Music and Memory, Part 36: Walking Away

After a long illness, Christine, the wife of my friend and former opera colleague G., died a couple of weeks ago, just shy of her fiftieth birthday. I wasn't able to go to her wake or funeral because of my teaching schedule here in Northern Appalachia, but I've spoken with G. at length in the days since. G. is a wonderful lyric tenor, and, beyond that, truly one of the best musicians I know. For a number of years he sang in many of the great opera houses of Europe and America, but he withdrew from all of his contracts a few years ago to care for Christine, and because opera gigs are scheduled at least two years out, that meant his career was effectively over. A late bloomer who grew up in a working-class Irish-American family and spent his early adulthood tending bar and giving guitar lessons, G., after walking away from the opera stage, never looked back. He now lives and sends his daughters to college on the proceeds from his church job and a small income earned teaching music to the disabled.

I've known G. for a long time. We studied with the same voice teacher, and on Thursday nights we would meet at the Liederkranz Club on East 87th Street, which was around the corner from his house (but far from mine), to work out the opera arias we sang at our auditions with a quirky but gifted stage director. "I can still see you twenty years ago," he told me recently. "I can see what you were wearing, and your hair. You were this hilarious, talented Italian chick who just said THESE THINGS." I remember G. picking me up and driving me out to Long Island one evening to run through obscure arias with a brilliant pianist whom I'd never met and never saw again. "I don't coach my repertoire," he said that night, with a cockiness that, in his case, was wholly warranted. "I just know how the music is supposed to go."  He was on the cusp of a great career, and I was on the cusp, for reasons still not completely clear to me, of using my career as a tool in the blowing up of everything in my life.

G. has what I would call -- though he does not call it this -- a visionary gift. Since childhood, he's been able to correctly intuit certain people's fates, including those of relative strangers. He's often able to discern whether someone is going to die, and roughly when. In fact, he and his wife both had the foreknowledge, years before she became ill, that she would not live to see her fiftieth birthday. But this gift -- or call it what you will, and he's often prayed that God would rescind it -- comes in the context of his deep, even mystical, Catholic faith, a faith he and Christine shared. Because of this faith, the death of his beloved, though it's devastated him, hasn't utterly crushed him. He has a kind of palpable, tactile, tangible knowledge of God's great love for him, for Christine, and for all of us, and he talks about it often. It was G. who told me about the rosary novena after I came back to the faith, and I have prayed it during some momentous times in my life. While I'm not sure the novena has always "worked," it has changed my life.

I thought of all this recently when I read some caveats going around the internet against praying the novena to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. Someone knew someone else who had prayed the novena, upon which the supplicant's life had rapidly started coming apart. A hard-line Catholic apologist I used to date mentioned once that he was terrified to pray to Saint Rita, because, according to popular legend, she would give you what you wanted, but it would come wrapped up in unconditional awfulness. And more than one friend has told me to be careful about praying the Litany of Humility, because that prayer was bound to be answered in particularly humiliating ways. But all of this goes back to the great fallacy of American Christianity across creeds: that when you embrace Christ, your life will get better. This is only a slight variation on that other characteristically American conclusion: that, if your life is good, it's because you deserve it (and conversely, if it's bad, it's because you don't, a faulty maxim upon which much unfortunate policy has been based). It's some combination of gnosticism, paganism, exceptionalism, and fatal self-regard, and it's so pervasive in our culture that, in spite of my own status as a miserable sinner, I have to remind myself multiple times a day that if my life has any good or happiness in it, it's not because of my relative merits. But if I lack merits, which I do, why do I possess or experience anything good at all? So many people I know have little, or even nothing, in their lives that is good. 

When G. and I became friends, I was married to M. He was an artist, and he strongly encouraged me in my singing. I wanted to get at something -- I used to tell myself it was the truth -- in and through my singing. I asked M. once if he would still love me if I stopped singing and did something else, say, became a lawyer. He didn't even entertain the question, because (he said) if I weren't a singer, I would no longer be myself. Ironically, M. is now a lawyer himself. 

