jwilzewske: autonomy

Showing posts with label autonomy. Show all posts

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Quadrivium Novum: Unity with Autonomy

A [filmic] image combined with a sound placed in a context--none of which matches expectations--creates a metaphor and invites an individual search for meaning at a physical, emotional and psychological level (in that order).”
— Paul Rudy, UMKC Conservatory.

T he performance last night at Unity Temple by the electroacoustic quartet Quadrivium Novum was the final event of the 2009-2010 season for the Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance, KCEMA.

Q uadrivium is comprised of Rebecca Ashe (flute), Kari Johnson (piano), Cheryl Melfi (clarinet), and Mark Stauffer (cello). [‘Quadrivium’ may not only allude to their quartetness but also to each member’s equal, autonomous role in bringing new, disruptive repertoire and techniques to the ensemble’s collaborations—much as though each member were a canonical ‘subject’ to be studied, learned, mastered?] Each of Quadrivium’s members is associated with the UMKC Conservatory’s Community Music & Dance Academy.

Daniel Eichenbaum: Orbit (flute, clarinet, live electronics; 20 min)
Jason Bolte: Scrap Metal (prepared piano solo, fixed media; 10 min)
Mara Gibson: E:Vespers (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio; 8 min)
Andrew Seager Cole: A Slow Unraveling (flute, clarinet, cello, piano, electronics, video; 8 min)
William Lackey: The World Falls Asleep (cello, digital recording of cello; 10 min)
Christopher Biggs: Bioluminescence (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio, video; 12 min)

E ach of the works was rewarding, and I should apologize for not commenting here on each of them. Let me at least offer a few impressions of the three pieces that were world premieres: ‘E:Vespers’, ‘Orbit’, and ‘A Slow Unraveling’.

M ara Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, a ‘fantasie’ or tone-poem composed on the occasion of observing an eclipse, was remarkable for the organic, natural way in which the digital audio functions as an equal to the three live performers. The partitioning of human assistants and digital tracks programs all the tasks into one application, run by a single assistant at the console workstation in the center of the performance space. This approach does not ‘reduce’ the interpretation to ‘assistant vs. trio’ duality, nor does it risk dichotomizing the technology and the performers at the front of the performance space. Rather, with the house lights dimmed, the effect is one of a thoroughly integrated ‘whole’ in which the individual parts reveal their character and ideas—beginning with the tolling of delicate, repeated notes by the piano.

T he technology actually helps to maintain the textural and timbral cohesion of the other parts (clarinet, flute, piano), whose acoustic spectra are otherwise diverse. Unlike some electroacoustic works in which the technology is intrusive or merely ornamental; unlike works where the digital tracks, having been laid down and sequenced in advance, are inflexible and impose too much determinism on the live executants. In the case of Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, the composer is still the creator, and the 3 performers and 1 assistant are the directors in charge of interpreting the musical elements of the work, whether they are for an acoustic instrument or combined with a computer sequencer. The performers are responsible to recreate the world the composer has envisioned: here, a contemplative, reverent, panoramic one—punctuated with worries but ultimately beneficent—captured in the twilight of the eclipse and return of the sun after 'totality'.

W e orbit and float in our space gondola and watch the oceans and islands and green hills of the continent pass by at five miles per second. We move silently and effortlessly past the ground. I want to say ‘over the ground’ as I write this, but remember: in space, your sense of up or down is completely gone and my description must reflect this fact. In addition, the breathtaking speed of the ship is an odd and confusing contrast to the feel of perpetually floating within the spaceship. You do not sit before the window to view the passing scene, certainly not down upon it. Are you speeding past oceans and continents, or are you just hovering and watching them move beside you?”
— Joseph Allen, U.S. astronaut.

D aniel Eichembaum’s ‘Orbit’ is an antiphonal piece for flute, clarinet, and electronics. Rebecca Ashe and Cheryl Melfi are dressed in black, in near-total darkness, barefoot. They perform Orbit’s several movements as a duo, gliding anticlockwise between the four ‘stations’ that are set up on-stage. The stations are separated around the perimeter of a 10-meter circle whose perigee is closest to the audience and apogee farthest away.

