2021.12.19 Let Heaven and Nature Sing—Bringing Music To the Soul With Wendy G.

This Sunday is Fourth Advent, an invitation to focus on Mary of Nazareth AND lots of other bringers of brilliance, including Wendy Gerbier, Mezzo-Soprano. 

 

 

When I was in college I took a basic music course as part of one of the requirements. I chose it over Art 101, not because I disliked great art, but because there was music in my family, and I loved to sing—in a large choral group—too shy to solo. Strangely, I loved studying classical music and discovering opera. It made my heart soar even when I did not understand the words. My dad had a rich deep bass voice, and his mother had given up her vocation as an opera singer to get married and have children. She did a good job at that, spawning six children. Operatic drama, however, stayed in her soul. She would frequently summon her “boys”, one of them my dad, to stand around the piano after dinner to sing. I don’t know why she never invited the daughters. Maybe they too could sing, but she favored those four boys. They all joined their father to sing in the Mendelssohn Glee Club in New York City. Felix Mendelssohn only lived to be 38 years old. His music will last forever. Did you know he composed music for “Hark the Herald Angels SING!”?  And sing we must.

My mother hated those concerts. She favored show music, even though her own father had been a New York impresario (importer of musical talent from Europe to this country) and was, like Mendelssohn, Jewish—a fact I discovered only after Mom died. She had “adored” her father and felt devastated when he died in 1924, when she was twelve. With the help of technological stretch on the internet and our parish archivist, I researched his beginnings in Eastern Europe before he emigrated/immigrated to the USA. Knowing such details of my own history made my life, my heart-and-soul being, richer and wiser. I wish I had known my Zaide.

This long string of extraneous personal facts warms me, yet is a mere lead-in to tell you about the roots of my love of operatic bravura—and Auntie Wendy, the finest mezzo-soprano soloist I’ve ever heard and felt a tiny bit related to.  

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Wendy Gerbier, Wendy G., a professional singer of classical music, is Aunty Wendy to my stepdaughter Honor’s son, Brianjohnson. We first met Wendy in Nantucket when she came with Honor for a weekend visit. She brought immediate delight. We were lucky to have mostly sun that weekend, yet I bet Wendy’s exuberant laughter and buoyant presence could have penetrated any island fog-sweeps, just as her mezzo voice penetrates the sound barrier. Honestly!

On December 3, 2021, we heard Aunty Wendy sing professionally for the first  time. We went to her concert as part of the Silvermine Artist Series in Norwalk, Connecticut, originally established in 1983 by Karen Shaw, Professor of Music at Indiana University’s Jacob School of Music. The venue was a nondescript brick house set way back from the road. We drove back and forth, passing it a few times until we saw Brianjohnson waving us in. He wore a jacket and tie—symphonic, really, and with a great grin. 

The interior of this house looked like a museum, crowded with antiques and amazing paintings, and seasonally swathed in Christmas greens and holiday decor. Chairs for the audience were set up facing the grand pianos—three of them. Here is one.

The audience chatted and waited. Somehow everyone suddenly knew to hush into anticipatory silence as we heard a distant voice calling. Aunty Wendy descended a side staircase, her voice growing louder, crescendoing, as she sang the spiritual, “Rise Up Shepherd and Follow.” Immersed, I would have followed that voice anywhere. I didn’t move, but my soul did, and my head turned, knowing something wondrous was about to happen. I wasn’t with those ancient biblical shepherds that followed a star, but quickly knew how moved this scruffy bunch of shepherds of old must have felt. Today I still follow that “star” and that call wherever I see or hear it.   

Wendy G stood at a podium to sing, and her gifted accompanist David Harris took his place at one of the pianos.   

The concert officially opened with Panis Angelicus (Bread of Angels), music by Cesar Frank, and text by Sylvester Wager.  As Wendy sang this very traditional Christmas anthem, I envisioned angels soaring about preparing a visitation to a young girl of Nazareth named Mary. I bet these angels conferred as to how to approach this teenager with the idea that the child to be born from her womb was of God. I’m guessing Mary fretted about being pregnant before marriage, but the biblical version tells us that a guy angel delivered the message to Mary, and a guy Joseph stood by. We all rest assured  to know that her scandalous condition was no offense to God, so why would it be so to mere humans?  