Apparently one of THOSE THINGS that I said back in our aria class was along the lines of "I used to be Catholic, but no more." G., whose father is a deacon, took note of that statement. He brought it up recently, and reminded me that without my life blowing up, I would never have come back to the faith, which is true.

Towards the end of his short life, Henry David Thoreau, the great naturalist and visionary in his own right (one scholar has written a book about Thoreau's "ecstatic witness") seems to have lost his vision, the hypersensory awareness of the indwelling sublime that formerly had colored all of his encounters with the natural world. The mystic of Walden, who called the telegraph wire that ran along the railway "the telegraph harp," and wrote of it: 

The telegraph harp sounds strongly to-day . . . I put my ears to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is as if you had entered some world-famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ. The fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very ground tremble under my feet as I stand near the post. The wire vibrates with great power . . . What an awful and fateful music it must be to the worms in the wood! . . . such vibrating music [must] thrill them to death

by the end of his lifetime had reduced his writing to dry journal notations about the seasonal changes of various plants and animals.

I have in fact been praying the Litany of Humility for a long time now. My hope is that God will give me the humility to walk away from the dreams that damaged my life and the lives of those in my midst, and to do it with good cheer. You'd think this would have happened by now; we've been living in Northern Appalachia for almost seven years, and my professional energies have mostly turned from performance to teaching, which I love. But I still reflexively try to assuage my loneliness in this small (and in some ways sad) place with the old thoughts of my talent and the delusion that it gave me special privileges. I pray that I will be able to walk away simply, as G. did, because, as he knew, in the estimation of God there was something better and far more important to do.

Music and Memory, Part 35: Lorelei

One summer a long time ago, I was a waitress at a popular restaurant in the publishing district. Late at night, at the end of a busy and generally lucrative shift, I would take a cab home with my tips rolled up in my little black waiter's apron. I was living at that time in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is now impossibly expensive, but was then a sort of African-American bohemia. A legendary experimental jazz musician lived nearby, and I was over at his house fairly often, because his girlfriend was a friend of mine. Spike Lee lived around the corner, and I would pass him walking his dog on my strolls through the neighborhood.

My apartment was at the back of the third floor of a brownstone, and it was quiet, which was nice, because I stayed up late in those days after winding down from the intensity of a busy night shift, and consequently I slept late in the mornings. It was a beautiful thing to be able to sit up in bed in the mornings and look out of the window and see not a concrete-paved airshaft, but the lush vegetation of old-growth trees-of-heaven filling the small lot that was my backyard, though I had no access to it, and the backyard of the brownstone on the block behind me. The fern-like branches of the trees -- ailanthus altissima, the eponymous tree of the great novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn -- seemed to be piled up in the condensed space of the lot, frond upon feathery frond. They emitted a dark, dusty vegetable smell, the fragrance, to me, of a New York summer. I would get out of bed and make a quart or so of strong coffee in my little Italian stovetop espresso maker and drink it all, sitting at the table in my kitchen-slash-living-slash-all-purpose room. Then I would practice. It suited me to work at a night job, because I felt like I was giving the best energy of my day to my singing, and whatever was left over could be tossed casually into the hungry jaws of the chi-chi-restaurant-going public, which seemed to me, as Enid Bagnold wrote in another context in the wonderful book National Velvet, "like a million little fishes after bread."

I lived alone, and while the solitude felt rich and redolent, it was also devastatingly lonely. I was in love with M., and he had treated me cruelly. In my anxiety and sorrow I didn't have much of an appetite; besides the coffee -- Café Bustelo, which I made so thick that it could probably have been classified a foodstuff -- mangoes and Italian bread were the mainstays of my diet. One night, I recall, I sat alone at my table drinking Wild Turkey -- M.'s favorite libation -- while listening to Joni Mitchell, which, by the next morning, had caused me to swear off Wild Turkey forever, if not off M. or Joni Mitchell.

