the cassandra pages

Nature and Nurture

 

My cousin, on the left, holding the black rabbit, had a birthday recently and I sent her this photograph of the two of us. It’s a slide my father must have taken in the 1950s. We’re standing in front of my aunt and uncle’s house, on their dairy farm in Smyrna, New York. I loved animals, but because of my mother’s asthma I couldn’t have furry pets, so I liked visiting the farm animals. I remember various pet dogs and cats, the chicken house out back, occasional pigs, and the huge herd of Holsteins, but not these rabbits — the fluffy white one one I’m holding looks slightly demented. But my attention was caught by two other things in this photograph as well.

One is the pair of pants I’m wearing, with their design of palettes and brushes and paint. Did I choose them or did my mother or someone else in the family give them to me? Did someone find the fabric and sew them? I was born into a family of makers; my father and grandfather were excellent woodworkers, all the women knew how to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, cook, grow a garden, and some — my mother and aunt — painted pictures. On my father’s side, everyone was musical, and my school had an active music and drama program. I had an easel and art supplies from the time I was very young, and always liked to draw and paint — but would I have discovered this if I hadn’t been encouraged? Would I have asked for a musical instrument on my own, without those external factors? And would I have persisted, without watching the adults around me, observing their enjoyment and satisfaction, and how they dealt with errors, mistakes, or making a dress or a chair that was harder than anything they’d tried before? What if I hadn’t had good teachers? What if all the music and arts programs at school had been cut, as is the case now in so many places?

The other thing I notice in the picture is my calm, direct look into the camera, and a sense of the person behind her gaze. It’s uncanny, how much of myself I see in that little girl, already.

Why, I wonder, do some children seek to emulate certain adults in their families or close circles, while others are rebellious, wanting to do just the opposite? What about a sensitive creative child, like my husband, born into a family that was not artistic at all, didn’t know how to encourage it, and had a much narrower bandwidth about what constitutes a valuable use of one’s time? Nobody was dressing him in clothes with prints of cameras and film, though I can imagine those existing in the funky design world of the 1950 and 60s. He and I grew up in such different environments, and yet ended up in similar places, partly because of discovering our natural talents and desires, partly because of encouragement from older people — outside the family in his case, inside the family in mine — and partly because of innate determination, persistence, and a basic tendency toward non-conformity.

Somehow we get launched on our particular paths, through some combination of nature and nurture, but then we encounter obstacles that can hinder progress. These can range from lack of education, money, or opportunity, or running into a destructive teacher, to basic character traits like lack of the necessary drive, stubbornness about fixing problems, or inability to take criticism.

In my case, my biggest problem has always been impatience. In music, I never wanted to play scales and exercises, and my teachers didn’t insist. I didn’t learn music theory. When you have a basic natural facility, and good skills like sight-reading, and you aren’t in a highly competitive environment, you can coast along for a long time. The same is true in studying, in art, in writing, and even in relationships. I’ve become a much more patient person over the years, willing to step back and analyze a problem and figure out how to fix it — which may require a lot of work — but that kind of patience wasn’t natural to me. We’re born with certain character traits. I doubt that anyone could have trained me to be a patient child; I would have rebelled. As an adult, I’ve had to make up for those omissions later on, but sometimes my impatience still gets the better of me.

I’m working on a new oil painting now, and it’s reached the stage where the decisions are on the fine-tuning level. Lots of stepping back and looking, not too much brush-on-the-canvas. In the days leading up to yesterday, the process has gone well, and I’ve been pleased to be able to keep the brushwork loose, the forms somewhat abstract, the colors within a range I had decided upon earlier. It’s close to being finished.

