ROBERT THACKER DESCRIBES Munro's story “The Peace of Utrecht” (Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968) as “one of the first stories to establish Munro's characteristic use of place.” The setting of the story is the town of Jubilee, to which the heroine returns after a long absence, during which her mother has died. The town's constancy bestows upon it something of the eternity of nature with which it seems to be one: “The rhythm of life in Jubilee is primitively seasonal. Deaths occur in the winter; marriages are celebrated in the summer. There is a good reason for this; the winters are long and full of hardship and the old and weak cannot always get through them” (DHS, 194). The symbiosis between human beings and nature represents the reconciliation between the insecurity of the vast, untamed natural space and the homely and emotionally bonding place in which the human being can feel protected. The heroine rediscovers her connection to her place of origin in its eternal rhythms and in the memory of her late mother who “became one of the town's possessions and oddities, its brief legends” (DHS, 194). The story thus sets the frame of what early critics perceived as Munro's regionalism, in which place is the one constant, impossible to erase from oneself, that facilitates a kind of metaphysical recognition, beyond the realms of words and logic but essential for one's understanding of life.

Such an apparently immovable place as described by Munro in the quotation from “The Peace of Utrecht” above is, first of all, merely one kind of place featured in Munro's fiction, and, second, a highly unlikely construction in sociological terms. It is the opposite of what the human geographer Doreen Massey labels “a progressive concept of space.” In her definition, places are “absolutely not static,” they “do not have to have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures,” they “do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts,” and “none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place.”

The Kitchen and the Heart of the Monastery

The Weston kitchen was designed to sustain a large family. Stainless steel countertops, a high-speed sanitizing dishwasher, a deep restaurant-style sink, and a walk-in refrigerator lend something of an industrial look, while bright red countertops, pegboard-covered walls, rustic wood cabinets, and high windows lend warmth and a farmhouse style. Longer windows in the corner cast light on a built-in bookcase filled with cookbooks. In the opposite corner, a large walkin pantry holds cooking equipment and various pantry staple foods.

On a warm July afternoon following an equally warm morning spent weeding and watering the garden with brother Columba, brother Daniel, brother Michael, brother Richard, and three fellow guests, I arrived in the refectory to find lamb on the buffet table. “Oh, I love lamb, what a treat,” whispered the woman standing to my right. We could hear the sheep bleating outside as they sheltered from the July heat in whatever shade they could find. “Let's not tell them we’re eating lamb,” she said, with a little wry smile, cocking her head toward the sheep. I wondered if she knew that the lamb on the table was in fact from the brothers’ own sheep. I decided not to mention it. Whereas the brothers preferred to eat meat that they themselves raised in a caring, sustainable environment, guests were often a bit squeamish when they realized that the cute sheep were destined to be their dinner.

In the Kitchen with Brother Mark: The Craft of Baking

Baking bread is a practice. Inspired by brother Mark's hearty yet soft dark brown loaves dotted with raisins, and feeling confident in my baking skills, I decided to try making bread when I returned home after an early field research visit. My first loaf was a brick with a clump of raisins in the middle. “You just know when it's right,” brother Mark told me. I did not know, and it was not right.

Several months after my failed attempts at bread baking, I was back at Weston. Brother John, brother Michael, and I had recently been discussing the practical work of creating new music—how they decide to write a new song, how they create the lyrics and melodies, how they introduce new music to the community—and the topic prompted a wider discussion of craft. Brother John explained that he finds it helpful to think of music as a craft in the monastery and the brothers as craftspeople, not artists. Brother Michael agreed; even though he currently does a lot of the practical work associated with creating new music, he eschews the label “composer” because it singles him out for special attention as an artist.

When the brothers said I should think about music as craft, I thought I understood what they meant. I nodded along as they spoke. But the more I considered it later back in the guesthouse living room, the more I realized how tricky the word “craft” really is. It is a multitasker in the English language, to say the least. Craft is a noun and also a verb.

