In 1609, it was time to raise the walls on the Thalbach convent church in Bregenz. Much labor went into the church, including that of the Tertiaries themselves, for the sisters helped haul stone, cleaned up the worksite, and generally contributed their own proverbial sweat of the brow to the project.
But supplies don’t come cheap, and the sisters turned to fundraising to meet their needs. Their reach was remarkably large, for contributions came from more than the local village and represented donors ranging from the princely to the servant. This suggests the importance of the Catholic network of the day, one which extended across social classes and geographical boundaries to connect the community of the faithful.
The Thalbach Chronicle records the gifts of 75 people, places, institutions, and families who supported the building enterprise. In the middle of the pack in terms of openness of purse fall the administrative gifts. The Lords of Bregenz-and-Hohenegg had their representatives pay for screens so that the sisters could be in seclusion in the church, and the representative of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria gave cash.
At first glance, the Chroniclist’s donor list appears fragmented, but a closer examination reveals patterns in the record. Most donors are identified by place, but 28 people are identified without geographical markers, including all of the donors who gave in Hellers rather than in florins. That probably reflects the convent’s (or at least the chroniclist’s) bookkeeping habits, since she clusters her entries by type of payment: florins, in kind, women’s donations (!), hellers. Some of the inconsistencies of identifying details simply reflect different decisions made at different times for the separate chapters that list donors.
A different situation holds, I think, for the women donors, who are separated into a chapter of their own (as if their cash were somehow different from their male peers). About half of the women donors lack geographical placemarkers, and are identified instead by marital status (wife, widow) and/or natal identity. This decision seems more gendered; marital affiliation “names” the woman, whereas for men, their community serves as part of their defining characteristics. This is perhaps confirmed by the fact that the unmarried women -- “noble and virtuous maidens” in the language of the chronicle – are tied to place. It seems an X+Y kind of equation: as a person one needs a name and either a place or a social connection – to be sure that the reader knows whose gift is being recorded.
For the remaining two-thirds of the gift-related entries, geography is part of this identity equation. Some donations might be predicted. Two former Thalbach sisters, now serving as leaders of convents elsewhere, sent contributions, as did the prioress of Hirschthal and a canonness from Lindau Abbey. Similarly, collective gifts came from several churches/monasteries and the city of Feldkirch, from whence many of the sisters came.
Yet the donor pool extended far beyond the expected circles of monastic and clerical supporters. Of the 38 individual donors with geographical markers, nine are from Bregenz and five from Wolfurt – the “local citizenry” contributing their piece to the sisters whose prayers were said on their behalf. Two donations come from Hohenegg, which, though farther away, sent multiple sisters to Thalbach. But beyond these strongholds, the chroniclist records gifts from a whopping 22 other locations, one-off contributions from a mix of secular and sacred donors – the local parish priest, a member of the lesser nobility, a particular family, the mayor, an abbot. Many donations come from Vorarlberg or the Allgäu, but others came in from places as far afield as Schwartzenburg, Zweifalten, and St Moritz in Augsburg.
What this pattern of support shows is the strength of the Catholic network, not just amongst clerical folk, but also, and especially, amongst the laity in the early seventeenth century. True, five individual parish priests donated to the building of the church. But so did widows, and tax collectors, and even a servant. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but evidently, it takes a whole Catholic community to raise a church.
Leprosy (now more properly designated Hansen’s Disease) is a
disease of almost overwhelming stigma. It can cause disfigurement and
is associated with poverty, all the more so now that treatment is
readily available. It is a disease that also causes us to attend to
our social response, highlighting the tension between charity and
revulsion, inclusion and fear.
The work that goes
on around the globe on World Leprosy Day seeks to create social
change – to reduce stigma, emphasize treatment and inclusion in
community, and break the inter-generational cycle in which leprosy
leads to isolation leads to reduced education and livelihood
opportunities leads to poverty which leads again to leprosy.
While it’s early yet to see what will be issued for THIS year’s
world leprosy day, I’d like to take up three examples of the
campaign from previous years which provide a glimpse into the
power that music has in these socio-medical campaigns. It is, in
other words, an example of music as public health, and one that I
like to talk about with students in my Music, Pandemics, and History
class.