All during that summer and into the fall, a man sang in one of the apartments in one of the buildings on the block behind my own. Each day, across the thick, weedy verdure of the back lots, I heard this man's stentorian baritone boom out as he sang along to recordings. He would keep it up for at least an hour, and longer on Sundays -- sometimes the entire afternoon. I don't know what it was that he sang, or what he was listening to; the music and the words were indistinct, muffled by the distance across lots and absorbed by the dense urban vegetation. But it was something anthemic and simple -- likely a soul ballad, from what I could make out -- and he sang it over and over again. I can still hear his voice rising the interval of a major sixth, with a flourishing crescendo, at the chorus.

Rather than annoying me, I found the phenomenon of the invisible singing man and his incomprehensible, repeated song strangely comforting. It gave a rhythm to my day. Perhaps I was, for him, also an invisible singing presence, with my caffeinated late-morning vocalizing. I remember that during that time, I was working in particular on the song "Waldgespräch" by Schumann, about a man journeying through the woods, who is seduced and entrapped by the Lorelei; she tells him, in the last vocal statement: "You will never leave these woods again."

And perhaps I identified with the Lorelei, that siren of the Rhine who enchants men with her song. Believing that my own singing was a tool, likely the only one I had, I honed it in the hopes that it would precede me into the world and bring me back the things I wanted: security, peace, happiness, and love. But it didn't. And I was not the Lorelei. I was the hapless man in the legend, enchanted by myths of love and illusions of my own power. And everything that, at the time, I thought real and vital turned out not to be, though it took me many years to grope my way out of those woods -- even though they were not really woods at all, only Brooklyn back lots overgrown with weeds -- and see it.

Above: La Belle Dame Sans Merci, J.M. Waterhouse, 1893.

Music and Memory, Part 34: Mister Softee

I've been having an ongoing conversation with my friend Ex-New Yorker about the ways that New Yorkers, when they are transferred to other regions of the country, are often revealed to be functionally incompetent. It's not just the not-driving; it's also the inability to perform the sorts of common workaday tasks that other people seem to know how to do instinctively, including any kind of home repairs more involved than changing a lightbulb. I suppose people's fathers teach them how to do such things; but if your father grew up in an apartment building, where the super was routinely called in to fix minor problems, neither your father nor you would ever have learned.

When I moved here, I assumed that most things would be essentially the same as they were in New York, only smaller and with a more primitive public transportation infrastructure. However, while the smallness and the poverty of transportation infrastructure were as I envisioned them, the rest wasn't true at all. We rented a half-house at first; I had imagined that renting a place would be much the same as it was New York, only that you would get more space for less money. But, while that part was in fact true, nothing else was. Before we found a livable place, we saw many that were in shocking disrepair; I told one landlady that her building ought to be condemned --the kind of candor, I soon learned, that does not seem to be appreciated outside of New York City.

At the start of our first summer here, though, I heard the familiar sound of the Mister Softee truck making its way up the street, and I figured I knew what to do. Well, actually, it wasn't the familiar sound of the Mister Softee truck, that great nostalgic jingle that sounds as if it's being played on some transcendent child's music box that never winds down.

It was really just a bell repeating the same note over and over every three seconds or so, but, coupled with the sound of a truck going slowly up the street, I got the message and ran out of the house with a couple of bucks in hand. I still remember, strangely, what I was wearing that day. I asked the ice-cream truck man for a coconut Frozfruit, the creamiest and most delightful summer treat known to man. He pulled one out of the freezer case, I gave him my money -- a lot less, incidentally, than I would have forked over in New York City -- and all was well.