But yesterday, as I looked at the painting and felt like I should work on it, I just didn’t really feel like it was going to go well. Sometimes, starting to work breaks through that kind of psychological barrier, whatever it is, and I find myself able to focus. I knew, instinctively, that it wasn’t one of those days, but nevertheless, I put on my apron, took up my brushes, and began. Sure enough, it went badly, but I kept going. I started watching myself, kind of standing outside and observing myself over my shoulder, as I made mistakes and poor decisions. It was almost amusing. Once in a while this happens when I’m sewing, knitting, or even practicing the piano. I’m just not concentrated, I know I should take more time, but I plunge ahead carelessly, impatiently, without measuring when I need to, without correcting the perspective, without mixing the colors carefully enough — there are a million ways things can go wrong and errors can be compounded. Inevitably, I make a mess that requires going back and correcting, taking out seams, ripping out rows of knitting, or having to rub out hours of brushwork with turpentine. It’s such a waste of time — and I know better!

Having basic facility come easily is actually a problem; getting to the next level requires a lot of patience and work. Fortunately my parents were able to recognize this tendency and help me through my frustrations as I learned difficult skills. My father was extremely impatient in nature, but also a perfectionist when it came to skills; he would practice a sports skill for years, fuss over a piece of woodworking until it was perfect, or spend weeks fixing an antique clock. My mother was very patient in nature, but never spent the time to figure out why a piece of knitting or sewing didn’t fit properly, or why a recipe had failed. She liked the process, but perfection didn’t matter to her. People did. She’d patiently hold wires for my father as he tried to repair something, or sit beside the piano night after night to help keep me at my practice.

The girl in the photograph above doesn’t look impatient; she looks calm, but I remember the conflict between my desire to do things well, and my impatience with how long it took. This isn’t a question of talent; it’s a question of mental and emotional self-recognition, learning to focus and analyze, and cultivating self-discipline. As an adult, there have been many stages in my life where I reached plateaus, and had to figure out what I wanted to do, what the problems and obstacles were, and how to go beyond them. I don’t think that process ever ends, if we’re honest with ourselves, and if we want to keep growing.

It was enlightening to me to watch that innate impatience take over yesterday. There’s no parent or teacher anymore who’s going to correct me; it’s entirely up to me to listen to my mood, realize what’s likely to happen, and master myself. Realize I’m too tired or distracted, take a step back and breathe, or put down the brushes and go for a walk. Then come back and, without touching a brush or a keyboard, figure out what’s causing the difficulty, and make a plan for dealing with it.

The girl with the paint-and-palette pants didn’t know where she was headed; she just knew she had some raw materials and some things she especially liked to do. I’ve been lucky to have had people throughout my life who encouraged me, and the strength of character to move beyond the ones who didn’t. Later, when most of our mentors and guides have left us, we have to find out how to continue on our own. It helps me to have internalized what these people lived: that the process is always more important than the end result, that pushing forward into new terrain is more satisfying than repeating yourself, and that patience with yourself and others is a virtue worth cultivating.

I Couldn't Keep from Singing

Sketching on the bulletin up in the choir loft, during the sermon last Sunday...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone back to singing in the cathedral choir. As the warmer weather appeared, the risk/benefit ratio between continuing to be super-careful and starting to live more normally seemed to change. My husband had started encouraging me to go back to the choir, but I was unsure. One day not long ago I went for a walk, feeling a bit morose and sorry for myself, but by the time I came back home, I had made a decision to write to the music director and ask if it would be all right for me to return. He said yes, and on the next Sunday, I sang in person with the group for the first time in three years.

It’s been a long history. I started singing in a church choir when I was about six years old, and have continued (which seems incredible, even to me) nearly all of my life.

I graduated to the adult choir in that Episcopal parish once I entered junior high school. After I graduated from university and was working in my home town, I conducted that small choir for two years. In 1976, I moved to New England, and joined a very good choir at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, New Hampshire. I stopped for a few years when J. and I got together, because his father was the Unitarian Universalist minister in Woodstock, Vermont, and we started going to hear him preach on Sundays, and then often had lunch with his parents at their home afterwards. After my father-in-law left that position, I realized how much I had missed singing, and began again with the choir in Hanover. I sang there during all the years we lived in Vermont, until we moved to Montreal in 2006, and took private voice lessons for some of that time as well. When we moved, we joined the congregation of Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Montreal but I was unsure if I could manage the commitment or the stress of being in the cathedral choir, which was on another whole level of rigor than anything I had experienced. Thank God I had the courage to try, and to sing with Patrick Wedd — the cathedral’s music director, extraordinary organist, and soon a fast friend — for twelve years, and then with Nick Capozzoli and Rob Hamilton, Jonathan White, and then Nick after he became the Director of Music following Jonathan’s resignation in the second year of the pandemic. But with my own age and my husband's immune issues, I didn't feel comfortable going back to singing when the choir regrouped in person, and especially not when the masks came off. It was only this spring, as the pandemic waned somewhat and we began to feel more comfortable after some medical advice, when I began to think about possibly re-joining.

