15th Street Quaker Meeting House, NYC
It’s Ed’s birthday today. Happy Birthday, Love. And as is tradition now in our relationship, I will gift Ed another viola/piano duet I compose for the occasion, each one called “Evocation”. This year my husband will receive Evocation XXIV.
I haven’t been doing much composing lately. Unless one counts the operas I get schoolchildren from Kindergarten to fourth grade to create – and I don’t count that as me composing – my last composition was last year’s Evocation, for Ed’s previous birthday, part of my ever expanding non-musical theater sideline of chamber music.
It has been a year of grieving. My father’s death last spring was followed a half year later by a series of deaths of close relatives and friends. In the course of four weeks alone Ed and I attended three memorial services. Including the one that, strangely, gave rise to Evocation XXIV.
Ernie and Vince Buscemi, center, surrounded by more lovely Quakers, 2004
Vince Buscemi was a Quaker in Ed’s meeting. He and his wife Ernie were part of Ed and my Clearness Committee, a group that is formed to meet with a couple that requests their marriage be taken under the care of a Quaker meeting. Vince was very excited about the prospect of Ed and me marrying. Morningside Meeting was the first Quaker meeting in New York City, let alone religious congregation of any kind, to welcome same-sex marriages. They married their first male/male couple back in 1980. And yet in 1998 Ed and I would be only the second. It’s a small congregation.
15th Street Meeting House interior
Vince was our greatest champion, and openly hoped I would become a full fledged Quaker like Ed (but I have been content to keep my spiritually unaffiliated status as a “Friend of Friend”, as spouses are designated in Quaker nomenclature). This happy, lovely, sweetest of men died in his early 90s, his final years marked by Alzheimers; a history which painfully mirrored the recent passing of my 94 year old cousin Monroe, for whose care I had been primarily responsible the previous seven years.
Vince, Monroe, the cascade of recent deaths close to me, all were not far from thought as Ed and I found our seats in the pews of 15th Meeting House where Vince’s memorial service took place. Quaker memorial services are structured like Quaker meetings for worship. There is no minister conducting a service, there is only the full congregation, seated in silence. If anyone feels moved to speak, they rise, and give a short message. Which is followed by an appropriate amount of silence while the congregation absorbs the message; then another congregant may feel moved to rise and speak. Or silence prevails. A regular Quaker service for worship may have few messages, even be 60 minutes of complete silence, depending on how the Spirit moves the assembled. Quaker memorial services, like Quaker weddings, however, tend to encourage a lot of messages.
I don’t often attend Quaker meetings for worship. And when I do, I don’t rise to give a message. I stay silent. And in that silence, what comes to my mind is usually music. Not words, or dreams, or memories. It is music that fills my mind in the silence of a Quaker meeting. Which is why I believe, if pressed for an answer on denominational affiliation, I would say my religion is Music.
Panorama view of 15th Street interior
That day, during Vince’s Quaker memorial service, a rather odd musical idea popped into my head. Not music I knew, which I would have expected, but a melodic line, by a string instrument. A willfully odd melody. Not even sure if it could be called a melody. Maybe more a motif. Which would leap up over one octave and jump back down multiple octaves. Which makes it the kind of motif one can not easily hum to oneself. It just felt weird and awkward trying to silently hear it inside my head. Not something for the human voice. But it made sense for the viola.
Sometimes this research took me into even earlier times, for need of greater context. Which is how I learned about the “female friendships” of the 19th century. These would be intense relationships between two women, in school or college, that could be as deeply bonded as any traditionally romantic or familial bond. Publicly these “female friendships” could exhibit all the hallmarks of romance: physical affection, love letters, lavishing gifts on another, intense jealousies, sharing beds, displays of devastating heartbreak when relationships dissolved. Society approved and encouraged these “female friendships” as a way for young women to exercise romantic proclivities within the safety of sorority, away from male temptation. That these friendships could become sexual was not imagined. That doesn’t mean however that some of these female friendships didn’t become sexual.
Times were different in the 1800’s. Men sharing beds with men and women sharing beds with women was common. The terms heterosexual and homosexual weren’t even coined until the end of the 19th century. But once coined, their usage and the greater awareness of homosexual identity and activity seeped into society by the early 20th century. Intense “female friendships”, as practiced and encouraged in middle class society in the 19th century, now became tainted and suspect. Suspicion and fear of lesbianism made something once deemed a normal rite of passage for young women now appear unhealthy and dangerous.
It wouldn’t be a visit to the botanic garden without the obligatory “Ed sniffs a flower” picture, as my Facebook Friends have already learned to expect from us with seasonal regularly.
To get to the unicorn one must find the meadow in the sky. A wizard helps the knight get to the meadow in the sky by magically creating a rainbow up to the clouds. The knight climbs up the rainbow. So far so complicated (and unromantic). But we are not there yet.
I was introduced to BJ and her writings that would eventually become “The Oriole’s Song” during a weekend visit to Philadelphia over 23 years ago. While Ed, Dave, BJ and other family members were leaving the house to attend Quaker Meeting, BJ handed me sheets of paper containing two short stories she had written for her writing group. She insisted I read them and tell her what I thought, as I was “an artist”. I felt a little trepidation. Ed and I had been dating for only half a year and I was meeting many of his relatives, including BJ, for the first time that weekend, and now I was being asked to read and judge her writing? What if I didn’t care for it? Already imagining devising diplomatic responses, I sat down to read in the empty house. By the time the family returned from Meeting, I was flush with the excitement of having encountered a thing of beauty.
BJ and I spent much of the rest of the day talking about her short stories, and how she planned writing more, vignettes that would eventually form the chapters of her memoir. She told me about her girlhood in China, her experiences of the war, of being one of the only Caucasian children in Yuanling, and feeling even more like a stranger as a teenager in the United States. She told me about returning to China in the 1970’s during the height of the Cultural Revolution with Dave and the two China born daughters they’d adopted in the 1960’s. She told me about returning again in the 1990’s, and floating high over Yuanling in a boat, now that the city of her childhood was drowned by the raised waters of the Yuan River Dam. She told me how her father was one of the last Americans left in China when the Communists took over in 1948, how he was denounced and put on trial and convicted as a spy, marked for execution.
The only formal requirement is that it must be no longer than 100 minutes duration.”
Notes from a Composer 