The Strange Case of the Singing Nun

The things, Dear Readers, I do for you! For nothing, ordinarily, would get me to re-listen to the Italian nun, Sister Christina, who has quite the voice, matched by none of the taste. Why else would she sing, “Like a Virgin,” which was a hit by someone named—although apparently not a nun—Madonna.

Well, it seemed like the thing to do, so I sat through it, and quite a slick affair it is: beautiful shots of Italy, incredible architecture, and then, of course, the rapturous Sister Christina herself: the rapture being conveyed by the three hand movements God has given her. But no matter, because she has over three million hits in the video I watched, and that, by the way, was uploaded less than a month ago. Am I placing the YouTube clip at the bottom of the post? Or even hyperlinking it? No way, since Sister Christina needs no help from me. So you’re on your own, guys.

Ah, how one longs for dear Pope Benedict, now reverently retiring under the nose and presumed eye of the new pope, who, according to The New York Times, is confusing his cardinals, archbishops, and bishops. Here’s what the Times has to say, in an article entitled “Bishops Struggle to Follow Lead of Francis.”

Change is rattling the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, as the American bishops hold their annual fall meeting here this week. The vast majority of them were appointed by Francis’ two more conservative predecessors, and some say they do not yet understand what kind of change Pope Francis envisions and whether it is anything more than a change in tone.

Well, the bishops may be struggling, but the rest of us? It’s pretty clear: enough already with all the talk about same-sex marriage and traditional values and let’s focus on the poor, about which Jesus spent a bit more time than he did preaching traditional moral values. At least, that’s my reading of the whole thing.

So now we have a singing nun, and guess what! She’s even appeared with our own Ricky Martin—soo all the world is seeing an Ursuline nun appearing with a gay parent of surrogate children. All this in presumably hyper-Catholic Italy; no wonder the bishops are confused.

Well, the BBC reports on all of this, since Christina has just released her first and undoubtedly-already hit recording called—no self-aggrandizing, here—“Sister Christina!“ Will I be excommunicated if I express the hope that all you out there pirate the music from YouTube?

The BBC, however, takes a bit of the stench away by offering up some really first rate nuns, whom the term “rebel.” That would seem to apply to the older of the two nuns, Hildegard von Bingen, whom I’ve always shied away from, since all the New Age types were listening to her. But really, what a remarkable woman she was: writing her theological texts, as well as…wait, Wikipedia to the rescue….

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, O.S.B. (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis) (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath.^[1] Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play.^[2]

She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.^[3]

Wikipedia goes on to say that Hildegard—who isn’t formally a saint, but a lot of people, including popes, refer to her as one—wasn’t afraid to buck the system, including going over the head of her abbot to the archbishop, all to get permission to move her nuns to simpler lodgings in Rupertsberg.

Interestingly, she took the time to invent a language—wow, the stuff you can get up to if you don’t have a man around the house!—which she called lingua ignota, and which may have been used to, according to Wikipedia, “increase solidarity among the nuns.” Is it just me, or does anyone else sense there might be another motive involved?

Though she professed to be an “unlearned woman, completely of Biblical exegesis,” she acquired fame in Europe, and corresponded with many notable people, including two popes.  

Then there are the famous visions, which prompted a lot  of writing, after initial resistance. But wait, were they really visions, or were they, as no less than Oliver Sacks diagnosed, or were they migraine? Again, here’s Wikipedia:

Oliver Sacks, in his book Migraine, called her visions "indisputably migrainous,"^[26] but stated that this does not invalidate her visions, because it is what one does with a psychological condition that is important.

Look—this is screwy to me: if I take LSD and experience the vision of God as Chippendale models playing celestial cellos, does that count? And isn’t a migraine a physiological condition, not a psychological one?

Lastly, back to the BBC, which claimed that Hildegard served up the first description of the female orgasm, and even provided the link, which of course I had to look up. So am I any smarter on the subject? Not really, though I did stumble across this:

From tasting evil, the blood of the sons of Adam was turned into the poison of semen, out of which the sons of man are begotten.

OK so we don’t always agree. But look…

…at least she’s not singing “What a Feeling” from Flashdance on YouTube!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

   

Red Eyes, A Niece, And A Son

I could tell you: I’m OK. I got through the eye surgery, managed to lose the prednisone drops that would spur healing, went back to the ophthalmologist, got another prescription, and then went to get it filled at the pharmacy. So that should have been easy, but guess what? The system refused to pay—which means that whoever designed the computer system that CVS uses had decreed: it was too soon to refill the prescription. So that meant either paying 90 bucks for what is the smallest bottle of eye drops visible without microscopy or going without.

