The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia

Today is the Feast of Saint Cecilia, a Roman martyr who suddenly began appearing in hagiographies in the fourth century. Her association with music seems to derive from a line in the Golden Legend which describes how, on the day of her wedding (a wedding she did not want, having consecrated her virginity to God), while instruments played ("cantantibus organis"), Cecilia sang to God silently in her heart, asking Him to keep her pure so that "I might not fall into confusion." A misinterpretation of this line became the source of much of Cecilia's iconography, which has her playing the instruments, usually the organ. Raphael's 1514 painting of Cecilia with SS. Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene (above) -- all saints who underwent profound spiritual change -- shows Cecilia holding a portative organ upside-down and backwards, the pipes slipping out of their frame, at the moment she hears the singing of the angels: the moment, as it were, of her own conversion; broken instruments (the instruments of profane, earthly music) lie at her feet. Franz Liszt was entranced by Raphael's painting when he saw it in Bologna in 1838, writing in to a friend, "Isn't that virgin, ecstatically transported above reality, like the inspiration that . . . fills an artist's heart -- pure, true, full of insight?"

The definitive scholarly work about Saint Cecilia is Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia by Thomas Connolly, with whose friendship in the past two years I have been particularly blessed. Connolly has postulated recently that Cecilia may have been a member of the Roman Jewish community of early Christians, which would explain a great deal about the ancient liturgy of her Station Day in Lent, which uses passages from the book of Esther. I took her name at my confirmation (a sacrament I received in adulthood) because of her association not only with music but also with profound spiritual change. May she bring blessings to all musicians today!

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
-- W.H. Auden

Casting Artificial Pearls Before Real Swine

I'm grading student papers in fulfillment of a big assignment that I prepared my class for over the course of three weeks -- roughly seven classes in all -- with readings, discussions, listening, and in-class practice assignments. The papers are on the whole so bad that I'm not sure whether to be angry at my students or at myself. Some of them have missed the mark by such a long shot that I wonder if they are innately unable to understand or appreciate an aesthetic that's not native or familiar to them. It raises all kinds of questions in my mind about the validity of teaching music or writing at all. Does beauty, especially if it's presented in difficult or abstruse terms, have any meaning in our world? Is it important that people learn about the artifacts of beauty that make up our shared cultural heritage and spur us to a greater understanding of our humanity? Or not?

That said, two of the papers I've read are outstanding. One is by an Italian national who is consistently one of the best writers and most original thinkers in my class.

From the Salon to the Carmel

Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of another “musical saint,” Fr. Hermann Cohen (1821-1871, pictured above), known in religion as Père Augustin-Marie du Très Saint Sacrement. Hermann, a brilliant child prodigy pianist from a liberal Jewish family in Hamburg, came to Paris at the age of thirteen to further his studies, and became the friend and protégé of Franz Liszt. Liszt gave him the pet name “Puzzi,” meaning cute or darling, and Hermann grew his hair to his shoulders in emulation of the master and made the rounds with him of the fashionable salons of Paris It was in the salons, he later wrote, that he discovered the mid-nineteenth-century philosophies of

"atheism, pantheism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, socialism, riots, the massacre of the rich, the abolition of marriage, terror, sharing of goods, the common enjoyment of all the pleasures; these notions soon found a place in my fourteen-year-old head . . . . I soon became one of the most zealous propagandists of those sects which had vowed to renew the face of the earth."

In Paris, Hermann also became hopelessly addicted to gambling. He and Liszt eventually parted ways after Hermann was accused, most likely unjustly, of embezzling Liszt’s concert proceeds. Hermann’s career continued in England, where he became the recital accompanist of the superstar tenor Mario (scruples about his noble birth discouraged this singer from using his last name).

Little by little, conscious of a great spiritual longing, Hermann was drawn to the Catholic Church, and was baptized in 1847. He entered the Carmelite novitiate in 1849, and was ordained a priest in 1851, a remarkable act considering his recent baptism, and one which required a papal dispensation. Hermann (now Fr. Augustin-Marie) was soon well-known throughout France and the continent for his fiery preaching, and in 1862 was asked by Pope Pius IX to restore the Carmelite order to Britain. He sailed for London, where he established several convents and led the first Marian procession England had seen since the Reformation. Fr. Hermann also initiated the practice of nocturnal adoration, which soon spread throughout the world.

Fr. Hermann died in 1871 of smallpox contracted while ministering to wounded French prisoners of the Franco-Prussian war at Spandau Prison. I had heard that his cause for canonization is being examined, but a Fr. Hermann scholar I know has reason to believe that the process has stalled at the Vatican. For more, see this article which originally appeared in the Journal of the American Liszt Society in 1994.