EXAMPLE 1: A Leprosy Awareness song
“Gandhi’s dream: India should be Leprosy Free”
The
song conveys straightforward yet impactful messages.
One theme is that of
awareness. “It does not spread by touching”; treat early;
it’s eradicable. Also, finish your course of treatment, “medicine
has to be given till the end.”
A second is working toward a
more inclusive society: “We should get a little more, we
should get all the rights, we should get a sense of belonging in the
heart, the society should accept us from the heart, leprosy has to be
eradicated from the body, mind and thought also.” Likewise,
eliminate discrimination and avoid stigma by adopting a
caring attitude -- “Avoid grudges or bad mouthing”; “Keep the
patient happy with a loving face.”
A
final message is the fact that we are all implicated in this
work: “Through a joint effort we can all make India free from
leprosy.”
The music reinforces this
vision in several ways. It adopts traditional Indian idioms and
instrumentation. The musical style is approachable, trending toward
pop. The presence of a lilting, danceable percussive backbeat, for
instance, gives the performance energy. There’s a good deal of
musical and verbal repetition, and sections are marked with dramatic
gestures such as a rising swoop in the strings. There is a chorus
that comes in to add richness to the texture. Put together, these
choices are signaling that theme of collective effort together; just
as this is “our music,” so is its challenge “our problem.”
EXAMPLE 2: Sparsh Awareness Campaign (A governmental educational program)
Theme: United for dignity
This initiative was a government-sponsored campaign to use a festival model to facilitate education and awareness of the disease. The performances include skits, dance, and song, in between giving speeches about the disease. The (edited) example here comes from Vellore district, and condenses the cultural offerings to focus in on the speeches that convey this 2022 message:
“The disease will not spread through treated persons. Hence all cured leprosy persons should not be neglected or disliked. The WHO Theme for SPARSH Leprosy Awareness Campaign 2022 is "UNITED FOR DIGNITY". Therefore, let us strive to uphold the honour and dignity of leprosy cured persons.” (Excerpt of the YouTube description)
At the beginning of the clip, we again get singing, this time by a woman singing in the traditional Indian style, celebrating the local region, Tamil Nadu. The song depicts the importance of local culture and the importance of state initiatives. This is followed by a traditional circle dance to sung accompaniment which visibly expands to include the community gathered in an outdoor venue.
This
initial set-up emphasizing music and dance creates
a bridge between cultural pride and public health awareness
messaging that follows. There is the familiar sound of local musical
practice. The performances, though polished, are not unduly
professional; they seem to stem from within the community. This is
reinforced in the dance, where the circle of women visually segues
into the circle of the listening audience, many of whom bob and sway
to the sounds they are hearing. We have been brought from the joys of
cultural expression into community, “United for Dignity,” which
shares its appreciation for such beauty. The implication is that they
will share as well in the understanding from the day’s educational
program.
There’s a bit of slippage
here: enjoyment of song, and enjoyment of message are portrayed as
somehow equivalent. This is an important public health messaging
strategy that we see on a variety of fronts (see AIDS awareness in
Uganda, for instance). Music, dance, and other cultural expression
draws in the crowd, garnering attention and preparing them for the
harder-hitting messaging about disease safety, treatment, and the
need for change.
Here in the Vellore
video,
that stratey is made
explicit. After
these initial song and dance excerpts, we cut
to a series of speakers each
of whom speaks from a seat in
front of a poster about leprosy awareness. The
poster behind the series
of speakers is busy
delivering text. It mentions symptoms (“loss of feeling”) but
also seeks to normalize the disease; we should “treat it like TB.”
Lastly, it makes the point that clinics will provide evidence-based
care, there is “no experimentation” (!) in delivering treatment
for the disease. As a
backdrop, the poster is a bit overwhelming; the amount of text and
the array of type-faces and colors seem to function more like a flag
backdrop than a conveyance of information. Tired eyes might prefer
instead to focus on the speaker, and maybe that’s part of its
purpose. It is “official” without being “interesting.”
Reading is work; listening is easier.
