Musically Speaking

I took a boat ride with the ghost of the composer Igor Stravinsky.

I said, “When I was an infant, my parents gave me a Sesame Street vibraphone. I used to bang away on it, and it must have sounded awful. I don’t know how my parents survived.”

Stravinsky said, “Everyone of us is born with innate musical talents. We express them as different tonal progressions of nature. A cacophony is simply an aspect of consciousness singing.”

A duck approached our boat. The duck quacked away.

Stravinsky said, “I must be honest, I abhor quacking.”

I said, “But you said that every sound is a note in the Universal Symphony.”

Stravinsky said, “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”