Midnight Mass and the Choir of the Misbehaved
(Or, Bread of the Angels)
How tiny Sister Dominique did it, I’ll never know. Maybe it was her vigor and enthusiasm. Maybe it was her knowledge of kids. Maybe it was the music. Probably, it was all of it — and then some.
At St. Bartholomew’s Elementary, joining the choir in fifth grade was expected. And since students would be at Bart’s until eighth grade, our voices were mustered daily — sometimes several times a day — for 4 years.
Some of us brown-bagged to school, since there was no cafeteria. But those of us living within an 8-block radius rushed home, scarfed food, and rushed back for a thirty-minute practice at lunchtime.
We gathered in a classroom with the piano, two kids to our old wooden desks. Sister Dominique played while another sister turned pages, supervised behavior, and ferreted out anyone off-key. When a piece seemed ready, we trooped to tiered risers for standing practice, or to the church’s choir loft. There, Dominique, whose feet barely reached the pedals, coaxed notes from the groaning organ for the sopranos, altos, and tenors.
Our musical guidance was similar to parenting in the sixties. There wasn’t a lot of feedback for positive efforts. We mostly heard about it when we missed the target. The sisters might say, “Good,” but never “Wonderful!” They might say, “The sopranos came in on cue that time,” but never, “Perfect timing, sopranos!”
There was no formal music education at Bart’s either, since there wasn’t anyone to teach about composers, chords, or scales. Our music education consisted only of voice training. Holding our palm-sized maroon hymnals up, and lifting our chins (always — to project our voices), we learned about rhythm, harmony, and any other musicality inadvertently.
To say we students weren’t dedicated is an understatement. In my mind, the choir was just “us” — a blasé assortment of hooligans and ragamuffins, following Dominique’s hand gestures to start or stop singing, increase or decrease our volume, all the while trying to remember where to catch a breath. I didn’t think much of the choir because I knew who was in it.
There was Helen, who went through jacket pockets in the coatroom, and helped herself to people’s lunch treats. William, who cheated on every test. Bonnie, who grew long nails for playground fights, but also so she could claw at her own arms and neck, raw with eczema. Tom, who swore. Michael, who sobbed whenever he got yelled at. And Janet, the goodie-goodie, friends only with Mary Ann, who was just like her. I sinned too, talking back at home and hitting my younger brother, John.
The fact that the choir had a community following, audiences that clapped enthusiastically for performances, and parents enchanted with our director — even the fact that we’d made a record — went right over our heads. We were just kids who sang — at Sunday Mass, funerals, jubilees, holidays (and once, at a priest’s birthday where, after a performance of his favorite songs, the nuns presented him with a new rifle. Honest to god). Once a year, we gave a fundraiser concert in the local public high school’s auditorium.
I didn’t realize what a blessing it was to have such a unique and dedicated choral director, how internal her music teaching had become, and how astonishingly we sang, until my last year at St. Bart’s. I was caught off-guard hearing my mother rave that no other catholic grade schools in the city had choirs like ours, and that Sister Dominique made us “sing like angels.” When my brother, also in the choir, talked about how he loved hearing our voices echo in the church at Christmas, I got out the scratched and tinny recording we’d made a few years earlier, sat down, and really listened. By the end of the record, everything had changed.
Sister Dominique was indeed a gift. While we sang secular tunes for programs and performances, our strength was the hymns of the ancient church, especially its Christmas melodies. Our recorded rendition of O Holy Night was reverent, with its attention to phrasing and slowed meter. O Come, O Come Emmanuel, was moving, in its minor key. And Joy to the World sounded triumphant as our voices rose in celebration.
However, it was the Thomas Aquinas Panis Angelicus (Bread of the Angels) set to César Franck’s arrangement and sung as a canon, that showed me how a couple of nuns and an assortment of liars and thieves could touch the face of god. When Sister pumped out the first notes at midnight on a Christmas eve sixty-some years ago, a stillness descended upon every person in that candle-lit sanctuary.
All of us, choir and congregation, listened in intoxicated wonder as one side of the powerful choir began, followed — one phrase later — by the other, a sacred surprise of point and counterpoint, melodic lead and melodic echo, in an uplifting awe I still feel to this day.
That one piece of music had the strength of a spell. Even now, I halt enraptured (and sometimes teary-eyed), when I hear it, and I’m carried back to my years at St. Bart’s, to Sister Dominique, and how — for one singular moment — she led a faction of the misbehaved to achieve the sublime.
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If you’re not familiar with Panis Angelicus, click here to watch a performance by The King’s Choir, Cambridge. The choir begins at :50, and the round (canon) at approx 2:10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK3TeWqSAZk
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Kris Heim is a baby-boomer with a past: teacher, gardener, crafter, writer, traveler. She recently downsized by half and is trying to organize the mess.
