jwilzewske: catholicism

Showing posts with label catholicism. Show all posts

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Seoyoung Lee/Heejung Hwang Cello-Organ Duo at St. Peterskirche in Wien

I looked at the reading on my hiking compass: the temperature inside the church at 3:00 p.m. at the time of the concert by cellist Seoyoung Lee and organist Hee-Jung Hwang was just 10°C (50°F). Brrrr! But what surprising, atmospheric music it was. The cello voice projects perfectly in the sanctuary.

H ow large can the literature for cello-organ duo be? Not too big, but due to composers’ increasing interest in it and several important recent commissions, the repertoire is growing.

F or a space as reverberous as St. Peterskirche, it’s important to keep the tempo slow—so the echoes have a chance to fade and not muddy what comes next. The meditative quality of the setting surely supports taking things at a slower-than-usual tempo anyway.

David Bednall - Sonata
Jean-Baptiste Breal - Sonate V in G-dur
Gabriel Fauré - Elegie, Op. 24, Siciliennen, Op. 78
Wilhelm Fitzenhagen - Resignation, Op.8
Georg Goltermann - Andante religioso, Op.56
Russell Hepplewhite - Invisible Landscapes
Jean Huré - Air
Theodor Kirchner - 2 Tonstücke, Op.92 for cello and organ
Julius Klengel - Andante Sostenuto, Op.51
Gustav Merkel - Ariosa, Op.55
Serge Rachmaninoff - Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14
Camille Saint-Saens - Le Cygne
Timothy Salter - Vitis flexuosa
Oskar Wermann - Sonata for Cello and Organ, Op.58

Friday, January 28, 2011

Sociotropic Provenance of Liszt’s Mid-Career Piano Works

The santa indifferenza of Liszt is the ‘holy indifference’ advocated by St. François de Sales and other spiritual writers in the Catholic mystical tradition. And this in turn is obviously identical with the non-attachment advocated in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions... Needless to say, ‘holy indifference’ is not at all the same thing as plain, unholy indifference, and is fully compatible with intense concern for goodness, beauty, and Truth.”
— Aldous Huxley, letter, 26-OCT-1961.

Eezek a darabok példái annak, hogy a romantika korszakában hogyan tudott megszólalni egy-egy szonett, bármi is, észre a következmények. A romantikus Liszt érzékenységének köszönhetően a versek hangulata, mély mondanivalója jut el a mentálisan zavart befogadóhoz, okoz a további kárt.”

A ttended an excellent concert tonight, given by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Harriman-Jewell Series.

Liszt—Consolations, S. 172
Liszt—Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, ‘Les jeux d’eaux’, S. 163
Liszt—Venezia e Napoli, ‘Tarantella’, S. 162
Liszt—Ballade No. 2 in B minor, S. 171
Liszt—Deux légendes, S. 175
Liszt—Isolde’s Liebestod, S. 447
Liszt—Polish Songs (after Chopin), ‘Meine Freuden’ S. 480

A esthetic experience is a kind of access to psychic reality, both our own reality and the reality of others—that much is certain from hearing these pieces. Aesthetic experience and creativity not only aid our recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also valuable for understanding and distinguishing internal reality and external reality. I listened to Thibaudet’s sensitive and highly-animated performances of these Liszt pieces, and as I did so I wondered more and more about the circumstances of how they were composed. Liszt’s major keys (all except S. 171) are like they have “something to prove,” no, more like there is someone whose mood they are emphatically meaning to elevate or tranquilize, like they were conceived with a particular patient and a therapeutic purpose in mind?

N ote: in recent days I’ve been working on health services research involving mental health and measures of quality and access to care for mental and behavioral conditions. This recent focus of my attention no doubt ‘primed’ me to respond to this concert in the ways that I did.

I n that regard, the importance of including ‘patient-intended’ criticisms and ‘partner-perceived’ criticisms and the parallel importance of examining gender differences in models of exchanges of criticisms between partners and depression of one or both partners—these are discussed in an excellent paper published last summer by Kristina Peterson and David Smith (link below) at the University of Notre Dame. Of course, Peterson’s and Smith’s study focused on members of the general population, not couples who are elite artists/composers/writers/celebrities.

