grids and charts that Agronin provides for each element make it easy to follow. What is not so easy is figuring out how to follow them if one is significantly compromised by the common (if scarcely inevitable) circumstances of old age – that is, by infirmities that may be physical, mental, emotional, psychological or some combination thereof. Readers who are essentially healthy and in command of their bodies and minds will draw a great deal of benefit from the positive thinking that underlies The End of Old Age. But neither this book nor any other can be reasonably expected to offer people with significant physical and/or mental compromises a reason to celebrate the exigencies of their daily lives.

(+++) PERSONAL EXPRESSIONS

Felipe Perez Santiago: Chamber Music. Navona. $14.99.

Rosewood Café: Music of Celso Machado, Paulinho da Vida, Pixinguinha, Ástor Piazzolla, and Jacob do Bandolim. Margaret Herlehy, oboe; David Newsam, guitar; Henrique Eisenmann, piano; Fernando Brandao, flute; Negah Santos, pandeiro. Big Round Records. $14.99.

Mark Volker: Three Quotations; Dust to Dust; Echoes of Yesterday; Young Prometheus. Navona. $14.99.

     Although contemporary music almost inevitably springs from personal experiences, there are times when the intensity of a personal connection is above and beyond what listeners are likely to anticipate when hearing a work. That is the case with Hospital Suite (2012) by Felipe Perez Santiago, played by the Onix Ensemble on a new Navona CD. Perez Santiago wrote the music while waiting for a considerable period at a hospital where both his mother and his former girlfriend happened to be convalescing at the same time. Although both recovered fully, this chamber suite is not at all the sickness-and-fighting-through-to-health sequence that listeners might expect from the title. Instead, it is something of a nonmedical person’s response to the words tossed about casually by medical personnel in a setting where they are comfortable and the listener is definitely not. The four movements are called “Suprarenal,” “Vesiculobiliar,” “Neuroma de Morton,” and “Neurocardiogénico,” surely among the most unusual movement titles in recent music. And the work itself speaks of both the confusion that terms like these engender in those unfamiliar with them, and of the emotional roller coaster that friends and relatives find themselves on when loved ones are hospitalized and there is nothing to do but wait for news of their condition – which, when it comes, is often delivered in nearly incomprehensible language. The suite manages to communicate all this within a more-or-less-classical form (opening movement, slow movement, scherzo-like movement, finale); but the music itself is very heavily jazz-influenced and, indeed, is closer to jazz than to classical models. The jazz feeling pervades this CD, despite the differences among the works. El Ansia (1997/2016), originally for string quartet, is first heard here in an arrangement for saxophone quartet and piano, then in its original version. The Anacrusax Saxophone Quartet performs it with the lilt and somewhat mysterious sound befitting a piece inspired by a vampire movie; the Apeiron String Quartet does a good job with the original and somewhat paler version. La Candesauria (2009), performed by Camerata Metropolitana, is a somewhat meandering piece, full of gestures in all directions. Pengamat Busan (2013), whose title is Indonesian for “Man Contemplating the Moon,” is based on a specific painting and is well-played by the Tamiya Ensemble, which commissioned it; it has attractive elements but is overly given to repetitiveness. Exoesqueleto (2014), another work played by the Anacrusax Saxophone Quartet, is particularly redolent of jazz; it does, however, somewhat overstay its welcome. Maniquí (1996), for clarinet (Ismael Sánchez) and piano (Abdel Hadi Sabag), takes the woodwind to the extremes of its range around a more-central piano part. And Mal Timing (2010), performed by Camerata Metropolitana, is a very short, encore-like piece with an interesting juxtaposition of percussion with the ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano. All the music here is nicely constructed and well thought out, and Perez Santiago handles the instruments skillfully – with Hospital Suite the standout composition on the disc.

     The standout work on a Big Round Records release titled Rosewood Café is Café 1930 by Ástor Piazzolla, and jazz is very much the order of the day throughout the recording. Of particular interest here is the instrumentation, which features Margaret Herlehy on oboe throughout the disc – the oboe scarcely being an instrument typically associated with music of this type. Much more common is the guitar, and indeed, eight of the nine works here feature it, with David Newsam offering strongly accented and idiomatic performances that complement those of Herlehy very well indeed. The one work here without guitar, Choro Negro by Paulinho da Viola and Fernando Costa, features Herlehy with pianist Henrique Eisenmann, who also shows strength in performance and a sure understanding of the music. Most other works on the CD are duets for oboe and guitar, but two are for small chamber ensemble: Nachele Tempo by Benedito Lacerda, Pixinguinha and Fabio Oliveira (for oboe, piano, guitar, flute and pandeiro – a hand-frame Brazilian drum), and Diabinho Maluco by Jacob do Bandolim (for oboe, guitar, flute and pandeiro). This last work makes a first-rate contrast to Piazzolla’s, which is inward-looking and has genuine depth of feeling: Diabinho Maluco is a bright, bouncy, almost swaggering Latin dance piece. The personal expressions in evidence on this recording are as much those of Herlehy and Newsam as they are those of the composers: most of the music other than Café 1930 and Diabinho Maluco is pleasant but rather conventional, offering touches of warmth and brightness in expected places but not striving for any particularly strong emotional connection. It is the way Herlehy and Newsam handle the material that makes the recording an intriguing and ultimately convincing one.

