WEBVTT

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"What Music Measures."

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This doesn't mention
it in the poem,

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but the boy who's playing
the fiddle in this,

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who I can't see at
this moment here,

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was about 11 or 12 years old.

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And he's-- I didn't
know it at the time,

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but he was practicing
his fiddle.

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This is up in Bread
Loaf, Vermont.

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And it was just beautiful.

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And later that night, he
played for us with his dad

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accompanying him
on something else.

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And he's known in those
parts as a prodigy.

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"What Music Measures."

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"A meadow recently
mown and vast.

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I couldn't see the
end of it, and I

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can't say the exact moment
because I was daydreaming

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when the fiddle started up, mid
tune of an Appalachian tune.

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I couldn't see where
it was coming from,

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neither instrument nor player.

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I could hear it.

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But as soon as it was
swallowed by my ears,

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it was gone to
wherever in the mind

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music goes as one
passage replaces another,

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note after note, lively, as they
first burst up from the fiddle.

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And as they rose,
they diminished,

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and as beauty has its limits,
disappeared without an echo

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to remember them by.

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When the music stopped,
meadow, sky, all of it

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seemed dull without whatever
it was the music had measured."