Music to mine the mind, pierce the heart and awaken the soul…

You know how you can see or hear something countless times and then one day you actually experience it?

It’s funny how some things come to one’s attention. Sometimes it takes another to point something out.

Sometimes it takes a parrot.

I have to admit that the revolutionary music of the 60’s and 70’s pretty much obscured other music for me. It is true that I played violin in my school orchestra and felt a puppy love for the classical music we played, but my true love has always been “classic rock.” Okay. There I’ve said it. So I can now tell you that some great music I have taken for granted and has remained in the periphery of my consciousness. Like Beethoven. It’s always been there in the background, like elevator music, droning away - pretty sounds and chords plucking at the head, but not quite at the heartstrings.

Not as an aside, I was reading “Great House” by Nicole Krauss (as an aside, I totally fell in love with her quirky characters and affecting prose in “The History of Love”), where she mentions the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132. I depend on the authority of seriously deep thinkers, like Nicole, for tips like this. I consulted my computer in the room where Pee Jay (my parrot) often waits for me to quell his temperamental outbursts. Usually I fail.

I was hopeful. Together we listened. Of course, as many of you undoubtedly know and would agree, the movement, in Nicole’s words “…charred the landscape of all human feeling.”

Well, evidently it works on animals, too. Pee Jay happily chirped along while I was treated to the kind of emotion only certain masters, like Beethoven and Krauss, can evoke. It has become number one on our Classical Hit Parade. Who can argue with an ornery parrot? He’s a tough bird to please.