T he ephemeral, ambient quality of electroacoustic elements is abundant, at times dominant. But it is important to note that the digital tracks are derived entirely from recordings of Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s own playing, breathing, moving—not from Eichenbaum’s digital waveform library or independent geek artistry in a vacuum. Extensive digital signal-processing (DSP) and editing have been done to produce what are now rendered by the sequencer in performance as, say, massive, rocket-like, spine-shaking ‘rumbles’ [from the multiple studio monitor speakers that are arrayed around the performance space, controlled from the assistant’s digital audio workstation console] or celestial chirps or high-energy quantum particle ‘tweets’. We had no idea of this in advance. But when Rebecca and Cheryl remarked after the performance that all of the electroacoustic effects we had just heard during this piece had begun from sounds that they themselves had made, and that Eichenbaum had recorded and processed and sequenced them as the three of them sat together at the DAW console in the studio, it was heartwarming evidence of a deeper sort of collaboration between performers and composer. Composer/DAW-artist/engineer as performer; performers as engineers/editors/co-composers. There is something profoundly ‘right’ about this.

W hat I mean is, composers, performers, computer musicians/DAW-artists have accepted, for the most part, the progressive abstractions from older analog and now-obsolete digital hardware into software modules and sequencer patches... not just ‘miniaturization’ per se but now total automation and virtuality, including software to manage the multiple applications and equipments and software to insert random aleatorics and emulate human-like variability effects. These abstractions are motivated by reliability, by productivity for the composer, by aesthetic considerations—all valid and admirable. But the abstractions have incrementally impoverished the electroacoustic performance experience, I think—compared to, say, my first experience of a Moog Synthesizer as a child of 10 at the Minneapolis Symphony (now Minnesota Orchestra) in 1963, teeming with patch-cables and wires and mad-scientist musician (I regret I cannot remember who, or which composers’ works were performed) at the keyboard, clearly *not* in complete control.

B ut in Eichenbaum’s ‘Orbit’ we have a focused assimilation of the digital and acoustic environments, in which the digital realization is a cohesive part--‘gluey’ elements that hold the entire composition together. The live performers are not ‘bystanders’. They are confronted, yes, by their own DSP-processed previously-recorded sounds. They are reacting to the aleatoric expressions of the DAW assistant who is reincarnating the sequences at one remove, so to say. And they know this, even though we in the audience did not, until the remarks following the performance.

H aving heard Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s post-performance commentary on ‘Orbit’, though, we now comprehend aspects of the performer-electronics interactions that we hadn’t grasped at first hearing: the intimacy of the part that you are now playing, live; the musical subtleties of rediscovering the state-of-mind you were in when you made the sounds that you are now hearing emanate from these electronics; the expressive stimulation of being re-reminded now, of how that sequencer patch was co-edited by you and Daniel not so long ago. This can be a truly productive process—and a provocative montage of active, creative roles and meta-roles for performers in their interpretations of electroacoustic music, as it was with the Quadrivium performance last night!

W hat else? The noise gradations range from total silence (a bus is heard faintly, passing by outside Unity Temple on 47th Street) to 100 dB butt-shaking. ‘Really Noisy’ (what Stockhausen would call ‘sehr geräuschaft’)–filtered ‘pink’ noise and rumbling ‘red’ noise, convolved with other signals on the track to the point where it pervades the space and progressively washes out and obscures Rebecca’s flute and Cheryl’s clarinet. ‘Sort of Noisy’ (‘etwas geräuschaft’) – square and sawtooth waves convolved with the rest, but with enough high-frequency spectral content to meld with and preserve the listener’s attentiveness to upper-register activity in the flute and clarinet parts... A dense polyphony, reminiscent of György Ligeti’s writing for the score of the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’: a choir of myriad voices; the mixing and intermingling and asynchronous entries and departures of thousands of voices; microtonal voices, sounding notes a quarter-tone higher or lower than their neighbors; cosmic cacophony tending toward pantheism.

