Sense and Sensibility

 

Though he hasn't been evaluated or diagnosed yet, my son's teacher at preschool recently suggested that he exhibits behaviors that may be consistent with a sensory processing disorder.  I wasn't alarmed by this, since he is a bit quirky, and since I know several children who have received this diagnosis and received treatment for it.  When I plunged into the waters of the primary source of all knowledge -- Google -- and found this checklist, however, I wondered if I didn't have it, too, especially in the area of hypersensitivity to sound.

As a child, I couldn't stand to watch t.v., a habit that's stuck with me, because I found the low-pitched buzz that the television made acutely disturbing.  As a parent, I physically cringe and do cartoon-like double-takes at every normal-household-decibel-level whine and shout, and even at the ringing of the telephone, until, by the end of some days, I am in the blackest of noise-induced moods.  When I met my husband, I was intensely drawn to him, among other reasons, for the beauty of his speaking voice, and rejected another suitor around the same time because (among other reasons) there was something about his voice that bothered me (based on his later denunciation of me, this seems not to have been a bad decision).  In spite of the fact that I'm a professional musician, I often find it difficult and unpleasant to listen to music, because it absorbs my attention so completely that I feel as if I become the slave of what I'm hearing, right down to my very cells.  And music of all kinds makes me weep (interestingly, my sister, the only one of us four siblings who did not become a professional musician, exhibited this same propensity as a baby).  And don't get me started on the sense of smell. 

My son has been telling me lately, "Mommy, we are twins," which I chalked up to your common house-and-garden Oedipal complex, but perhaps he's more right than he realizes.  My friend H., disability activist and author of the now-defunct blog Retired Waif (as well as one of the most brilliant and fascinating people I know), once guffawed loudly when I referred to myself as "neurotypical," and replied, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, "Oh right, Pentimento, you are the poster girl for neurotypicality."  I wonder now if I would have made entirely different choices in my life if I had been the kind of person who was not wholly unsettled by the hum of a television.

And, come to think of it, when M. gave me a copy of Remembrance of Things Past years ago, and told me that Proust had lived in a cork-lined room on coffee brewed with milk, I found myself nodding my head in total sympathy with the neurasthenic author; it sounded like a good kind of life to me. 

Hearing the Past

Some clever soul has written a Facebook program called "Musicology is Awesome," which allows musicologically-inclined Facebook users to send gifts like "Challenging Austro-Germanic Musical Hegemony," "That Dreaded Cultural Theory Reading Assignment," and "Illegible Cantata Manuscript" to their friends, who will only find these gifts funny if they're also musicologists.

Up until about thirty years ago, musicology was Austro-Germanic Musical Hegemony and Illegible Cantata Manuscripts, but, since the advent of the "new musicology," its focus has widened to embrace many musics (the new-musicological noun of choice), and it has become largely driven by Dreaded Cultural Theory. There are both good and bad aspects to this gradual transformation of a formerly stuffy discipline: among the bad are an overreliance on unconvincing post-structuralist theory and jargon, and tediously long articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, but among the good are the expansion of the canon of musical repertoire for serious scholarly study to include some wonderfully worthy genres that would have been laughed at thirty years ago. Also among the good (depending on how you look at it) is the fact that not everyone has to deal with Illegible Cantata Manuscripts anymore. Virtually all of the lost medieval and Renaissance manuscripts have been found (and their finding has been the basis of many a music scholar's career), which means that musicologists have to find other things to do, and there are lots of other things.

The bulk of my musical work as both performer and scholar has been in nineteenth-century music. It's great fun, if you're so inclined, to do research in the era known as "the long nineteenth century" (considered roughly to span the years between 1789 and 1914): documentary sources are numerous and well-preserved, and it's fascinating to peer into an era that, with the exception of advances in technology, was so strikingly similar to our own. In terms of performance practice, there is ample documentation in sound from the early days of recording, as well as notebooks, diaries, and musical sketches by composers and performers, as well as letters and reviews, that enable us to construct a reasonable notion of how nineteeth-century music sounded in its own day (this is not the case with, say, early music, whose performances, many of which strive for historical verisimillitude, are largely based on unverifiable conjecture about the performance practices of the day). We know, for instance, that Rossini hated it when singers interpolated notes above high C into his arias: he called this practice "singing in hair voice" (voce di capelli). And we can guess at the ornamentation style of the bel canto era from the earliest extant recordings, including this one by soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, which most modern connoisseurs would find tacky, if not cheeky. And we can wonder at the tempo and technique employed by the great Josef Joachim, friend and colleague of Johannes Brahms.