I had almost resigned myself to the idea that my singing career was over; after all, I was not young anymore, and I absolutely did not want to be one of those people who is talked about behind their back: “Why doesn’t she quit?” I wasn’t sure how it would feel this time around, but so far, my voice has felt good, and not too fatigued even after a full day of rehearsals and two services. However, I’ve pledged to myself that I will stop when I can no longer contribute positively — and hope it will be clear to me when that time has come.

Making music hasn’t been the problem: I’ve been playing the piano a lot since moving it to our new apartment. This winter, working on some Schubert Impromptus, new to me, was a great consolation during the darkest months of weather as I dealt with change and grief. But if you have had a history of making music with other people, that experience is pretty irreplaceable. Singing in a choir is a particular kind of musical experience, too, and in one like ours, where we churn through a huge amount of repertoire in a short time, you have to like sight-reading and be good at it, have experience in a wide range of periods and styles, and be able to absorb and learn the music very quickly so that you can perform it confidently after only a couple of times through -- if that. It’s not the same at all as a choir that practices a few pieces of music intensively for, say, a whole semester, and then gives a concert. A choir like ours cannot work on each piece with the same level of attention to detail, but if the singers and director are very good, and they have a strong affinity and sense of singing together as a group, they can actually perform very well, week in and week out. Although we don’t repeat pieces very often — it may be a matter of many years — when we come back to something that we know, then of course we can work on the details with even greater finesse. It’s a particular kind of challenge, and it’s exactly what I like most as a musician.

The camaraderie of a choir is also a particular sort of bond, and I think some of that comes from the fact that our only instruments are our bodies. There's a physicality about singing with others that creates a greater awareness of all the other group members than I ever found when I was playing in a band or orchestra. The personnel of this choir has changed a lot in the years I was away. Most of the professionals who sang with us have left and been replaced by new and younger singers (all of whom are excellent); most of the volunteer singers are also younger — many are McGill students or recent graduates — and in addition to the eight paid professionals we now have three choral scholars. These are gifted college-age singers who are given a stipend in exchange for the experience of singing in this kind of a group, and doing some solo and ensemble work on their own. But there are several people who, like me, were in the choir for years and are still there, and some new, but older volunteers I’ve been happy to meet. One of them is a man in his late 80s who I talked to for the first time last Sunday. He had sung in the cathedral choir thirty years ago, and then stopped because of some vocal problems — and now he is back. After we had told each other brief versions of our choir histories, he smiled at me and said, “Yes, it just gets into your blood.”

Like him, I don’t know how long I will be singing, but I know how much I missed it, and that it means a great deal to me to be able to do it again. Of all the things I've done, singing is one that keeps me firmly attentive to the present moment, and is perhaps one of the best ways of finding the joy that being fully in that moment can provide. And it still seems miraculous to me that, with only our bodies, we can take a collective breath in silence, and, the next moment, bring forth the extraordinary music that only a choir of human voices can create.

For a quiet moment that illustrates this, listen to the introit (opening choral work) by going to 6:20 in the video below, of last Sunday's Evensong for the Feast of the Ascension. It's "My Peace I Leave with You" by the 20th century American composer Amy Beach. (All the works except one that we sang that afternoon were by female composers.)

 

 

 

Not Springing Along, but Inching...

Spring is coming very fitfully to Montreal this year. One day, warm weather; the next, cold clammy rain. It's pretty awful today. But forsythia is blooming, and the first daffodils, and the magnolias have huge buds. It will arrive.