Liszt’s illness was prefigured by depression, which was, in part situational... [He] began to drink cognac heavily and was warned to decrease his intake by his physicians. He also smoked a lot of [George Sand’s?] Havana cigars.”
— John O’Shea, 1995.

S o, gee, these pieces were written roughly in the aftermath of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult and the recurring encounters occasioned by family events involving their children (Cosima; and until their deaths in 1859 and 1862, respectively, Daniel and Blandine) and also through Chopin—more or less between 1841-1867, from when Liszt was about 30 to 55 years old.

T his must’ve been stressful and awkward… Sociotropic process, the psychic equivalent of a semi-permeable membrane, which selectively and through passive transportation or active transportation allows some emotional ‘molecules’ to pass through the membrane but prevents others from passing. The emotional brew contained several types of dissolved ‘solute’ molecules, in a family chamber—multiple compartments now separated by thin semi-permeable membranes with pores, and sealed... (Seated in Row #2, in close proximity to the piano and Thibaudet in-charge, it is natural that one’s imagination will run wild.)

S ome small emotions crossed Liszt’s semi-permeable membrane, like small molecules cross dialysis tubing, in their attempt to reach equilibrium. Bigger emotions, bigger molecules, not so much...

Y ears of Pilgrimage’... this conceit implies a wanderer in search of truth, and, one can only imagine that the title is, in good measure, Liszt’s autobiographical reverse-osmotic self-mythologizing.

Because Marie broke with both Liszt and George Sand, she has been given a ‘bad press’ in biographies of both of those celebrities... What was the private life of a woman like this? A woman who left her great love (Liszt) after five years and returned to Paris, not to her husband who would have taken her back, nor to her family, but to an independent life... One of the first things one must ask about any independent woman in the 19th Century is: Where did the money come from; how did she support herself? ... Posterity has reproached Marie d’Agoult for not having loved Liszt’s art sufficiently to sacrifice herself to it.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton.

O ne might question whether Liszt was really as cultured as Marie presented him in her memoirs... he quoted famous authors indiscriminately—St. Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Hugo, the Bible. Although he seemed avid to read and represent himself as a reader, it is not clear that he had digested much or developed any critical abilities. Even in the springtime of their romance, Marie, always a precise thinker, criticized not only some [trashy, sophomoric] books he liked [Bande Dessinée comic strips] but also the [purple] language of his letters.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton, p. 24.

W hether or not the Charismatic Hungarian was literally searching for Truth truth, he was surely searching for audiences receptive to his preferred, dramatic, truthy historiography—part of which we heard in these emphatic works that Jean-Yves performed. Years later, Marie, too, in her writings prevaricated, denied, revised, glossed, hid…

W hat were Liszt’s sources of support, emotionally? How lonely was it, “at the top”? How much of a mutual “nightmare” had Franz and Marie been to each other, I wonder?

M arie d’Agoult’s nightmares, especially in Italy, in Venezia e Napoli, were unrelenting. Not much is known of these—what the subjects or imagery in them were, and so on. There is only the evidence of a few letters, and even less is objectively known about the quality of Franz’s sleeping. Not much detail is known about Marie’s suicide attempts; their frequency, their seriousness, her moods and ideation in between them...

H oly extra-marital stress-diatheses! What, if any, mental health services did Liszt avail himself of during the years of these compositions? Was Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein any help at all to Liszt in the years subsequent to Liszt’s break-up with Marie, or was Carolyne instead mostly a hazard, a hindrance? Was in fact Liszt’s music-making the only ‘therapy’ he received, self-administered? Alan Walker’s books don’t have anything to say about this. But that is what I wondered, more and more, as Jean-Yves’s recital progressed...

A s for Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, what modest amount is known of her emotional condition during those years is gathered together in Phyllis Stock-Morton’s recent book (link below). Well worth your look if you’ve made it this far in reading this blog post...

N either Liszt nor d’Agoult was continuously the more forceful personality, I suppose. Both were likely self-propelled multivalent ‘causes’ and ‘effects’, both Forces of Nature to be reckoned with. There were pressures, one upon the other; interpersonal dynamic equilibria; inescapable sociotropic osmosis...

W e are grateful, of course: very grateful to have these beautiful, vivid pieces today—we who are hardly aware of what pressures and emotional costs were associated with their composition. We are grateful, too, to Jean-Yves Thibaudet for reanimating them in the way he was able to do last night with such insight and consummate skill. Through the music, we might learn something about ourselves, even if we shall never be certain of the truths between Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.