Unlike her interpretive style, Luisa Tetrazzini's vocal technique is not appreciably different from that used by singers today. But Joachim's extraordinarily pure tone and eschewing of vibrato are a different story. People just don't play the violin like that today, which indicates that not only music, and but also culture itself, were perceived differently a hundred years ago.

But analyze as we might, the one thing that we can never really know is what the world sounded like in the nineteenth century. What was it like to live at a time when the sounds of the countryside were gradually and then definitively supplanted by the cacophonous din of the city? What was it like when the first inventions for the amplification and transmission of sound -- the microphone, telegraph, gramophone -- were introduced? How did people hear the world before and after these new technologies? And how does our own hearing differ from that of our near ancestors?

In Brahms's day, the contralto was a common female voice type. He wrote his Alto Rhapsody for the great contralto Pauline Viardot, the younger sister of the great contralto Maria Malibran, and he wrote many of his most beautiful songs for the contralto Amalie Joachim, wife of the violinist, including the two op. 91 songs for alto, piano, and viola. But the contralto voice is virtually unknown now. Is the reason for its disappearance to be found in the way we hear the world?

To be sure, there are a few exceptional contraltos singing today, but they can be counted on one hand, and our age has a marked preference for higher, lighter voices in both women and men: witness the enduring popularity of soubrette-type sopranos like Kathleen Battle, Barbara Bonney, Anna Netrebko, and Dawn Upshaw (though, admittedly, Upshaw has expanded her repertoire far beyond what is typically sung by others in her vocal category), and the dubious rise of the countertenor over the past fifteen or so years. Is the shift away from darker to lighter voices a sign of progress or of a deficiency in our culture?

I'm inclined to think the latter. The virtual disappearance of the contralto voice -- deep, dark, womanly -- is, I think, like the disappearance of the blackbird from mid-nineteenth-century London, one of many small but sad outcomes of the stepped-up mechanization of modern life.

Here's a stirring example of what we've lost. Marian Anderson is like a vocal version of Joachim's violin: pure and radiant.

(Above: Brahms taking a walk, Vienna, c. 1880s.)

The Binding of Isaac and the Problem of Happiness

In the first reading for Mass yesterday, God famously puts Abraham to the test (Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18). I sat in the pew for a long time after the end of Mass trying to puzzle this one out. Why would God, who abhors human sacrifice, compel Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac -- the child of destiny whose descendants God had promised would be more numerous than the stars of the sky?

We have come to think of Isaac as a young boy, but, according to ancient interpretation, he was in fact a grown man who, along with his father, dutifully obeyed the command of the Lord and allowed himself to be bound and led willingly to the holocaust. As Christians, we see the Abraham-Isaac dyad as a type, a prefiguring, of God's later sacrifice of His only son. We know God's later sacrifice too to be sui generis, unique in history, and yet it happens every day in bloodless form in the Masses that are said upon all the millions of altars throughout the world. Can we understand God's own sacrifice, happening both in time and in eternity, as therefore in some sense coming before Abraham's test, and also as co-existing in time with it?

It has seemed to me in observing the lives of some very holy people that God has sometimes asked them for what they love the most dearly. Again, I have to wonder why. The testimonies of priests and religious whom I know suggests that they are happy; that is, that only after giving up the fulfillments, both real and tenuous, of the wordly life have they been able to find happiness. Does this mean that, after giving up what God wants of us, we will be happy? I've never been convinced that living happily in this life is part of God's divine plan for His people. But if we are not happy, how can we serve Him? As the Psalmist asks, "Can the dust praise you?" How could Abraham fulfill his destiny if God took from him the only thing that had meaning and value for him -- that is, the only thing after God? And it is not any generic taking-away; God told Abraham to slay his son with his own hand.

The Binding of Isaac is a radical, shocking text, and I'm not entirely sure what it means. One thing that strikes me about it, though, is Abraham's attentive listening to the voice of God. When God and "the Lord's messenger" call to him, he answers, "Here I am!" with alacrity. Maimonides suggested that Abraham heard God's command to slaughter Isaac in a prophetic vision -- in this case, an auditory vision -- which suggests that we need to listen for the voice of God in a particular way. But how will we know when we hear it?