The next time he came up the street, I ran out again and asked him for the same, but he didn't have them. Nor the next time, nor the next. After a couple of weeks of this, I asked him why. He explained that he had only had coconut Frozfruits that first time as a fluke: in New York on other business, he had loaded up his truck at the legendary Benfaremo's, the Lemon Ice King of Corona, Queens. Frozfruits were apparently an urban treat, not to be had in the hinterlands. Crestfallen, I got some cardboard-y regional ice cream instead, and stayed indoors the next time I heard that single-note bell coming slowly up the street. I have since found coconut ice-cream bars at the grocery store, but, gluey and too sweet, they're nothing like coconut Frozfruits.

That winter, when I still got everywhere around this town on foot, I was walking down the gray, shabby Main Street when I saw a New York City bus driving past. It really was an actual New York City bus, without a number or route listing. I stopped and stood there staring; it was like seeing a ghost. It made me ecstatic for a brief moment, and then plunged me into back into abject homesickness as I resumed trudging through the slush, realizing that I was about a million miles away from my old life. I later found out that the New York City hybrid buses were built by a local manufacturer.

But memories of the old life are not exactly like cash in hand. They're outdated currency, and the more I trade in them, the more I feel like I'm trying to pass off Confederate currency in a Union state, or trying to substitute an Irish pound for a Euro. Time has gone by, it is summer again, and the world is not now as it was. And the strains of the old Mister Softee truck anthem, to take T.S. Eliot out of context, "echo/Thus, in [my] mind,"
                                 
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Music and Memory, Part 33: The Key-Flower

I was thinking today about a man I dated for much longer than was reasonable, because it is his birthday. The last time I saw him was from the window of a bus going up Madison Avenue about ten years ago. On that day, as I was gazing idly out of the window on my way uptown, I happened to see him, my former love, driving a pedicab against traffic and hand-signaling a left turn with a vaudevillian flourish. After my first son was born, I mentioned to a new friend with a same-aged baby that I had once dated a pedicab driver, and she told me later that my revelation had shocked her. Since I'd done a lot of worse things, I wondered why.

I suppose it was because I was a serious classical musician, at that time pursuing my doctorate in music, writing my dissertation, teaching in the music department of one of the four-year colleges of the City University of New York, and gigging out. I was also, by then, a married mother, living in the Bronx in a leafy working-class neighborhood with freestanding houses and well-gardened postage-stamp yards. On the face of it, I must have seemed a nice hardworking girl, and nice hardworking girls, one would think, don't date scruffy downwardly-mobile alternative-transportation fanatics, nor, moreover, those whose lives are foundering in the mire of extreme past trauma (sexual abuse at the hands of a close relative from the age of five; drug abuse from the age of nine; and all this in a nice middle-class family from New Jersey). In short, intellectual women who spend the better part of their time, talent, and treasure pursuing an elite art are somehow inoculated by their specialness from slumming it with losers, except in novels in which their characters are inevitably doomed, or unless, in real life, they are convinced that they possess some salvific power that will make everything all right.

In other words, it's really not that shocking. How many of us striving women haven't thought we could save a hapless man?  And how many of us haven't thought, too, that, through our special abilities, we could even somehow save ourselves? Although classical music is not exactly the same thing as drug abuse or wanton sex, its relentless pursuit, for some of us, promises a similar sort of escapist release. I have known other musicians who became excellent rather incidentally in the course of running like hell from a troubled past. There was the wonderful tenor whose father had systematically violated every child in the family, and another male singer to whom dark things had been done in his poor Appalachian childhood, who remains to this day one of the greatest musicians I've ever had the good fortune to know. There was the soprano fleeing from an abusive marriage who brought her baby to her classes at the conservatory and later became the chair of a well-regarded university voice program. And I often ponder the preponderance of gay men in our profession. I have no idea how much of gayness is nature and how much nurture, but I do believe that there is a compulsion toward purification in the pursuit of great music: while it generally doesn't work out that way, the urge to cleanse oneself of one's sins through sustained hard work and an ascetic life focussed on high art cannot have been particular just to me.