"The Minor Prophets"

Many years ago, I think in 1991 or 1992, I read an essay in Harper’s by Michael Lind that impressed me deeply. I don't remember the name of the article, and have only a vague idea now of what it was about -- something to do with political power structures being opposed to communitarian values, if I recall -- but the writing was so captivating and beautiful that I wanted to read more (I soon found, however, that I couldn't continue reading Harper's; its editorial tone of unredeemed despair was just too depressing). Lind was at the time a young right-of-center think-tank intellectual from Texas who wrote like a poet. Thus I was delighted this morning when I opened up my web browser, whose homepage I am forced to confess is set to the web page of the NPR radio program "The Writer’s Almanac," and found that the poem of the day is by Michael Lind. This means that Garrison Keillor will be reading it on the air tonight in his gentle, world-weary baritone. It’s a good poem, too (to read it, go here and scroll down to today's date). Perhaps Lind is reviving the tradition of the policy-wonk poets of China’s literary golden age.

Sanctify My Soul

Last weekend I saw the movie Bella, which has gotten a lot of press in the Catholic community. I thought the film needed a good bit of editing, but I enjoyed it for many reasons, among them that it is a beautifully-filmed movie about New York; that it represents an intersection between the art house and the pro-life movement that’s pretty hard to find anywhere; and, not least, that it has an amazing soundtrack. When I got home I did some googling to see if the soundtrack was available on CD, but it’s not. I would see the film again just to hear the music, which is employed with great skill, and in my opinion served the story better than a lot of the dialogue did. There is one moment that I found particularly poignant, when the two main characters return to Penn Station on the Long Island railroad early in the morning; a wonderful Nina Simone cover of a spiritual, “Sanctify My Soul,” is playing on the soundtrack, and I thought that Dr. Simone’s combination of sophisticated musical restraint and heartfelt-if-slightly-intellectualized singing was a great choice.

I have my doubts about whether this film will play in Peoria. It’s too arty – and the heroes are Mexican immigrants, and we all know how that’s been going lately. But if you get the chance to see it, go – it has a few flaws, but it's excellent.

Musical Saints of Helfta

November 22, aside from being a singularly tragic day in American history, is the feast day of the Roman martyr Saint Cecilia, patroness of musicians, whose name I took at my confirmation. I love that her feast falls at the denouement of autumn, when the beauty of the season is mostly past and everything is gray and barren; it cheers the heart. But November also marks the feasts of some other remarkable “musical” saints, a trio of women from the thirteenth-century Saxon monastery of Helfta, a Benedictine abbey that was a sort of hothouse of visionary nuns: Mechthild of Hackeborn (November 16), Gertrude the Great (who shares her feast day), and Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose feast day is November 19.

All of these nuns were party to visions of Christ in which musical sounds and imagery played an important role. Gertrude the Great, for instance, wrote of a visitation by the Lord in which he told her: “Listen to me, beloved, and I will sing you a song of love that is quite different from those sung by profane courtiers,” and then proceeded, in a voice that Gertrude calls indescribably sweet, to sing the following words to the hymn tune Rex Christe factor:

Amore meus continuus,
Tibi languor assiduous,
Amor tuus suavissimus,
Mihi sapor gratissimus.

(My continuous love,
Your persistent languor;
Your very sweet love,
a most pleasing savor to me.)

Mechthild of Hackeborn, the abbey’s choirmistress, was renowned for her own beautiful voice; her sisters in religion referred to her as “God’s nightingale.” She received a revelation in which Christ extended a harp from 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 Christ, 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.

Mechthild of Magdeburg’s mystical writings are well known, and have been studied and appropriated by both feminist and Jungian scholars. The record of her revelations, the book The Flowing Light of the Godhead, is also filled with remarkable musical imagery, including a vision in which Christ tells her: “Oh, dear dove,/Your voice is string music to my ears./ Your words are spices for my mouth./ Your longings are the lavishness of my gift.”

I find the musical mysticism of Gertrude and the two Mechthilds of Helfta quite thrilling and encouraging. Their aesthetic – a sort of ecstatic rigor that, like all mystical writing, from Rumi to St. John of the Cross to William Blake, uses the language of poetry and eros – is so very far removed from our present understanding of holiness that it strikes me that many present-day orthodox Catholics would find it dubious and unsettling at best. But it seems to me an antidote to the both the meandering confusion of liberal Catholicism and the joyless legalism of modern-day traditionalism, and I'm happy that the Church in her wisdom has seen fit to honor these three nuns.