A ndrew Seager Cole’s ‘A Slow Unraveling’ applies combinatoric permutations to tiny musical elements to generate large [fractal?] structures. The fast-tempo elements that begin the piece devolve into slower ‘child’ elements that enclose and subsume the ‘parents’ until the music completely unravels, finally coming to a rest. The music was genuinely interesting and admirably executed, regardless of its formal compositional methods and inspiration. Kari Johnson’s piano and Mark Stauffer’s cello were especially compelling, as regards imbuing the piece with vivid kinesthetic impressions of velocity and depth/space. The piece has narrative; a story unfolding among the performers. It is intimate ‘chamber music’, yes. But it is the paradoxical ‘intimacy’ of space itself, on an astronomical scale.

B ravo!

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Canonical Form as Social Networking (Reply re: Canonical Form as Epidemic Contagion)

Y our infectious/epidemiology model may be the first theory of canonical form that says that voices engaged in canon are passive ... coerced, so to say. As though the neighboring parts had some sort of apraxia until infected. But they are not at a loss for words. They are not passive [respondents]. And you obviously do not have anything like the release of tension, which is the conclusion of normal classical music composition structure.”
— Anonymous email to CMT.

I agree with some of the emailer’s observations about the earlier CMT post: the players are not ‘passive’ or ‘inert’. Each is receptive to stimulation and, after being stimulated/infected by those around them, engages in ‘speculative’ or ‘expansive’ elaboration upon what they’ve received.

B ut I disagree about the ‘tension’ point. There’s no ‘law’ that says that all musical events must be deliberative or rational or intended. Individual players may emit sounds that have unintended [but wonderful—] consequences or inadvertent meanings. Players have a possibility for automatic or pre-conscious improvisational sonic production, which the composer can call upon if she/he wishes (think Stockhausen or Nancarrow or Tenney). There may be hyper-structural or obsessive features that are far from ‘rational’ (think Feldman or Babbitt or Cage). Stochastic/random elements don't mean that a piece defies analysis—only that the analytical approach has to change to address the content. It’s not a music theory dead-end.

I n fact, I think that the indeterminacy/stochastic elements tend to make the music more ‘listener-centric’ rather than ‘performer-centric’ or ‘text/composer-centric’. We are on ‘edge’ in part because of the greater indeterminacy/unpredictability that it has, compared to conventional forms. The indeterminacy itself is a kind of ‘structure’ or ‘form’. And, so long as the player or listener understands the relationships of the structures and mechanics of the thing—how the stochastic events and mechanisms fulfill the roles of themes and modulations in traditional music—then the thing can be comprehensible and emotionally accessible, just as any other piece of music is.

I suggest that Ferneyhough’s ‘Chûte d’Icare’ and other recent compositions that employ canonical structures actually do permit significant run-time indirection. Furthermore, I suggest that such compositions are analogous to social networking and micro-blogging service. Canonical-form compositions like these are neither more nor less coercive than contemporary Web 2.0 apps and the canonical exchanges that arise in those.

Y es, canonical forms are inherently replicative. This cuts out a lot of the ‘me-too’ chatter and dilatory utterances among the parts, by definition. But there is nonetheless a lot of within- and between-channel complexity. The entropy of the signals is high, even though the signals are canonically structured! And in the Ferneyhough—or in, say, James Tenney’s ‘Postal Pieces’—the parts have to decide whether to ‘resist’ or instead ‘give in’/’succumb’ to the neighboring canonical utterances/viruses. There is the text of the score, and then there is each performer’s free-will...

C learspace uses an unconventional, passive ‘friending’ model. Other users can assert themselves as your friends with or without requiring or permitting your active assent or declining. Your only choice is to remove them (socially awkward), when all you maybe want to do is clear up your “activity feeds” so that you don’t have to drink from such a big fire-hose of information when all those people who friended you generate activity that doesn’t interest you. Facebook and other social networking apps have active/consensual assent-or-decline friending—so filtering/throttling the fire-hose is easier. In the Facebook and other active-friending apps, reciprocal friending is expected, and friend relationships are hard to break. By contrast, in Twitter the ‘following’ relationship comes without connotations of friendship (and less hesitation about unfollowing to control your attention).