     Emotional connection is the avowed purpose of the major Mark Volker work on a new Navona CD: Young Prometheus, an eight-movement suite drawn from a ballet that in turn is a reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But the grand themes of the novel that led it to be subtitled “The Modern Prometheus” are nowhere present here: this is simply a story of bullying and of the difficulty of fitting into the modern world if one is young and deformed – the central character of the ballet is a disfigured middle-school student. The ballet characters are types, quite deliberately: only the protagonist has a name (inevitably, “Frank”), while the others are the Bully, the Cheerleader, the Jock, and so on. In the music, a chamber ensemble is used to characterize each individual. The ensemble consists of Carolyn Treybig, flute; Matthew Davich, clarinet; Alison Gooding Hoffman, violin; Stephen Drake, cello; and Kristian Klefstad, piano. The performance is fine, but the music, like the feel-good balletic work from which it is drawn, is somewhat obvious and superficial, as individual characters are limned by specific instruments and then combined in a section called “The Misfits” and, at the end, for an upbeat finale. The musical material is thin, but pleasant enough to hear. The three other works on the disc are quite different from Young Prometheus. The most-extended of them is Three Quotations, an attempt to illustrate and expand upon words by Robert Aitken, Sylvia Plath and – most interestingly – futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, authors of Future Shock. The first movement, “Morning Chorus,” offers typical contemporary scene-painting of birdsong; the second, “I Am,” is an unsurprising set of struggles and eventual resilience. The most interesting movement is the third, which is indeed called “Future Shock,” and which neatly depicts constant motion and change over an ostinato that propels the music strongly along a track that eventually leads to a driving, dramatic but ultimately unresolved conclusion. The performers here are John McMurtery, flute; Nobuko Igarashi, clarinet and bass clarinet; Daniel Gilbert, violin; Craig Hultgren, cello; and Adam Bowles, piano. The remaining two works on the CD are shorter and intended to be expressive in very different ways. Dust to Dust, for string quartet (Katelyn Westergard and Alicia Enstrom, violins; Jim Grosjean, viola; Emily Nelson, cello) is a bit of expressionism involving a specific painting and the notion of mortality – it is thus appropriately, well, dusty, with smeared and swooning textures from which bits of portentous sound emerge. Echoes of Yesterday is for solo clarinet (Davich) with interactive electronics: the clarinet’s sound is passed to computer software programmed to respond to specific portions of the score in specific ways. Like many pieces of this type, the work seems designed more as a how-clever-I-am piece than as one intended to evoke an emotional reaction from human listeners – who are, after all, considerably less predictable in their responsiveness than computer programs.

(++++) OUT AND ABOUT

Unplugged. By Steve Antony. Scholastic. $16.99.

Ava and the Rainbow (Who Stayed). By Ged Adamson. Harper. $17.99.

     Here are a couple of parables for our time, intended for ages 4-8: overt “message” books, but ones whose stories are told entertainingly enough so they do not become overly preachy. Unplugged is the story of – well, of Blip, who is apparently a girl (Steve Antony always uses the pronoun “she”), but who looks like an old-fashioned robot, with chunky grey body topped by a rectangular head on which big eyes and a smiling mouth appear in black and white. Blip is not quite a computer, since the story starts by showing how much she likes being plugged into a computer. But Blip is certainly enthralled by computers – although the activities she finds are of the old 8-bit variety (from the days of Pong, Space Invaders and the like), not the full-color, immersive games and scenes that confront computer users today. However, Blip has a great time being plugged in all day long: learning, playing games, dancing, and visiting “faraway places.” Blip’s computer-focused joy is shown in a dozen small drawings in which she expresses various forms of delight and interaction with the screen to which a cable connects her (no WiFi here). But one day, during a blackout, Blip trips over her connecting wire and tumbles down the stairs and out the door of what we now realize is a house – and suddenly she is in a world of color rather than black-and-white (Antony has been keeping all the computer interactions in the 8-bit age to maintain the black-and-white appearance of Blip’s life, despite its pleasures). Blip rolls quite a distance outdoors, down a hill and through a forest and into a river, eventually emerging in a pretty area, watched by a curious fawn, bunny and duckling. And now Blip interacts with them, doing exactly the same things she previously did with the computer’s images – learning, playing games, dancing and visiting faraway places. Here too the activities continue all day long, in 12 small scenes, but now everything is in color and involves Blip and her new animal friends. At day’s end, Blip and the animals head back toward Blip’s house, where Blip says good-bye at the front door (shedding a couple of on-screen tears); she walks upstairs and plugs into the computer again – this time with a flower in a small vase nearby. Now, however, Blip thinks during plug-in time about the fun she had outdoors, and Antony offers one more contrast between black-and-white and color illustrations before having Blip, at the end, unplug herself on purpose and head back to her friends. Unplugged is probably best for kids at the lower end of the intended 4-8 age range, because those at the upper end will immediately critique the "boring" black-and-white scenes and games that Blip enjoys and will know that today’s computers (including smartphones) offer stuff that is lots more interesting. Still, the notion that there is something rather dull about interacting only with a machine, on your own, instead of doing things with friends, comes through clearly in Unplugged – and offers parents some teachable moments to supplement those included by Antony in the book.