And normalcy in our personal life also seems closer this year than for the past three. This weekend we had dinner at a friend's house and met some new people - what a pleasure! Saturday night we drove out to Pierrefonds, a western suburb that is still on the island of Montreal, to see Albertine en cinq temps, an opera adapted from Michel Trembley's 1984 play of the same name, with music by Catherine Major, and is a production conceived, created, and carried out entirely by women. It tells the story of a Montreal woman, Albertine, who has had a difficult life, and at age 70 is spending her first night in a nursing home. She talks with her earlier selves -- Albertine at 30, 40, 50, and 60 - as well as her sister, Madeline - and the story of her life is revealed through their conversations. Albertine's history mirrors the history of many Quebec women who were unable to find much freedom in their lives, and were deeply affected by patriarchal and religious attitudes. Interestingly, too, the story of her life takes place on rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine, the exact part of the city  where we used to live ourselves.

Albertine en cinq temps is also the first opera ever produced in Quebec to be written and performed in Joual. This is a Quebec dialect of French that was spoken mainly by the working class and is now a source of Quebec identity; many of its words have entered the main language as Quebec slang, but for those of us who didn't grow up hearing or speaking it, it can be really hard to understand. One of my close friends, Catherine St-Arnaud, who I sang with in the cathedral choir, sings the role of Albertine at 30 and has been part of the production team bringing this opera to life. She sent us a bilingual libretto to read beforehand, in French and English, and there were projected sur-titles, but because the French was all in dialect, it was a little tricky, as well as being fascinating to a word nerd like me. All in all, Albertine is a brilliant and very moving opera, beautifully conceived and sung, and if you ever have a chance to see it, by all means do so - there are several more performances of this current Quebec tour. This was also the first big public performance we've attended in three years, so it felt like a liberation for us.

I haven't been painting or drawing much this week, except for the watercolor here -- the bowl of fruit on the blue-and-yellow platter just begged to be painted, especially the brilliance of the pomegranates. This was somewhat bigger than usual - I did it in my 14" x 11" sketchbook and used large brushes.

Instead I'm working on a text to go with the charcoal landscape drawing series, which I hope to publish later in 2023. Because it's personal, as well as being about the art, it's been rather slow going, but it's coming along -- like the slow progress of spring.

The Consolation of Snow

My friend Jon Appleton died on Sunday evening at the age of 83.

Yesterday afternoon, a brilliant blue day, we drove to Mont St-Bruno and took a long walk around the Lac Seigneurial; it was the right thing to do. I may write more about this eventually, but for now, I'll let Tomas Tranströmer speak for me. Jon loved Sweden and poetry, and although he also spent a lot of time in warm places, such as California, Hawaii, Tonga, southern France, I always think of him in the north: Vermont, Sweden, Moscow. One of my most vivid memories of him is from a visit to us in Montreal some years ago, when there was an absolutely huge blizzard, one of the heaviest and stormiest I can remember. Being Vermonters at heart, none of us wanted to stay in, so we bundled up and decided to go out and see if we could find a restaurant that was still open. I can still see Jon, wearing his Russian fur hat, cavorting in the snow-filled street and laughing with delight: "This is aMAZing!"

He was a person who lived life as fully as possible, and who for many of his students and friends was -- as this poem says - "a half-open door leading to a room for everyone." Like Tranströmer, Jon suffered a stroke toward the end of his life. It affected his speech, which he gradually recovered, but he wasn't able to continue composing music. During our last visit to him, he showed us the art studio in his retirement complex, where he said he was enjoying doing some painting. And even in the last two weeks he was writing with great pleasure about a new recording being done by Yoshiko Kline of some of his piano works, and working with an editor on the final draft of his autobiography. The creative spark never went out, and the best way I can remember and honor him, and what he gave me, is to try to do the same.

Two poems by Tomas Tranströmer

The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

 

Snow is Falling

The funerals keep coming
more and more of them
like the traffic signs
as we approach a city.

Thousands of people gazing
in the land of long shadows.

A bridge builds itself
slowly
straight out in space.

