The way of things
Music for a Garrulous Grumpy Gato
Pets can teach many lessons: how to be patient, how to love, how to trust, how to show up every day. They can open doorways to an otherwise-unexpressed goofiness and creativity. They teach us how to extend empathy and person-ness to a being who is not-human, a training ground for doing the same towards humans who are unlike us. I was once ridiculed for treating a young child like our family dog. It cut deeply—because I accorded as much respect to the dog as to a person.
Pets can also teach us how to say goodbye. And how to live better before we have to.
I grew up a dog person. When my girlfriend moved in with me last year, she brought her cat Dapper Dan to live with us. Wary of the aloofness cats, I mostly kept my distance, which fortuitously allowed Dapper the space to get comfortable with me and approach on his own. I grew to enjoy his gruff but affable demeanor; he was a very vocal guy and always greeted you verbally when you walked into the same room he was in.
On his side of things, he wasn’t so sure about my saxophone playing and would often run and hide when I started to make noise. But eventually he got so comfortable he would lay on the couch near me while I’d practiced, becoming a discerning listener, chiming in with a grunt when my intonation was awry or my vibrato’s amplitude was becoming a tad too French. He once sat through a full 2-hour saxophone quartet rehearsal a half a room away, asleep the entire time.
Many of the lessons pets provide come as they leave or after they are gone. This past Thursday morning, Dapper Dan was back to back with me sitting on the floor as we each contemplated our favorite things: he the sunlight with his eyes half-closed; me the implied polyphony in a Bach Partita. Come evening, he was suddenly, devastatingly, irretrievably no longer here.
Though he’d been living with me less than a year, it felt like our home’s spirit, its latent animacy—the potential that he could be anywhere or suddenly enter any room and it would be that much more alive—had been snuffed out. An unremitting emotional heaviness settled on the household; my girlfriend and I spent many minutes aimlessly shuffling room to room as if physically stunned. His absence viscerally brought home what we’re all told but don’t always know: what makes spaces, concepts, content, music, life, and anything else matter is not the forms themselves, but who and what is moving through them or in them.
As ever, music is a response to life and can be a way to process what’s happening. I wrote all this as program notes to accompany the first sketch of a piece I wrote less than 24 hours after Dapper Dan’s passing. It will eventually contain two parts: an expression of his character and the process of losing him. The section on loss is almost totally realized, while the half illustrating him in full flush only exists as a couple loosely connected musical ideas not fit to share; he’s too painfully proximate at the same time that he’s completely unreachable to consider setting him back to life in music. And I can’t see the full lesson yet; mostly things are miserable; much too close and too soon. Even so, the “loss” music I’ve written mostly evokes the Seussian “don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened”, a smile or laugh through tears, a strong ray of horizontal sunlight beneath a sky of dark clouds.
Early on in meeting Dapper, I fashioned a derisive little tune I would sing to/at him, adjusting the lyrics according to my or his perceived mood—a jauntily stylized version of the horn solo that opens Brahms’ second piano concerto that humorously undermines the nobility of the original—which you’ll hear at the beginning of my piece, too, once the whole thing is finished.
This, in a few guises, becomes the primary material of the piece.
I’ll leave you with a mockup of the second half, scored for saxophone quartet for now. It’s not sophisticated, there are musical cliches, it came out all at once. I’m mostly sharing this to provide permission to make something for an audience of one, or none, or for someone who can no long hear it. And then don’t be like me; be like Kurt Vonnegut and don’t share it, because the magic has already happened:
Even so, hopefully this leaves you with a desire to cherish and remember those important to you, too—and continue on your own path of becoming.
A little listener’s guide—you’ll hear:
First, a stilted, uneven section that mirrors his heavy and often uneven tread as he made his way around the house. The stilted awkwardness is also evocative of the unpleasant anticipation of sitting in the pet hospital lobby waiting for news when you already knew
Second, saying goodbye, joking sadly, his breathing and heart beat slowing and slowing. And then stopping, which moves directly into…
Third, powerful, heartfelt, upward-surging music, as he’s literally and figuratively carried off—inexorable passing of time and life
Fourth, left with wisps and memories.