Music dedicated to the courage of this young girl named Mary and the glory of divine courage followed. There are many tunes and texts to Ave Maria. My own prayer version only alters one word: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is within thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Wendy G. sang this to a tune composed by an Italian composer, Guilio Caccini (1551-1618) of Fiorenze (Florence), Italy. Caccini’s music is every bit as melodic as the traditional tune, and even more meaningful to Honor’s dad and my husband, Richard John Simeone, whose father was born in Italy. I never knew his father but lovingly call him Ernesto di Napoli. His presence at this concert was invisible although honored by the presence of his son and granddaughter and maternal great grandson. Here are Wendy and Dick Simeone. 

The Spiritual, “Mary Did You Know?” graced this audience and the biblical story with a musical tradition familiar and beloved by African Americans. Wendy G. did it justice: “Mary did you know that your little baby would be a king?”  Similarly, “Pie Jesu” from the requiem by Andrew Lloyd Webber, also the composer of my all-time favorite rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” swept over us with deep tenderness and volume rich enough to make me hold my breath and think to myself: Aunty Wendy rocks!    

The closing hymn “O Holy Night” composed in 1847 by French composer, Adolphe Adam, a name close to that of my maternal great grandfather, Adolph Adams, whom I never knew. Wendy sang it with such power and volume I turned my head to look up to the balcony to follow her voice—almost too big for the humble space. I felt grief and grace. But is that not the point of Incarnation, God in our flesh, praised and mourned?  

At Christmas, 1982, my 71-year-old father was dying of esophageal cancer. Surgery had not been enough. He was young. He made a final stab at “Merry Christmas” and came to sit at the head of the family dinner table. He couldn’t swallow or eat. My heart wept as we all smiled and cheered Christmas. Later that night Dad sat alone with his nurse as the night settled in and sang “O Holy Night.” It was his own “Magnificat”. 

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining

It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth

Long lay the world in sin and error pining

’Til he appeared and the soul felt its worth.

Wendy G. sang traditional seasonal music—vital because it is beloved. She gave it the brilliance of Mary’s life and story as well as her own and mine. 

This concert made my soul feel its worth. It was Advent anticipation blended with Christmas joy—already and not yet in the same moment. Every day we live this story over and over as if it were our own. And so it is. 

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See WendyGerbier.com for a schedule of Wendy’s performances and to hear her sing. She is a United States Anthem Ambassador with a three-octave range and sings regularly at Greenfield Congregational Church in Fairfield, Connecticut. 

2021.08.15 Ichi-go. Ichi-e

Do you think my computer leapt to another language font or secret app? The phrase Ichi-go ichi-e is Japanese. It means “one time, one meeting”—no moment in life is repeatable. Still, we continue to think we can “go back to something” after we’ve left it “just for a minute.”  It is not really possible to do this, perfectly or even well enough, because inside the mind all time exists at once (past, present, future)—each dimension fighting vigorously for dominance. 

But do not give up trying to cherish every second for the love of God. 

Today in our liturgical calendar we remember the biblical story called The Visitation. We live as if it were our own, the moment in which Mary of many names— Mary of Nazareth, Mother of the Church, Immaculate, Virgin, BVM, Mother of God, Blessed among women, Holy, and more—praised God with such radical and ENORMOUS force, that it stuns. The Gospel of Luke places into Mary’s mouth the words of an ancient hymn, The Magnificat. (Luke 1:46-55, Inclusive Bible translation.)  All this over being pregnant? NO, all this because Mary and her elderly cousin Elizabeth—both at once in one moment—cherished what their God had told them would/could be accomplished: that which they desired with all their hearts and in all their fervent prayers. The Church of  the Visitation, Ein Karem, Israel. 

