This is a case of, I woke up feeling that I wanted to share a memory of an event in my life, but initially nothing came to mind (that I haven't already written about, anyway!). Once this particular memory popped to the surface, I tried mightily to push it back down, but in the spirit of cleaning out the crevices (July 22), I'll forge ahead, although it terrifies me.
Yup, several key memories of my attempts to enter the world of English church music remain quite close to my chest. Why? Well, for a long time I kept hoping that I might still make a name for myself in that field and I didn't want to burn any bridges. A second reason was that I felt a deep sense of shame at having been so unsuccessful. It's absurd, of course. There simply were no girls or women in the field during my formative years of the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and just trickles by the 90's. By the early 2000's, it was changing in the UK, but virtually not in the US. A few British women of my generation made a little headway around the edges during that 50-year stretch, but my early intention to become the first woman conductor of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge and devote my entire life to this singular musical genre could never have happened, no matter what Herculean efforts I might have made. The fact that I still feel ashamed about my lack of success is almost as heartbreaking as the fact that I lived a life so far removed from that world. It's all heartbreaking, it still is, every day.
So here's a memory that I've been trying to bury to spare myself just a little of that heartbreak. It illustrates the incredible strangeness and paradox of my whole life.
My two years in Helena, Montana were, in most respects, among the hardest ever, even though I was near family. For much of the time, I lived at the YWCA, and I struggled to get any kind of work, much less anything that would have had meaning for me. Singing in two choral groups helped save me, as did starting to do research about my favorite composer, Herbert Howells. My first article about him was accomplished simply by sending emails and letters to some of his former students. My laptop was perched on my lap on my rather saggy twin bed in my nun's cell of a room at the Y, and I was surrounded by scribbled notes and drafts. If I remember correctly, my computer died at some point in the process, so the bulk of my work (emails, research, article drafts) ended up being done at Helena's public library. (I mean it when I stress the centrality of public libraries to my journey!) "Herbert Howells, the Teacher" was first published by the British Music Society News in January of 2013, then reprinted by The American Organist later that year.
Around that time, I was invited to teach a class about Howells at Helena's Episcopal Cathedral. Inevitably I discussed, and played a recording of, the motet "Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing", purportedly sung at John F. Kennedy's funeral. I had always thought this to be a dubious story, and several students in the class pointedly asked how (and why) on earth a piece by a British composer would have been sung at the funeral three days after the president's completely unexpected death. Why wouldn't an American composer have been chosen? More to the point, we all wondered how, in the early 1960's before the era of faxes and email attachments, a piece of music could have made it from Britain to Washington in that time frame. There was something clearly wrong with the story, and I promised attendees that I would look into it.
I started to dig. It was slow going at first, but I stumbled upon the name of a former organist-choirmaster who would help me "crack the case". On a hot summer afternoon, I was walking through the Y's living room towards the staircase up to my room, when my cell phone rang. It was the organist, happy to tell me what he knew. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper with some open space to write on, and at first sat in a comfortable chair, trying to scribble down notes and ask him questions. Eventually, the loud sounds of TV ("Law and Order: SVU") and general conversational hubbub forced me out onto the porch, where I continued the interview. Even as I spoke with him, I thought, if this organist knew the conditions under which I was doing my research, he might never have called me!
(Please, don't misunderstand...moving into the Y was by far the hardest thing I had ever done. Slowly but surely, the place became a safe haven, and a place of growth and solidarity with other women. Sometime soon, I'll write more about the experience, for which I am profoundly grateful.)
"To make a long story short", my second article "'Take Him, Earth' Revisited" was published by The American Organist in September 2014. Howells's motet was, in fact, first sung in Washington a year after Kennedy's death by a Canadian men-and-boys' choir. This update by no means diminishes an extraordinary piece of music, but it was a big revelation which should have met with a fair amount of hoopla in the music world. To my knowledge, this never happened.
I'm full of trite sayings today: "What came first, the chicken or the egg"? Is it the fact that I was female (not male), Smith- and Royal Holloway-educated (not Oxbridge), and ahead of my time that led to my gaining no life traction at all and ending up living and working in the most inappropriate circumstances for my goals? Or is it because I started in the proverbial wilderness (as far as this tradition is concerned) and kept ending up there, that I couldn't eventually gain a little deserved respect or attention? Perhaps both. At this moment when all these traditional constructs are beginning to collapse, perhaps it doesn't matter.
But remembering this story has stirred up some long-hidden anger, humiliation, and frustration. It is hard to imagine a human being with my level of intellectual, spiritual, musical and artistic skills being more thoroughly swept aside -- except, of course, there have probably been hundreds of thousands over the centuries, women and men of the wrong background, or gender, or educational accomplishment, or religion, left "homeless" and invisible. And for a woman in a patriarchal construct, nothing was in place to support my actual thriving or success. I guess what keeps me going even today is remembering that I've never been as alone in this silencing as I have felt. Every day that I am still alive is an accomplishment, hopefully not just for me, but for so many others.
Yes, today's memory is bringing up a lot of negative emotion, but I hope bringing that to light will lead to eventual healing. That's all I can say today.