W hat would be useful would be if canonical-form compositions were written like Twitter—and offered the notion of ‘following’ a part as an alternative to ‘friending’ or passively ‘subscribing’ as in conventional canonical-form compositions. That way each performer could retain some autonomous control of her/his social filter without having to ignoring feeds or corrupting the composer’s text with individual expressions/interpretations or out-of-band [a-canonical] irruptions.

Y ou can get around this by subscribing separately to each person’s activity RSS feed, but I have found no way to easily aggregate those into a single ‘river of activity’ stream other than creating a combined folder in my feed reader. By contrast, the ‘broadcast’ nature of sound means that we automatically aggregate the acoustic feeds of the other parts around us. (With my chronic hearing loss, I just have a hard time hearing the harpsichord...)

I suppose a non-broadcast canon could be composed and performed. Actually, tape loops and other electroacoustic media are in that vein. Or we could update Tenney’s postcards, and compose a canon where each performer goes into the studio alone and lays down a single track: each person/part is entirely at liberty to listen or not listen to a headphone ‘mix’ of one or some or all of the tracks that have been recorded by other performers. Then the engineer/producer/composer do the edit and post-production. Still canonical form—only off-line!

T witter itself is a great social filter. It has ‘lower friction’ than blogging, and the 140-character limit per tweet makes it less cognitively intrusive/absorptive than blogging or RSS feeds. It’s a shared party-line, and users tend to tweet things that preserve the signal-to-noise ratio for everybody on the party-line. (If they don’t, they can be un-followed without any concern.) Like blogging, Twitter allows you to time-shift your participation (something you can’t do with IM). And like ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, it permits stochastic run-time indirection.

A bout 20% of my Twitter followers are people I know. For better and worse, the rest are a wonderfully-varied ... canonical, stochastic ... Fire-Hose...

H ow does it feel to perform ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, I wonder?

T hank you for the email, and for the privilege of exchanging ideas about these things here!

I think of ‘form’ on a larger temporal scale—as what’s called ‘content’ on a smaller scale. That old ‘form-content’ dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be substance or content—say, a string quartet—is really the result of forms—formal shapes and structures at a microscopic level: particular envelopes, waveforms, and sequences of these—detailsin the signal. All ‘form’ is just the same thing at a larger level,involving spans of time over, say, five minutes or more.”
— James Tenney, interview with composer Gayle Young, 1978.

Stravinsky, ‘Threni’, virulent tenor infector and susceptible bass, minor 6th below, canonically making and breaking the score’s rules

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Matthusen: Biblical Imagination, Deep Play, and Theology in Chamber Music

A nd in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.’ And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, ‘Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’ Then said Mary unto the angel, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’ ”
— Luke 1:26-34, KJV.

I t is a rather firmly patriarchal and relatively transcendental notion of Deity that sets the grisly logic of sacrifice in motion in the first place.”
— Ivan Strenski, Professor of Religion, Univ California Riverside.

A s I was talking to a software engineer friend at work, he mentioned that the minister in his church had given an Advent sermon/homily about ‘emergence’. I confided that I was (am) skeptical about ‘innovation’ in the context of organized religious practice and theology. I averred that innovations/neologisms seem to me often to be a sign of predatory marketing, a pastor’s ego needs rampant, or even a sign of cultish heterodoxy and obfuscation. But, given that he and I both write code, I did recommend to him a couple of recent books on emergent architectures for software game design, especially massively multi-player online games. I suggested that he might read those and use them as comparators, to gauge the soundness and completeness of the ideas that his pastor had been putting forward. After all, if you are writing game software, the game gets played; the software either works or it doesn’t. You get to find out pretty quickly whether the features and behaviors that are supposed to be supported are real or vapor.

Other parts of our experience and belief-states are also amenable to good-hearted experimentation.