Mary said:

My soul proclaims your greatness, O God,

and my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.

For you have looked with favor

upon your lowly servant,

and from this day forward

all generations will call me blessed.

For you, the Almighty, have done great things for me;

and holy is your Name. 

Your mercy reaches from age to age 

for those who fear you.

You have shown strength with your arm

you have scattered the proud in their conceit;

you have deposed the might from their thrones

and raised the lowly to high places.

You have filled the hungry with good things,

while you have sent the rich away empty.

You have come to the aid of Israel your servant,

mindful of your mercy—

the promise you made to our ancestors—

to Sarah and Abraham

and their descendants forever.

Such extremes of thankful praise are rare and short-lived. Every moment of my own aging, ebbing life is such a moment. Our fragile warring planet trembles every second with this prayerful awareness, this humble, grateful, trustful, momentary praise. 

Ichi-go ichi-e.

2018.08.12 Art Is Memory

"Art is memory. It is the excavation of so many memories we have had - of our mothers, our best and worst moments, of glorious experiences we have had with friends or films or music or dance or a lovely afternoon on a sloping, green hill. All of this enters us and, if we are artists, must be shared, handed over to others. This is why it is so important to know what came before you. It is also important to understand that things will follow you, and they may come along and make your work look pedestrian and silly. This is fine; this is progress. We have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  Martha Graham, modern dance artist (1894-1991). Photo portrait by Yousuf Karsh, 1948.

We are in Nantucket, a place of memory—over 50 years of it. Everyone’s memories are different. Everyone’s creative expression is unique. Everything passes into memory. Nothing will ever be the same. Graham calls this progress. I call it the way of the Spirit—creating, re-creating, re-membering, over and over and over again in multiple shapes and sizes.

Isn’t this what the art of Scripture is—re-member, re-create, re-call, re-invite?  Nothing is new and everything is new, generation by generation of interpretation. Know where you came from and hand it all over to others. That’s how it lasts. Graham sank into a major depression after she left ballet. Her wisdom came out of this darkness; she re-created her art and her life in choreography until her death in 1991. 

Is this what Mary of Nazareth did when she found herself pregnant? She raced off alone to see her cousin Elizabeth. What woman would set off on such a difficult and arduous journey in that vulnerable condition? Wasn’t Joseph available? Oh, that’s right he didn't know yet. This unbidden state of affairs had to be frightening. We don't know if Mary was depressed, but the story tells us she felt a familiar spiritual assurance before she fled into the hills.

I remember a time when I thought I was pregnant and wanted to flee like Mary. I was in high school. I was going steady with the man who in time became my first husband. We shivered in fear—together. He would call me every single day to check on my menstrual status. Our code was: “Are there carp in the H’s pool?” Really! No meant I had not gotten my period, and yes that I had. If I answered yes we planned to sneak into the H’s pool, a neighborhood rarity in the 1950s, and take a big fat illegal bloody swim—quietly in the dark.

That’s how crazy we felt at the prospect of our tender young lives being possibly over, or at least so disrupted that we would be rent asunder by parental rage, or worse, divine wrath. My mother caught me sobbing, so I confessed my fear. She sent us to the local GP who told us the facts of life—again. Then he suggested that our fears had caused us to imagine a scientific impossibility. (We hadn’t even had intercourse, just got overheated, and imagined the worst, something like the sin of the biblical Onan who spilled some sperm, but in our case we imagined that such spillage could defy the law of gravity and travel upward and into my womb.) 

The kindly doctor might as well have been God, because his word alone dispelled our fears, and, miraculously, induced my menstrual blood the very next day. Mary of Nazareth discovered that Joseph would marry her, and that her elderly cousin had an irregular, postmenopausal, pregnancy.

My story isn’t the same as Mary’s, but I re-membered hers and re-created it in my own. As Graham wrote:  “Art is memory. Artists have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  That’s what God the Artist does.

Scripture is art, and art is memory, and memory keeps us alive and dancing.