Indeed, what IS interesting,
in contrast to the poster, are the series testimonials
from individuals who have had the disease. These
testimonials make up the
central portion of this “Leprosy awareness day.” The first [in a
google translation based on a notta.ai transcript], reads:
My
name is Shafuddin. I am speaking from Vellore. My body has been
damaged since 2001, so I went to the hospital. They said it is
leprosy. In the hospital they said it will be cured by treating it. I
took similar medicine for two years. The body recovered to some
extent. Hands and feet are very nerve affected, there is a lot of
pain, so they said that by doing an operation the hands will be
cured. After doing the operation it got cured. I do my work myself. I
can eat. I do all the work myself. There is no problem. Feeling good.
Leprosy is not a bad disease. If you take the right medicine you will
be cured.
This shared personal
experience helps the audience understand the multiple treatment
options. There were the meds, and then afterwards a surgical
intervention. The success of his treatment and his subsequent
independence would be important to anyone who fears that they
themselves might be suffering. Moreover,
his story demonstrates personal resilience and also the societal
support needed to uphold dignity for those affected by leprosy.
Shafuddin’s journey from diagnosis to recovery directly embodies
the campaign’s call to honor the dignity of those affected by
leprosy. Likewise, his ability to regain independence challenges
stigmatizing narratives. His message, as I see it, reinforces the
hope embedded in the festival's music and dance.
Later in the video (1.59)
there is a masked and
costumed dancer and supporting chamber ensemble; the elaborate
costume and intricate steps contrast with the packed-earth dance
circle and the backdrop of cow and crops. A second and then third
character come in to enliven the skit. This cultural
offering too is followed
by impassioned speakers.
Alternation of entertainment
and education keeps the audience engaged. Such alternations also
subtly suggests that there is a “whole-life” experience in
illness treatment. Just as we (here the we of the community audience
and its internet echo) enjoy the singing and dramatic action, we –
the united “we” of community – should enjoy our support for
these companions who have suffered with the disease, and for their
invisible compadres.
The
video ends with a medical overview of symptoms and treatments, and an
emphasis that treatment is free. The government is working to support
eradication, and anyone who has the disease should be treated.
Here,
we see music as an attention-getter,
valuable for its entertainment value, and providing a forum in which
other socially-critical messages can be sent. We
also see music as a community-building
element, identifying the “united we” of the messaging campaign.
The visual placement –
an outdoor festival setting, with birds and other nature sounds –
create an ironically “homey” atmosphere, in which you are hearing
from neighbors and compatriots about what is possible. And
throughout, the upbeat
music goes along with the upbeat message: Leprosy can be cured. That
message is worth celebrating.
In short, I think this
approach – blending
traditional cultural expressions with modern health messaging
– creates
a shared space for education, empathy, and celebration of civic
progress in a
significant public
health initiative. Like
“Gandhi’s Dream,” the message here is simple: just as we
collectively respond to the music, we should collectively respond to
the disease itself. Through its blend of traditional cultural forms
and modern health education, the Sparsh Awareness Campaign
demonstrates the potential of music and other performative arts to
transform public health initiatives into inclusive, community-driven
movements.
EXAMPLE 3 An Award-winning leprosy awareness short (from 2003)
Dungarpur Films' 2003 award-winning short, recipient of the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA) Gold for the best public service film for leprosy awareness, delivers a powerful yet simple message:
One intervention can make a difference.
The film follows a woman and her son as they navigate the stigma surrounding leprosy and move toward the hopefulness of seeking treatment. It begins with the village headman’s stark declaration: “There’s no place in the village for leprosy patients.” This sets the stage for conflict, as the family’s diagnosis has sparked fear among the villagers, who seek to exile him and his mother so that the disease stigma doesn’t pass to the broader community.
Yet,
one woman raises her hand and calls to the mother and son. She speaks
out against exclusion, commanding them not to leave the village, but
rather to go straight to the health center. She reinforces this
message by publicly inviting the mother’s touch, hand to head. Her
intervention shifts the focus from judgment to action and the
narrative from vague crowd mutterings to crucial public health
information: “A disease-free body… Leprosy is completely cured
with MDT [Multi-Drug Therapy]. And this MDT is available completely
free at every government health center.”
The film ends with a
resolution—the mother and son are welcomed at the clinic, where
they receive treatment. The final frame features the National Leprosy
Eradication Programme (NLEP) symbol: four connected stick-figure
hands alongside the message, “Join hands: eradicate leprosy.”
This visual reinforces the short’s central theme of connection and
collective responsibility.
