Musical Spirituality: Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy

Abstract

Several years ago, I attended a Pontifical High Mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. It was the feast of the Epiphany, a public holiday in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Austria.1 A lapsed Catholic myself, my intention as part of the congregation that day was not primarily one of worship as it was to listen to a performance of the Pauckenmesse of Joseph Haydn, complete with soloists, full choir, and orchestra (in overcoats), including, of course, timpani. As I stepped from the brilliant winter morning into the narthex of that gothic splendor, the pungency of the incense propelled me into Proustian recollections of growing up female, Catholic, and Italian-Canadian in the cathedral parish in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada's steel town. My mother and father, first generation Italian-Canadians, whose own parents had emigrated as teen-agers, had been partners in a corner grocery located in another part of the city that was largely professional and white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Eager to assimilate (they never spoke Italian to my sister or me, and we never learned the language), my parents realized early on that their most valuable legacy to their two daughters would be the advantages of a solid education, religious and secular. For them that meant enrolling us in the local co-educational Catholic elementary school. Later we attended a convent secondary school as day students, and were the only members of our extended family, male or female, to attend university. It was memories of those elementary school years that were conjured up for me that crisp January morning at St. Stephen's. (In hindsight, I am struck by the synchronicity2 of the fact that my original surname is Di Stefano, or rather Distefan, as it had become in its anglicized form).3 For a