Year that Trembled and Reel'd beneath Me

I’m giving my writing class for musicians the assignment of writing program notes for George Crumb’s song cycle Apparition. I found a website from which they can download and listen to the entire piece, and I am putting one of my copies of the score on reserve (I bought two when I performed the piece several years ago, one for me and one for my pianist), along with an anthology of Walt Whitman’s complete poems that I’ve had for many years (the text of Apparition is taken from Whitman’s great lament on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”). I just had a very odd sensation as I wrote my name on the inside cover of this volume, as if I’d seen a doppelganger.

The book, while I’m not sure if it was a gift from my former husband M., is one that I very much associate with the years I spent with him. I was deeply enamored of Whitman’s verses in those days, and used to read them as if they were sacred texts. M. did not share my love of the poet he called Uncle Waltie, but he indulged me. One night towards the end of our marriage, I remarked as we were getting ready for bed that I missed Whitman; I suppose I hadn’t leafed through "Leaves of Grass" for a few weeks. M. got out of bed and brought me the book, and, instead of being grateful, I was angry with him. I’m not sure exactly why; I suppose I was upset that he didn’t understand that I wanted to safeguard and savor my sense of longing, rather than have it fulfilled, and I concluded from this that he would never really see or understand who I was.

I’m chagrined now by my overweening pride and self-importance then, not to mention my utter foolishness. I still pray that M. will be able to forgive me for my thoughtless, careless, selfish unkindness to him (not only in that incident). I felt just now that I was being disloyal to him and to that time by writing my new, married name on the flyleaf of that old book.

Lost in the Supermarket

While I generally find any kind of shopping an onerous chore, I happen to love grocery shopping, especially when I can do it alone. It is a secret pleasure for me to roam the aisles of a big, clean, well-lit store and look for bargains; it’s probably the closest thing to hunting that I will ever experience. I love to cook and bake, and I love the challenge of planning the week’s menu out of what I might find while stalking the sales. I try to find the freshest, best things for the lowest prices, and feel a sense of accomplishment, and even delight, if I can pull something off like happening upon a rack of Angus steaks on the day before expiration, when the manager is offering them for two bucks off, or finding Yuban coffee at two for four dollars (I would prefer to drink something more coffee-snobbish on a regular basis – my favorite coffees are Peets whole bean and the Route 66 Blend from Misha’s in Alexandria, VA – but Yuban is actually quite good for what it is, and I feel virtuous when I buy it because they include some fair-trade beans in the mix).

But if everything can be a catalyst for transcendence, then everything can also be a cause for heartbreak. Shopping alone gives you ample time to concentrate on the soundtrack being piped over the supermarket’s PA system. I’ve always wondered how these stores choose their playlists; I’ve heard music while shopping that I can only call astonishing, and a great deal of music that, as music does, evokes memories of the past, and those not always happy. Last night I had the whole store almost to myself, and I heard the Beatles song “You Won’t See Me” from Rubber Soul, one of my favorite albums of all time, which I received third-hand in childhood, and was flooded with cringe-inducing memories of my adolescence. Then, as I was checking out, an unidentifiable song by the Cocteau Twins came on, which evoked all kinds of painful mental images of my college days, when that band was all the rage among sensitive, artistic, goth-leaning girls because it featured the sort of wordless keening that seemed to express what we wished to call up out of our own souls, but could not in words.

As H.R. Haweis wrote in 1872, “When memory is concerned, music is no longer itself; it ceases to have any proper plane of feeling; it surrenders itself wholly, with all its rights, to memory, to be the patient, stern, and terrible exponent of that recording angel.”

Heavenly Grass

My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she give me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
-- Tennessee Williams

I assigned one of the students in my voice class a setting of this poem by American cult author and composer Paul Bowles. The song is short and beautiful, written in a simple, folk-like style; the phrases that mention feet walking are conversational, while the phrases that speak of nature are lyrical and rhapsodic. We talked in class about how it mirrors the Romantic concept of Heimweh, which is more than just homesickness; it's the longing for a place which is not anywhere near the place you are, and which is in fact a place to which you can never return. I love the simplicity of Williams's poem; it reminds me of the greatness of other simple poems, like Yeats's "Brown Penny" and "Down by the Salley Gardens."

Sex, Death, and Mozart

When I was studying for my master’s degree in music in the early 1990s, I took a seminar on the operas of Mozart with a brilliant professor (his other specialty was the Japanese shakuhachi flute, which he played at the level of a master, and for which mastery he’d even received a spiritual name from a Japanese sensei). The class was one of those once-in-a-lifetime learning experiences that make you fall more deeply in love with a subject you love passionately already. I remember particularly well the section on my favorite opera of all, Don Giovanni. Professor B. suggested that when Mozart uses a chromatic descending figure in this opera, it is to illustrate sex – specifically, the destructive force of untamed sexual energy, in an opera in which such a force threatens to loosen society itself from its underpinnings.