At its core, the film frames stigma as a more pervasive and
damaging issue than the disease itself. We initially sit with the
discomfort of an unhappy village; we are grounded in the reality that
the ill one might be ostracized. The disease is contagious, but
attitudes are even more contagious. The woman’s intervention not
only counters this stigma but also demonstrates the courage and
compassion needed to enact change. By touching and interacting with
the family, she visibly defies the rumor and shunning which had
seemed increasingly normative. Her actions embody the film’s call
for inclusion and understanding.
This act of bravery is pivotal. It transforms a moment of
potential exclusion and banishment into one of connection and hope.
The journey to the clinic becomes a metaphor for the broader societal
journey—from ignorance and fear to knowledge and action. The
message is clear: intervention, grounded in education and empathy,
can dismantle stigma and pave the way for healing.
Her intervention is successful; we follow these characters as they
move toward the clinic, receiving crucial public health information.
Leprosy is completely curable. Treatment is free at all government
health centers. There is a solution. We end with an arm around the
shoulder in support – connection, not stigma, will solve the
disease.
The film’s music underscores this narrative journey, amplifying
the emotional stakes and reinforcing the thematic arc. At the start,
the suspenseful score reflects the villagers’ tension and
hostility. There’s a traditional voice, and threatening
intermittent and unpredictable drum. We hear discussion and crowd
noise. This is the acoustical chaos of bad things happening.
Yet, after a woman intervenes, we move toward acceptance and a
resultant shift of musical idiom. A more hopeful lyrical voice
emerges, as well as more instruments playing in a coordinated and
more predictable way. We have a reiterated drone pitch to provide a
harmonic reference point, making the point that stability comes from
seeking treatment. So does optimism, for a series of arched phrases
accompany images of the journey to the clinic – the boat, a bike
and walk into the clinic. The highest of these vocal phrases is
delivered as our patient receives her packet of medicine, not only a
climax, but a happy one. Throughout this section, there is also more
complexity in the drum rhythms, accompanied with the tinkle of high
bells – a brighter timbre, with more interesting patterns. This is
music that we want to listen to. It is music as “accompaniment to
action.”
The music of this 90-second
short, in other words, tells us that inclusion and intervention are
the right choices, the ones that will lead to a positive, major-key
kind of place. We have, in the final frame, the joy of treatment with
the final high arched phrase. Layered over that is the visual cut-in
– the NLEP symbol, and four connected stick-type figures, with the
words of the final message: “join hands: eradicate leprosy.”
Dungarpur Films’ offering blends narrative, music, and
public health messaging together in order to inspire change. By addressing stigma
through a compelling story of intervention – by illustrating the
transformative power of knowledge and empathy – the film leaves
viewers with a clear and actionable message: inclusion and education
can eradicate both the disease and its associated stigma.
The
music, serving as both a narrative driver and an emotional guide,
amplifies the film’s impact. From the acoustical chaos of exclusion
to the lyrical harmony of hope, the soundtrack underscores the
journey from fear to acceptance. Storytelling and music here foster understanding and community-building. The film's call to “join
hands” remains as resonant today as it was in 2003: just as we
collectively respond to music, we must collectively respond to
disease and its societal implications.
TAKE-AWAYS
As we have seen in these
three examples of leprosy intervention, music plays a vital role in
public health. It bridges the gap between complex medical messaging
and community engagement. Its ability to evoke emotion, foster
community, and reflect local cultural values makes it a powerful tool
for reducing stigma, promoting awareness, and encouraging positive
collective action.
Whether through traditional
idioms, modern compositions, or community-driven performances, music
transforms abstract health messages into relatable, memorable
experiences. By integrating music into campaigns, public health
initiatives transcend mere information dissemination; they build
empathy, solidarity, and hope, empowering communities to confront
challenges together. Music, in essence, resonates not just in sound,
but in its capacity to inspire societal change.
I would like to thank Avagail Hulbert, whose seminar contributions
on India’s leprosy eradication programs introduced me to these
and other compelling examples of music in public health. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend Gregory
Barz, whose work on medical ethnomusicology was my first introduction
to the topic. Lastly, I’d like to thank all those many people –
musicians, film-makers, dancers, educators – whose capacity for
empathy and commitment to optimistic service is the active force for
good that makes real change happen in the world.