     The message is somewhat more subtle and a bit harder to communicate in Ged Adamson’s Ava and the Rainbow (Who Stayed), with the result that Adamson eventually states it straightforwardly. But first he weaves an intriguing tale of a little girl who adores rainbows, sees an especially beautiful one, and wishes it “could stay forever.” This wish comes true, but things do not go quite as Ava expects. At first the unexpected sight of a smiling rainbow (it has a little face beneath its innermost, violet arch) thrills and enchants Ava, and soon “people were arriving from far and wide” in Ava’s town to see the beautiful sight. But then things take a commercial turn, from ads promising “rainbow-tastic prices” to lots of “rainbow-themed souvenirs.” Undaunted, Ava spends a lot of time with the rainbow, talking to him and introducing her friends to him and singing to him and showing him her books and toys. Then the seasons change, and although the rainbow stays all through winter, by spring “people had gotten so used to the rainbow, sometimes they even forgot he was there.” Ava, of course, does not forget, but she sees rainbow-focused signage being removed, rainbow posters defaced, and eventually the rainbow itself becoming a place for postings and ads and cell-phone towers and all the detritus of modern life. Ava cannot understand how people could do this to something so special, until several people show up – not to see the rainbow but to look at a seldom-spotted bird – and one of them refers to the bird as “a rare and precious sight.” The rainbow hears this, and the next morning, it is gone. And Ava realizes that when a rainbow is “a rare and precious sight indeed,” it is loved and enjoyed for as long as it lasts; and it is better to see a rainbow now and then, for a short time, knowing that there will one day be another, than to have this bit of magic become commonplace and end up ignored. Here too is a teachable moment for parents and children: as Ava finds out, sometimes what makes a thing special is precisely the fact that it is not always there. The lesson is worth learning, and can easily be extended to many things in everyday life – which may make it a little easier to comfort kids who wish that something delightful, such as (perhaps) a beach vacation, could go on forever.

(++++) HELPING WITH FEW WORDS – OR MANY

I Walk with Vanessa: A Story about a Simple Act of Kindness. By Kerascoët (Sébastien Cosset and Marie Pommepuy). Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

Wordy Birdy. By Tammi Sauer. Illustrated by Dave Mottram. Doubleday. $16.99.

     Pantomime books – that is, wordless ones – are among the most difficult to write, and yes, they most certainly require writing even if they are essentially wordless. The French husband-and-wife team of Sébastien Cosset and Marie Pommepuy, using the nom de plume Kerascoët, uses pantomime very effectively in the service of a “message” book about bullying. In fact, the message comes across far more effectively in I Walk with Vanessa than it would in a word-filled book, where it could easily sound preachy and appear to be more a lecture than a story. I Walk with Vanessa, on the other hand, is a story, and a beautifully told one. Readers know Vanessa’s name only because of the book’s title, and never learn the names of the other children in the book at all. The story starts with Vanessa and her parents moving to a new house, continues with Vanessa being introduced in class, and shows the entirely expected difficulties that any “new kid” would have in adjusting to a different school in a different place. Vanessa sits apart as the other children work and play together, and starts her walk home alone as the other kids gather in groups, smiling and chattering to each other: even though no actual words are shown, the excellent illustrations show exactly what is going on. Then Vanessa encounters a boy who appears to be the class bully, puffing himself up and yelling at her for no reason whatsoever before stomping away down the street. One little girl, who has already noticed Vanessa during the school day, sees the bullying, watches Vanessa shed some tears as she runs the rest of the way home, and herself feels sad. This girl notices what house Vanessa goes into, and talks to three of her own friends about what happened – leaving all four kids downcast and dejected. The girl is clearly thinking about Vanessa all evening, even as her upbeat family goes through its usual routines. But at breakfast the next morning, the girl has an idea – her whole face seems to light up, in one of the best pictures in the book. She runs out the door with her backpack, but instead of heading for school, she goes to Vanessa’s house, takes her by the hand, and starts walking to school with her. And soon the two are joined by other kids, and more and more children, until a huge, happily bubbling crowd is escorting Vanessa to school – and the bully is nowhere to be seen in the group or the classroom. This is a lovely paean to the notion that it takes a village (or a school) to help, support and protect a victim of bullying (although unfortunately in real life, bullies do not just disappear this way). After the story, there are some words here, ones for children on helping kids who are bullied (“one small act of kindness can inspire more kind acts”) and ones for adults presenting and defining “some helpful words to use when talking about this book with children,” the list including “ally,” “brave,” “bystander,” “teasing” and more. A beautifully written – yes, written – book with a lovely presentation of a difficult subject, I Walk with Vanessa handles its tough topic sure-handedly and more effectively than do many books that are absolutely jam-packed with verbiage.