Hermit Diary 50. Christmas music from our choir

Here are two musical offerings for this Christmas season by the Cathedral Singers of Christ Church Cathedral Montreal -- a lullaby written by our director of music, Jonathan White, and a lively carol. As always, I'm delighted to be part of this group and glad we've managed to maintain some enthusiasm even though it's painful to all of us not to be able to make music together or present it in the usual way. (Both of these videos sound better with headphones and look better full screen, but do watch however you want!)

Merry Christmas!

 

Hermit Diary 37: Beginning Again, and Again, to Draw

Red ochre on my hand, Anatoliki, Mani Peninsula, Greece.

 

This week, thanks to a link from Jean Morris, I read an essay by David Farrier at LitHub, titled "On John Berger and Rediscovering Drawing during Lockdown." Some of you might connect with the personal story he relates:

When I was younger, I used to draw. Not particularly well; enough to gain a little praise from adults and peers, although it wasn’t praise that interested me. There was a stillness in drawing that I didn’t find anywhere else. Paul Klee famously called drawing, “taking a line for a walk.” In a way, like walking, it gave me a sharper sense of how my own body occupied space. The close attention to shape and space was grounding. It made me feel both more distinct from my surroundings, and at the same time more a part of them. Knowing that I could draw was a talisman I carried with me, like a pebble in my pocket.

And then, without any clear sense of why, I stopped.

It’s now nearly 20 years since I have drawn out of habit. When my children were small I did plenty of scribbling and doodling with them; twice, I have painted my wife a picture for her birthday. But I have rarely sat down to draw for the sake of it. On the few occasions I have picked up a pencil I retreated after a few sketches. The line was broken. I felt guilty for letting it go, and unable to pick it up again.

As he remarks, the initial appeal of drawing was not in seeking praise, but in finding a sense of groundedness, that he defines as "stillness" and a different sense of self, as both "distinct from his surroundings" and at the same time more connected.

During the lockdown in Edinburgh, he kept thinking about drawing.

Thinking too much about the sudden disconnection from the life I knew before, or about how dramatically the future I had anticipated had changed, brought on a kind of vertigo. Lockdown left me feeling unmoored, and my mind turned often to drawing. I needed the old feeling of being grounded by the line. But still, as the weeks of lockdown went by I didn’t draw.

Instead, I read John Berger’s essays about drawing.

Berger compared the drawn line to music, saying that the line emerges from somewhere and leads you on to someplace new. As a musician, it's always been helpful to me to remember that music is never static; it's always coming from somewhere and going somewhere. As an artist, I agree with Berger too: the drawn line arises and moves forward, and so do I, the draughtsperson. Each drawing takes me somewhere I didn't anticipate, and in some very subtle way, changes me. But during the time when I'm drawing, everything except the line is very still.

“Each mark on the paper is a stepping-stone,” Berger writes, “from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as thought it were a river.”

After all those years of not drawing, Farrier finally pulls out an old sketchbook and some charcoals and goes out into the garden. He makes three sketches, and describes them all as "clumsy" but in the third, a branch of tomatoes, he says he "feels something shift."

But then, as Berger wrote, real drawing is both “a clumsiness” and “a constant question.” I realized that drawing is not a pause, but an entry into the complexity and open-endedness of any given moment.

I too felt something shift as I read this essay. It reminded me that drawing is not just something I do, but a place where I go. It's a human activity nearly as old as our species itself. Yes, some of us have greater facility and perhaps greater innate talent, but drawing always improves with practice. I've been fortunate to draw almost continually, all my life, and it's been a great help to me during this period of time. But from what many of you have told me, you're more like the author, who "for years, ... had shied away from drawing because I regretted breaking with it, and as more time passed the gap seemed ever more difficult to bridge."

Regardless of where we begin, or begin again, the place where drawing happens is accessible to everyone, and doesn't need to involve a great deal of self-consciousness or self-criticism. Sometimes all it takes is the courage to makes some marks.  The hand, the eye, a stick of charred wood taken from a fire or a lump of ochre picked up from the ground -- this is all we need to take a line on a journey, and be taken by that line to somewhere new.

