Cathedrals & a Royal Peculiar I’ve always thrived on pressure. Perhaps it’s the residual effects of having worked as a triage secretary in a hospital Emergency Room while in college, or perhaps it’s just my particular constitution. But in the music world, one’s ability, or inability, to remain calm and flexible under extremely stressful situations
A few hours after posting my last blog, I was fired. It wasn’t the first time I’d been fired from a church job; it was actually the fifth! So the psychological pattern that would follow was well-known: shock from being broadsided, anger and desire for vengeance, long aftermath of depression and self-doubt. But this one
Although I don’t recall the actual circumstance, part of our family lore is that when I was three years old, sitting next to my mother at church (Presbyterian Church on the Green in Morristown, NJ), when the organ started to play, I leaned over to her and told her: “When I grow up, I’m going
“Ce n’est pas moi qui fait le chemin, c’est le chemin qui me fait.” (“It’s not me that makes the Way, it’s the Way that makes me.”) Every place we stopped for the night, from gîtes to chambres d’hôte to AirBnBs, all have little sayings scattered around the walls. They’re there to make you
Rocamadour is a place of legend. It emerges, high upon a cliff, from fog and clouds, and seems to brood over the surrounding valley like a mother hen over her chicks. Historically one of the main four pilgrimage spots in Christendom (alongside Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela), this UNESCO site continues to draw spiritual
On February 22, 2022, the planet Pluto was exactly at the same place in the sky that it was on July 4, 1776 – American Independence Day. Pluto’s orbit around the Sun takes 246 years, and Pluto’s return was talked about as a portent for revolutionary change. But February 22, 2022 turned out to have
The Global Pandemic has created a ubiquitous artistic presence that was only somewhat employed in prior years: YouTube recordings of music. Like countless other musicians during the pandemic, I chose to create video musical presentations, solo performances and choral performances (edited from individuals performing from their homes), during the sudden absence and impossibility of performing
On the surface of it, the phrase “never again” doesn’t make sense. How can something that doesn’t exist (“never”) happen again? But in the context of the appropriate predicate (such as a killing) the logic of the statement becomes clear, taking on an urgency of exasperation, a demand for an entire society to examine its
It sounds like an oxymoron, but I played my first live funeral service a few days ago. The church had a congregation of masked and socially distant attendees; I was accompanying a singer and playing prelude and postlude music. It felt incredibly foreign and normal at the same time. But unlike in the many hundreds
It is a tradition in India to perform music of spiritual depth only if one is a spiritual master. The purpose of music not being for the development of ego of the performer, but rather for the enlightenment and spiritual edification of the listener. In other words, music’s goal is connection with the Divine. In
I’m one of the many that wears a mask with some degree of annoyance, resenting the imposed strictures that keep me from being able to show the world a smile. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about masks lately, their historic place, their fashion, their aesthetic, what it feels like to be behind one, and
In Latin, “corona” refers to a garland worn on the head as a mark of honor or emblem of majesty; it can also refer to a halo around a celestial body.[1] I prefer “coronavirus” to the clinical “COVID-19” because using the word, “corona,” conjures up an image of an encircling light. That encircling light is
It was 1856 and Clara Schumann was newly widowed. She hadn’t seen her husband, Robert, for several years; his ragings, during his institutionalization, specifically made clear that he did not wish to see her. But as a new, and young, widow, still with many of their nine children at home to feed, she needed to
There is a law of diminishing returns that states that a benefit will require an ever increasing input of energy to maintain a fixed result. In the United States, in early 2017, we witnessed a casual amount of bullshitting by our nominally-elected president. The outrage and shock by the citizenry was high. But today, after
In spite of thirteen hours on an airplane, a time change of nine hours, and sleep deprivation for most of us, some 35 singers, my husband as their choir director, and me as their organist were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We were at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, about to sing for an evening Mass
How often do we initiate conversations of complaint about how things have changed in our place of residence or place of former residence? Ah, but it’s human nature, we might say, to compare and contrast. Inevitably the conversation includes at least one of the following: I barely recognize the place; it no longer feels like
It is only once in an artist’s lifetime that the opportunity presents itself to participate in the memorial service of one’s first, and most formative, teacher and mentor. It’s an honor and a responsibility simultaneously, the very last showing of respect, and the official passing on of the baton. In some Asian traditions, it is
Fifty years ago, what would eventually be known as the Early Music Movement started. Period instruments came onto the scene, mostly played extremely badly, and everyone in the instrumental world of music at least became aware of the small but important body of literature, from the baroque period, that informs playing-technique for baroque music. Europe