News-as-Opera: Shenton/Steyer’s On Call: COVID-19 (2021) (1/17/25)

Image includes the 6-box screen of characters and their fictional names

Today’s contribution is a review of a pandemic opera – one that I’ve just taught in my Music, Pandemics, and History class. Since not a lot has been written about the opera yet, I thought this overview might be helpful to the interested reader.

In the middle of the pandemic, the creative team of David Shenton and Christine Steyer took on the lived experience of COVID-19 directly. They focused their three-scene / one-hour opera on the voices of healthcare workers. Their information was, as they explain, well-researched, “drawn from 200 articles about health care workers facing the pandemic.” While news as opera may seem surprising, questions of moral codes and strong emotion – especially tension, fear, and hope – emerge from the script as part of its  operatic landscape. By the end, we care for the characters, as one should, and have traveled their story arc – from angst to connectedness and from outrage to hope. It is, as critics note, an “operatic love letter to global front-line healthcare workers.” The opera was also deemed successful by judges, for the first production was the winner of the National Opera Association Production Award and garnered 3rd place in the 2022 American Prize for Opera Production.

Set as a zoom call, the operatic performance cleverly begins with that moment of recognition: “Please wait. The host will let you in soon.” Yes, we all came to know that phrase all too well during the early stages of the pandemic. Likewise, as we move into the first scene, the mood of melancholy set by the Overture gives way to a frenetically repeated piano, underscoring the urgency in which the characters have been immersed. We meet the various characters, especially Sandra, the RN who has convened the group out of near-overwhelming frustration and a need for connection.

In this first aria, Sandra describes the nominal perks accorded the frontline workers, including fancy hotels and invitations to jump the queue (!), but points out “it all comes down to nothing” because she’s not able to see her own family. She snapped, she tells us, when the hospital started talking about pay cuts because of the lack of elective procedures. Pay cuts? In the middle of a pandemic? So her frustration boiled over into the need for this call/this opera.

The opera is divided into three scenes set several months apart: “Of the Heart”; “Just when things couldn’t get Worse” and “Tell Me Something Good.” Within each scene, several of the six healthcare working characters will share some part of their COVID-related experiences; Paolo, in “Fratelli” (I.3 – 17:25) explains the Italian penchant for balcony singing and its historical grounding, Gordon uses a refrain aria to articulate the frustration with a lack of progress in “One step forward” (II.2); Jane questions what we are all inheriting as a society, and whether it’s actually the good place that she was raised to see (“I’ve always been taught to respect my elders,” II.4).

Elements of the contextual news for the pandemic also peak through – for instance, Gordon’s experience (II.2) with the Beirut explosions, and Rolanda’s with deforestation in the Amazon, and the spaces it left for graves (II.3). A concatenation of negatives layers up in the closing part of scene 2, where five of the six characters pile on with their anger and worries about the way in which the pandemic has unfolded, until Sandra calls a halt to it all. 

CLIMAX AND RESOLUTION (AN EXCERPT)

In fact, if you only have ten minutes to sample the opera, this climax and its resolution across the boundary of the entr’acte into scene 3 is the part of the opera that I think is perhaps the most worth viewing. This section follows Jane’s aria, previously mentioned, where she balances respect for her elders and dismay at behaviors that have led us to the current moment with its multitudinous ills (39:24). Ultimately, she tells us (40:07), she finds herself “unable to remain silent.” The Ensemble joins in for a group layering up of concerns: (41:00) “the World leaders protected from accountability… (42:29) deny responsibility and find a scapegoat…” The libretto goes on to distinguish problems from dilemmas: “problems have solutions; dilemmas don’t.” And the pandemic for many countries is a dilemma. This leads into the climax, which is where we pick up:

The excerpt itself features several returning lines. At the start of the excerpt (45:00), we hear how the virus “brought planet to its knees.” And that in turn raises the repeated question, “…how did we come to this?” The layers of concern, each character adding thoughts and observations into a cacophony of stress, reaches a climax, prompting Sandra to intervene (45:41), saying “Stop, please, please, enough!” These calls began, she reminds everyone, as “a space for me to share,” and after making a claim for the usefulness of connections, asks the other characters to “promise me you will tell me something good” when they return.

