Tota pulchra es Maria,
tota pulchra es Maria
et macula originalis
non est in te,
non est in te.
Every Sunday morning, we sit in our kitchen listening to “With Heart and Voice,” a program from WXXI in Rochester, NY. It is what passes for church for us most weeks. “With Heart and Voice” is a program of choral music of the type that, for many years, I sang every Sunday morning and several nights a week in exchange for a paycheck. This morning Duruflé’s four songs on Gregorian themes came on. And I found myself dripping tears in my coffee, no longer in the kitchen, but in a cathedral many miles away.
I didn’t ever plan to be much of a singer. It was something I did for fun. I was a violinist. But my voice was okay and my pitch was accurate and I was often picked out for solos in elementary school. In junior high, I was always in the school musical. But in high school, violin began taking more time and I let the singing drop. It wasn’t so important.
It wasn’t until my junior year in college that I joined an actual choir. A bunch of my friends were in Glee Club and they urged me to join because it was fun. So I tried out at the end of my sophomore year (I think) and joined the following fall. And I loved it. It was fun. And social. And much less stressful than my lessons with my critical German violin teacher (a man who looked disturbingly Gustav Mahler). But I struggled with the commitment as I started planning my junior violin recital. Later that year, a small subset of the group, the Chamber Singers, was touring England for spring break. Some of my friends auditioned for the group, but I didn’t. I wasn’t a real singer. But the director asked me if I’d join them and of course I said yes. But I felt — still feel — a little guilty that I never had to audition. And more guilty that I wasn’t going to have much time to prepare. My recital was looming.
My relationship to singing changed when I came out of the door of my seminar on Dostoevsky’s novels on the first day of class after winter break, my backpack slung over one shoulder and my violin in one hand. I had to sprint across campus to get to my lesson in time. Avoiding the crowds squeezing out the main door of the old house that held our classroom, I went out the side door, down some stairs that had not yet been cleared of January snow. At the bottom of the stairs, I prepared to run through the fresh powder back to the path. But hidden under all that powder was a large glassy sheet of ice. I fell hard. And in an effort to keep my violin from hitting the ground, I landed on my left hand.
It wasn’t broken, the doctor said, but some of the bones in my wrist had never fused properly when I was a baby, which allowed my thumb to bend much farther back than it should have. It probably saved the bones, but I’d have to wear a splint for 6 weeks while the torn ligaments and tendons healed and then follow it with physical therapy. No more recital. No more violin at all for a while. It was too painful to even hold it up. And so I threw myself into choir rehearsals.
Tu Gloria Jerusalem
tu laetitia Israel,
tu honorificentia populi nostris,
populi nostris
In March, we stood in a semicircle inside Coventry Cathedral, a starkly modern space. Through the windows etched with ghostly saints, you could dimly see the archways of the old Cathedral, destroyed by bombs, Churchill’s impossible decision. In that enormous space — inspired by its awesomeness, on the spur of the moment, to contribute something to it — we sang the smallest of pieces, Maurice Duruflé’s spare setting of the Gregorian antiphon, “Tota pulchra es Maria.” It was a moment like I’d never experienced before. In all the years of practice and mastery of violin, I had never felt so physically involved with the sound. For a few minutes, I was the sound, the history of the space, the mysticism of the text, the entire group, every atom in the room. It wasn’t until after we finished that I realized I’d been crying. And I wasn’t the only one.
There would be other moments like that for me with singing. They are always unexpected, always a fusion of something more than the music itself, but its space, its time, its history. I have never had such an experience as an instrumentalist. I think it’s the mechanics. It’s at another level of remove. I can see what I am doing. There is less magic in it than in the invisible sound that comes out of my mouth, the way it naturally adapts to the voices around it, they way you disappear in the service of the choir, the song. I still play – and love playing – violin. But it is different. It is less naked, more intellectual, and less organic.
They are only moments. They don’t last long. But they render the music indelible. Any time I sing one of those pieces again, or sit hearing them over the internet in my kitchen on a Sunday morning, I am always back there in that original moment when the world reforms itself. As I get older and more removed from that kind of singing, I wonder if it will be enough to remember them.
As we walked out of Coventry Cathedral that day, to pay our homage to the grounds, we were shaken out of our musical moment by the organist who had come in to practice. He pulled out all the stops and launched into…the theme from Star Wars. We walked out laughing.
Posted by harri3tspy 