My great voice teacher and mentor A.B. once told me a fable in which a shepherd idly picks a flower, whereupon a cleft in the hills opens to reveal a hidden vaulted treasure-room, its coffers open and overflowing. The amazed shepherd goes from one treasure-chest to the next, filling his pockets with gems and coins and ropes of pearls, while all the while an angel hovers near him, exhorting him: "Don't forget the best! Don't forget the best!" Finally he can carry no more, so he makes ready to leave, planning to return with a wheelbarrow. "Don't forget the best!" the angel whispers again in his ear. The shepherd looks about wildly, trying to find a jewel more precious or a coin more brilliant than those with which his pockets are already bulging. Finally, in confusion, he gives up and stumbles out into the daylight. The treasure-room disappears, and the cleft in the hills closes over it as if it had never been. And he realizes with despair that he has forgotten the best: he has left the key-flower behind, the simple flower he plucked that had opened all the treasures of the mountain to him.

Things get so complicated, so labyrinthine, when you try to make something out of something else, to do something with that something else that it cannot do, that it was not ever meant to do. Art cannot be salvific -- though how very, very close it seems at times. Music is still for me the elusive sacred tongue, the holy language which, when I hear a few words of it spoken here in exile, pierces my heart like a dagger. It is the language whose words at once cut to the quick and heal. It is the key-flower I search for in my memory, which will unlock the riches of the history of the human spirit. It is medicine and elixir. But perhaps it is none of those. Perhaps it should never have been any of those at all.

Nevertheless, if my own great pain and the pain of so many of my colleagues had not driven us to seek its solace and transformation, we would have been fortunate to find ourselves driving pedicabs against traffic down Madison Avenue.

Music and Memory, Part 32: Piano Karma

Back when we were struggling singers in New York, my friend Soprannie once mused that everyone -- at least everyone in our station in life -- had piano karma, a principle whereby, when it is ordained that you should own a piano, a piano comes your way. This principle was necessarily tinged with both superstition and fatalism, because it is nearly impossible for a struggling singer to acquire a piano, even a crappy one, in New York. But Soprannie had a piano, obtained under mysterious circumstances. And then one day, my own piano karma came up. An older, richer colleague -- a formidable coloratura soprano who had created the role of Madame Mao in John Adams's opera Nixon in China -- was getting a Steinway, and she offloaded her battered Ivers and Pond console onto me for pocket change.

(Trudy Ellen Craney, offloader of my karmic piano, as Madame Mao in Nixon in China. She enters during the ballet scene at 2:27.)

I was entirely grateful for what seemed like a gift from the fates. The piano had no overtones. When it went out of tune, the upper register would go sharp, and the lower register would go flat. Certain notes stuck, others didn't sound, and still others would reverberate on and on even if you weren't holding down the pedal. It had a crack in the soundboard. Nonetheless, it was a piano: a huge step up both in sound-making capacity and in prestige from the three-quarters-size keyboard that I'd had for years, and on which I'd learned all my repertoire. When we moved away from New York, the Ivers and Pond moved with us, over my husband's half-hearted objections. "It's a piano," I reminded him. In fact, the piano was my prize possession. By chance, a friend of mine from graduate school, an academic musicologist, was already living here in northern Appalachia, and was teaching a course in American minimalism -- the music of John Adams, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass -- at the local university. I told him that he should bring his students over to my house to see the piano upon which Trudy Ellen Craney had prepared the role of Madame Mao in Nixon in China.

The other day my piano tuner called. There was a piano in the area that he thought would be a good piano for me. It was a Kimball console in mint condition. I should go and take a look at it. 

I should note here that, while in New York City a cheap piano can't be gotten for love or money, northern Appalachia abounds in them. People are always getting rid of pianos here. I suppose it's because people die, people move, people go into assisted living; this is the kind of place that has an aging population, because young people with talent and ability leave here for places that have jobs. Pianos are a casualty of this migration, and also of the gradual movement away from the practice of making actual music on real instruments, so small pianos seem to be widely available in this area at prices that would be considered shocking in New York.

