Praying for Song

Maggie and Suzzy Roche will present some new material from the haunting prayer-songs from their recent release in an intimate concert Jan. 18 in the Domestic Arts Building at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton.

By: Susan Van Dongen
   Everyone prays, and we pray to just about everyone. In some countries, "Jedi Knight" is an accepted faith, so folks could conceivably beseech Yoda for guidance.
   A prayer can be anything from a formal sutra or reflection on the rosary to something like "Help me pass this test I didn’t study for" or "Please don’t let that truck squish me."
   New York-based singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche discovered all this when she launched a project to collect peoples’ prayers and set them to music, resulting in the CD Zero Church (Red House Records). Ms. Roche and her longtime collaborator and sister Maggie Roche were inspired while attending playwright-performance artist Anna Deavere Smith’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard.

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From left: Suzzy and Maggie Roche, two-thirds of the singer-songwriter sisters The Roches, will perform at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton.


   "It was an idea I had for a long time, but I wasn’t sure how I would do it until (Maggie and I) attended the IACD," Ms. Roche says. "That’s where we went to collect the prayers initially.
   "All we really did was go out to the community and ask people if they had a prayer, although we didn’t have a definition about what a prayer was. We weren’t looking to represent religion but were more interested in individual people and their prayers. It was a really amazing experience because a prayer is such a different thing for different people. We made songs out of them and that’s what ‘Zero Church’ is."
   Maggie and Suzzy Roche will present some of this new material in an intimate concert Jan. 18 in the Domestic Arts Building at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton. In addition to the haunting prayer-songs from Zero Church, the Roches will draw from their voluminous catalog of material, representing more than 20 years as slightly left-of-center chanteuses. Third sister and longtime cohort Terry Roche did not participate in this project, which, in fact, marks the debut of Maggie and Suzzy performing as a duo.
   Live treatment of the material from Zero Church has to be presented in just the right way, Ms. Roche says, and the duo has only done a few appearances featuring the prayers.
   "It’s a very delicate subject," she says. "I would never want to exploit it."
   Ms. Roche harvested prayers from Christians, Jews, Buddhists and an agnostic, who prayed "To know what to say when I see whatever’s above." She sorted through traditional spiritual writings and meditations such as a Shaker hymn, a Hebrew chant and a poem attributed to Mother Teresa, said to be authored on her deathbed.
   Contributors included Dr. Ysaye Barnwell — longtime member of the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, an AIDS patient and a refugee who had undergone a childhood of slavery in the Sudan.

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The Roches’ Zero Church CD was originally scheduled to be released on Sept. 11, 2001.


   "For some, a prayer has a religious (resonance), for some not at all," Ms. Roche says. "We were amazed by the differences, yet there were similarities as well.
   "It’s almost like each one of the prayers is a short story about someone’s life. In the CD’s booklet, everyone wrote something about his or her prayer. It was very important to these people to have given these prayers, and it wasn’t easy for many of them to do so. It’s such an intimate thing."
   Ms. Roche says the project took on a life of its own and the selection process became almost organic, with pieces of the puzzle fitting and flowing together naturally.
   "It wasn’t like we chose any of the prayers — they kind of chose us," she says. "They were the ones that came into focus the most quickly. They seemed to be the ones where the people were the clearest about what they wanted to say."
   The origin of the CD’s title comes from the actual address where the IACD took place — 0 Church St., Cambridge, Mass. The project had been in the works for several years and, ironically, the CD was scheduled to be released on Sept. 11, 2001. It was pushed back by the record company even before the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., then stalled for quite some time.
   "It was just a strange, shocking coincidence," Ms. Roche says. "Once (the attacks) happened, everything stopped. Then, during the week that followed, someone called us and asked if we could sing at Squad One, a firehouse in the Park Slope (neighborhood) of Brooklyn that had lost half of its men. The families and people from the neighborhood were going to be there, and we wanted to have a song for them, but at that time we didn’t. I felt that I needed to have something for those people, and it was really the only useful thing I could do. That was the point where I actually prayed for a song to come."
   The result is "New York City," also influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Renascence" — especially the line "may our voices rise to split the sky and let the face of God shine through."
   "It turned to be a good song for that situation," Ms. Roche says. "Then, so many people at that service asked for a copy, we decided to put it on the album. I had been steeped in these prayers for almost two years, so I was really in this receptive frame of mind anyway. But I didn’t realize that the song would fit so well and would relate to the project until it was done. To say it was a spiritual experience would be employing a rather overused term, but if I’ve ever had such an experience, this would certainly be one."
Maggie and Suzzy Roche perform in the Domestic Arts Building at Grounds for Sculpture, 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton, Jan. 18, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $18; members $15. For information, call (609) 689-1089. On the Web: www.groundsforsculpture.org. The Roches on the Web: www.roches.com