As the excerpt continues, we segue (46:56) into a keyboard entr'acte, designed to shifts our mood for the upcoming arrival of the new year. It’s “Hard to believe” (47:33) that it’s been almost a year, the characters observe at the start of Scene three. After toasting the new year with wine and water, the characters share positive updates. Sandra has just gotten a second dose of the vaccine so is able to return home to her family; Mario speaks to the legacy of learning that he has from his grandmother, whose advice helped get him through a difficult delivery (50:06). It is a different sound-world than the echo-chamber scapegoating at the end of the previous scene.

 

THE REST OF THE OPERA

I’ve ended the excerpt there with Mario and his grandma, but further positive news then continues to unfold across the third scene – the availability of vaccines, the recognized wisdom as a legacy of a beloved grandparent, volunteers helping with ventilators. Sandra perhaps sums it up best: “it all comes down to nothing if there’s no one to share.” The opera ends with an ensemble number from our main characters: “Microbes older than us” and its second part, “We are healers.” The close is provided in memoriam with a virtual choir.

OPERA OVERVIEW

A viewer-based (rather than score-based) summary of the opera’s structure looks something like this:

 

Overture

Scene 1: Of the Heart (early April, 2020)

1.      Sandra’s aria

2.      Mario: “We called her Lily”

3.      Paolo: Fratelli

4.      Jane: O what an awful blight

5.      [Gordon and Rolanda passim]

Scene 2: Just When Things Couldn’t Get Worse (early September, 2020)

1.      [Action: report on Beirut, Paulo]

2.      Gordon: “refrain aria” “One step forward…”

3.      Rolanda “Amazonia from above”

4.      Jane: I’ve always been taught to respect my elders

5.      ENSEMBLE: Scapegoat

6.      [Stop, enough.]   >>>

Scene 3: Tell Me Something Good (New Year’s Eve, 2020)

1.      Sandra: 2nd vaccination

2.      Mario: Hard delivery; grandma Lily

3.      Jane: Family & pictures of the hospital

4.      Paolo: sung to high A

5.      Rolanda: volunteers help with ventilator

6.      Gordon: y’all

7.      Sandra: it all comes down to nothing if there’s no one to share

8.      ENSEMBLE: Microbes older than us

9.      ENSEMBLE: We are healers

10.  In memoriam (choral)

THE OPERA'S CONTEXT

As A.A. Cristi noted in their initial review, the opera not only told a significant story, but also provided a “meaningful project” for the singers “who have been hard-pressed to find work during the pandemic.” To record the opera, composer and pianist David Shenton laid down the piano tracks, which the singers used as they recorded their own parts – safely, and at home. Those samples were then merged as a single soundtrack, at which point production turned to the video portion. The singers were asked to lip sync, pretending to sing on Zoom, as Schering captures in his news coverage of the premiere.

In fact, the executive producer situates this performance for us in the playbill: “We have yet to meet in person.” This counts as a “remote ensemble” production. The relatively small forces – the orchestra is a piano and sometimes violin, and six singers in gender-flexible casting – reflect the challenges inherent in all our various “safer at home” quarantines impacted music-making world-wide.

Overall, this one-act is a remarkably approachable 21^st century opera, and has proven an effective entre to the genre for the non-music majors I’ve taught. The musical structure with its occasional use of refrains and its clear accompanimental markers to distinguish one section from another is relatively easy to follow. There’s perhaps more arioso than aria writing, but this keeps the action and events of the story line at its center. The singing of this performance is wonderfully done; my students voted for Paolo as the singer they’d most like to hear again. (It also helps that we’d just finished a unit on balcony music, and here it was, brought to life!)

