Something before bedtime. So I start off with Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a piece of music I'm still trying to learn to like, and follow that with a faceless Martinu piano concerto that might deserve a better listener than me, but my mind did wander a lot.

Then I put on Bartok's Divertimento for strings, and the difference is startling, It's a half-hour dialogue between string orchestra and string quintet, and if drawings were sound, this would be a large-scale drawing in carbon, charcoal, and graphite pencils: velvety blacks, mysterious grays, and silvery highlights that shift and sparkle amidst the darkness. It's music that no one else could've written, a sound world of Bartok's own, and it all but embarrasses the Martinu out of existence.

It put me in a good mood. Funny how music can do that.