     On the other hand, kids given to too many words need help as well, even when a story uses a bird as a stand-in for a child. Wordy Birdy is the opposite of I Walk with Vanessa in its word use – there are so many words here that the story begins before the pages proper (that is, on the inside front cover), and does not end until after the last page has been turned (it continues onto the inside back cover). Tammi Sauer’s title character chitters and chatters from wake-up time to bedtime, unleashing a torrent of words that complement her multicolored plumage and the overall bright appearance she has in Dave Mottram’s lively illustrations. On and on Wordy Birdy goes, exclaiming nonstop about what she likes (“spaghetti and unicorns and library books and polka dots…”) and what she dislikes (“tall grass or turtlenecks or long lines or tuna salad…”), and sometimes asking an unending series of questions – whose answers she never learns, because she does not stop talking long enough to hear what anyone tells her. Wordy Birdy’s unending word flow becomes a problem for her three forest friends, Rabbit, Raccoon and Squirrel – all of whom are given distinctive personalities through Mottram’s art. When the book’s narrator says that “Wordy Birdy is not the world’s best listener,” the three object to that characterization, and the narrator has to change it to, “Wordy Birdy is terrible at listening.” And this becomes an issue when Wordy Birdy blissfully strolls into the deep woods, ignoring signs that warn of danger and paying no attention when Squirrel, Rabbit and Raccoon warn her to stop, go back, and finally, “Run for your life!” It turns out that there is a very large, very angry bear directly in Wordy Birdy’s path, and Wordy Birdy is – well, actually, she is rescued by her three friends, who band together (Mottram makes them look like the Three Musketeers) and get themselves and Wordy Birdy to safety. Now, none of this changes Wordy Birdy’s propensity for nonstop babbling most of the time – Sauer makes it clear that a bird does not change its plumage just like that! – but what does happen is that Wordy Birdy learns to listen some of the time, and that certainly represents progress. In other words, things are better at the end of the book than at the start – a worthy (or word-thy) outcome.

(++++) WORD LOVERS

Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen. By Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrations by Qin Leng. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Alabama Spitfire: The Story of Harper Lee and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” By Bethany Hegedus. Illustrated by Erin McGuire. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     Despite the very different times in which they lived and the very different lengths of their lives, Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Harper Lee (1926-2016) had some significant similarities. Both were writers above and beyond anything else – determined, from an early age, to put down on paper the events and people they observed around them. Both were realistic writers, not fantasists – something far more unusual in Austen’s case than in Lee’s, since in Austen’s time books about everyday life were not commonly written or read. And both were quiet about their personal lives, with neither marrying and neither known to have had serious long-term relationships (after Austen’s death, her sister, Cassandra, actually destroyed all letters that might have shed light on personal matters). Of course, in other ways Austen and Lee were quite different: simply on a literary level, Austen wrote six novels (and a seventh, early one was also found and eventually published); Lee wrote two (the second of which was essentially an early version of the one for which she is famous). And yet the adjectives “ordinary” and “extraordinary,” applied by Deborah Hopkinson to Austen, would apply equally well to Harper Lee as seen in Bethany Hegedus’ biography.

     Both these books are for ages 4-8, an early age for kids to be reading Austen – although within the age range in which some schools present Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The “story arc” used by Hopkinson and Hegedus is similar: both start by showing their subjects as children, looking for a connection with the targeted readership, and explore a bit of Austen’s and Lee’s lives before giving suitably abbreviated and simplified information on their novels. The ink-and-watercolor pastel illustrations by Qin Leng fit the time period of Hopkinson’s book well, and it is fun to follow the way some of them interact with the narrative – for instance, there is a cutaway view of Austen’s childhood house, showing her “six boisterous brothers” as well as parental areas and a book-stuffed library that, as Hopkinson explains several pages later, “boasted five hundred books (almost all of them by men)” and was Austen’s “classroom,” where she “devoured everything” but “loved novels best of all.” Austen’s entry into writing while still very young, her father’s gift to her of a “fine mahogany writing box,” and her decision “to hold up a mirror to the ordinary world” instead of writing far-fetched romances, are all presented here. So are her father’s ongoing support, her eventual publication of novels with title pages that “simply read ‘by a lady,’” and a quick connection with a simple page turn from Austen’s to the modern world – where an entire subway car is shown filled with riders who are all apparently reading Austen’s books. A timeline of Austen’s life follows the narrative, and at the very back of the book there are brief and very helpful summaries of all six of her novels published in her lifetime (although nothing on the posthumously published Lady Susan). The quotations from Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion are nicely chosen, offering a good sample of Austen’s style and helping young readers decide if they would like to try going through any of the novels in their entirety.

     Hegedus’ book takes place closer to our own time, and Harper Lee’s life connects more directly to that of modern young readers than does Jane Austen’s. But here too, the illustrations – Erin McGuire offers clean, Photoshopped digital ones – help bring out elements of the story of Lee’s early life. These include her admiration for her lawyer father (whom Lee watched in court “instead of going to the movies”), her early acquaintance and friendship with Truman Capote, the stories the two wrote together, and Lee’s college and post-college life after Capote moved to New York City. The turning point for Lee was being given a Christmas present in 1956: a year off from her job to write. Hegedus then moves into To Kill a Mockingbird, explaining how that year of writing was the genesis of the novel and how Lee’s own childhood permeates the work’s pages. The huge success of the book, and the unhappiness Lee felt at being hounded by reporters and others after it became a best-seller, are used to explain her becoming a recluse. Hegedus puts a positive spin on this, not wanting to complicate matters for a young audience: “She carved out a life of her own design.” And Hegedus omits other complexities of Lee’s life, such as her eventual estrangement from Capote and their later reconciliation, and the names of the people who funded Lee’s year of writing (Michael and Joy Brown are mentioned only in the Author’s Note after the main narrative). Lee’s other published work, Go Set a Watchman, also appears only in the Author’s Note. All this makes sense in a book for this age group. If there is a noticeable lack in Hegedus’ work, it is the absence of any quotations from To Kill a Mockingbird itself, or even a summary or partial summary of the novel – all Hegedus says is that it is “a story as satisfying as a serving of grits and gravy.” Of course, the novel is very widely available, and Hegedus does provide a selected bibliography and some suggested videos for young readers interested in more information about it and about Lee. But parents who know To Kill a Mockingbird may need to nudge young readers of Hegedus’ book a bit to get them interested in the famous novel as well as in the woman who wrote it.

