About a Rat and Music

 Some names a writer is best advised to avoid. You don’t write a line like “I’m Bill Bailey,” unless you want the audience to think, “Won’t you come home?”

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

So a fish has no affection, eh? He does not attach himself, I suppose you mean, to some particular human being and hang on to the bitter end, like the Canary and the Airedale and the people you used to know in Ashtabula. Well, I’d call that a break. Most fish, it is true, are not very responsive. You never know real trouble until you find one that is.

— Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct

What are the chances?—The day before yesterday in a Lyft vehicle I met a Syrian-American who grew up playing the cello (hold onto that thought) who told me of the magnificent medieval scholar Al-Farabi (if you scroll down the Wikipedia article, you will see that the USSR issued a six-kopeck stamp commemorating the 1100th anniversary of his birth in 1975. My driver was a retired commercial pilot. He explained that the name dervies from rat and father. He told me that the illustrious Al-Farabi was an inventor of music notation, and that this is related to his name, the story being that a rat came into his study, and the tapping of the rat’s feet gave him the idea of how to notate music. The real What are the chances? aspect is: As I had recently re-watched Timothy Dalton in Living Daylights, I asked my new friend if he knew the movie, and he did (wait for it) I mentioned that one thing that always tickles me about that movie is that Bond attends a concert, and cellist Kara Milový (wrong grammatical gender, by the way) is in the orchestra which is playing Mozart’s great g minor Symphony, K. 550. And the intermission is (at the end of the symphony? No! After the first movement.) You, Gentle Reader, get it, and I get it. But I chanced to be in a ride-share with a driver who got it.

Am I only now discovering, after all these years, that Applied Music may essentially be a branch of Chaos Theory? Then let me be grateful that I have me so trusty a team. For after all, it was my colleagues who kept the concept of the Henning Ensemble alive while I was in rehab following my stroke. At yesterday’s excellent rehearsal, my bandmates felt that What I do is not so much Composition, as Chaos Theory ought to be a T-shirt.