Overall, the operatic takeaway is pretty simple: “kindness and compassion can be as powerful a tool as a vaccine and a ventilator.” Not a bad message for troubled times.

RESOURCES:

• Complete first performance of Shenton/Steyer’s On Call: COVID-19 (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDb70FfOSMc. This video can also be accessed through the Bellissima Opera website.
• Playbill: https://bellissimaopera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/On-Call-Playbill.pdf
• Bellissima Opera: https://bellissimaopera.com/covidopera/
• Cristi, A.A. "Working In Concert Premieres ON CALL: COVID 19 An Opera Love Letter To Health Care Workers." Broadway World, April 12, 2021. https://www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/article/Working-In-Concert-Premieres-ON-CALL-COVID-19-An-Opera-Love-Letter-To-Health-Care-Workers-20210412
  
• Nelson, J. R. and Leor Galil. "A new Zoom opera honors the health-care workers fighting COVID." Chicago Reader, April 13, 2021. https://chicagoreader.com/music/a-new-zoom-opera-honors-the-health-care-workers-fighting-covid/
• Schering, Steve. "New international opera by Oak Park librettist tells story of health care workers battling COVID-19 pandemic." Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2021. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/04/16/new-international-opera-by-oak-park-librettist-tells-story-of-health-care-workers-battling-covid-19-pandemic/

 

 

Documenting Lepers’ Lives: The House is Black (1962)

Two men in hats on a rubble heap, one playing a wall-attached string instrument

I watched the Iranian film “The House is Black” to see if it would be useful for my Music and Pandemics course. It has a couple of short musical examples, but they didn’t really have enough context to be useful for a teaching purpose.

And yet, I want to make a plea to you, dear reader, that you take the 21 minutes to watch this amazing film about a leper colony, a film created in 1962, the year before I was born. Feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad made only this one film, but her documentary about ugliness and beauty and grace and humanity – and isolation – and disfiguring disease is truly transcendent.

Her film is a profound meditation on the resilience of humanity and the power of community in the face of disfiguring disease and social exclusion. Through stark and compelling visuals, poetic reflections, and moments of shared joy—a few of which are marked by music—the film challenges viewers to confront our own perceptions of beauty, grace, and shared humanity. The message of the film is that we humans are not limited to our disease-prone body; perhaps the most important things to all of us everywhere are the moments of joy, the beloved doll, and the connectedness one to another.

“On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain that no caring human being should ignore,” she warns us at the beginning of the film. Disfigured bodies, and the care that they need, are dealt with unflinchingly. Well, that’s not true. Farrokhzad may not have flinched from showing the care of a diseased foot, even returning to it, but I flinched. The hands, yes, pressing the hands to straighten them out makes sense. It’s even akin to the treatment that mom went through, though she had a different disease. But the dead flesh on the foot, yikes, that was hard to see. Why look? Because, as she says, we should care enough to know.

Superimposed over the glimpses of life in the leper colony, we get segments of Farrokhzad’s poetry. “Remember that my life is wind. I have become the pelican of the desert, the owl of the ruins, and like a sparrow I am sitting alone on the roof” (12:03). We watch members of the community at games, and Farrokhzad reminds us again that “Remember my life is wind, and you have given me a time of idleness, and around me the song of happiness...” (13:32). These poetic evocations help us to process what we’re seeing. They aren’t a narrative per se, but rather the evocation of meaning that goes in tandem with the visual element. More lyrical than prosodic, Farrokhzad reaches to us at a visceral level to command our engagement and provoke us into understanding of what we are seeing, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, into acceptance of the shared humanity of these scenes.

Music appears in a few segments of the film. It accompanies the scenes of play, work, grooming, and childcare (14:17-14:43). This is self-made music, internal to the community, not from outside, and not complex, but rather a simple thrumming of an instrument I don’t recognize. The community does, though: we see the dancing feet of a member of the community in time to the thrumming. “Let’s listen to the soul who sings in the remote desert,” says  Farrokhzad, “The one who sighs  and stretches his hands out saying: Alas, my wounds have numbed my spirit.” Numbed my spirit, perhaps, but not deadened it. There is still a capacity to dance, and to love.

