Anna Schuleit Haber - The Magnificat

 

Lisa or Elisabeth was the name of my German grandmother, a feisty mother of four with an earthy sense of spirituality. One thing she used to say was, “Wenn jemand stirbt, muss man das Fenster öffnen, damit die Seele hinausfliegen kann.” When someone dies, you have to open the window so that the soul can fly out.” But there’s that curious delay between listening to something and hearing it, and then learning it for yourself all over again from scratch. 

 

So, one day, I was walking up a hilltop in western Massachusetts. I walked through a tall row of black pines and I found a brick structure that emerged against the sky that was gray and November-like. I walked around the structure not knowing what it was, and I only saw windows, a few doors, bars, rusty railings and I realized this was a mental hospital, a psychiatric hospital that was abandoned. I walked around the structure, the façade-- In order to see the entire facade on this hilltop, I had to step back. As I stepped back, I was able to see it. I later found out it, 800-feet wide. I turned around and I felt it looming in my back, and I felt this was something I wasn’t going to understand so soon. 

 

Years later, I became a student of art in a painting department. I looked at the map of New England, and I realized I was close to this place, I was close to this little town in western Massachusetts. I borrowed a friend’s car and I drove out and I said, “Okay, so, let’s see if it’s still here.” I walked up the same hill, through the same pines, and I found the same structure, untouched, crumbling and rotting with nobody there, just an eerie silence. I decided, since I was a student of painting, I would set up an observation post, a visual, scientific observation post in the grass to see if I could understand this building, to just spend time on this lawn overlooking this structure. 

 

I would sit on this lawn with weeds all around me, and there was a security car that would pass around in circles, that I could estimate. I knew when this security guy was coming by, so I could duck and he would pass and I could continue painting. But because I had to be able to immediately pack up and leave, if necessary, my paintings were very small, they were the size of my thumb.

 

I would draw these very little paintings, and the security car would come by and sometimes they would come over and say, “Young lady, no picture taking allowed on these grounds.” I said, “I’m not taking pictures. I’m drawing.” But I wanted to know what the structure was for. I wanted to know what the people knew about this building. And so, on my walks through town, I would try to find people who knew about this building. One story that I found was Clotilda, a patient who had been there, because she was a pregnant teenager, was committed by her family. She gave birth, she stayed in the hospital and her daughter was remembered by the nurses as driving around the campus on her bike. And then, her daughter went to school, came back to the hospital and stayed for her entire life.

 

The other patient was Daniel, the autistic race-car guy, who would make race car noises as he paced around in circles, and every now and then would burst into outcries of “Shift, shift, shift.” Or, Emma the Seamstress, who, after cutting off the heads of tulips very neatly in her neighbor’s garden, was committed for a 30-day observation period that became thirty years. I didn’t know what to do with these stories. I knew there were many more, of many patients whose names I do not have for you. I realized that this hospital had absorbed many, many thousands of lives, and that there were many more such hospitals around the country. 

 

I would sit in the grass and I would observe this building and I would draw it and paint it. I was frustrated, because my paintings did not touch that scale. I wanted to work on a one-to-one scale with the whole building. And then, I had an idea. I said, “What if on one day and then never again, this building could be made into an instrument by using the hollows and voids of this building to function like an instrument? What if the entire structure were made to sound?” And I said, “Well, what if I would just set out trying to do this?” 

 

I went out and I was told, “Well, there are state officials involved and local politicians.” I would meet with them all and I would say to them, “What if, one day and then never again, this building were made into an instrument in honor of its past? And what if one day, and then never again, we were to play a piece that I thought, as a teenager, was so moving when I worked as an usher at a classical music festival, the Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach?” 

 

As an usher, I would stand at the back of these sacred places and I think that this music was something that touched on the unspeakable. So, I presented this project just like I did to you now. And the consensus was, “Honey, we really like your idea, but we’re not the right group for you. You have to talk to state officials.” And I said, “Well, if you like my idea, could you write me letters of support on your stationery?” And they did, because they felt bad. And so, I got all these letters of support.

