MORE TEAKETTLE, MAESTRO?

After forty years of coming home from a day of teaching to face the immediate challenge of putting supper on the table for our family, Caryl was only too happy to relinquish that task—about ten years ago—when I took to cooking as kind of a hobby. Now in retirement, I find it very satisfying to see her actually sitting down, reading or working a crossword, while I busy myself in the kitchen.

For me, one of the best parts of fixing a meal is listening to music while I’m cooking. And it has to be loud, or, should I say, of appropriate volume. My theory is that the music

My little Sony kitchen speakers can really
pump out the sound!

coming from the set of Sony bookcase speakers that I’ve put in the space above the kitchen cabinets should be at least as loud as what one would hear in a symphony hall or honky-tonk bar. 

One day last week I had just downloaded a new recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony and was using my supper prep time for its first listen. I punched “play” on my iPhone music app, and as the tremendous sounds of the Eleventh filled the kitchen with the cacophony of the 1905 Russian Revolution, I turned to my cutting board. As the music built in tension and sonority, I set my knife down and turned up the volume just a bit. My eyes might even have been glistening a little to the thrill of it all, when my reverie was rudely interrupted: Caryl, standing in the doorway, finger poked in the page of the book she was holding, “Does it have to be so loud?!” she shouted. I started to reply, “Have I ever told you my theory about how music should be loud enough…,” “WHAT?...” she shouted, cupping her ear. “MY THEORY…” I started again. “Oh, never mind, “ I said in something of a huff, “I can listen on my headphones.” (Despite my sweet, husbandly description, above, I actually didn’t realize that she was sitting in the next room, reading.)

Caryl returned to the living room and her book, I plugged in the headphones and turned again to the tasks of chopping, dicing, boiling water, and preparing the spices. The preparations were coming along nicely when Shostakovich got to the great second movement, the Allegro: “The Ninth of January.” That rapid, repeating gunfire assault: Staccato snare drums at full volume! The shrieking violins were the screams of the innocent protesters under attack. Once again, I put down my ladle and stared off into a kind of musical-historical haze. Once again, I was wrenched back into the now: Caryl, at the doorway: “WHAT IN THE WORLD…?!!!”

“But,” I started to say, “I’m wearing my headpho…” when, at that instant, I became aware that the teakettle was fuming at full steam about eighteen inches away from me. In that same instant, I realized that it had been screeching at full throat for about three minutes! “WHAT IN THE WORLD…?!!!”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, as I took off the headphones and removed the kettle from the heat. And then I explained, “You know what’s funny? It’s not that I didn’t hear the teakettle. I heard it—and I thought it was part of the symphony! It fit right in! Pretty funny, huh?”  Then we both had a good laugh. At least I think Caryl was laughing as she turned once again into the living room. I know I saw her head shaking.

In my defense, dear Reader, I urge you to listen to this movement, the Allegro from the Shostakovich 11^th. If you want to get right to it, you can start at about minute 14. But you must listen loud—loud enough so that a tea kettle at full throttle will sound like part of the ensemble, subtle as a flute.

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Dmitri Shostakovich, 1906~1975