That chromatic downward figure occurs throughout the opera; one famous moment is in the duet that Don Giovanni sings with Zerlina, whom he is attempting to seduce on her wedding day, “La ci darem la mano” (the scene is shown above in a photo from Sacramento Opera's production). This duet, wonderful in its simplicity, using such a minimum of resources to show so much about the two characters who sing it, is well-known not only to opera lovers but also to readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Don Giovanni tells the peasant girl that he will take her to his castle, where they will give one another their hands, and where she will say “yes” to him (as Molly Bloom says yes at the close of Ulysses). Zerlina is about to go off with him when she is rescued by another of the Don’s conquests, Donna Elvira, who, in the Don Juan legend but not in the opera, is a nun whom he has seduced away from the convent. The descending chromatic line appears in the orchestra at the duet’s coda, when the two are singing, “Andiam, andiam, mio bene, a ristorar le pene d’un innocente amor” (Let us go, beloved, to assuage the pains of an innocent love). Its function is to tell us the truth: that the love Don Giovanni offers Zerlina is far from innocent (he later tries to rape her offstage during a party at his house).

The other night, I turned on the radio and heard the third, adagio movement of Mozart’s great Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595, in a live performance by Imogen Cooper with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis on his 80th birthday. It took my breath away – not only the performance, which was full of both brilliance and insight, but also the music itself. I first heard this concerto on an LP that I begged my mother to buy at the supermarket when I was around nine (I don’t know why; I just saw it in a display of classical LPs for $.99 each, and I thought I would like it. It was published by Funk and Wagnall, and featured a nineteenth-century color engraving of Papageno, the birdcatcher from The Magic Flute, on its cover. She acquiesced, and I wore the grooves out listening to it). The elegiac adagio movement is heartbreakingly simple, its theme almost folklike; one can almost see one’s own life pass before one’s eyes when one hears it, in all the bittersweet folly that makes up any life. It also makes frequent use of a downward chromatic figure in the piano theme, later taken up by the orchestra. Hearing it made me think of the long-ago opera seminar. Surely in this autumnal concerto, Mozart was not thinking of sex, but of death; he wrote the concerto just a few months before his own death, when he was living in poverty, and was surely already gravely ill. Perhaps he really used descending chromaticism throughout his work when he wanted to indicate one of those moments of profound, unspeakable truth upon which everything else hinges.

The Voices That Have Gone, Part 6: The Two Sopranos

In my yeoman’s days as a singer in New York City, I had a friend whom I loved and admired. We were very close, but we could never be best friends, because we were both sopranos, and such a thing simply could not be. We performed together once in a production of Figaro (she sang the Countess, I sang Susanna), and later in a concert with the group I had formed to present specialized repertoires. That latter gig was a stressful one for both of us. She was on her way to the venue when she realized she’d forgotten her gown. She went back to get it, and ended up warming up and doing her makeup in a cab on her way to the concert hall. She was also recovering from an ailment that caused her serious vocal distress. In an important segment of the concert, an extended duet cantata by Rossini, she found herself unable to continue singing. Although at that point I was pretty upset with her, I summoned all the love I could muster in myself and poured it out in her direction. Amazingly, she was able to recover her voice and finish the piece. I remember taking her hand at the end, during the piano postlude. In my dressing room afterwards I made a mental vow never to perform with her again. But she told me a few days later, in tears, that the power of the love she had felt from me had made the concert one of the greatest musical experiences of her life.

Right around that time, my former obsessive, driving ambition for success as a singer had started to crumble. My first marriage had ended, and at the same time I had switched fachs and begun singing the lyric mezzo-soprano repertoire. Although theoretically I might have gotten more work as a mezzo, where the field was not as crowded, I asked my manager not to send me on any more auditions. I simply couldn’t stomach continuing along the path that I believed, because of my ambition for it, had led my whole life astray. But I was very slow in learnng the lesson my friend provided during that fraught moment in Rossini: that the love with which we sing, and the love with which we regard our friends, is the better part.

My friend got married and started a family soon after, and I went to graduate school. She later moved across the country, and we have not been in touch for some time. I’ve been dreaming about her for the past few nights, though; I feel as if she is speaking to me in my dreams. She was always an incredibly tender and wise person, and in my dreams I have been able to experience her tenderness and wisdom. In spite of the real disappointments and frustrations in both of our lives and careers, she is someone I wish I could be more like.