 

By then, I woke up every morning pulling the sheets up to my face and said, “What am I doing?” I didn’t have any money. I had slowly gotten support, but no permissions. And this went on for three years. After three years, and I don’t know how this really happened, I got the permission from the state of Massachusetts to go ahead with the planning. I gathered a team of counselors and advisors, people who supported me in the beginning with half-heartedness. They would never quite know how this would all play out. I didn’t know either, but they thought I did. So, this was very scary to me at those times. 

 

Well, we had to find a quote, the quote for the actual cost for doing this. I contacted Bose, because Bose is headquartered in Massachusetts. I thought, perfect reason. They took a walk with me over the grounds and they said, “$300,000 for 28 minutes.” I had to tell them, “I’m not living under trust, and please reduce the price.” And they said, “We can’t make it cheaper than $250,000.” And I fired them. This was four months before the event actually happened. The date I had set completely randomly for November, and now this was my own countdown that was strangling me. 

 

It was August, I had no sound company or no funding. The press had started to write about this, because they were very curious as to what would happen to this European girl that traveled around trying to raise money for an instrument that was actually a building. I’d gotten a lot of wonderful press and I realized the only way to do this is actually by raising funds door to door. The deadline was in mid-August, the event was in November. And a day before the deadline occurred, and me, really committing to despair and saying, “This is it. I’ve tried. I’ve tried. I have tried and failed.” 

 

The phone rings and it’s a woman from the West Coast who says, “I heard about your project from an arts journalist. I support the arts, I love the arts, I wanted to know how it’s going.” And at that time, my neck felt like this, because I couldn’t speak to anyone about this, because I had instilled all this hope in people and couldn’t really admit that I didn’t really know how to do this. 

 

And so, I said to her, “Since you’re a complete stranger, I will tell you the truth. The truth is I can’t pull this project off. I don’t have the money for this.” And she said, “How much money would you need right now to save the project?” I just went through my head really quickly, having no relation to money, of course, and said, “$25,000. I knew I had to make down payments for the electricity, the sound company that I didn’t have, I needed to put that aside, permits, insurance, liability and such.” 

 

And she said, “I’d like to donate that to you.” After a little more small talk where I didn’t know how to say and how to express my thanks, and I hung up the phone and I thought I had gone insane, because there was no proof that she had really called. [audience laughter] And then, the next morning, a courier service came and brought a letter that was tiny, with pressed flowers and a whole-grain-type envelope. And inside was a checking-account check for $25,000, and she saved the project. 

 

I deposited the check and I made down payments that same day. And now, the next problem was to get the sound company to commit, or any sound company. And the sound company that I found was a man who runs the New Orleans Jazz Fest, all 32 stages. He loves unusual projects. He took this project on, and he said to me when I met him, “I have a quote for you, it’s by Goethe. The quote goes, ‘Architecture is frozen music.’ That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” And I said, “You’re hired. I want to work with you.” [audience laughter] And so, I worked with him.

 

We had a team of 75 people. We installed a sound system of 45,000 watts throughout the entire building. We strung 5,000 feet of cable, we opened hundreds of windows and we had one sound test in which we tested the system using the architecture to make the sound reverberate, so that it would sound to the outside. As we turned the speakers, the sound would change in all of the wings. So, on the next day, we had former patients who had never told their own stories and a whole community of people, 650 seats there were, and I walked into the back of the auditorium and I said, “If these 650 people come from the town to my installation up on the hill, then I’m very lucky.” 

 

We went to the forum. It was extremely moving, these patients had never told their stories. We walked up to the hill together after the stories ended, and there were thousands of people that came from everywhere. And then, the music started, and people sat and walked and held each other and cried and laughed and were joyful and very sad. As I walked among them, I thought of Clotilda and Daniel and Emma and the many more who had been there, and I thought that the most moving thing about this was not the music and Bach in the distance, who I always thought was my collaborator in this, but that the people had come to this, because I had said I wanted to create a moment of buoyancy for this building. And it was created only by bringing these people together. I was hoping that focusing them, gathering them in this way, would make them look more kindly and gently and with more compassion upon the setting of suffering and mental illness. Thank you.