Do I have to tell you what I chose?

“Dammit, Marc, spend the 90 dollars,” said Lady yesterday, as she was looking at my reddened, inflamed, I’ve-just-been-sobbing-my-ass-out-of-my-left-eye-exclusively eye. So I’ve learned: most of the time, the stuff people say to you is stuff you should listen to. Next step: a trudge back to CVS.

The pharmacist was good enough to try to get the insurance company to pay for the medicine, which meant that she spent ten minutes giving information into a machine. “Pharmacy,” she announced. “Inquiry,” she continued. “Declined,” she announced. I waited until the system had decided a person was needed; the person, obviously peering at the equivalent screen that the pharmacist had seen, gave the same answer: declined.

It would have been easy if it had just been about the 90 bucks. In fact, it was more: I was buying drops for my eyes when in fact I was suffering from drops in my life.

Consider, we are animal people, Mr. Fernández and I, and our aged cat—now requiring a special diet that of course no one but Mr. Fernández can administer—is hanging to life by a thread, or rather, by the special love between Mr. Fernández and Kitty. So we’ve had no vacation for a year.

Noise—constant noise, from the reconstruction of the street outside, and from the sculptor above. Oh, and did I mention that a piece of the balcony above us fell and was found on the sidewalk? We replaced our balcony five years ago: the upstairs neighbor has allowed hers to rot in the salt air.

What I am telling you—or trying to—is that a man can be maddened by a swarm of gnats as much as by a Cyclops. And so I bought the drops, put them in, felt relief, and went to bed, thinking that the issue had been dealt with. Had it?

Evidently not, since I woke up at three in the morning, shifted restlessly in bed for four hours, and then fell asleep as the morning radio trumpeted the morning’s bad  news. I then slept until eleven, awoke, felt guilty, felt a pain in my left side, and felt an incredible tension in my left trapezoid. It was not a muscle, what I had had between my neck and my shoulder—it was more like one of the steel cables of the Golden Gate Bridge.

My mind was busy telling myself that everything was fine; my body was screaming that it was not. So my mind decreed: time to take two extra-strength Tylenol. You—smarter than I—will know that it didn’t work.

“Hey, guess what!” said Lady, “Montalvo is back helping me in the kitchen!”

Interesting news, since I had been speaking to Lady and Naïa the day before, and had asked whether she had seen Montalvo. “Yeah,” she said, “and he was demanding his job back! But how can I give him his job back when I laid down ONE rule: don’t go into the kitchen! And twenty minutes later? I caught him walking out of the kitchen! So how can I give him his job back?”

“He’s oppositional, just like Naïa,” I tell her, since the two of them have been doing her—do I have to make clear that it’s Naïa’s, not Lady’s? though come to think of it, it’s both—homework. Well, it was a throwback to happier days, when Naïa absorbed her education while flopped on a sofa, instead of sitting at a desk. But the question was: what were three causes and effects of immigration.

This is why I can never be a teacher, since I cannot do what Lady did: search the book, come up with three causes, feed them to Naïa, and check to make sure they were regurgitated correctly onto the paper. What do I have to do? Well, my first thought was to tell a story: a man I knew was fleeing his home in the Dominican Republic, and had managed to cross the deepest waters of the Atlantic Ocean in a ten-foot wooden boat holding twenty people. In fact, the depth of the Mona Channel was the least of the problem: the fact that it was shark-infested was of more concern. So he arrived—as many, many do not—on the beach in Puerto Rico, where a man had arranged to pick him / them up, and take them forty minutes away to the Dominican part of San Juan. And was this all part of the deal? No way! It was a hundred bucks a head.

It’s a story that I, at least, find compelling. The man crowded with strangers into a boat, was he aware that going home was not an option? However long it took to straighten out his immigrant status, the likelihood that he would miss the births, the deaths, the big and the small moments that are family—well, it was almost certain he would. And how much had he paid to renounce all that? Depends—not much in my money, but several years of selling fake cigars to gullible or just worn-down tourists on the beach resorts for him. And that was, OK—if not 24 / 7, at least 12 / 7.