(+++) BEING AT PEACE

A Peaceful Garden. By Lucy London. Pictures by Christa Pierce. Harper. $17.99.

Dear Girl,. By Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Paris Rosenthal. Illustrated by Holly Hatam. Harper. $17.99.

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Peaceful Leader. By Sarah Albee. Pictures by Chin Ko. Harper. $16.99.

     Peace means different things to different people, from “absence of war” to “inner calm.” This means that books for young readers can explore varying aspects of peace and peacefulness, offering different sorts of messages about quiet, serenity, and allied concepts. It also means authors can become a bit cloying when presenting their ideas. A Peaceful Garden will be a touch too sweet for some families, despite being well-intentioned from start to finish. There is no plot per se. Instead, Lucy London simply shows two cats digging a garden, with cute Christa Pierce illustrations to emphasize various points. London says “dig yourself a patch (soft soil is best – no clumps!),” and Pierce shows the cats digging and one of them picking up a smiling worm on a trowel and smiling back at it. London says, “A peaceful garden is for growing many things you might want to eat,” and continues in praise of carrots and peas, and then adds, “Lettuces are always lovely, don’t you think?” And Pierce shows the cats selecting seeds and digging holes in which to plant them. There are references to bees, butterflies, and blackbirds that enjoy things that grow in gardens, and how to attract some of these creatures, and London writes, “plook-plook-plook go the seeds. Very nice. Little paws can tuck them in.” Pierce shows the cats’ paws doing just that, and labeling the planted areas, and keeping everything watered because “water is important for growing things.” The narration continues at this level, which is more usually seen in board books than in ones intended, like A Peaceful Garden, for somewhat older readers. “What a pretty patch you’ve made,” London writes, and Pierce shows the garden growing extremely quickly – a touch of unreality there in what is otherwise a pretty good guide to growing flowers and vegetables. This is a sweet book that tips over into being a bit treacly: intended for ages 4-8, it will be most enjoyable for kids at the younger end of that age range.

     The same 4-8 age range is targeted by a book that stands as, among other things, a tribute to Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965-2017) and includes material both by her and by her daughter, Paris Rosenthal. The book is in the tradition of such Dr. Seuss works as Happy Birthday to You! and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! That is, it seems to be addressed to individual readers, telling each a story all his or her own rather than offering a more-general narrative. But this Rosenthal offering tries a little too hard, as evidenced by its title, Dear Girl, – in which the comma is, confusingly and unnecessarily, part of the title. The idea behind this is to make the book a series of notes to each girl reading the book (which is for girls only), with the totality adding up to, in the words that appear on the cover, “A celebration of wonderful, smart, beautiful you!” So one page starts, “Dear Girl, Look at yourself in the mirror.” Another begins, “Dear Girl, Do you know that there is no such thing as asking too many questions?” And another opens, “Dear Girl, Make your room awesome.” The intent is fine, but the execution is somewhat awkward, and the text has none of the charm of the words of Dr. Seuss (admittedly an unfair comparison: almost nothing does). Holly Hatam’s illustrations lighten and enlighten matters enjoyably: one entire wall is covered with excerpts from Alice in Wonderland, written directly on the wall itself (as if on Lewis Carroll wallpaper), and one girl’s room includes a poster of Amelia Earhart bearing the quote, “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” The intent of the book is to have girls feel good about themselves no matter what is going on, no matter what they are doing, no matter what feelings they may be having: “Dear Girl, Sometimes you just need a good cry.” The whole book is uplifting, determined to teach girls to be happy and at peace with themselves; and even though it pushes that uplift a bit too intensely, its heart is certainly in the right place. The best part of the book is the way Hatam’s work gently and effectively enlarges the text again and again. In one of the most telling illustrations, the text says, “Dear Girl, Find people like you,” and shows three girl soccer players of different races – while the next page, “Find people unlike you,” shows three non-soccer players (including a skateboarder and a painter) who are also of different races. This is a subtle and excellent way of indicating, without ever saying so directly, that “like” and “unlike” need have nothing at all to do with superficialities such as race or ethnicity.

