“Music is connected to everything.” That’s our motto at the Professor Carol office and it proved a good one yesterday.
I came home to find a fist-sized tarantula in my kitchen, perched at a 60° angle in front of the refrigerator. Okay, where’s the musical connection?
Tarantula’s are named after a southern Italian town Taranto which lent its name to a tradition of furious dancing said to dispel venom from a deadly spider bite. Or so the local people believed, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fiddlers and pipers knew a good opportunity when they saw it, and began to accompany this dancing. Voilà—the birth of the tarantella.
Samuel Pepys’ diary entry from 1662 immortalized the relationship between spider and music:
. . . all the harvest long . . . there are fiddlers go up and down every where [sic] in expectation of being hired by those that are stung.
The spider in question during this epidemic was likely a black widow, but never mind. A good story is a good story.
By the 19th century, the high-energy tarantella inspired composers like Chopin and Liszt. Elegant ladies in Parisian saloons smiled knowingly at the tarantella’s origins, but their enthusiasm was whipped up more by the players’ fingers flying across the fingerboard or keyboard.
My favorite tarantella comes not from the “great Masters” but from the 1954 musical Peter Pan. If you know this Broadway production, you will recall the scene where magnificent Cyril Ritchard (Captain Hook) pondered the tune his little band of pirates should play to assuage his temper. He strokes his chin and requests a tarentella:
Me thinks I see a spark, a gleam, a glimmer of a plan
In which perhaps it may redeem me honor as a man. . . .
With its final tag
To the ship, to the ship, to the ship. . . .
I grew up counting the days til Mary Martin‘s Peter Pan was aired once a year on TV (black and white, of course). At some point I received a recording of the s soundtrack (in the relatively new 33 LP format), filled with the songs and precious bits of dialogue. I wore it out.
So what about my kitchen tarantula?
I’ve come a long way from 2005 when the one I first encountered in 2005 crawled across my shoe in the driveway. My response was not charitable and I sent it to la-la-land. On hearing my proud narration, our rancher-neighbor chastised me: “Tarantulas don’t hurt anybody.” And he added, “Some folks say it’s bad luck to kill a tarantula.”
Great. I hung my head and swore to respect the next tarantula—the one in my kitchen. I found the dust mop, and gave it a gentle scoot out the door, singing “To the ship, to the ship” as it skittered across the patio.
It’s harder to come up with connections between music and scorpions, but I’ll work on it.
Image: Pip_Wilson