Musical Saints: John of the Cross

Today is the feast day of the great Carmelite Saint John of the Cross. The Carmelite Order, which traces its origins to the prophet Elijah, is notable for its ethos of close listening -- Elijah himself had to discern the voice of God on Mount Horeb in the midst of a soundscape of terrifying power -- and so it is fitting that the order has attracted holy men and women of a musical bent, incuding Father Hermann Cohen and Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity.

Saint John of the Cross himself spoke of the search for and mystical union with the Savior in musical terms. In his Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, he described the fleeting moment between night and day as a time charged with the "silent music" of this encounter:

The tranquil night
At the time of the rising dawn,
Silent music,
Sounding solitude,
The supper that refreshes, and deepens love.

Musical saints of Carmel, intercede for us, that we may receive the gift of true hearing!

The Loudest Voice

I just re-read the Grace Paley story "The Loudest Voice," about a Jewish girl in 1930s New York who, because of her clear, loud voice and expressive reading, is chosen to narrate the school Christmas play. Her mother is against the idea at first, but her father reassures his wife:

"You're in America! . . . In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms . . . Here you got Christmas . . . . What belongs to history, belongs to all men. . . Does it hurt Shirley to speak up? It does not."

So Shirley Abramowitz is allowed to continue with rehearsals. The day of the performance comes, and her voice -- as the voice of Christ -- booms from the wings as the actions she describes are pantomimed on the stage.

"I remember, I remember, the house where I was born . . . "

Miss Glacé yanked the curtain open and there it was, the house -- an old hayloft, where Celia Kornbluh lay in the straw with Cindy Lou, her favorite doll. Ira, Lester, and Meyer moved slowly from the wings toward her, sometimes pointing to a moving star and sometimes ahead to Cindy Lou.

It was a long story and it was a sad story. I carefully pronounced all the words about my lonesome childhood, while little Eddie Braunstein wandered upstage and down with his shepherd's stick, looking for sheep. I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated. Eddie was too small for that and Marty Groff took his place, wearing his father's prayer shawl. I announced twelve friends, and half the boys in the fourth grade gathered around Marty, who stood on an orange crate while my voice harangued. Sorrowful and loud, I declaimed about love and God and Man, but because of the terrible deceit of Abie Stock we came suddenly to the famous moment. Marty, whose remembering tongue I was, waited at the foot of the cross. He stared desperately at the audience. I groaned, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The soldiers . . . grabbed poor Marty . . . but he wrenched free, turned again to the audience, and spread his arms aloft to show despair and the end. I murmured at the top of my voice, "The rest is silence, but as everyone in this room, in this city -- in this world -- now knows, I shall have life eternal."

Later, the Jewish parents discuss the paradox of their children taking the lead parts in the play. One mother opines that the teachers showed poor taste in assigning the major roles to the Jewish children, while the Christian children got cast in small parts if at all. But Shirley's mother explains: "They got very small voices; after all, why should they holler?"

Shirley listens from the other room to the talk of the grown-ups, then

I climbed out of bed and kneeled. I made a little church of my hands and said, "Hear, O Israel . . . "

. . . . I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passers-by, and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest.

God's Nightingale [UPDATED]

Today is the feast day of Saint Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241-1298), shown above at left with her sister Gertrude; both women were Cistercians in the renowned Saxon abbey of Helfta, which was also the home of Saints Gertrude the Great, who shares her feast day, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose feast is November 19. Mechthild of Hackeborn was the abbey's choirmistress, and her beautiful singing voice earned her the sobriquet "God's Nightingale."

Like Saint Augustine, Mechthild experienced a heightened sense of hearing, which afforded her the grace of auditory visions. In one, Christ proffered a harp drawn out of His Sacred Heart, explaining that the harp was Himself, and the strings were “all chosen souls which are all one in God through love”; then He, who Mechthild described as the “high chanter of all chanters,” struck the harp and led “all the angels with delectable sound” as they sang the hymn Regem regum Dominum: "O come, let us worship the Lord, the King of kings, Who is himself the Crown of all the Saints." Her visions were transcribed and published in the fourteenth century as the Liber specialis gratiae, which was translated into middle English as The Booke of Ghostlye Grace. The Liber also became popular in Florence as La Laude di donna Matelda. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the beautiful lady who Dante hears singing "Venite, benedicti patris mei" on a riverbank in Canto XXVIII of Purgatorio, and who is later identified as Matilda, is in fact Saint Mechthild.

