The Hermit Songs are spiritual without being liturgical. One of the most peculiar is “St. Ita’s Vision.” I don’t know much about St. Ita, but at least in this snippet of her life, she feels that she has been put on this earth in order to physically nurse the infant Jesus. It takes her throwing a temper tantrum (portrayed in the opening recitative) for God to answer her prayers. It sounds like she and Moses had a similar relationship with God.
In this bizarre and beautiful scenario, I see someone who is so clear in her vocation that she rails against God, having the deepest faith that God will find a way for her somehow. Maybe “St. Ita’s Vision” means “St. Ita’s Clarity.” She knows what she is supposed to be doing and has faith that it will happen. I think her story can be a lesson to all of us who get stuck trying to second-guess, trying to figure things out with our logical human brains instead of having faith that if it was meant to be, it will happen.
As a liturgical musician, I have struggled with my own vocation for years as I’ve seen so many changes in music and liturgy for worship. Music programs get cut because the money isn’t there. The type of music I do – what is closest to my heart – is no longer meeting the needs of a living and dynamic congregation. Language reforms, even those done with great care and the best intent, can mean throwing out entire bodies of music wholesale. Opportunities are fewer and farther between to offer the kind of musical spirituality that I need to offer.
And now, since the onset of COVID-19, every choral singer is experiencing that same loss. We have no idea when our true love will return, and when it does, we don’t know what it will look like. We’re having to figure out some way to keep creating, to keep opening ourselves to the kind of transcendence that so often comes when we join our voices together. Without physically being able to.
We’ve made choral music electronically and separately and had it spliced together later. It’s a novelty, and sometimes the end result sounds pretty good, but it’s not what we do, and it’s not why we do it. I’ve found myself fairly unable to tackle anything very difficult because I have no idea when the payoff – the performance – will come, if ever. Nobody wants to just practice.
So my own biggest music project during the pandemic has been learning – truly learning and memorizing – music from more popular and accessible genres, including music for children. I have always loved a broad range of musical styles, and now that I’ve practiced, I can sing some of these songs and really connect with an audience. I have had some truly sublime moments, moments when a lyric jumps out at me, or waves of emotion that I didn’t anticipate. And some songs start the waterworks when I just think of them. (Someone sang “Over the Rainbow” at an online ukulele jam the other day and I had to excuse myself to get a tissue.)
Sometimes I get to the third verse of a song I thought I knew and discover a whole new meaning. Even some of the comic songs I’m learning have touched me when I realized that I could play them on the ukulele and bring joy to people. (You know you have pandemic brain when you break down while singing the Crawdad Song or Feelin’ Groovy.) I even accidentally wrote a song (stay tuned!) and have been exploring whether a singer/songwriter niche is good for me. None of this is the same as joining our voices in song, but it is creativity finding a way to be expressed when our usual channels are off limits. Like St. Ita, I know what I was put here to do – I just need to keep asking for the clarity of vision to do it.
My Hermit Songs recording is now also available on Pandora!