Morning Vigil

Finger-picked guitar strings broke the silence of night: a simple tune followed by a chord plucked out gently, one string at a time. No light except for the faintest blue glow of the coming dawn filtered in through the high windows. A single candle flickered in the center of the chapel. A collective breath from the schola, a small group of brothers who lead the singing, then a slow Alleluia sung on the tune the guitar had just given. A gentle, three-note movement on -lu and an upward step on -ia brought a sense of uplift, lightness, and subtle energy. A carefully picked guitar chord marked the syllables but did not establish a regular beat.

They sang the next line: This is the day our God has made. The rest of the brothers responded: Alleluia. It was more like a chant than a song. They articulated each word on the same pitch until the final four words stepped down in a simple cadence. This time the Alleluia also stepped down, mimicking the cadence. The schola brothers sang the next line: Jesus our hope is risen. This time the cadence stepped up, mirroring the meaning of the words. The response again, Alleluia, was similarly uplifted: vowels and syllables extended by more ornate melismatic movement. The opening chant continued through several phrases, each with a responding, Alleluia.

There was no steady beat. Only a subtle suggestion of meter created by the emphasis of the syllables of each word, marked by the plucking chords of the guitar. It at once evoked the natural rhythms of the spoken word, the carefully crafted meters of poetry, and the regulated pulse of song. The brothers sang in unison, breathed in unison. Except for the slight movement required of the guitar player, they sat essentially motionless in their semicircle.

Resonance: Music in Catholicism

It was an unseasonably cool April morning when I walked up the steep hill from Morningside guesthouse as I had done countless times before. Over the years, brother John and I had often talked about our various writing projects. That morning, we discussed my progress with the present book and his own work to share some of their founder's writings with a new group of oblates. I was helping him with that project, so he handed me a pile of papers. On one of the sheets he had written: “This is the sign of the novice: always to return to the beginning.” I had heard him talk in this way before, about how we are always standing on the threshold of a new beginning, always novices in a perpetual experience of learning and relearning. It was serendipitous. I was struggling through manuscript revisions, trying to establish a sense of direction, and here was brother John telling me: return to the beginning.

That is exactly what I did. I went back to the guesthouse to reflect on the experiences that sparked my interest in my research area. As the chapters that follow attest, I had spent years thinking about issues of ethnography and field research in a monastery. But that morning, I considered that it was not ethnography that pointed me toward Weston Priory. It was music. I knew the brothers’ music well from my Catholic upbringing. The folk-inspired liturgical music of Weston Priory became an important part of the soundscape for generations of Catholics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century as guitars replaced organs and communal singing became the new normal in the post-Vatican II American Church. I wanted to see, hear, and understand the music in its home context. But more than that, I wanted to understand how and why people use music—any kind of music—in their religious practices and what their choices and discourses tell us about why that matters.

During the first year of my graduate work, I did a brief ethnographic research project with musicians in a local Catholic parish with three different Masses featuring either a Gregorian chant ensemble, a choir with organ accompaniment, or a praise band consisting of drum set, electric guitar, bass, and vocalists.

Rooted in Gregorian Chant

I had my first formal interview with brother John during an early November visit to Weston. I was still getting my bearings in the monastic life around me and my role as ethnographer. My discomfort showed as I haltingly began the conversation, “I thought maybe we could start … I’m curious about … Could you tell me about what brought you here? To become a monk?”

Brother John smiled kindly, likely recognizing both my nervousness and a familiar question. He chuckled lightly as he said, “Of course. Well, it might not have a lot to do with music!” We were all still navigating my self-identification as an ethnomusicologist studying the brothers’ music. “Actually,” he went on, his facial expression becoming just a bit more thoughtful, “when I was a parish priest up in the Hardwick area, I was quite close to the Trapp family. I got a lot of feeling for good folk music with them.” He referred to the Von Trapp family of Sound of Music fame. They made their home in Vermont after their flight from the Nazis, made legend in film. “But before that,” brother John continued, “I was in the seminary and we had a lot of Gregorian chant. At that time, it was the 1940s, and the chant was pretty strong in the seminaries.” He explained that the seminary piqued his interest in liturgical chant, while the Trapp family singers introduced him to a wider variety of folk, popular, and religious music.