May Saint Mechthild of Hackeborn pray for us, that our ears and voices may be opened to hear and proclaim the truth.

UPDATE: After looking more closely at the image above, I'm starting to doubt whether the figure on the left is really Mechthild of Hackeborn. As a fully-professed Cistercian nun, she would be wearing the same habit as her sister, Gertrude (known as Gertrude of Helfta to distinguish her from Saint Gertrude the Great), shown on the right. I'm wondering now if the figure on the left is actually Saint Mechthild of Magdeburg, who had been a Beguine -- a woman living in a lay community of the faithful -- before joining the abbey at Helfta; as such, she would have worn a different dress and habit before profession. There is indeed some confusion in the biographical records of these saintly women, owing perhaps to the remarkable plethora of mystical Mechthilds and Gertrudes all in Helfta at the same time.

Music and Morals, Part 6: Augustine of Hippo

Today is the birthday of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church, who was born in 354 in what is now Algeria. Augustine's conversion from Manicheanism to Christianity was accomplished through the sense of hearing; as he wept in a garden in Milan, unable through the action of his will to free himself from his slavery to sexual sin, he heard the voice of a child repeating, "Pick up and read, pick up and read [tolle legge]." He picked up a Bible that was at hand, opened it, and read Saint Paul's instruction to the Romans:

Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in lusts (Romans 13:13-14)

and his conversion was complete.

Augustine, who had written the treatise De Musica before his conversion, struggled mightily afterward to define an appropriate Christian response to the sensual pleasures that music confers. In Book 10 of Confessions, he writes with palpable anxiety of the urge to

[have] the melody of all the sweet songs with which David's Psalter is commonly sung . . . banished not only from my own ears, but from the Church's as well.

He was ultimately able to reconcile his love of music with the hatred of the memory of sin that it evoked by rationalizing that it was not the singing that moved him, but rather the content of what was sung. Indeed, he frequently refers to his own conversion using the language of music, and, specifically, of singing. In Book 9 of Confessions, for instance, he writes of the desire to praise God for granting him the gift of faith by singing a song (invoking Psalm 26) from the very depths of his being:

[Converts wish] to sing from the marrow of our bones, "My heart has said to you, I have sought your face, your face [O Lord] I will require.

And in his Commentary on Psalm 32, Augustine glosses that Psalm's famous opening verse:

The old song belongs to our old selves, the new song is proper to persons made new . . . Brothers, sing well.

The liturgical music performed at his baptism seem to have entered as deepy into Augustine's physical body as into his soul, inpiring the cleansing tears that reflect the ritual water of baptism itself. Augustine describes it in Book 9:

I wept at your hymns and canticles, moved deeply by the sweetly-sounding voices of your church. The voices flooded into my ears, trut seeped into my heart, and . . . tears streamed down, and to me it seemed they were good.

In 1838, Franz Liszt wrote to his friend Joseph-Louis d'Ortigue about Raphael's painting of Saint Cecilia in ecstasy surrounded by SS. Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene (top; the second image is Botticelli's rendering of Augustine), which he had seen on a trip to Bologna. The painting impressed him deeply, and he interpreted it as an allegory of the artist's ability to perceive and propagate the divine truths revealed through the sort of heightened sense of hearing that had brought about Augustine's conversion itself. Liszt considered Cecilia, "that virgin, ecstatically transported above reality," to be the exemplar of the artist, who translates divine sounds in such a way that they can be understood by the masses, and he saw the three saints who flank her as representing varying degrees of comprehension of music. As he described Raphael's rendering of Augustine (second from right):

His face is serious and grieved . . . . Having waged a constant war against his senses, he is still fearful of the fleshly snares hidden in the appearance of a celestial vision . . . as one who had been seduced and transported far from God's way by the lure of paganism, he is asking himself . . . whether these harmonies that seeem to descend from heaven are not actually deceptive voices -- a contrivance of the devil, whose power he knows only too well.

May Saint Augustine intercede for us, that we may be given true hearing and be able to discern between the two.