     Of course, for many years – and even today – people have believed that race and ethnicity are what make people similar or different, and therefore justify different treatment (legal and otherwise) of those whose superficial appearance differs from that of the majority. In the United States, unequal treatment has been directed at all sorts of groups: Catholics, Native Americans, Orientals, Italians, Irish. But overt race-based separation in the past most directly hit African-Americans, and many in this group, which as a whole represents 13% of the current U.S. population, continue to accuse the nation of falling short when it comes to equal treatment. Those accusations in recent times have often been associated with violent protests, but stories such as that of Martin Luther King Jr. show that violence is not the best way to a better world. Sarah Albee’s very short book about King is at Level 2 in the “I Can Read!” series (“high-interest stories for developing readers”), but tries to go beyond the constraints of its format by keeping Albee’s narrative exceptionally short and including seven pages of a timeline and photographs at the back of the book. Albee bites off a bit more than she can chew here, reducing King’s story to very minimal length. She does hit several of the high points, though, and Chin Ko’s straightforward illustrations add to the hagiography of the text. The most telling points here are the ones of small things in King’s early life that, Albee suggests, helped form his eventual character, such as the time he “accidentally stepped on a white lady’s toe” and she “slapped him and called him a bad name,” but he “did not react with anger” because he “believed that bravery meant peacefully standing your ground.” Inevitably in a book of this type, this is a vast oversimplification – the consequences for young King would have been dire if he had reacted angrily – but the point is made that even as a child, King did not walk an angry or violent road. Martin Luther King Jr.: A Peaceful Leader is far too short and superficial to be more than a very basic introduction to King’s life and times, and 21^st-century children are sure to wonder why there was differing treatment, “in the United States in the 1950s,” of “black people and white people.” It is certainly true that that was quite a long time ago, in a society very different from today’s. But Albee’s book and its portrayal of the peaceful nature of King’s battle against a far more restrictive society than now exists may help contemporary children and their families put in perspective the ugly, violent response to real but far less pervasive instances of mistreatment 50 years after King’s death.

(++++) MUSIC AND LIFE, INTERMINGLED

Mozart: Sonatas for Violin and Piano, KV 296, 301-306, 376-380, 454, 481, 526 and 547. Tomás Cotik, violin; Tao Lin, piano. Centaur. $39.99 (4 CDs).

Polonaise-fantaisie: The Story of a Pianist. Inna Faliks, piano; Rebecca Mozo, narrator. Delos. $24.99 (2 CDs).

     Although all music springs from channeled creative impulses, the exact relationship between an individual piece and the circumstances of the composer’s life at the time the work was written are by no means generally clear. A lot of musicological exegesis tries to establish a level of clarity that is rarely convincing. Do Beethoven’s late quartets directly, in their extension of tonality and structure, reflect his deafness? Maybe. Can Mahler’s clearly autobiographical symphonies be matched to specific events in his life? Sometimes. Does the renunciation theme in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger clearly reflect the composer’s relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck? Perhaps. Is Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony a suicide note or an attempt to move into new symphonic realms, one cut short by his untimely death? Umm, well… Are all the elements of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte tied to Mozart’s Masonic membership, or only some? Hmm. The absence of definitive answers to so many questions like these does not make it any less tempting to search for connections between specific music and the situation under which it came into being. Extended surveys of similar works by a composer can be particularly enlightening in the search, even though they may not provide any conclusive findings. This is one thing that makes the four-CD Centaur recording of 16 of Mozart’s violin-and-piano sonatas so fine – in addition to the sensitivity of the performers and the excellence of their playing. The set is misleadingly labeled “complete,” but that is scarcely the case: Mozart wrote more than 30 sonatas for these instruments, including some early ones that should be played on baroque violin, some other early ones that are for violin or flute, and several that were left incomplete at Mozart’s death and were finished by Maximilian Stadler (best known nowadays for contributing one of the Diabelli waltz variations). The 16 played by Cotik and Lin, though, represent the mature, completed sonatas for violin and piano, and for this reason provide some interesting insight into Mozart’s life at the times he created the works. For example, the very last sonata, KV 547 in F, was specifically written for amateur performers, at a time (one of many) when Mozart needed money. Far greater than most music written for a quick buck (or quick Austrian florin), it is nevertheless a more-straightforward work than the other late violin-and-piano sonatas – indeed, simpler than a number of earlier ones heard here. To their credit, Cotik and Lin give even this lesser sonata a finely honed performance, one that does not overwhelm it – and they bring equal sensitivity to the other pieces here. These fall into two groups of six. The KV 301-306 group mostly includes two-movement works in the galant style, reflective of the influence of Haydn and J.C. Bach and showing the importance of those composers to Mozart’s stylistic development at this time. The most interesting of these is the only one of the 16 sonatas on these discs in a minor key: KV 301 in E minor. It reaches for profundity that it never quite attains, but Cotik and Lin allow its greater emotional reach to come forth without making the work seem deeper than it is. The second six-sonata group, KV 296 and 376-380, primarily includes three-movement works and shows Mozart at this time in his life moving into far greater expressiveness and an increasingly sure-handed blending of virtuosity with emotional communication. And then there are three later sonatas that clearly reflect significant biographical elements: KV 454 in B-flat, written to take advantage of a specific violinist’s penchant for expressive playing – and, also, written for performance in public;  KV 481 in E-flat, which looks both back (in quoting a previously composed Mass) and ahead (in using a theme that would appear in the Jupiter symphony); and KV 526 in A, which vastly expands the piano part and which has an intensity that may be connected to the recent death of the composer’s father. It is to Cotik’s and Lin’s credit that they individualize these sonatas while at the same time being sensitive to their groupings and, where appropriate, the circumstances of their composition – indeed, the performers are at times, if anything, a trifle too Romantic in their expressiveness in the later sonatas. The violin-and-piano sonatas as a group are among Mozart’s less-often-heard music, but this recording shows them not only worthy in their own right but also very distinctly (if scarcely perfectly) illustrative of Mozart’s biographical as well as compositional circumstances when he created the music.