In that regard, I recently had the opportunity to hear some of Paula Matthusen’s electroacoustic compositions. Her works typically explore multi-vocality—multiple conflictual types of evidence; discrepancies in perceptions of space and timbre; the vagaries of imperfect memory; reconciliations between corroborating and discorroborating views; the evolution of who we understand ourselves to be; the real, imagined, and remembered changes that happen to us over the course of our lives; the impossibility of ever really controlling anything, even our own bodies.

For solo performer, live-electronics, quadraphonic sound, and eight mini-speakers, here is an MP3 clip from Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ meditation on Mary, on the occasion of the angel Gabriel visiting her, to tell her that she is to bear the baby Jesus:

[50-sec clip, Paula Matthusen, ‘and believing in…’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Paula Matthusen, ‘rosenthaler’, 1.2MB MP3]

M atthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ composition was commissioned as part of the ‘Re-thinking Mary’ project led by Eve Beglarian and in collaboration with Corey Dargel, Joseph Hallman, & Joshua Palay at the Atlantic Center of the Arts.

Paula Matthusen, who currently resides in Brooklyn, is noted for her electroacoustic and acoustic music and multimedia sound-art installation pieces. She’s collaborated with choreographers and theater companies and has written for widely-imaginative and eclectic orchestrations … “run-on sentences of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, for examle. Her music has been performed by Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, Ballett Frankfurt, noranewdanceco, Kathryn Woodard, Diesel Lounge Boys, and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at Merkin Concert Hall, WAX, Judson Dance, Joyce SoHo, the Construction Company, Das TAT, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, Aural Tick Festival, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, NWEAMO, and the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, among others. She performs frequently with the electroacoustic duo ouisaudei, Groundwave New Music Collective, Object Collection, and recently winter company. Paula is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Award, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, and a MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship. Matthusen has also held residencies at create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic, STEIM, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. Matthusen did her doctoral studies at NYU and has recently joined the faculty of Florida International University in Miami, as Asst Prof of Music Technology and Composition.

Revelation 12 talks of the ‘sign of the woman’ ??

A nd there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.”
— Revelation 12:1-2, KJV.

Pope Benedict (Ratzinger) in his recent book describes the Church’s biblical positioning of women (Gen 3:15), the so-called ‘Protoevangelium’ where, even as early as the Fall in the Garden of Eden, there is the promise of Christ “in chiaroscuro ... a promise to and through Woman” (p. 52). “Revelation is a way, [but] it does not speak its message until the whole is present.”

M atthusen begins with the proposition that there are experiences, both ones that are intentional and conscious as well as ‘revelatory’ ones that are happenstantial, unbidden and undeliberated. She projects herself into imagining Mary as a woman— as a woman who has a stream of experiences, experiences having ordinary intentional content; as a woman who has coherent notions of what those experiences are about. The content of Mary’s experiences is distinct from the experiences themselves: the content could exist or not, or could be true or not, regardless of whether her experiences occurred to her, regardless of whether or not she were alive to experience them.

And then the angel Gabriel appears, radically altering the fabric of reality, the coherence of it, the ‘aboutness’ of it. The musical gestures that Matthusen’s composition puts forward amount to an electroacoustic chamber music essay on the necessity of Mary’s experiences, both at the Annunciation and subsequently. It is a radical sort of ‘deep play’ that Matthusen engages in. ‘Deep play’ is a phrase coined more than 30 years ago by anthropologist Clifford Geertz—referring to a complex topography of perception and decision-making and belief; cultural loci where multiple levels of structure, explanation, and meaning interact and establish the regimes in which will, reason, and language operate. In objection to Brentano’s assertion that intentionality is the hallmark of human personhood and identity, Matthusen argues (in the music) that there are without doubt conscious, mental experiences which are not intentional. Zen-like transcendental receptiveness—this seems to be the state that Matthusen implies as characterizing Mary’s disposition toward the angel Gabriel and, later, toward Jesus after he is born.

A nd I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
— Genesis 3:15-6, KJV.