I went to look at the piano. It was a lovely little console, about the size of my karmic Ivers and Pond, but in much better condition, with a nice solid action. Evidently it had been rarely played. Kimball was at one time the biggest piano manufacturer in the world; there were Kimballs in many of my elementary-school music classrooms, as well as in the practice rooms I haunted as an undergraduate, but those markets are dominated now by Japanese makers. The Kimball's owner, a former band instructor, was in assisted living, and his brother was sorting out his possessions. The brother was a kind man, well into his eighties himself. His father, unbelievably, had been born in 1868, and had been an engineer on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. We had a lovely chat, I played the Kimball and sang a little, and he gave me the piano for free.

The new, free piano was moved in the other day, and my old Ivers and Pond moved out. The mover was a gruff man, who said in an accusatory way, "I don't know why you're getting a Kimball. You can't get rid of them. They're crap." I blanched for a moment, but I said goodbye to my old karmic piano, the instrument on which a great artist had learned a role that she created in a great and groundbreaking work of art.  I imagine that Trudy Ellen Craney had brought the Ivers and Pond from her childhood home in New Jersey to her loft in SoHo; it was that kind of piano, a family piano. Our old voice teacher, who lived in Washington, D.C., used to give lessons at Trudy's loft when she was in town, so, besides being a tool in the furtherance of a great work of art, that piano had accompanied a lot of other great singing besides (I do not mean my own; our teacher had some really fantastic students). I had had the Ivers and Pond for fifteen years, and it had taken me through a new stage in my career -- when I transitioned out of opera and into the concert performances that grew out of my archival research into rare repertoires -- and into new stages in my life as a graduate student, wife, and mother. My older son had recently begun playing it. 

I wanted to sing "Vecchia zimarra" to it, but there wasn't time. I wonder where it will go; to a church basement or a VFW hall, perhaps. And no one will ever know the part it played in the creation of a great opera, nor in the hidden joys and sorrows of the lives of a few struggling artists.

Music and Memory, Back to School Edition: Artificial Pearls

The music department at the community college where I teach moved to a new building over the summer. This is a good thing, even an excellent thing, since, up until now, the music department has been housed in a building that was apparently designed as a bomb shelter. All the classrooms in the old building were in the basement, and all their carpets were mildewed; I stopped reminding my students not to bring drinks to class, because the odor of stale spilled coffee was a marked improvement over what it could have been. The large number of linoleum tiles missing from the ceiling gave it the appearance of a menacingly-grinning, upside-down clown-smile, and the choir couldn't rehearse in the building, because so many of its members were stricken with mold-induced asthma attacks during practice.

Last week, before the semester began, we music-department adjuncts (who make up, incidentally, around eighty percent of the music faculty) converged upon the new building to clean it up and make it ready. It was a beautiful late-summer day, and my heart did strange things when I stepped outside the cinder-block building to make a phone call. The Soviet-bunker-style campus is nestled in a depression in the achingly-green northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains, hills that look so gentle, so kindly somehow. I thought about Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," about how the jar on the hill in Tennessee "made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill," and how, here, the anecdote was turned upside down: how here the hills surround the makeshift slovenliness of the college, but the artifice of man does not add order to or impose mastery upon those surrounding hills. I thought, too, of Emerson noting that