     The blending of music and biography – in this case of the performer rather than any composer – is even clearer, in fact quite explicit, on a new two-CD Delos release called Polonaise-fantaisie: The Story of a Pianist. But the mixture here is less successful than is the Cotik/Lin presentation of Mozart, and indeed this (+++) recording is really a “celebrity profile” of pianist Inna Faliks – the musical focus is incidental to the biographical one, which is a rather upside-down arrangement except for listeners who are devoted fans of the Ukrainian-born performer. Faliks is a fine and sensitive pianist, but neither her personal experience (the words here are by Faliks herself, although spoken by Rebecca Mozo) nor her choice of music that is meaningful to her is particularly surprising or revelatory. Faliks’ fans will be interested in her impressions of Odessa, in her Aunt Dolly and Uncle Ilya, in her emigration to the United States, in how she met her future husband when both were children and re-encountered him later in life. But none of these events is especially distinctive from a biographical standpoint, and none of Faliks’ writing about them stands out in any way beyond the largely unsurprising personal observations she offers. Faliks’ story, including both the narrative and the music interspersed with it, runs an hour and 40 minutes, a near-operatic length for material that simply does not sustain at such length. As for the music itself, although all of it is well-played, it is such a mishmash of styles and so varied in interest that – while the hodgepodge certainly provides insight into Faliks’ taste – the material is simply unconvincing on a strictly musical basis. One bit of Bach from The Well-Tempered Clavier, one Mozart fantasia, a Tchaikovsky nocturne, three Gershwin preludes, two Liszt arrangements (of pieces by Chopin and Paganini), plus pieces by Rodion Shchedrin, Elliott Carter, Jan Freidlin and Harrison Birtwistle, all of them short – this is scarcely a musical mixture representative of anything beyond Faliks’ personal preferences. The result is that the music does not stand on its own – it simply reinforces the idea that this recording is by and about Faliks and intended for her devotees. Interestingly, the only substantial work here is the one that gives the production its title: Chopin’s Polonaise-fantaisie, Op. 61. And Faliks’ performance of this music is emotive, nuanced and altogether convincing. A release built around this sort of pianism, showcasing the musical abilities of the performer while perhaps delving briefly rather than extensively into her background, would have been much more appealing to a much wider audience than this presentation, in which the musical material largely fades into the background except as a way to highlight and focus on a musician who turns the limelight primarily on herself.

(+++) THE SALON OF TODAY

Third Coast Percussion: Paddle to the Sea. Third Coast Percussion. Cedille. $16.

Robert Morris: Mountain Steams; Mysterious Landscape. Robert Morris, laptop computer, fixed media and electroacoustics. Ravello. $14.99.

Shadow Etchings: New Music for Flute. Orlando Cela, flute. Ravello. $14.99.

Jason Tad Howard: Piano Sonata No. 2—Nine Short Shorts for Piano; Daniel Perttu: Sonata for Piano. Nancy Zipay DeSalvo, piano. Navona. $14.99.

     The salon music of old was, in effect, the elevator music of its time. Intended to remain in the background so aristocratic gatherings could have a pleasant sonic ambience when conversation flagged, this was generally unchallenging music that still has a place in gatherings today – for example, at weddings and conventions where a small ensemble offers live performances to which guests can listen if they choose and that they can ignore if they prefer. And salon music was by no means inevitably “bad” music: great composers, including Mozart and Haydn, wrote their fair share of it, and quite a few Romantic-era piano and chamber pieces fall into the category. Intentionally or not, modern composers also produce salon music from time to time: the minimalist works of Philip Glass and his followers fit the bill very often, although Glass et al. would scarcely describe them as “salon” pieces. A new Cedille release featuring the Third Coast Percussion ensemble shows how much care can be lavished on creating and performing modern salon music while still producing works that tend to fade into the background unless listeners try very hard to focus their attention on them. There is, in fact, some Glass here: the group intersperses its own arrangements of movements from Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia with other material. Also included here, also in interspersed form, are parts of Jacob Druckman’s solo-marimba Reflections on the Nature of Water. Third Coast Percussion cites the Glass and Druckman material as influential on its own composition, Paddle to the Sea, which is music for a children’s film and which is the primary work on the CD – and the only one played straight through rather than broken into segments. Another influence they mention and perform is a traditional Shona song, Chigwaya, in an arrangement by Zimbabwean Musekiwa Chingdoza. The Glass movements are arrangements, too, in their case by a Brazilian group called Uakti, of material originally created by Glass for piano and titled 12 Pieces for Ballet. And where do all the influences and arrangements take listeners? To a sound world that is pleasant, if scarcely compelling; to one where it is easy to imagine the sonic representation of water in various forms, even though there is little connection between specific movements and their putative titles. Thus, Druckman’s “Profound” and “Relentless” are interchangeable, Glass’s “Madeira River” could as well be his “Xingu River,” and there is little in the 10-movement Paddle to the Sea suite to distinguish “Flow” from “Open Water” from “Thaw” from “Release.” Not even “Niagara” sounds as one might expect. The homogeneity of the music itself occurs within exceptional heterogeneity of scoring: Third Coast Percussion’s skill lies in bringing out a very wide variety of percussive sounds both from individual instruments and from combinations of them. There is nothing especially noteworthy in any of the musical material on this disc, and it is quite easy to allow the whole disc to fade into the aural background, to emerge periodically when Third Coast Percussion offers a particularly felicitous touch in a performance of one track or another.