For Matthusen, if Mary becomes a symbol of whatever is deemed to be the ‘highest’ or ‘best’ or ‘most commendable’ or ‘most womanly’ in a given culture, then she can become a symbol of almost anything. A symbol points to something other than itself; otherwise, it would be the thing signified rather than the symbol of it. The social ‘constructedness’ of the concept of Mary that the Church has transmitted to us is what Matthusen’s work tells us of; that and the necessity of our individually reaching our own understanding—informed by the Church, yes, but also influenced by our other happenstantial (and emergent), non-intentional experiences. Matthusen challenges us to consider critically the views we have received—challenges us to question whether Mary is a symbol of a facile determinism, legitimization of a monarchy, libertarianism, nonconformity, socialism, a force for civilizing humankind, repudiation of one’s own body, renouncing violence, etc.—or something else entirely. For Matthusen, not a ‘waiting for the immanent whole’ as Pope Benedict, anyhow.

True christianity vs. a politicized, relevance-chasing, charisma-obsessed ‘Christendom’ of secular convenience and instant dominion. True christianity vs. instrumental-Mary: the scary cooptation of Mary as an emblem, by a politicized socially-conservative faction that wishes to roll back liberal/progressive trends involving feminism, LGBT rights, women’s ordination, birth control, etc. The conservatives are pugnaciously confident that their Mary, the Mary that is so pwned by them, loathes all of that, so the more prominent this instrumental-Mary’s role in the Church, the better. Conservatives will not like Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ very much, I think. Not if they grasp what how it’s constructed and how it works…

A nd it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, ‘Blessèd is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked’. But he said, ‘Yea, rather, blessèd are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’ ”
— Luke 11:27-8, KJV.

Ever since I was a kid it amazed me that the gospel of Luke doesn’t allow for the possibility of Mary’s refusing the angel Gabriel’s ‘request’. Luke doesn’t seem to consider that Mary is to be commended for choosing the ‘right’ decision. Cynthia Rigby has a nice essay on this in her recent book (link below). Rigby argues that considering Mary’s free will (or Luke’s lack of attention to it) amounts to regarding the relation between Mary and God as a merely instrumental or contractual one. She recommends that it is more productive to consider Mary’s cooperation in giving birth to Jesus as ‘kenotic’ [spontaneous, Zen-like ‘self-emptying’]. ‘Kenotic’: at least Rigby’s use of that fancy word has a few hundred years’ endorsement of theologians and scholars to recommend it, in contrast to this sketchy ‘emergence’.

So Paula Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ amounts to a reading of the biblical Mary from the perspective of literary and cultural criticism. It moves away from historical methods of exegesis—the traditional methods that aim at finding the one true meaning of the original actors in their original context. Paula’s contributions are a sort of literary and composerly criticism that engages with the texts as they have been handed down to us—concerned with cultural exegesis of social settings that have influenced the formation of ideas through history.

Joel Green, writing in the book edited by Cynthia Rigby and Beverly Gaventa, holds that Mary’s role—at least in the gospel of Luke and in the writings of Paul—is mostly that of an ‘accessible exemplar’, not just an exemplar of holiness but also an exemplar of discovering and maintaining good ways of thinking. Mary, according to Green, is an exemplar for ways of seeing the world and seeing “beyond the world, whose rhythms and patterns we take for granted; beyond to fresh ways of making sense of our lives, including especially our relation to God and our relationships with one another.”

W hat we have in Matthusen’s ‘and believing in…’ meditation is ‘Mary-as-emblem-of-narrative-theory’—discovering her story; a story that necessarily exhibits strange, surreal ways of the Divine: creatively, responsibly, defensibly generating her own (and, as we follow Paula Matthusen, generating our own) inner disposition towards reality and the Divine, whatever we conceive the Divine to be.

The woman offering the blessing in Luke 11:27-8 is disposed to ‘re-up’ with the patriarchal regime defining the place of woman in society in terms of relatedness to men and children. Jesus’s reply is often read as a rebuke or ‘correction’, but to some it’s more an addendum or poetic decoration than a stern corrective. I think Paul Matthusen would favor the latter interpretation...

A nd all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”
— Luke 2:18-9, KJV.

I am sure my friend’s faith can stand up to a few MMRPG ‘emergent programming’ books and some hard-core electroacoustic music by Matthusen. Indeed, it could be said that it must hold up against those.