Last night, I listened online to an organ recital given by a friend. It reminded me of my own history as an organist, which I haven't spoken about much, but perhaps I did best in "Fugue" (August 12, 2015).
Basically, I turned to the organ as a teenager, arguably as a substitute for singing in the English men-and-boys' choir tradition. With expertise playing the organ, perhaps down the road I could enter that world through the proverbial back door; shorter term, there was the immediate gratification of being a powerful woman making a loud noise! However, I knew even then that the organ wasn't my passion. The high point of my career, at 21, was my Smith College senior organ recital, after which the whole thing petered out. For a time I blamed it on a poorly-set broken little finger (which genuinely made impossible the playing of really fast passages), but in fact it was disinterest. Once I returned from the UK in 1981 realizing that the entry of women into "my" milieu was decades away (and, hey, to this day there has never been a female conductor of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, which was my specific dream), I simply dropped organ playing completely. But watching a superior organist from time to time is a thrill, and my hands and feet try to play along. It is an amazing instrument. On some level, I miss it like crazy.
I am grieving another aspect of church music, which I suspect factors into my finally having dropped choral evensong almost completely from my life. I guess I'll say this short and sweet, without too much explanation. It gets back to the words again, not the music and the harmonies...given what is currently happening in the Middle East, I find the singing of psalms (to my beloved Anglican chant) utterly unbearable. That is all I will say.
I guess it goes to show (going back to the boxes "thing") that to live with total inner integrity, it is impossible to keep shuffling your boxes around, to keep thinking "I can continue to do A as long as I box up B and never look at it." (And given the fact that I have really never had a home and my belongings have literally almost always been in boxes, this is serious food for thought!) Becoming truly honest with oneself requires opening all the boxes. All of them. And looking at the contents thoughtfully, and really being honest about one's past, present and future.
None of this changes what feels like a serious break in my old patterns, hopes, dreams, and disappointments around church music (this moment feels like a whole new era!), but some of the old threads are still dangling, and need to be either unravelled, cut, or re-woven. And metaphorically at least, any boxes that go forward with me will stay wide, wide open! Perhaps they will be made of plexiglass so I can always see the contents and gauge whether they continue to bring me joy. I simply haven't got the energy to carry anything heavy or joyless. Anything.