We have a bit of singing at (15:09), but it is a momentary lead-in to visions of more personal grooming: a mother (one presumes) with her daughter, and a woman with deformed hands applying makeup to her eyes. These images are accompanied by an exhortation that vanity is in vain: 

“O the time-forgotten one, dressing yourself in red, and wearing golden ornaments, anointing your eyes with kohl, remember you have made yourself beautiful in vain, for a song in the remote desert, and your friends who have denigrated you…”

The question of beauty is particularly fraught, of course, in the environment of a leprosarium.

The third musical example of the film is a bit of ceremony, with drum (15:52-17:10) interlaced with singing mixed with murmurs as the crowd moves in what seems to be procession. The procession  segues directly into a chamber ensemble environment, with visual closeups of a strummed fretted string instrument (an Iranian Tar), a double reed, and a flute-like instrument, as well as the pervasive drum, shown toward the end of the section. This music is met with enthusiasm – the audience smiles, indulges in clapping along, and dances. The film seems to argue that music is integral to community, and I can get behind that sentiment! With music driving the gathering, we are led to see these people not as patients, but as engaged participants in an inclusive community.

We may know that this is a leper colony, but the film doesn’t make that point explicit until the gates close in on the inhabitants at 20:30. By that point, we have been so engaged with the life of these people that the closing gate – the separating out, the quarantine, the segregation – comes as a disturbing rejection of our shared humanity.

Which is probably exactly the message that Forough Farrokhzad meant to convey.


The House is Black (1962) by Farough Farrokhzad, available https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-house-is-black

Note: Nowadays leprosy is called Hansen’s disease to avoid the stigma associated with the terms “leper” and “leprosy.” I use the former term since it is the language used in the film’s translation. The disease is still relatively common; the CDC points out that 250,000 around the world are diagnosed with Hansen's disease each year. But it is also treatable, a point that Farrokhzad emphasized in her narrative.

To Banish the Earworm: "If We Were Married" by Shaina Taub (1/8/25)

An ear with three arrows containing identical music pointing at it

Last night, somewhat to my morning chagrin, I taught “If we were married” from Shaina Taub’s Suffs (2022) in my Women and Music class. I’d seen the whole musical in the Fall, and this jaunty hit about gender discrimination in marriage back in the 1910s stuck with me. Our classroom take-away: music in good hands can function effectively as feminist critique. However, I had an additional personal take-away: bits of the song have been stuck in my head all morning.

The song is sung in alternation, Dudley leading and Doris providing a gender-informed counter-perspective to each of his observations. It’s a familiar set-up, one most of us would recognize as informing the structure of Stephen Sondheim / Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story. In each song, we swing from one perspective to another at a lively clip. Bernstein’s perspective juxtaposes Rosalia’s nostalgia for Puerto Rico with Anita’s tart rejoinders:

WEST SIDE STORY (Broadway lyrics)

ROSALIA: I'll drive a Buick through San Juan.
ANITA: If there's a road you can drive on.
ROSALIA: I'll give my cousins a free ride.
ANITA: How you get all of them inside?

(This is reframed as a dialog of women vs men in both of the film versions, but the song is well worth a re-listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoQEddtFN3Q )

In comparison with Bernstein, Taub’s exchange between Dudley and Doris gives each character more extended space to elaborate on their perspective. She builds an antecedent-spun-out-consequent phrase pair instead of a single phrase each like the West Side Story number:

SUFFS

• DUDLEY: If we were married / I'd promise to cherish you just as a gentleman should
• DORIS: If we were married / I'd promise to forfeit my legal autonomy <syncop> for good
• DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd buy our own acre of land for our own little house
• DORIS: If we were married / Our possessions and property would solely belong to the masculine spouse
• BOTH: If we were married (if we were married) / If we were married

Cherish or forfeit: the gendered nature of the marriage divide is laid out clearly in Taub’s narrative, and the clever rhyming of house with its imagined future of belonging “to the masculine spouse” sets the groundwork of the song firmly into the space of feminist advocacy. Doris is, after all, secretary for the suffragist organization, and so grounded in the bureaucratic and legal realities of women’s (absence of) rights.

