Musical mac and cheese

Stumbling out of an Airbus 330 after an eight-hour red-eye flight from Honolulu to Minneapolis at 5:30 this morning, I was bleary-eyed, comatose and cranky. I'm not a good flier to begin with, but the overnight thing compounds problems because I can't sleep on planes, leaving me completely useless the day I arrive (although I did manage to get through a vocal/choral rehearsal this evening for the Broadway show tomorrow). Exiting the plane, I made my way to the ladies room in the terminal in a miserable mood.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of frequenting the facilities at MSP, let me say that I always look forward to hearing the music they play in them, which is invariably classical and runs the gamut from Haydn trumpet concertos to Debussy piano pieces. I find it a little odd that it's the only place in the terminal in which continuous classical music is played, but far be it for me to complain - and, besides, it kinda classes up the joint a bit, you know? So, this morning, at 5:40-ish a.m., the selection playing in the ladies room in the G terminal was Dvorak's String Serenade.

More specifically, it was the first movement of the String Serenade, which I find to be one of the more sublime creations on earth, and it's one of those pieces that invariably makes me smile. There's something about the melody that unknots the tension I carry between my shoulder blades, something that lets me breathe a bit easier. It's a piece which, for me, is tremendously comforting, and it did wonders in alleviating by crabby mood this morning.

I imagine we all have "comfort music", music we wrap ourselves with in times of stress or distress, music that we turn to time and again to calm us with its familiarity. For me, Chopin Marzurkas are the musical equivalent of comfort food; I'm almost always in the mood for them, they are somehow filling and deeply satisfying, and they're nice to curl up with on a cold night. When I'm having an existential crisis, the 2nd movement of Brahms's Third Symphony always seems to set me to rights. And for those days I'm feeling particularly gloomy and isolated, anything by Bach does the trick - I'm not quite sure how it works, but when I listen to Bach I no longer feel utterly alone in the world.