Last night at the Chamber Music Northwest summer festival, I was fortunate enough to experience the West Coast premiere of “The Anchoress,” a musical collaboration between poet Katie Ford and composer David Serkin Ludwig, featuring soprano Hyunah Yu luminously voicing the imagined thoughts and dreams of a 14th century anchorite.
(For those of you playing along at home, an anchorite was a person — often a woman — who chose to be enclosed, for life, in a small cell attached to a church. A typical cell would have a “squint” (a small window looking into the church, for receiving communion), a bed, a table and chair, maybe a Bible if the anchorite was able to read. Finally, there’d be another window in the outside wall, where food was handed in and waste handed out… and where members of the local community sometimes came for counsel. The person lived a life of contemplation and prayer, only leaving the cell at her death. Julian of Norwich is the anchorite we know most about today; the tradition died out about five hundred years ago.)
Once a woman walked down the hill towards the anchorhold, her whole body barnacled with what she could not say…
The music isn’t exactly toe-tapping… Ludwig (who was present at last night’s premier, as was Ford) explained that he’d been given a commission with only the instructions to “do something you’ve never done before.” He approached Ford, who he has collaborated with in the past, who was working on these poems. Yu was the singer they knew they wanted to voice this monodrama. The music incorporated ancient instruments, but used mostly modern idioms.
I loooooooooove that human beings do stuff like this!
Think of it: with all the difficulties of simply keeping ourselves, our loved ones and (perhaps) progeny alive in this man-eating world… Somebody decided they wanted to write the thoughts and feelings of a 600-hundred-year-old somebody who didn’t exist. Somebody else decided they wanted to set that to music. Both of those somebodies had spent years, hard years, learning to a) write poetry and b) compose music good enough that anyone else would care about it… And then they turn this over to a singer (ditto long, hard years of learning) and musicians (ditto ditto), who had to rehearse to make this music performable, and then the whole troupe has to find a place to perform it, a place chockablock with all the people whose work it is necessary to support and maintain that performance space, and this particular performance…
Just the work that went into making Yu’s gooooooooooooown! Look at it! It’s flawless… and it wasn’t made by friendly woodland creatures, chirping and chittering with wisps of chiffon in their beaks (or equivalents).
Why do we do this? Why do we involve ourselves in such complex, not-necessary-to-maintain-biological-life projects? If humans are just a fancy sort of animal, destined to sink into the grave after our allotted span… why on earth would we feel impelled, literally impelled, to be such an extremely fancy animal?
We’re given so much more, so lavishly and irrationally more, than we need to survive. Maybe it would be better if, as a species, we put a little more effort directly into survival, what with the world burning around us and the voices of hate and intolerance demanding — and being given — so much airtime.
But maybe it is an act of survival, to imagine someone far away in time and in space — and listen to them. Maybe every creative act is one that participates in the work of the Divine — creating, nourishing, healing and naming holy. The work we’ve been given to do in this burning world, the work that matters, the work we’ve been so lavishly equipped to do and have been so urgently invited to undertake.