But while Bernstein’s “America” breaks into the famous hemiola ( 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1 & 2 & 3 &), Taub uses a different strategy to enliven her narrative. Having already spun out the consequent clause into two units, the second strophe breaks down in the fourth line, as Doris’s iteration of women’s legal and economic oppression refuses to fit to the planned structure. 

• DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd fill out our family, and life would be simply sublime
• DORIS: If we were married / I'd sure have your children, 'cause <syncop> contraception's a federal crime
• DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd save up a nest egg to cushion us later in life
• DORIS: If we were married / My earnings would be in your name / And I couldn't control my own spending / Or open a bank account, or sign a contract, or hire a lawyer / Because economically speaking / I die by becoming your wife
• <PAUSE>
• BOTH: If we were married (if we were married) / If we were married

How does that work? Doris’s frustration with inequality is made manifest by insistent and extended repetition. Instead of an antecedent and two consequent phrases (b1 and b2), we get stuck on b1, which is itself made up of a three note rising motive – for a total of fifteen statements, instead of three!

DORIS: 

•   a    If we were married /
• b1    My earnings would be in your name /
• 2 And I couldn't control my own spending /
• 3 Or open a bank account,
• 4 or sign a contract,
• 5 or hire a lawyer /
• 6 Because economically speaking /
• b2    I die by becoming your wife

We had already known to listen to Doris as the “interesting” partner. She uses syncopation – pausing where we were expecting sound, and then delivering some kind of “kicker” clause. I’d be giving up my rights, she says. For good. It’s a clever rhythmic framing.

The second half of the song has a contrasting segment in which Doris muses about how women buy into the patriarchal system: “Daughters are taught to aspire to a system / Expressly designed to keep 'em under control.” She bemoans the legality of domestic violence within marriage – a situation which surprises Dudley (and in the story line helps to awaken him to the need for the suffrage movement, moving him toward a role of advocacy), asking the kicker: “Can you believe it is 1916 / And all of these things are still actually true?”

Questioning patriarchal systems is serious stuff, but set here to a boppy tune with swing overtones. The humor helps to frame the lesson in ways that the protagonists (and the audience) can hear the disconnect of romance and reality, and recognize for themselves the injustice of that very disconnect.

Why am I writing about it? Because after hearing it, it totally got stuck in my head, particularly the repeated “if” clauses (“if we were married…”) and also Doris’s rolling extension of the second stanza. Both those parts invoke underlying and ongoing worries I have about historical echoes, since injustices from 1916 have uncomfortable resonances with the present day. 

But also, and perhaps more importantly, the tune is just plain sing-songy – simple, approachable, and repetitive without being boring. And it swings. In short, the front part of the song can definitely be classed as earworm worthy!

And now, having paid “If we were married” close attention (yes, brain, okay, we can spend time with it), now I’m going to go put on some Hildegard, and settle into my administrative duties for a while.

Happy listening. May your earworms be pleasant teases for you, just as this one has been for me!

 

2024 Silences and Sounds (12/31/24)

The 2024 blog word-cloud

As 2024 finishes up, I've been looking back on the year’s journey—its silences, its sounds, and the moments in between. Writing this blog has been a rewarding practice, a space for reflection and connection. As I noted earlier this week, it’s been a way to map the contours of my own thoughts, from the micro to the macro.

Today’s post is a pause, a chance to look at the bigger picture. Above, you’ll find the word cloud of themes from this fall (as derived from post tags). It’s fun to see how words – like echoes – pattern the ways we think about things. Earlids, eh? And cemeteries. And a bit of metacognitive work.

