of the Muses

musique – from the Greek mousikē – meaning (art) of the Muses

In July 2020, a tentative lifting of strict COVID restrictions meant I could escape isolation and enjoy a long drive to a mostly, but not entirely, abandoned office. For most of that year and well into the next, a string of small blessings kept me OK. That’s the upside of deprivation – the ordinary can climb to precious.

One of those July mornings, I walked into my front room to turn off the radio. I’d packed up my work bag and was ready to go. But at that moment a woman began a story. And her voice enchanted me.

My name is Carla van Raay. I was born in the Netherlands and came to Australia as a child, when I was twelve. I was brought up in the Catholic church, school and all that … all my life really, and became a nun when I was eighteen. I stayed in the convent for twelve and a half years. I was a very good nun — for ten of those years anyway, and then had to leave. I’d been trained as a teacher in the meantime, and wasn’t cut out to be one at all. When the idea of prostitution entered my head, being a Scorpio I didn’t really think twice. So this virgin became a prostitute overnight. Then came a time when I had to leave that particular kind of work, and I could not … I couldn’t find a way to do it. And that’s when that music came in.

Carla pauses as we listen to the opening of Ravel’s melancholic Pavane for a Dead Princess.

She tells us one day, finding herself in the low of despair, she stood in the entrance hall of her empty home. She stopped to listen to the answering machine. Instead, Ravel’s piece flooded the room.

I imagine it billowing. The song haunting the walls up to the ceiling. And in doing so, “the huge confusion” that tortured her soul finally collapsed into knowing.

I have also had moments, or at least one I can think of, where a piece of unbeckoned music pointed to a path previously blocked.

Of the experience, Carla quotes the Jesuit priest-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

I had stumbled, that morning, into the BBC series Soul Music. Each thirty-minute episode revolves around one piece — classical, jazz, pop or show tune, discussed by a handful of people whose lives were altered by it. The series reveals how music smooths the texture of our idiosyncratic biographies with a shared fabric of meaning.

And that morning, I was reminded that while a song can whisk your longing back to a life you no longer lead, it can also show your longing a way forward.

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In addition to Carla van Raay’s episode, Prince’s Purple Rain and Gaynor’s I Will Survive remain two of my favourite.

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