Bregenz Parish church (E) and, perhaps, Thalbach (yellow), from Copperplate of M.Meriam, 1643
In July of 1588, Catarina Haidenhoferin from Ravensburg arrived in the monastery of Thalbach in Bregenz. She was, at the time, six years old, but her monastic career was auspicious. She eventually became the convent’s Meisterin in 1641, at age 59 (by my calculation), and served until her death in May 1664. She took holy orders at age fourteen or fifteen in August of 1596, and made her profession on 27th of October 1599, tucking her in among the monastic sisters of the 16th century.
The story of Catarina arrival’s is seen by the convent chroniclist as remarkable, since her natal city of Ravensburg was at the time mostly Lutheran. Nevertheless, the family’s Catholic faith remained staunch, as witnessed not just through Catarina’s monastic dedication, but also through the story of her arrival, as the chroniclist tells it:
A Lutheran baker wanted to throw our dear lady's Vespers picture into the oven and burn it, but the mother of this 6-year-old child saw this and asked the baker not to do this but to give her this little Marian picture, and she would give him other wood if he wanted, which was also done.
Afterwards she sent the original Mary or Vespers picture with the child to the monastery, which is still in the church on the right hand side, in the choir of the same place in which St. Ursula is grouped with four virgins, of whom the eleven thousand had been previously venerated, but this Vespers picture was recently kept and venerated. (Bregenz VLA, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9 Thalbach Chronicle, p. 19. Transcription/translation by the author.)
Our chroniclist is doing several things here. She is first telling a story of the miraculous rescue of an image of the Virgin, the so-called “Vesperbild,” rescued by a devout family in a “remarkable” intervention. (Such pictures were frequently the focus of specific prayers, and particularly, of Vesper services, when the singing of the Magnificat could be enhanced by the contemplation of the Virgin's image.) The Catholic hero of the story, Catarina’s mother, had to be in the right place at the right time; had to convince a Lutheran tradesman not to consign the picture to the flames; had to bribe him with substitute wood. Moreover, this mother’s faith was evidently strong enough to rescue the picture from this hotbed of Lutheranism and send not just it but her small child to a Catholic sanctuary – and not just any monastery, this monastery of Thalbach, one in a Catholic stronghold.
This, of course, raises important questions of gendered agency in the context of contested religious identity. We hear of the mother’s actions, but not the father’s. We also learn here of the young age of Caterina’s arrival as a six-year-old Catholic girl finding home with Catholic sisters of Thalbach. Notably, the Chroniclist centers the age of arrival in many of her reports of Convent sisters, and the majority of these “early arrivals” (pre-14 year olds), at least in her telling, choose a monastic vocation upon maturity. It is also interesting that the only man in this particular story is the baker, who was about to perform an act that Catholics would consider sacrilege. The women of the story – the mother, child, and arguably the Virgin herself – turn what could have been a crisis of his making into a pivot-point towards Catarina’s future monastic success.
The chroniclist is also telling a story of Catholic persistence in regions that are (from her vantage point) uncomfortably Lutheran. Since, at the time, Bregenz was firmly positioned in the Counter-reformation camp and was Catholic to the near-exclusion of other faith practices, she’s telling a story of “our side’s” success in the face of oppression in other lands. That Catarina – eventual leader of the convent – came from Lutheran lands shows, suggests the Chroniclist, a hint of divine providence. The 10-hour walk from Ravensburg to Bregenz might only have been a few hours on horseback, but the arrival of a 6-year-old from a place as remote as Ravensburg is itself worthy of mention, even without the gift of precious artwork that accompanied her.
This story is also an explanatory story which tells of convent treasure and its derivation. It is a specific image, identified not by internal visual clues but by location. It is that image which stands in the corner of St Ursula, “on the right hand side in the choir.” It is, moreover, an image of the virgin, acquired at nearly the same time as the convent came to own the miraculous statue of the Virgin (the 13th century Gnadenmutter) which still adorns their chapel. The Virgin, in other words, is being made visibly manifest through these miraculous arrivals. (The story of the statue’s arrival at Thalbach is told in a number of places, and perhaps I’ll retell it in a later post. Stay tuned.)
And lastly, this is an anticipatory story, for Caterina Haidenhoferin was to feature in the reform of Thalbach’s liturgy. But that is a story I will tell another day.