Basil and Tomatoes, fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

 

 

Hermit Diary 35: Proud

 

It's Pride Week in Montreal, and although there won't be the usual city-wide festivities, the cathedral held a virtual version of our annual "OutMass" on Sunday evening. The link above is our choir's offering of hope and love, with photographs from last year's Pride parade. This piece of music was written by the British composer Will Todd and made available to musicians worldwide. It was originally written to celebrate the NHS in the early days of the pandemic, and offer some hope and cheerfulness with the rainbow as a symbol, but we felt it was just as appropriate for a dual purpose, acknowledging that the coronavirus is still with us, making events like these as well as the usual closeness between friends impossible, and also as a symbol of Pride.

Just as the service began, our gathering -- which had been advertised and was open to the public -- was Zoom-bombed by a group of anonymous men, who spewed homophobic hate in the most vile way possible. Thanks to the quick reactions of our hosting team, they were removed and the "room" was locked, but of course it was a shock, and distressing. However, the service resumed under the calm leadership of our music director, Jonathan White. The incident was unable to mar the beauty, love, and solidarity of the hour that followed, which was filled with music, spoken word, prayer, reflection, and shared purpose. In fact, I think all the positive qualities of the gathering were actually augmented, and burned into the memories of the people who were present.

When I think of the courage, gentleness, openness, honesty, and calmness of the people of all ages who were gathered, representing all aspects of LGBTQ+ expression as well as their straight allies, and compare it to the cowardice of those who tried to disrupt this beautiful celebration of pride in our human diversity --  and the sanctity of that diversity -- there's really little to say. It's so obvious. Love triumphs over hate.

I'm proud of our community, and extremely proud of and grateful for the friends who planned and prepared this service, and all those who came and stood together on Sunday night. Your strength makes all of us stronger, and I'm glad to be able to help salute you in music and join with you in working for a better, kinder, more just world.

The full service is embedded below. I'd like to call your attention particularly to the section from 26:16 - 32:10, where members of the community offer a litany asking God to "walk with us, grieve with us, and rejoice with us," interposed with Jonathan White singing a Kyrie.

 

 

Hermit Diary 28: Some calm at the end of a wretched week

Deer under a palm tree, a watercolor and ink drawing of a tiled panel in Lisbon.

Such a difficult week this has been, full of sorrow, outrage, solidarity, anxiety for the future, and also some glimmers of hope that this might be a turning point.

I will not add any words, as I think this is a time for me, and for most white people, to listen to black voices, and to learn what we need to do (and not do) to be the best allies we can. What I can offer is a little bit of calmness through music, which is maybe the best and most continuous gift I've been able to give others throughout my life. Music has always given back to me, too, in multiples, helping me through the worst and best times.

Not being able to sing together has been one of the most difficult parts of isolation for me, and probably for all choral singers everywhere. Because there's so much danger about viral spreading through singing (though there have recently been some articles saying it may not be quite as bad as we initially thought), it's still going to be ages before congregational and choir singing returns to churches, and before my professional musician friends are back in concert halls. I'm seeing first-hand the financial and emotional toll this is taking on many of them. For congregations who are used to a lot of beautiful music, as most Anglicans are, the loss is keen too.

But where there's a will, there's a way. Our choir has produced its first two virtual choir pieces, and we've got two more in the works. These were presented during live-streamed Zoom services of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, and then placed on social media, YouTube, and the church's website, along with a growing library of organ music, music education resources, psalms and hymns, and recorded services. We're finding that the new situation is spawning some new creative responses, and also the surprising gift of being able to share what we do with a much wider, far-flung audience.

Recording your own part as a solo, based on a click track or recorded accompaniment, is totally different from the organic experience of sitting or standing next to your colleagues and making music together -- so much of what happens in live performance has to do with careful preparation combined with listening closely to each other to correct the pitch and watching the conductor for tiny shifts in tempo, dynamics, and feeling. This creates a collective emotional and physical reaction to the actual moment. It is intensely "real-time." In contrast, the way I do the recording is to stand in front of a tripod that holds my phone, which will record the video and audio of me singing, while playing the accompaniment on my computer and listening to it in headphones. Meanwhile I'm holding the score in my hands and yet trying to look at the camera as I would the director. You can see that most of us got better at presenting ourselves visually the second time around.