My problem as a teacher? Answers don’t interest me, which is why I was stopped completely when it turned out that one of the reasons for migration? Drought!

Then I figured it out: for hunter / gatherers, drought would be a very compelling reason to move elsewhere. But Naïa is a 12-year old girl living in Puerto Rico, so her chances of running into a tribesman hunting water buffalo? Not so great.

Well, the homework was done, so at last I could ask her what I really wanted to know: what was the difference between “affect” and “effect?” It’s every English teachers’ pet peeve. Fortunately, Naïa has excellent parrying skills.

“One is spelled with an “e” the other with an “a,” she informed me.

“Excellent,” I told her, “and what is another difference?”

“One is used in one way in a sentence, the other in another way,”

“Completely correct,” I told her, “and I wonder, in what way do you use the one and in what way do you use the other?”

“Differently,” she said.

“Naïa, put you name on your homework,” said Lady, who, though a poet, still can step into the territory of mother on occasion.

“On the top right-hand corner of the paper,” I told Naïa, since that’s what they always told me, and since they were still teaching ridiculous facts like drought spurring migration, I figured the right-hand corner thing still held as well. Who knows, maybe she would have gotten points taken off for misplaced identity?

Naïa, of course, turned her paper sideways and wrote her name down the left-hand side of the paper.

“Oppositional,” I told her.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said.

“Exactly,” I told her, and then went on to say, “and yes you do.” Then I went on to say that the 90-dollar eyes drops were working.

“Remarkable,” said Naïa, “since that’s what they’re supposed to do, right?”

Well, that meant I had to tell her what they told me, which was:

1. keep a civil tongue in your head
2. don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs

So Lady went off with Naïa to deal with the next thing—there’s always something—and I went off to play the cello—this time at the front of the store, not the back. And today, of course, I woke up feeling like hell, but cheered by the fact that Montalvo, my son, had been restored to where he should be. Lady, with perfect poetic logic, had told him absolutely NOT to step out of the kitchen!

“Lady was really firm with him, so he’s like a little puppy, told not to come out of his corner,” whispered Sunshine, after I had loudly protested that I was being ignored.

OK—I sometimes think it’s “abandon sense, all ye who enter here,” but I also think it’s excellent, because if I wanted Starbucks? Guess what—there’s one two blocks from my house.

And so Montalvo is restored, or redeemed, and the world is partially where it’s supposed to be, but it’s not, since I am listening to Brené Brown for the umpteenth time and not finding anything to write about, since who can possibly want to hear what I think about The New York Times, which is eager to tell me that the Republicans are going to install the famous pipeline and dismantle the EPA at the same time? Anybody out there? Drop me a comment, and I’ll be happy to straighten you out….

So the world is not OK, since my neck is screaming and my stomach is groaning, and all I can do is think: why do I feel so horrible? And why am I listening to Brown talk for the zillionth time about vulnerability? That’s when I see my young son playing the guitar, and when I realize—can’t I be vulnerable, too?

So he’s giving me a backrub, or rather, cutting his hands on the steel ridge that is my shoulder and then he says, “you know what gets me through? We’re an absolutely miniscule part of the universe. Think how many trillions of years old the earth is, and we live—what?—maybe eighty? Think of the enormous space in the universe, and how small our personal worlds are. All we have to do is be happy, and in the moment….”

Well, I think that’s what he said, but can I be sure? No, because I’m crying, and he asks me why, and I tell him, though it’s hard, because guess what? I’m a shame man, not a guilt man—which, if you know Brené means that I think what I have to admit is bad because I am bad, not because it is bad. And so what’s so horrible?

I want recognition.. I want to give a TED talk that will go viral and sizzle the minds of men and women, all of whom will say utterly nasty things in the comments section of YouTube, but not to worry, since I’ll pay—just as Brené does—somebody to read them for me!

“Why do you want that,” sputters Montalvo.

“Who’s the guy who wants to win the Nobel Prize,” I tell him. “And it’s great to wake up and say, ‘I don’t care what the world thinks of me,’ but guess what? I put a lot of time and a lot of energy into this, and fuck art for art’s sake!”

It’s out, it’s said. I ponder—I can feel guilty, I can feel shame, or guess what? I can just sit down and do what I do.

Which is what I’ve done….

“Love you,” I tell Montalvo, as he passes by.