NOTE:
I use the term chroniclist rather than the masculine-gendered chronicler that abounds in the literature. I follow Catarina’s own spelling of her name from Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv Klosterarchiv Box 15, Folder #225, document of 1649.
THALBACH CHRONICLE:
Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336-1629.
THALBACH’S GNADENBILD: A story told several places, including these:
“Wie das alte Bild der Gnadenmutter von Mehrerau nach Talbach kam,” Holunder Wochen-Beilage für Volkstum, Bildung und Unterhaltung zur Vorarlberger Landes-Zeitung, Jg. 15 (1937), Nr. 40, S. 1 – 2.
“Das marianische Gnadenbild zu Thalbach bei Bregenz.” Monat-Rosen zu Ehren der Unbefleckten Gottes-Mutter Maria 14 (1884-5): Heft 1, Beilage, pp. 48-53. https://books.google.com/books?id=kKPi0ihULl4C
(I need to dig up the rest of my bibliography on the Thalbach Gnadenbild from my files from pre-pandemic days, and am putting that on my to-do list now!)
Image of female pilgrim with "sounds," "melodies," and "Hallucinations" as responding themes
"Sum-tyme sche herd wyth hir bodily erys sweche sowndys &
melodies that sche myth not wel heryn what a man seyd to hir in that
tyme less he spoke the lowder."
Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies
that she might not hear effectively what a man said to her at that
time unless he spoke louder.
Here we see
attention as commodity in the Book of Margery Kempe, that most
idiosyncratic of medieval mystics.
Richard Lawes (2000)
shows that Margery distinguished between the inner sound of visions
(“hire gostly undirstondyng” (her ghostly understanding) and the
external ear-based sounds. He believes that her passing experience
(Sum-tyme) betokens an “auditory hallucination.” This, to him, is
a signal of brain misfirings, and an acoustical experience generated
from an interior rather than exterior source.
I wonder, however,
if she describes here instead a kind of gendered listening. Margery
describes herself as hearing those details of the surrounding
landscape, attending to the “trivial” sounds of background noise,
instead of to the details of the in-person conversation to which she,
particular as a woman, is supposed to be attending. Just as parents
yell, ahem, increase their volume to garner the attention of
their inattentive offspring, so too Margery’s interlocutor
increases his volume to drown out the distracting if more distant
noises. Is the story, then, about a mystical vision? A medical
moment? Or an (admittedly difficult) woman defying expectation? We
should pause and consider context, I think, before deciding that
she’s just hallucinating.
Similarly, Lawes
names the “rushing sounds, likened to a bellows” that are
one-sided, present only in her right ear. As a long-term sufferer of
tinnitus, I suspect that she’s just describing the distracting
internal ear noise to which all such sufferers might be vulnerable.
Again, there are gendered implications; Margery is letting her
experience of self dominate her perceptive world. Would a man,
describing a “rushing like unto a river” be chided for the
experience? Or might it more be wrapped up in assumptions of memory
and experiential displacement?
That is not to say
that Lawes was intending ill by Margery. Rather, I find him an
empathetic reader, if a bit over-fond of his own temporal lobe
epilepsy diagnosis that he believes to be her underlying medical
condition. Still, his assessment and the care he gives to her sensory
details did, IMHO, help to move forward the field of interpretive
writing about her experiences. It’s just that we all come to our
reading with the cultural habits of thought and unconscious biases of
our own generation. And here, picking apart these examples a bit
further does, I think, have something to tell us about the sound
experiences of an important late-medieval laywoman.
Ultimately, Margery
Kempe’s auditory experiences—whether mystical, medical, or
mundane—make me, at least, want to reconsider how we approach
sensory perception and identity in the medieval world. Margery’s
“bodily ears” and their contested sounds challenge us to think
about how gender, culture, and personal experience shape not only
what we hear but also how we interpret it. Was Margery’s listening
“misdirected,” as her contemporaries might have thought, or was
it reflective of a richer and more complex sensory engagement with
her world? Was she, in other words, simply hyper-aware of the world
around her—and if so, shouldn’t we prize that?
RESPONDING TO:
Richard Lawes,
“Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian
of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve,” in Writing
Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late
Medieval England, edited by Denis Renevey and Christiana
Whitehead (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000): 217-243.
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’swith 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 21st
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