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

I've been asked to give a paper at a conference being held in honor of my dissertation advisor, an important musicologist now retired after many years of teaching, an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn with whom I became, during the time we worked together, somewhat uncomfortably enmeshed in a sort of artificial mother-daughter relationship. She remarked to a friend at my wedding that she hoped I wasn't going to take my husband's name, because I had worked so hard to build a scholarly reputation under my own (Italian) name. When my dissertation voice recital was approaching, she, apparently worried over what I would wear, confronted me awkwardly in the hallway of the university, where she was a full professor and I an adjunct, and anxiously enquired how I was planning to do my hair. When my first son was born, she said something I wasn't sure how to interpret at the time about how some people thought you should change your life for your children, and others thought you should fit your children into the life you already had; to this day, I don't know which camp she, a mother as well as a scholar, fell into. I still worry that I'm disappointing her with my hair, my life, and my scholarship, and I still don't know what my paper in her honor is going to be about. But I felt like hanging my head when I saw the website for the conference, and saw my name (the version of it that's trotted out for performance and publication purposes, Italian maiden name first, followed by married name) and my affiliation (northern-Appalachian-county community college) next to the names of well-known musicologists who teach at Case Western, The City University of New York Graduate Center, Harvard, and Yale. I recalled how I wanted to be something great, to do something important, and yet, here I am.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Someone once said that teaching is casting artificial pearls before real swine, which, to the extent that it's true, does not make the thrower of pearls any less swinish than his intended audience. How am I supposed to do this job -- to teach music to my students at northern-Appalachian-county community college? I want to do it, I burn to do it, because, as William Carlos Williams wrote (about poetry, though the same can be said about music):

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die every day
for lack
of what is found there.

I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for The Magic Flute -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.

While singing along to the radio, I saw a shabby-looking, morbidly obese man with dirty legs riding in a self-propelled wheelchair in the oncoming lane. I thought about my mother's LP. Where would I be, who would I be, if my mother had not had it? Classical music is not salvific by any means (I remind myself), but, for me, it's always been anodyne, palliative, hallucinogen, and opiate all in one. It dulls pain, it comforts, it heals, it confers vision. Without it, I would be a miserable worm of a person, even more than I am now. And I wonder if this is true for everyone: if everyone, had he had access to my mother's record collection, would be a better person.

I thought about my wonderful voice teacher and mentor, A.B., who grew up, as it happens, in rural Tennessee. His parents were mountain people; his father was a self-taught singer who worked for a biscuit-flour company. The flour company would send out a string band to drive around the rural counties in a flatbed truck, from which they would play music, and then give a baking demonstration with a portable oven. A.B. told me about how, as a child, he was given a recording of the Nutcracker on 78s, and he listened to it until the records, as he put it, literally dissolved. He later found a recording of La Bohème at the public library, and played it, too, into the ground, memorizing every word and note of Rodolfo's Act I aria, but -- as he found when he got to conservatory -- memorizing it wrong, because the record had a skip in it that obliterated part of one measure.

Classical music, discovered as a child, taught me how to live, how to breathe. It did the same for A.B. I wonder if it might do the same one day for one of my students. I think of a recurring dream I've had for years, in which I am walking certain streets in New York that I know as well as I know the Mozart Piano Concert no. 27, but finding them slightly and ineffably altered, and looking for something as I walk -- something that, while I can't quite remember what it is, I know to be the key to everything. There's a beautiful children's book by Barbara Helen Berger called Grandfather Twilight, in which the twilight is personified as an old man who each night takes a pearl from an endless strand and walks with it to the sea, while the pearl grows larger and larger, eventually becoming the moon. I hope that the artificial pearls I offer to my students this semester -- not out of perversity, but because they're all I've got -- might be able to change into something real and beautiful for them, too.

Music and Memory, Part 31: In Defense of the Folk Mass

When I came back to the Catholic Church a little more than ten years ago, I discovered something I'd been ignorant of as a child of the aggiornamento: that is, the division, fragmentation, and opposition among the multifarious branches of the faithful. In my few childhood years in the church, the idea of disunion was not on my mind, of course, and I loved everything about going to Mass and Sunday school. I loved the colorful vestments, I loved the felt banners, and most of all, I loved the music.

As a returning adult woman, however, I discovered that there was, in fact, some division within the Mystical Body. I discovered orthodoxy, and, not long after, the New York orthodox Catholic subculture, which included not a few cape-wearing, pipe-smoking, Chesterton-quoting, never-marrying-though-apparently-uncalled-to-religious-life-albeit-heterosexual Traditionalist men (there wasn't any female equivalent of this type that I could see; perhaps the young women of the cohort were all married with children, and thus didn't have time to spend cultivating a countercultural image). And I learned that I was supposed to scorn and deride the aesthetic trappings of the New Mass, while not entirely rejecting the Mass itself:  I was supposed to hate the vestments, the banners, and most of all, the music.