For nerds among us (and who doesn’t have a bit of nerdery?), here are the words that echoed most strongly across my Fall contributions, by frequency: 

• Silence
• soundscape
• Thalbach, eco-acoustical
• sound, nature
• beauty, earlids, hearing loss, writing strategies, monastic, Ovid
• cemeteries, urban, bird song

An interesting list. Ovid's a bit of a surprise. And the obvious omission is "music," which gives me something concrete to do this Spring. Places to go, things to write about ... Not a bad ending to the year!

I hope that your 2024 has been all you had hoped, and wish you a 2025 rich in sounds and in silences. May YOUR acoustical moments bring you to spaces of beauty, joy, and connectedness.

 

Writing is momentum (12/28/24)

Newton's cradle with an arrow for the impulse of "writing"

Why write a blog? In all the busy times, with all the other things to do, why blog at all? In the few months since I’ve started there are a few things that have been motivators.

Ideas: it gives me a place to work out ideas – to take the bits and bobs of reading and remembrance and tie them up into small packages that I can come back to when the need arises.

Accountability: Writing is a kind of progress, even if it isn’t directly adding to word count that “matters” for the CV. Thinking through things on the additive basis is making progress. And to make progress on MY work while also chairing the department, handling hospice at a distance, householding, teaching, and spending time with Tom – that’s a good thing.

Writing Practice: Setting up a writing practice has been helpful modeling for setting up appropriate timeframes. Specifically, I think it’s helped me better plan the idea-generation stages of writing.The sitting and listing things IS an important part of writing, and I give myself more time for gazing absently into space now than I did before I started blogging. I'm thinking less transactionally and more effectively these days. Win!

Momentum: I just have a better sense of ongoing engagement with my own work when I’m putting my ten fingers and some coffee time into the project. I can feel the shifting shapes of the book outline moving in the background even if I’m not actively “writing chapters” yet. The ideas about sound experiences in installations in Chicago, for instance, have shifted the way I’m thinking about civic experiences of sound in the 15^th century since I’m considering how shared sounds provide points of reference – a kind of acoustical person-to-person bonding. Moving forward; that’s a plus.

Perspective: Blogging gets me to the proverbial Forty-Thousand Foot view, and I’ve enjoyed my forays into medieval deafness, earlids (or here or here), and poetry (with its follow-along on poetry and silences). I work more broadly in the blog than I do when I think, “oh, I should work on the book.” The details of medieval documents are one kind of practice; this has been a helpful space for developing a different kind of thinking.

Fun: Okay, who doesn’t enjoy putting words together to make a thing? I love making things. And these short things, these posts, they’ve been interesting to me. I share them in hopes that they’re also of interest to some of you.

So, yep, blogging is something that stays into the New Year. I am going to try to cut back on the book binges and to plus-up the Tom time. But I think I’ll keep blogging. As long as it stays fun!

 

 

“Aged documents” in the Thalbach Monastery Chronicle (12/16/24)

 

1728, 1336, 1338, 1340, 1655, 1532, 1557, 1612, 1597: How old is your evidence?

The Chronicle of Thalbach is a mass of contradictions. (And what monastic chronicle isn’t?) For our chroniclist, history is a bit of a wrestling match, one that needs to reconcile institutional mandates with historical documentation in order to assert the convent’s enduring significance in a period of increasing bureaucratic scrutiny.

I’m starting back through for my fourth journey through the Thalbach Chronicle and its meanings. The chronicle is (largely) an early 18^th century contextual document. In her narrative, the chroniclist tried to do three broad things:

• show the ongoing importance of the convent (with its relatively strong array of incoming novices and postulants and its significant leaders over time),
• trace its history as the oldest women’s monastery in Bregenz, and
• stake its claim as one of the significant Catholic monasteries in the region.

She was writing, in other words, from a position of (justifiable) pride in the convent’s history and its linkage to other convents in the region – a reformer of Wonnenstein, Brunnenstein, and Grimmenstein, for instance. To put it bluntly, she’s writing a history of (women’s) Catholicism triumphant.