It's a very weird and self-conscious-making experience! But I've found that this process is showing me aspects of my voice and technique I didn't know, encouraging me to listen harder, practice, and try to improve in subtle and not-so subtle ways. For instance, I can really hear my American accent on certain vowels -- not really desirable! Once we've done several recordings and chosen the best, we each send off our video files, and our music director does the painstaking work of assembling and editing the tracks. The results have been startlingly good, considering how flawed some of us have felt our individual recordings have been. Even though our voices and images have been technically-reassembled, we sound remarkably like our own particular choir. Hearing and seeing these pieces of music, sung by people I care about deeply and haven't seen for months, has really moved me, and members of the congregation say the same. I hope maybe these motets will give you some peaceful moments at the end of this week.

The first, Palestrina's Sicut cervus, is a setting in Latin of the first verses of Psalm 42, "Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks/so longeth my soul after thee, oh God."

 

The second piece is a setting of a well-loved hymn, O for a Closer Walk with God, by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). The original hymn was written by William Cowper in 1769 during the serious illness of an aunt he loved.

 

Hermit Diary 26: Down to the Sea in Ships

This entry is cross-posted from Daily Bread, the blog of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal. The painting is Dutch Fishing Boats in a Storm by J.M.W.Turner, 1801.

 

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;

These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.

Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.

He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.

Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.

-- Psalm 107: 23-30 (KJV)

 

Psalm 107, appointed for Evening Prayer today, is a true poem, immensely satisfying not only for its message of deliverance from various sorts of trouble but also for its use of language. In sections of about 8 lines each, we hear about four different groups of people in danger: “Some wandered in desert wastes / finding no way to an inhabited town”; “Some sat in darkness and in gloom / prisoners in misery and in irons;” “Some were sick^[through their sinful ways / and because of their iniquities endured affliction.” Finally, we meet the sailors: “Some went down to the sea in ships / doing business on the mighty waters.”

Each of these four groups is, or becomes, lost in some way, which the psalmist describes, but by the end of the eight lines, the Lord has led them out of their trouble into safe haven. The whole psalm is wonderful in its repetition and vivid description, but the best-known lines are those quoted above, about sailors who go to sea, only to be tossed and terrified by winds and waves, but are saved when the Lord calms the storm and brings them safely home.

The King James Bible gave us the familiar English wording: “They that go down to the sea in ships.” But throughout the centuries since the psalm was written, to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, to the era of exploration, and right up to the middle of the 20^th century, when air travel became common, the basic concept resonated. People have always known what it means to go to the sea in ships, face the intense danger that claims many lives, and they’ve always been grateful for reaching safe harbour.

It’s not surprising that Henry Purcell (1659-1695), living in a great age of seafaring, felt compelled to set these words to music; his is a chamber music setting for bass, alto (or counter-tenor), two violins and organ.

 

But the setting better known to Anglicans today is the one linked above, written by Herbert Sumsion (1899-1995). It was brought to our cathedral choir two years ago by Rob Hamilton, co-interim-music director, who remembered it fondly from his own days as a boy chorister. Most of us had never sung it before, but we too had fun with its evocation of calm seas, then the storm, and the sailors “staggering like drunken men” before the calm is restored again.

I asked our music director Jonathan White for some additional insights about the composer and what might have influenced him to write this piece.

“Sumsion was heavily embedded in the English choral tradition,” he told me, “spending practically his entire musical life at Gloucester Cathedral, all the way from being a chorister as a child to being Director of Music for almost 40 years. This is a late work from his career -- 1979 -- and we know it was written as a commission. He may well have known Purcell’s own setting of the text as this was also a period of ‘rediscovery’ of older music. Sumsion was well acquainted with composers like Elgar, Howells, Vaughan Williams, Holst. Howells and his circle were central in reviving the Renaissance composers – Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons etc – and Purcell likely also formed part of this. Britten and his circle were very interested in Purcell, for example.”