J ean-Yves was born in 1961 in Lyon to a German-born mother and French father, both amateur musicians. In addition to diplomatic duties, Jean-Yves’s father taught history and geography at the University of Lyon and was a good amateur violinist. His mother, an accomplished pianist, taught German language and literature at the University.

Friday, May 14, 2010

An Accumulation of Energies, Nameless and Named: Evening Chamber Music in Prague

O nce you’ve seen the signs about it [The Most-photographed Barn in America!], it becomes impossible to ‘see’ the barn,’ said Murray.
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.
‘We’re not here to capture an image; we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies...’
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
‘Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see [and hear] only what others see [and hear]. The thousands who were here in the past; those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception.”
— Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985).

A ve Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.
Ave cuius conceptio,
solemni plena gaudio,
celestia, terrestria,
nova replet letitia.
Ave cuius nativitas,
nostra fuit solemnitas,
ut lucifer lux oriens
verum solem preveniens.
Ave pia humilitas,
sine viro fecunditas,
cuius annunciatio
nostra fuit salvatio.
Ave vera virginitas,
immaculata castitas,
cuius purificatio
nostra fuit purgatio.
Ave preclara omnibus
angelicis virtutibus,
cuius fuit assumptio
nostra glorificatio.
O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.”

W e hastily ran around the small central core of Prague—the Stare Mesto (old town) and the Hrad (castle). The evenings were dark and delicious.

W e found the astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall to be especially interesting, both symbolically and from an engineering point of view. At the top of the hour, the clock features a procession of figurines of the 12 apostles, preceded by the figure of Death (you can see him in the picture above, on the right-hand side) pulling a rope in his right hand, and inverting the hourglass that’s in His right hand. Each evening, we attended one or two concerts featuring Mozart, Vivaldi, local Czech composers—at the baroque Church of St. James, for example. The evenings had more renditions of Ave Maria than I ever knew existed.

E ach night from 8 p.m. onward you can find many—dozens?—of these chamber performances—in churches and other small halls. Very modestly-priced. Small ensembles, quartets, trios, duets, violin and piano, cello and piano, violin and piano and voice, voice and harp, violin and harp and organ/harmonium, string trio with trumpet, violin and harp and flute--anything and everything. Mostly, these are short programs less than 1 hour in length, cash admission collected at the door, with repertoire picked to appeal to a touristic audience and insure a nice extra income for the performers, many of whom are professional members of standing orchestras or chamber ensembles in and around Prague.

I nvariably, there is at least one version of Ave Maria.

F amous and familiar as it is, the most frequently performed is the version by Charles Gounod, who added melody and words to J. S. Bach’s first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Mozart’s K.554 is the one next most common version on offer. Brahms’s Op. 12.

A ntonín Dvořák’s version, the one composed in 1877. Another one, Verdi’s, for his 1887 opera Otello.

R ussian composer César Cui’s obsession: he is one of several composer ‘repeat offenders’ who have set the text at least three times: Op. 34, for 1 or 2 women’s voices with piano or harmonium (1886), and as part of two of his operas: Le Flibustier (premiered 1894) and Mateo Falcone (1907). Anton Bruckner wrote three different settings...

S ettings by Bruch, Byrd, Elgar, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Stravinsky, Schubert, Massenet, and Perosi as well as versions by less well-known composers, such as J.B. Tresch.

J acques Arcadelt’s setting: in reality, a 19th century arrangement by Pierre-Louis Dietsch, based on Arcadelt’s three-part madrigal, ‘Nous voyons que les hommes’.

F ranz Schubert’s ‘Ellens dritter Gesang’ (D839, Op 52. No. 6, 1825), performed with the Ave Maria prayer sung in place of the original text.

A lso, Josquin Desprez, Orlando di Lasso, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Nights are cool, chambered Grace, full of Marys. Collective, maintained perception—sort of like DeLillo's most-photographed barn, or like Motif #1.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Tallis Scholars, Notes on Remembrances, Riding

T he oxymoron ‘aural image’ highlights the special nature of musical ‘exemplarity’ and notational representation. Notated music examples are doubly distant from the aural phenomena that they represent: the notation stands for sound, but, excised and framed as example, points back to a presumed whole that it represents (synechdoche) and also forward from the new discourse of which it becomes a part... In moving from an analogical mode to an iconic one, the example itself becomes exemplar—inducing an imitative realization on the part of the audience.”
— Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, p. 5.