John Cage in Black and White

While working with my student on the Cage “Aria” the other day, I starting thinking that John Cage neatly and rather strangely sidestepped all of the most dynamic innovations taking place in the music of his day. “Aria” is a guided improvisation, and a great deal of work in the genre of guided improvisation was going on around the time he wrote it; but the lion’s share of that work was in jazz. The late 1950s saw the flowering of the sons of the bebop generation (like John Coltrane) and the turning of public attention to those who’d been neglected in bebop’s first wave (like Thelonius Monk). Their music was full of warmth, wit, humanity, and vitality. Cage’s music, on the other hand, has wit aplenty, but little warmth, and his aesthetic seems to have been untouched by the most interesting innovations in the music of his day.

The jazz musicians of the 1940s and 50s self-consciously modeled themselves on contemporary European intellectuals, with the ironic twist, of course, that they were black and American; they saw themselves as the true heirs of European harmonic and tonal tradition. John Cage, on the other hand, who admitted that he'd been unable to master the principles of harmony in his studies with Schoenberg in the 1930s, adopted instead the “cold” aesthetic of Japanese Buddhist thought, which, while it may have seemed like a salutary aesthetic cool breeze blowing what was non-essential out of the American ear, ends up going nowhere. This is why Cage has no real heirs in music.

I suppose there are two paths in the art and music of the twentieth century, one of which is a blend of European and African strains, and the other of which is an amalgam of nineteenth-century American transcendalism and authentic Asian practice. Although the ethos of the latter is intriguing, it circles around and bites its own tail; it is self-referential, and its influence is limited. As my brother says, American culture is black culture. Perhaps this is why Cage is so uncompelling: he is, as my friend put it, so short of negritude.

By the way, today is the ninetieth anniversary of Thelonius Monk’s birth. I also happened to see a MetroNorth train car this afternoon named, oddly, the Thelonius Monk.

Aria

I’m working one-on-one with a gifted young undergraduate singer on the John Cage piece “Aria” (the photo above shows an excerpt from the score). I got a small grant from my university music department’s diversity committee to design and teach this course; they have the earnest but perhaps misguided goal of trying to attract more minority students into academic music studies. A colleague of mine expressed some curiosity about how it would play out, seeing as John Cage is a composer, as he put it, “seriously lacking in what the French call negritude.” The more I work with my student on “Aria,” the more I see what he means, and the more I become frustrated with Cage’s real limitations. Obviously he’s a very important composer and thinker, crucial to our understanding of the post-World War II breakdown of previously-received systems and standards across the arts. He also represents the advance guard of what writer Rick Fields called “the swans coming to the lake”: the dissemination of eastern spiritual thought in American culture, which can be seen also in the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, J.D. Salinger, and many others. As such, he provides a kind of link back to the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau by way of Japanese Buddhism. But his music is beginning to seem maddenly boring, not to mention totally divorced from what music is meant to convey, i.e. meaning. What's more, I'm coming to the conclusion that Cage's musical ideology is just plain wrong. This is, after all, the man who said that duration in music is more important than harmony, and that Satie is a more important composer than Beethoven -- in fact, that Beethoven corrupted music. While Cage and Satie have their charms, I’m beginning to feel like I chose the wrong piece for my tutorial.

Music and Memory, Part 2: Neil Young

I had a friend long ago who once said that she wished Neil Young were her dad. While such a wish strikes me as misguided at best, my own opinion about Young has progressed from indifference to a respect that borders on awe. I first discovered his music while babysitting for hippies in the late 1970s. At that time, I was more attracted by the gorgeous harmonizing of his colleagues Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Young's quasi-tuneless, mournful, boyishly fragile voice and alternately morose and bitter songwriting seemed to me hallmarks of guy music, which didn't interest me as a rule; I preferred Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Phoebe Snow. But I recall riding on a city bus around that time and witnessing an older teen vandalizing the seat-back ahead of her with the iconic words: "Oh to live on sugar mountain, with the barkers and the colored balloons." The pathos of this scene touched and unnerved me,leaving me wondering if the adulthood I so longed for would leave me with a broken sense of longing (it has).

As a professional longhair with a limited amount of spare time, I'm pretty well out of touch with current pop culture, and I haven't heard Young's latest two albums. However, the shaky voice, seemingly without overtones, and the despairing songs of the 1970s-era Neil Young are so full of human loneliness and a kind of existential resignation to the uncontrollable strangeness and suffering of life that they resonate powerfully in my heart and memory.