Plainsong v 2

Years ago, when I was at Rice, I had a roommate named Fred who was very musical — he played the piano and guitar and had a powerful but sweet tenor voice. One evening, he claimed to me that he could sing anything, absolutely anything. I challenged him and offered a textbook øn differential equations. He opened it, and immediately began to sing the text beautifully, turning phrases like: ” the partial of y with respect to the partial of x” into lovely sounds.

I thought of Fred when I wrote the...