C oncerts like the one that Tallis Scholars presented in Kansas City last night reconstitute iconic ‘things’ in their own likeness, by encompassing them as examples.

A s Cristle Collins Judd (Dean for Academic Affairs & Prof of Music Theory at Bowdoin) has written, examples are inherently ‘dependent texts’: they occur in the context of other/larger texts or discourses, which provide the framework by which we understand them and systematize them and recognize them and remember them.

T he holiday season and concerts that are performed during the holiday season are meta-exemplary? They abound in the recognizable. They leverage both tradition and memory to work their magic. As ‘exemplary’, they bring what’s ‘outside’ into the ‘inside’—inside the texts/discourses that they enlarge and annotate and illuminate as we listen and participate in the spell that’s being cast...

T here are, of course, discontinuities and rhetorical processes that aren’t discursive. The music; the program notes for the Tallis performance; the snippets of rendered music notation that we are able to review, etc.—are extreme in their ability to simultaneously provide streams of visual imagery and sonic stimuli along with the unfolding ‘text’.

W e delight in Josquin’s 6 usual Marian tropes—the delight made juicier by our knowledge that the Missa de beata virgine was later piously excised in the 22nd session of the Council of Trent, in 1562-1563.

I s my reveling at papal pique and Counter-Reformation vanity so wrong?

O h, the final cadences, enriched with thirds that Josquin did not put there. The mensuration of transitions resolved to clean, clear ‘sesquialtera’ completions that were not Josquin’s. The final notes’ durations lengthened or more notes added to tidy it up. Bare spots filled-in. ‘Tis a thing now of even greater beauty than it were in Josquin’s day...

I need to go to library and check out a copy of Sherr’s wonderful book (link below).

T his Tallis Josquin has got to be the most beautiful version of the Kyrie and Sanctus I have ever heard! Tallis’s Missa de beata virgine is a scholarly version, not a vehement or sentimental or valedictory one. I find the Tallis Scholars’ approach brings a new freshness to the piece that I can’t help but prefer. In particular, the soprano, countertenor, and alto parts have a lovely tone and some soul-stirring melodies above the lower voices. The friendly acoustics of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception lends extra warmth to the endeavor.

P hillips’s conducting—and the responsiveness of the ensemble to his direction—are the causes of the vibrancy and freshness. And just watch! The ‘vibrancy’ is explicit, demanded by Phillips’s hand gestures on many downbeats and on fermatas. So besides the notation and the ‘aural image’, we have the visual image of the conductor and the choir...

P hillips’s hands extend outward from his waist, oscillating in a diminuendo—the amplitude of the hand vibrations decays from 2 centimeters, peak-to-peak, to zero centimeters over a period of a second or so. The waveshape of the gestural decay is approximately exponential each time, with a time constant 1/λ equal to about 200 milliseconds. He does this throughout the performance; it is clearly a core idiom of Phillips’s personal conducting language.

A(t) = A₀exp(-λt)

T his is not a ‘bouncy’ gesture. Instead, it suggests exquisite ‘tautness’, controlled impulsion—an equine sort of ‘puissance’ being brought gracefully to rest. It reminds me specifically of a manner of applying ‘leg aids’ to the flanks of your horse when you are bringing your horse to an elegant halt in the dressage ring.

W hat I mean to say is, this choral ensemble ‘animal’ loves its work, and it aims to utterly please. And the choral ‘rider’ [Phillips] loves the suppleness and compliance he finds in the animal, and his subsequent hand ‘aids’ generously adapt to the eager suppleness that’s displayed by the animal.

W hat we see and hear, then, is this sublime unity of the joy of conducting and the joy of singing, the joys of riding and of being ridden. Spirituality through innocent, virtuosic carnality. Maybe that’s what the Council of Trent was worried about.

A usterity, logic, and Josquin’s complete command of compositional form and contrapuntal symmetry permeate [Missa de beata virgine], suggesting a purity of conception meant to please God in its perfection—not excite the passions of men and women.”
— Peter Phillips, Tallis Scholars Programme Notes, 10-DEC-2009.

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.