“Listen”: Telling the Weston Story

Several brothers, each in his own way and in different contexts, emphasized to me that their music is not composed in a vacuum, that it grows out of their experiences and reflects their lives together. To illustrate this, several of them told me the same story. On Christmas day in 1971, the Priory's founder, brother Leo, suffered a heart attack from which he recovered. Brother Leo had retired from his role as abbot of Dormition, he was living full time as a Weston monk, and he had grown very close to the still-young community. The near loss of their founder and father figure was intensely emotional for the brothers. As a reflection of this moment and as a gesture of honor for brother Leo, the brothers created the song “Listen.”

I first heard “Listen” at Morning Vigil one day in the late spring. Perhaps fitting for my own participation in the Weston narratives of history, memory, and everyday life, it was the day before the burial of brother Philip's ashes. Brother Philip had passed away after living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The brothers’ friends and family members were beginning to gather, the guesthouses were full to capacity, and there was a more pronounced reflective atmosphere around the Priory.

I walked from the guesthouse to the chapel that morning in the bluish darkness just before dawn. I walked up Priory Hill Road from the women's guesthouse, and as I reached the top of the steep hill the chapel gradually came into view through the trees. When I entered the chapel, my eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light within. I saw the shadowy outlines of several people scattered around. To my left, a woman sat in the back row. Her eyes were closed; her hands were folded in her lap. Brother Daniel's mother, Lupita, sat toward the front.

The Glamorous Job: The Mystical Spirituality of Monastery Labor

It was mid-January. I dressed accordingly and stepped out of the guesthouse door for Morning Vigil into a mixed precipitation of freezing rain and snow. With the strong winter wind, I felt as if I were being pelted in the face with frozen slush. I could see only as far ahead as my headlight shined. Driving to Vigil was an option in less-than-appealing weather, but my car was encased in thick ice. I wrapped my face as tightly as possible in my scarf, leaving only my eyes exposed. I put my head down against the driving slush, and I got on with my walk. In an effort to think about something other than my discomfort, I tried to shift my attention to the world around me. I noticed the quiet stillness of the forest in winter: no little critters scurrying around, no birds singing, no crickets or peepers filling the air with their distinctive, not-unpleasant din. There were also no bugs. I tried to appreciate that as I winced against the pelting ice. I also tried to notice, if not appreciate, the distinctive chill of the wind and crunch of my feet on the frozen ground. Step, step. Crunch, crunch. Eventually the monastery came into view and the warm chapel welcomed me inside.

Back in the guesthouse after breakfast, the icy precipitation had turned to a heavy snowfall. I sat on the couch facing a large picture window looking out over snow-covered mountains. The world was steeped in the deep silence of a snowy winter's day. From this comfort, with my field journal open in front of me, I spent some time reflecting on my morning. I wondered about my relatively unpleasant walk, and the challenges it posed for appreciating the world around me, my presence in it, my movement through it, and what I might be learning from it.

On Being Present

It was a brisk May morning when I stepped out of the guesthouse into the predawn darkness in what had become the daily ritual of my ethnomusicological field research with the Benedictine monks of Weston Priory in the rural Vermont mountains. The monastery bells echoed in the distance as I walked along the dirt road connecting the guesthouse to the chapel. The sound of gravel crunching beneath my feet seemed an affront to the intense stillness of the night forest around me. I thought about the archive of bulletins brother John handed me earlier in the week—a pile of letters and pamphlets saved over the course of nearly sixty years. Having read through the earliest bulletins before Compline—the last prayer of the day—the previous evening, I smiled as I recalled a 1961 bulletin with the brothers’ humorous description of gathering for the first Divine Office prayer of the day: “Getting up at that hour is distinctly not among the pleasures in life. Yet there is always competition among the brethren to reach the chapel first.” I knew that no matter how fast I walked, brother Columba would already be in the dark chapel. He always beat me there, regardless of how early I arrived. But seeing him each morning sitting in quiet repose had become a kind of comfort. I knew he would be there. It may be a simple statement, but this realization allowed me to begin to understand the complex experience of presence—the presence of selves and others—in a monastic community and in field research. I was alone with my thoughts in the dark forest. I would sit in the quiet stillness of the nearly empty chapel for the long Vigil prayer. I would speak to no one until at least late morning that day, if not later. But the brothers would be there. They would be present. I could depend on that.