Music For Basset Hounds

When I was a child I was required to practice the  piano for an hour--and at certain points two hours--a day. This strictly enforced practice schedule was usually procrastinated till the end of the day, when there were no more excuses and bedtime loomed in the near future. Of course, this was exactly the way my dad liked it, who often laid down at the far end of the baby grand and listened to the full hour or two of practice. Much to his chagrin, however, not too long after I began learning the piano my parents got me a basset hound puppy for my birthday, and she too liked to participate in the hour or two of music. Now, with him on the floor it was a hard choice between sitting and listening quietly and sticking her face in his in order to gain attention--because negative attention was apparently better than no attention.

At the time I don’t think any of us realized that Daphne listened to music. But when my dad finally relinquished his position on the floor Daphne began sitting by the piano whenever I played, a rare, self imposed exile from my mom’s side. At various points in her life when Daphne was sick or recovering from surgery I would be asked to play the piano, and without fail she would lie down. Sometimes she even sat on the pedals, 

which limited what I could practice. At the time I took it for granted that my dog enjoyed classical music, and it certainly never occurred to me to ask why. She did and that was enough.

The second chapter of Elizabeth Grosz’s chaos, territory, art, deleuze and the framing of the earth has forced me to revisit those moments by the piano, and further brought to mind a short story “Music for Chameleons” by Truman Capote. This story is mostly a conversation between Capote and a woman he is interviewing--at the time when he was exploring what he termed “the nonfiction novel”--culminating in a concluding scene where the woman he is interviewing plays the piano, and a group of chameleons line up along her terrace to listen to the song, as they apparently did any time she played. When I read this story I didn’t make the connection between Daphne and the chameleons, and I frequently wondered if it was true. I loved the ending of the story, that he’d name an entire collection of short stories after this one,

and what the ending suggested about the human connection to the animal. But I never fully believed in it.

What we learn in Elizabeth Grosz’s book is that the human, the animal, and the earth intertwine in art--musical, architectural, any kind of art, that art can no longer be taken for a humanizing pursuit, and instead must be understood as some sort of universalizing pursuit, or a chaoticizing pursuit insofar as chaos serves to form unexpected yet fully possibly connections. So that it is no longer surprising that the chameleons come to the terrace in Capote’s short story, nor is it surprising that my dog listened to our piano--though, not the radio. She did jump the first time I turned my iPod on around her, for what that’s worth, so she was always responding to sound and music. In fact, her consistent response to music throughout her life should have been a sign that her “deafness” when being called was feigned.