What Bees Like

What are Proles? asked Pliny the Elder, after reading my blog about Shostakovich.

Plebs, I said.

Aah! said Pliny. Now I understand.

What do you understand?

I understand you were gently hinting you and your companions could also be seen as Proles.

Well spotted Pliny. I am a bit of a Prole. But equally I do like Shostakovich. I especially like that Jewish Death Dance, in his Piano Trio Number 2. It's mesmerising...... and once you've heard it, you hear it in everything he wrote.

Surely not. He couldn't have been very talented if that were the case.

It's just in certain combinations of notes. It's like his handwriting. Anyway death and transfiguration are common themes in music, nearly as common as water.

Yes I suppose that they are. Although in my day musical themes were more concerned with war, or Bacchic rites, or keeping control of bees.

Well, it amounts to the same thing, I said.

Does it? said Pliny, looking doubtful. So what was that about water?

Music sounds like water unless it's specifically meant not to, I said.

Nonsense! Prove it, said Pliny.

I nearly always think music sounds like water. It's a fall back position. Because music suggests the movement of water in so many different ways. I should know I've heard a great deal of it over the years. Splashing, lots of high tinkly notes; flowing, joined up notes; fish, wiggly notes; babbling brook, wiggly notes with tinkles; the sea, rising and falling notes, repeated; the deep scary sea, swelling notes ; a storm, thunderous rolls and claps, on the bass and tympani.

You haven't proved a thing, said Pliny. But you know, that was exactly the sort of music we used on the bees. It put them in a trance. Bees like music.

That would be because bees like water.