She who sings prays twice
Every Wednesday morning: the sliding door of a maroon minivan. Jumping out of the car in a plaid skirt and polo. Icy breath protesting the early hour before school started. The warming of hands. The singing of scales. Friday afternoon: standing in front of the student congregation. Swaying through communion songs, the sweet, simple melodies of psalms. These gentle routines guided me the first times I sang to God. As a ten-year-old member of the church choir, I got to leave class early to unlock the thick wooden doors of the cathedral and set up for mass. The robes were hidden in a hall behind the altar. The songbooks and microphones in boxes were stacked in a brown cabinet with flaking gold paint by the piano. As a cantor, I sang a chorus to the congregation alone, and they sang it to back to me. The great stone steps made me feel an intercessor, translating the conversation between the human and the holy.
My adolescent faith was played out in shag carpet living rooms late at night. I still led conversations like cantor psalms, sitting in circles with my closest girlfriends. Stacks of Seventeen, whose horoscopes whispered to us from the back cover, and bottles of nail polish sat like incense at our feet as we contemplated the forces that moved us. For every argument there was a response with a correctly-cited bible verse. I led a middle school youth group in worship nights. I offered my congregation a steel chalice of bitter red wine.
Then the crowded hallways of public high school swallowed me whole. Meaning, I became a part of them. I wore no robe for distinction. I no longer had the metal cross of a music minister. Who could I sing to, if I had no congregation to respond?
I lost god somewhere between sophomore year and reading Siddhartha. I never called it atheism, but rather, “I guess Catholicism doesn’t give its god figure enough credit for me.” I felt as though I had found Him to be much more than I bargained for, not at all someone with whom I could converse. It wasn’t enough to have created the universe; to me, a god had to be the universe. For me, the Christian God was only one facet of deity, a relationship defined by call-and-response rather than omnipresence. I found a god I couldn’t look at and didn’t fit inside my living room.
Still some ancient tradition was calling to me. I missed the ritual of the mass. I missed the tug of dusty medieval phrases, thousands of years old. There is something to be said for repetition-- a room full of voices not only speaking in unison but also believing and feeling together. I missed the familiarity of a melody that guessed itself, a reliable arc of music, a prayer a whole room could know.
Then, in the middle of college, I was invited by a Catholic friend to sing in a community chorale. Which is to say, a choir with a lot of retired folks. We sang pieces penned when the Church sponsored music: Mass in G, Sanctus Deus, everything in Latin. Singing those songs was like holding a needle to vinyl prayers. Trodding my maternal alto line, I felt solidarity with every singer in every cathedral who had sung the same notes before me. I was no longer in front of, I was among. It didn’t matter whom I was singing to; what was important to me was that people were still singing it, the mass, all over the world. Even when I was away. I joined choir to be closer to God. Let’s say I joined again to find him.
It is Monday evening, and we’re sitting in a church. We’re sitting in a beautiful church with stained glass and a vaulted ceiling. The pews are empty, but ninety-eight voices fill the area where the altar has been pushed aside; people who have seen the wars, people who were alive to make vacuums a common household appliance, people who have never missed a Sunday mass. Our young conductor stands in front of us, his admonitions to listen more carefully, elongate our vowels, and stagger our breathing oddly technical, yet somehow intimate in the yellow light of a church after hours.
The piece we are singing, Maurice Duruflè’s Requiem, is divided into nine sections- a musical translation of a funeral mass. Completed in 1947 in France, a country still reeling in broken bricks and loss, Durufle’s Requiem is the firstto feature the peaceful Pie Jesu as its centerpiece, foregoing the fire-and-brimstone dramatic stylings of Requiems past. The piece begins slowly, mimicking fourth century Gregorian chant.
Introit. The piece changes time signatures five times on the first page. The rhythm is intentionally confusing, intended to encourage choir members to listen louder than they sing. We watch carefully for the barest lift of our conductor’s fingers and we tap our palms on our blue jeans. We trust each other, not the book, to move the music.
Agnus Dei. The sixth movement. Above the word sempiternam, (eternity?), Duruflé has written perdendosi, a directional note to the choir in Italian. It means we hold our note until we have no breath left, each voice drops out on its own time until the choir has obtained silence. Literally, it loses itself.
Morte aeterna. At the end of the penultimate movement, the bass line echoes and the organ pedal lifts with a chnk that could be a coffin falling to wet earth. It could be monks. It could be me. Silence for a measure. Then a soprano slowly.
sum te deducant te Angeli…
Imagine the notes filling a sunlit glass vase, dust motes, hourglass, narrow and ethereal, then all at once lifting, spilling into the hollow arches of the church. There is no way to explain the relief earned when a measure of discordant minor seconds has passed. There is no way to explain what its like to end a fifty minute piece on a dominant ninth. This is one conversation that is untranslatable.
I’ve regained the sense of mystery I lost with my first circuit through the faith. I am singing in a dead language, following key signatures and times I’ve never heard of. I’ve yet to translate the words we are singing, for fear of tainting this transcendence with the cerebral. For now, I’m content to obtain meaning from the way the music sounds and the few words I recognize that have danced their way down into modern English. To sing them is enough.
When I think about moments in my faith marked by mysticism, I remember a retreat I attended as a teenager with two thousand other Catholic youth. We took over a college campus for one July weekend in Tucson; musty dorm rooms with white brick walls became confessionals, the slick new student union-- all neon and fast food-- our daily bread. On Saturday night, the auditorium was our cathedral. Its stage a modified altar where the consecrated body of Christ rested in a golden frame on a simple table. As we sat in the darkened concert hall, clouded and sang the Latin adoration, tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui, I watched goose bumps rise on the neck of the person in front of me.
I have never been a solo singer. Much as I would have loved a voice suited for hazy acoustic covers and late night camp talent shows, on its own, my voice is about as lyrical as a plastic Yahama recorder. Yet I have mastered the art of blending with those around me. I allow my own humble offering to be cared for and carried by the stronger voices. The moments I felt closest to God were not the times I was leading the song as a cantor in elementary school, nor were they in the religious or philosophical debates that followed. I found spirituality in the moments I lost myself. I believe in unity. I believe in eternal life in the sense that a serpentine timeline of humans can be connected by a singular piece of music centuries old. I believe in becoming one.
In choral singing, an overtone is created when multiple voices sing different strains of one chord so in tune that, by way of resonance, there emerges a higher, unsung but still audible note floating above the voices. There are several opportunities in Duruflé’s Requiem for an overtone. I imagine it shooting from the middle of our choir like a glowing wellspring of holy water. For me, that note is divine.
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