     Water is also a theme, and salon/background music a result, in two works by Robert Morris on a new Ravello CD. The water connection is explicit in Mountain Steams – there is even narration at the start, from a Zen Koan, to inform listeners that they are about to experience something liquid-sounding. Both in this work and in the very extended Mysterious Landscape, whose half-hour length seems interminable if listeners try to pay attention to the material instead of letting it float through the background, the material that is electronically manipulated by Morris is drawn from the natural world. Mountain Streams uses sounds of water moving in various forms and various venues to produce its effects, many of which are much like those to be heard if one pays close attention to a tabletop fountain or an unenhanced recording of actual water flow. Mysterious Landscape employs water sounds, too, along with those of birds, frogs, insects, mammals and wind, to produce an environment that is not so much mysterious as it is variegated and generally rather pleasantly unfocused. Listeners who concentrate on Morris’s work may soon find themselves drifting into sleep or at least inattention, and there is nothing wrong with that: this material is intended to comfort, quiet and lull, not to engage listeners’ thoughts or emotions in any significant way. That is why, despite the ultra-modern compositional and reproduction techniques, these works retain a direct tie to the salon music of centuries ago.

     Some contemporary composers incorporate what is essentially salon music into works that also include sit-up-and-take-notice elements. This is the case with some of the material on a new Ravello flute-music CD and a piano-focused one on the Navona label. The flute disc features excellent and highly adaptable playing by Orlando Cela in five pieces for solo flute: Le soupir du roseau dans les bras du vent by Jean-Patrick Besingrand, Variations on a Schenker Graph of Gesualdo by Robert Gross, Hang Down Your Head by Dana Kaufman, A Turning Inwards by Edward Maxwell Dulaney, and Self-Portrait by Ziteng Ye. The other two pieces on the CD expand the flute: Skiagrafies II by Stratis Minakakis includes Cela’s playing and the composer’s contribution of piano resonance, while Winter Variations by Lou Bunk has Cela playing alto flute and piccolo and accompanied by Sivan Etedgee on piano. The works have different provenances and reasons for being, of course: for example, Besingrand’s involves variations on Debussy’s Syrinx, Gross’s traces to a Gesualdo madrigal, and Kaufman’s variations are on an Appalachian folk song. And the rationale for the pieces can be quite complex, as is typical in much contemporary composition: for instance, Minakakis talks of two movements in his three-movement work as having melodic lines “whose geometry is liquefied by a multitude of ultramicrotonal inflections,” while Dulaney says his focus is “the liminality between becoming and being.” That is all well and good, but what the listener actually hears in much of this music is neither more nor less than varied flute sounds punctuated at times by some deliberately nonmusical elements (loud breathing, humming, vocalizing and subvocalizing), the totality tending to blend – much of the time, although not always – into a kind of aural soundscape that can easily be allowed to continue in the background while one focuses on something entirely different, and entirely nonmusical, at the same time.

     The mixture of salon/background and focused/foreground material appears as well, although to a lesser extent, in the piano sonatas played by Nancy Zipay DeSalvo. It is especially clear in Jason Tad Howard’s work, which includes eight very short snippets (two under one minute and six under two), plus a concluding four-minute overview/summation, all based on the pitch C – although it would be stretching matters to say that the sonata is “in the key of” C. The homogeneity of the movements’ tonal center tends to make the sections blend despite rhythmic differences. It is the “Pensive,” “Dolce e cantabile,” “Sempre cantabile e legato” and “Cantabile” sections that mostly align with a “background” feeling, their impressions broken up by a couple of “Agitato” segments that do insist on attentiveness; the final “Reconciliation” subsumes and expands elements of what has come before. Daniel Perttu’s sonata is more conventional, indeed traditional, in layout, in three movements marked “Allegro maestoso,” “Misterioso” and “Presto” – designations that are tied to those of past sonatas very closely indeed. And this is program music, the sonata as a whole supposed to reflect the mystery and mysticism of Stonehenge. Here there is little that invites or admits of inattention: whether the work succeeds in transmitting an impression of the impressiveness of the ancient stone circle is arguable, but certainly Perttu again and again requires listeners to pay attention to his musical argument – even if one does not know what the argument is about or see any direct Stonehenge connection (or know that there is supposed to be one). One might expect this sonata’s second movement to be quiet, contemplative and perhaps on the order of background music, but in fact Perttu alternates the more-restrained material here with some outbursts that come as a surprise each time they appear. It is actually the finale, which has elements of perpetuum mobile, that superficially seems most like old-style salon music, but here too Perttu continually introduces material that requires listeners to pay closer attention and not allow the music to become simply an element of the auditory background.