As I am studying her narrative this time, however, I’m struck by two areas of tension that the chroniclist faces, though I’ll focus today primarily on the first of these. Notably, our chronicle historian faced a significant Then/Now challenge. She’s writing under command – the chronicle has been commissioned, or at least commanded, by her superiors, she tells us – but she’s also grounded in the documents and legacies of the past. Her audience, in other words, is uncertain. Is it the Catholic leadership? Her future sisters? Some external audience (such as the increasingly involved Imperial audience)? The convent stems from two generations before the Aufhebung, the monastic closures of the end of the century, and already the bureaucracy is closing in. There’s a sense in which that pressure to prove the monastery’s importance shapes the narrative as delivered.

To that end, the author claims that she is writing in “the year 1728” (Gathering 1, p. 3), but she is also writing “as I found it in the old writings of the house of God” (Gathering 1, p. 1). She is laying claim to “found” information; her narrative, she asserts, is document-based. And if document based, it must be authentic, yes? Such grounding in the convent record is important to her, for she repeats those claims several times. She cites the “old documents” of 1655 (Gathering 1, p. 4) and the “old booklet” (p. 7). Oldness is evidently a virtue in documents. Plus, she is clearly concerned about showing her authority and research capacities.

That trend of reference to “older” sources continues:

• There are “old records” which attest to Dorothea Kelhofferin’s role as Mater in 1532 (Gathering 2, p. 1).
• There are other unspecified “old writings” regarding Regula Weisin’s ascension (in 1557) as convent leader (Gathering 3, page 36). Regula was to serve in the role for forty years (1557-1597), so her selection was indeed a matter of significance for the convent
• In Gathering 4, p. 74, we learn about a gift of fish (!) that Amalia Loherin “then wrote this with her own hand in the old good book, which still exists” – one that dates back to 1612.
• Gathering 5a p. 102 suggests that Loherin may have been a kind of genius of accounting practices, since the 100fl, given “30 years ago,” was documented as coming due in 1627, a timely infusion of much-needed cash for the convent!

Oldness and designated leadership – the convent heroes who shaped the successes of the monastery over the centuries -- are thus intertwined. The venerable documentary record – the very stuff of “old records” -- reinforces the idea that significant people and significant documentation are coextensive. Oldness is, by implication, trustworthy. Thus, if an old record says something is so, it has authority.

Such references to Old Records draw us into the realm that Steven Colbert has designated as “Truthiness.” We trust the purported fact or story as much for how it makes us feel and how it explains historical happenings as for any external evidence of its reality. For instance, Amalia Loherin, our beloved financial wizard, is otherwise unattested by that name in the Thalbach record. This is perhaps a slight hiccup in the chroniclist’s pathway of argumentation; we only have her word that the documents (or the person) once existed. On the other hand, names do change; Amalia’s absence may be amended by future findings. And the vividness of the fish story is vivid enough to fit the category of stories that should  have been true; she is telling a story here of how the convent came to be financially self-sufficient. The name may be wrong, but the implications – a fully funded and financially secure convent – are demonstrated through these anecdotes.

Even if she is sometimes telling anecdotes on slender evidence, our chroniclist does get frustrated with the absence of information in what convent documentation does survive. She found, for instance “in an old booklet… that the trustworthy and well-loved Mr. Hiltbrand-Brandenburg of Biberach had traveled to Rome in his post, but it is not written in which year it happened.” (Gathering 1, p. 7). As a researcher trying to tack-and-tie the details of her story, our chroniclist finds that the habits of earlier writers can be frustrating But she’s also sure that his actions were important; she exhorts her fellow monastics to say 3 rosaries on his behalf every year.