The young orthodox Catholics I was now encountering, though they were too young to have experienced the old rite, claimed to have discerned from early childhood that these aesthetic trappings were almost entirely lacking in merit. And their scorn was reserved in a special way for postconciliar liturgical music. It went without saying that Gregorian chant was the mode of sung worship par excellence; even polyphony was viewed with a soupçon of moral suspicion (as it had been, too, in the 1590s by a group of Italian composers and men of letters who wanted to be able to understand the words, and who, as a result, succeeded in inventing opera).

This surprised me, because -- perhaps very much unlike you, dear reader -- I loved that music.  My babysitter used to play her guitar in the sanctuary, her long braids hanging down over the body of the instrument, and sing liturgical folksongs, some of which I suspect were of her own composition. I loved her. I loved her long hair. I loved her singing, and I loved what she sang. In fact, it was in order to emulate her that I first wanted to become a singer myself (she also taught me how to say the rosary, and told me about the many miracles of healing at the Church of Saint Anne de Beaupré in Quebec. Maryann McCarthy, where are you now?).

I'm no chant specialist. Even among musicologists, the real chant specialists are few and far between. Chant is a whole musicological world unto itself, and the work of the vast majority of music scholars is focused not on chant, but on the music of the common practice period. And the fact that there are few chant authorities even among musicologists and musicians with doctorates, makes it safe to assume that that guy in the Tyrolean hat who took you out for coffee after Mass and, after reminiscing about the Habsburg dynasty, trashed the priest from southeast Asia who came out to help distribute Communion because he bowed before the tabernacle instead of genuflecting, is not one, either. This doesn't mean that I don't love Gregorian chant, of course. And I would venture to say that I actually do know more about it than that guy, though it wasn't the focus of my doctoral studies.

Whenever I'm told by orthodox, Traditionalist, or even serious-and-faithful Catholics who are not necessarily culture warriors, however, that postconciliar liturgical music is heretical or a desecration, I imagine that they're waiting for me, with my doctorate in music, to nod my head vigorously and offer some kind of musicological proof of their point. But I don't, because I love that music, and not just out of sentimentality or nostalgia for lost childhood. Some of that music is good and effective qua liturgical music, and I think that it's probably crappy execution of it that makes educated listeners think the repertoire itself is crap. This hymn is a particular favorite of mine; I love the coda in the chorus: "We will find an open door THERE; we will find an open door," where the word "there" lingers between doubt and hope on the fourth degree of the scale before resolving, consolingly, to the tonic. I'm not being ironic here. I couldn't find a decent performance of it on Youtube, which underlines my point -- though church music is not really performance. But I do not think the liturgical music of the 1970s and 1980s is monolithic crap; not at all. I've disappointed many people by saying so, but those many probably also don't love Michael Jackson or the music of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (composed by Fred Rogers himself) the way that I do, either. And they should. At the risk of sounding hopelessly middlebrow, I will assert here that some of the music of aggiornamento is both beautiful and consoling. As Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good . . . it is good."

I know I'm supposed to love music that is beautiful and reverent and old and serious and could be suitably transferred from the organ loft to the concert hall. And I do. But what's wrong with worshipping God with the simplicity of musical expression which is the extent to which most people are capable of producing musical sound and meaning? Our hearts and our tongues don't customarily address God in the language of the psalms, after all. The liturgical music of the 1970s that you think you're supposed to hate, or at least to laugh at, can be as much an ancillary or an inducement to worship, I believe, as can chant and Palestrina. We approach God in the Holy of Holies, yes. But we also have an everyday relationship with Him in which we accept and embrace His presence in the least dignified and the most mundane parts of our lives. There is a place, I would argue, for the hymns you hate: "for God is the simplest of all."