“Me too,” he tells me.

Oh, and the neck?

Much better!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

       

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Six Suites by Somebody-or-Other

Well, here’s today’s question: was it Bach or Mrs. Bach who wrote the suites for solo cello—those suites that Casals championed, and about which he said, “they are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music?”

Hunh?

Look, I’ve played them for about four decades, and I’ve gone through several feelings about them. Written sometime around 1720, when Bach had finally found a job that didn’t require cranking out a religious cantata every week—his archduke or prince or elector or whoever being of some protestant sect that disapproved of music—the six suites follow a basic pattern: a prelude followed by four or five dance movements.

OK—so that’s a pattern that Bach followed in the partitas for solo violin. So why should anyone think that it was the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach who had written the cello suites? Because that’s what Martin Jarvis, a Welshman teaching in Australia, is claiming.

His first assertion I agree with: there’s something not quite right about the suites. Here’s how The New Yorker puts it, “He reports that when he was studying the works in his youth he had the nagging sense that they differed from other music by Bach.” And what’s the difference?

Well, to me, the cello suites are a lot less interesting, less complicated, less sophisticated than the solo violin works. Want a comparison? Check out the two sarabandes below—one for violin, the other for cello. And it may be that the—for me—excessively slow tempo of the cello sarabande dooms it to sound plain and unimpressive, but I think there’s something else. If J. S. Bach did write the piece, he wasn’t having his best day.

And I know—that damn Prelude to the G Major suite makes it onto a lot of “top ten classical music” lists, but to me? It’s a snore, which is why I spent years paying it at a breakneck pace, and trying to emphasize the essential chordal nature of the piece. Why? Because there’s absolutely nothing else going on….

As you can see in the third clip, Jarvis isn’t afraid of suggesting some rather dark stuff about Papa Bach. His first wife—did she commit suicide because Bach was fooling around with Anna Magdalena, who would become his second wife, and the presumed composer of the cello suites? And why was Bach ordered to get married, but refused a church wedding? Oh, and then why did the two children of wife number one burn the love letters and day books of Bach and Anna Magdalena?

Beyond all of this, is there any serious evidence that Anna Magdalena, not Johann Sebastian, wrote the cello suites? Well, the only manuscript we have is one written by Anna Magdalena, and the traditional belief is that she was merely a copyist. We do have, however, the violin partitas in J. S. Bach’s hand. And then we have “forensic” evidence: here’s the Independent on the subject:

Forensic analysis of her manuscript handwriting shows that it did not have the “slowness or heaviness” usually attributed to someone who is simply copying but the quick, uncertain hand of a creator.

Numerous corrections to scores written in her hand, signal that she had been composing the works all along.

In the Independent, the cellist Julian Lloyd Weber makes a good point—Anna Magdalena, who was a singer but not, apparently, trained as a string player—had her hands full. From the same source:

Anna Magdalena ran a busy and stressful household. She was pregnant every year from 1723 to 1737, bearing 13 children, seven of whom died in youth. The couple also raised the surviving children from Bach’s first marriage.

In fact, people were quite a bit less fussy about attribution in the baroque era, when Bach, for example, borrowed from Vivaldi and other composers. And however much I love Bist du bei Mir, which everybody thinks is by Bach, I know that it was really written by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. So? It’s still a beautiful piece….

Will we ever know if Anna Magdalena, and not Johann Sebastian, Bach wrote the cello suites? Probably not. But it is true that there are very few female composers, which started me to thinking: Who was the first female composer? Well, I figured it would be Hildegard of Bingen, in the 12^th century, but guess what? There’s the little case of Sappho, born six hundred years before Christ.

Lastly, it has to be said that I am as guilty of sexism as all the rest. I play the suites virtually every day, since it’s what cellists do. I’ve made my piece with them: I neither think they are masterworks nor rubbish. My beef, mostly, is that for them to be effective, we have to give up, give in, and recognize that baroque performance practice has a lot—if not everything—to help us put them across. But how have I been sexist?

By assuming that the suites are lesser music than the other music Bach wrote, and therefore have to be by his wife. No one, by the way, has suggested the opposite—that all of the manuscripts we have in Bach’s hand are simply copies of Anna Magdalena’s work. And however much the idea that Mrs. Bach was a composer, the idea that Mr. Bach was the copyist?

Revolutionary!