Jonathan went on to say that he didn’t know of any other Sumsion anthems quite as dramatic as this one:

“It’s a very evocative anthem, with a rippling accompaniment that is clearly designed to convey the ebb and flow of the waves, that follows a great arc, building to a dramatic climax before ebbing away again. This, of course, is a trajectory that you can see in many Renaissance works (think of the Tallis O sacrum convivium that does just that, the Palestrina Agnus Dei from the Missa brevis…) but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s directly connected to that period of music – it could just be a coincidence.”

As I listened to Sumsion’s anthem again, I thought about how we often forget that Montreal was once a seafaring city, except maybe when we attend a concert at the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours in the Old Port -- once known as the “seafarers’ church” -- and see all the handcarved wooden ship models hanging from the ceiling: offerings of thanksgiving made by sailors. A great many of our ancestors, including mine, arrived on the shores of the New World by boat, often enduring horrendous trips during which survival was not at all certain. Sometime, visit the Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum next to the Chapelle Bon-Secours, and listen to the recording of a letter written during a terrifying voyage from France to the nascent colony of Ville-Marie around 1653 (four years before Purcell was born.)

But you don’t need to be a seafarer to find a contemporary resonance in the psalm and the anthem. The arc of the text and music also mirror the uncertain journey we’re going through today -- and express clearly how grateful we will be if and when the waters feel calm again, and we’re home, on dry land, in “our desired haven.”

 

Hermit Diary 24: Remembering Patrick Wedd

A year ago today, the music world lost a great man and musician, Patrick Wedd, who had retired a year before as organist and music director at Christ Church Cathedral Montreal but whose reputation extended well beyond Canada. It was a personal loss for me, too: in addition to feeling incredibly fortunate to have sung with him for more than a decade, and to have had the privilege of sitting near the organ bench watching him play, Patrick was a dear friend.

Nick Capozzoli, our present assistant organist, had worked under Patrick for several years and became interim co-music director during the year after Patrick's retirement. Nick is one of the finest organists of his generation, following in Patrick's footsteps. As a tribute to his teacher and mentor, Nick put together this video, published today. The music is one of Patrick's favorite hymns, being sung in the crowded cathedral during his memorial service, and the photographs of Patrick and our choir were taken on several occasions by the diocesan photographer, Janet Best. At the end, our soprano section takes off in a descant written by Patrick for the final verse of the hymn.

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On Thursday, Donald Hunt, former assistant organist here in Montreal, and now director of music at Christ Church Cathedral Victoria, will present Olivier Messiaen's l'Ascension as a live-streamed concert in memory of Patrick Wedd. The movements will be interspersed with meditations on the scriptural verses to which they refer, by several of Patrick's clerical friends and colleagues. The links for that are here: To tune in live: https://www.facebook.com/MusicCCCVictoria/live_videos/
To watch on demand after the live stream: https://vimeo.com/user12422383

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The worst part about the current crisis for me personally, other than intense sadness about the loss of life worldwide, has been the loss of making music with others through singing. Added to that is the growing awareness that, because singing is one of the most dangerous activities, it may be a very long time before we can return to it. I was already fearing that I might be getting toward the end of my time as a choir singer, though I waffle back and forth about that. Now, in my worst moments, I wonder if I will ever return to it, after a lifetime of being in church and cathedral choirs.

However, our choir has just produced their first virtual-choir video, and we're working on two more which I'll share with you here when they're completed. It's a bizarre and quite self-conscious process, where you  record your own part, solo, while listening to a backing track on headphones. The tracks were then assembled by our music director, Jonathan White, and the resulting video recording sounded remarkably like us -- the way our own particular voices blend and sound together. This video was played during the cathedral's Zoom service last Sunday morning, and a number of parishioners told me they were very moved to hear and see the choir again.

Patrick was one of the least technological people I've known in my life, but I know he would have been delighted. His focus was always on producing the best music possible and sharing it widely. He'd be happy to know that we're finding new ways to continue singing, continue performing, and bringing this tradition of liturgical music to people at a time when it particularly matters.