The second area of tension is that of convent identity. She’s sure, on the one hand, that the convent was founded by devout sisters, and supported by an unnamed widow. She is also equally convinced (or should that be, she is equally devoted to convincing us as readers) that the convent had always belonged to the Franciscan third order (p. 3), as early as 1338, or perhaps 1340 when the sisters went back to Constance. This is, of course, pish-posh – a historical fabrication generated on political grounds in a moment of intense political need. The convent only became Third Order when commanded to do so after the Council of Trent in the late 16^th century. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

TAKE-AWAY:

The Thalbach chronicler’s narrative invites us to consider how historical memory is shaped—not only by the documents themselves, but also by the pressures of the moment in which the author writes. The Thalbach chroniclist is concerned that we readers understand her reliance on written records from the convent archives. She did not, in fact, need to tell the reader that documents were old, so her framing of the age of her sources reflects her own intentionality. She is calling to the reader's attention this tension of past and present, historical story and living tradition. And she is doing so by naming her heroes, telling their stories, and even accounting for the convent’s annual gift of fish.

 

CHRONICLE SOURCE:

Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336-1629. References are to pagination where it exists, but to gathering and page number where formal pagination is missing. One gathering is out of order, and another (omitted entirely from the Vienna copy) has been separated in the archival record.

The Vienna copy (ÖNB Cod. 7406: Chronicle and Necrology) largely accords with the VLA copy on the points discussed above.

 

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: I use the gender-neutral label “chroniclist” rather than the masculine gendered “chronicler” to reflect the reality of women’s agency in the creation of such monastic chronicles. Though un-named, the chroniclist also served as convent archivist for several years; her hand is found frequently in the surviving archive records of the early 18^th century.

Starting from a place of blah (12/11/24)

 

A "no entry" red circle over a parallelogram labeled "The Blah Zone"

When you're caught in the blah zone—the one where starting anything feels impossible, but the work just HAS to get done—it’s time for a reset.

Here are three strategies that I’ve used successfully this past week to get over the not-starting blues…

Actual anonymized excerpt from a 70 item spreadsheet from last Wednesday:

1. Spreadsheet with color, text deleted; each row labeled "Thingy 1, thingy 2" etc.

1. Make a spreadsheet.

Those of you who are spreadsheet people will get where I’m going with this: the spreadsheet itself is an accomplishment. Bonus points for prioritizing with colors. (It was a big project – still is – so the kick-off thinking was facilitated by a little fancy spreadsheet driving.)

Don’t you instantaneously feel better, seeing all that organization? I know I do!

Besides, a spreadsheet can make the next steps straightforward. Ask a question about G3. Then about G4. Then about C5. A spreadsheet can put things into an order that your blah brain just isn’t managing right at the moment. Win!

2. Boots. Put 'em on.

2. Don’t climb the mountains, put on your boots.

Seriously, who has energy for mountain climbing this time of year? (I did last year, but that was last year. This is this year. Be one with the blahs.) If the mountain (or whatever the next task is) seems insurmountable, ignore it. Focus on the next step. If I’m going to go walking, I need to put on my boots. I will now put on my boots. (Or order the interlibrary loan materials, or figure out the grocery list.)

Once the metaphorical boots are on, I’ll often get a couple of hours mileage out of things done “while I’m here.” And if not, at least I have my boots on. Little bits of progress DO add up. 

3. Work-in-progress list

3. Check back on your progress.

So, you’re just going to open the file to see how much you managed to get done this week. You don’t have to work on it. Just report-out on what got done. And while you’re there, maybe write a little summary, or a reminder of things you wanted to do. Maybe bullet point something. Just a little bit of progress.

THE TAKE-AWAY:

            Little by little, and it all gets done.

You don’t always have to have the “big task” in mind. Make progress in increments for a while and you’re still making progress.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

If you’re up against the writers-block-blues version of the blahs, perhaps this writing strategies post will help:

•     The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It
   

Caveat: this post is about the exhaustion blahs; more serious causes may need more serious attention. If you think you’ve gone beyond exhaustion into depression, please seek support. Here are two resources that can guide you to help.

• https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression

• https://www.helpguide.org/mental-health/depression/coping-with-depression