Liz Thompson of Aurora plays the hurdy gurdy at the start of the group’s concert Saturday evening. Fellow musicians Amity Baker and Susan Comen look on. The group performed medieval vocal music and performed on a variety of old instruments, including recorders, the vielle (an early form of the violin), hand drums, and hurdy gurdies from two eras. Photos by Joseph Gresser
GREENSBORO — On Saturday evening, at the end of a blazingly hot April day, Sister Gail Worcelo and Sister Bernadette Bostwick welcomed about 30 visitors to the Green Mountain Monastery for a concert in celebration of water.
In remarks before the performance, Sister Gail traced the history of water from the time, four and a half billion years ago, when atoms of hydrogen and oxygen first combined. Since the early days of our planet’s existence water has been a primary building block of life on Earth from plants to animals, including humans.
“In a way you could say water is celebrating itself,” Sister Gail said.
After the ringing of the monastery bell, which Sister Bernadette said is the sisters’ call to prayer, the three musicians of Aurora walked to the front of the hall.
Liz Thompson began the concert of medieval music with a solo piece dating from twelfth-century France, which she played on a hurdy gurdy, a kind of automated violin.
A musician plays the hurdy gurdy by turning a crank attached to a circular bow that is mounted inside the instrument. The bow causes the strings to vibrate, creating the sound. The player’s other hand presses keys that stop the strings to produce a tune.
Vocal music predominated in the rest of the performance with Amity Baker and Susan Comen joining Ms. Thompson in a selection of mostly
Visitors arrive at the Green Mountain Monastery in north Greensboro. The buildings were moved to the site by a former owner and adapted for use by the sisters of the order. The large bell serves to call them to prayer.
liturgical music chosen to match the theme of water.
The words of “Ave Maris Stella,” for instance, praise Mary as the “star of the sea,” a description familiar to residents of Newport. The piece, written some time during the ninth to the twelfth centuries, is an example of plainsong, a style of unison singing designed so that music focuses attention on, rather than detracts from, a religious text.
Several works by the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen offered a variation on the simplest form of plainsong, in which an accompanying instrument or another singer supports the person singing the text with a wordless drone. The effect is a meditative flow, much like the sound of a stream running over rocks, or the wind blowing though the trees.
Other works from twelfth-century France ventured into organum. In that style the words still predominate, because they are sung in rhythmic unison, but two of the singers perform parts that harmonize with the lead vocal line.
The most florid piece of the evening was “To Many a Well,” an English work from the fourteenth century. Each verse started as unison plainsong, but soon drifted into something that resembled a madrigal.
The hall of the Green Mountain Monastery is shaped like a small barn, with a tile floor and a high ceiling. It was the ideal space for Aurora’s soaring singing and playing.
Sister Bernadette said, before the concert, that the monastery’s building started its existence as a farmhouse and barn built by a member of the Hill family. A doctor purchased the building and had them moved to their present north Greensboro location, as what she termed “a trophy house.”
The sisters found the building a few years ago and adapted it to the needs of their order, which Sister Bernadette said, “is dedicated to the care and protection of the Earth and its life systems.”
Sister Gail said the order, known so far as Sisters of the Green Mountain Monastery, is an outgrowth of the Passionist Order. She said the sisters were inspired by their mentor, Father Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and “self-proclaimed geologian.”
She said her order follows the Benedictine rule, which she said represents the oldest set of instructions for the monastic life in the Roman Catholic Church, and joked that eventually the order may be known as the Berrydictine Sisters.
Sister Bernadette Bostwick and Sister Gail Worcelo welcome guests to the monastery. The sisters read haiku related to the theme of the concert, a celebration of water.
“Religious communities are founded to meet the needs of the human community,” Sister Gail said. Some focus on educating children, others on nursing the sick. The Sisters of the Green Mountain Monastery concentrate on healing and preserving the Earth and its systems in the belief that “you can’t have a human community apart from the Earth community,” and “you can’t have healthy humans on a sick planet.”
Sister Bernadette said the sisters have been in Vermont for about ten years. She said they were made welcome by Vermont’s former Bishop Kenneth Angel.
After time spent at the priory in Weston, which Sister Bernadette said was a congenial community, in part because of shared prayer hours, they began to look for a home for the order.
Sister Gail said the sisters are thinking of making organic altar bread, in the belief that one can’t celebrate Mass with “toxic wheat and toxic grapes.” She said the monastery has opened its doors frequently for musical events such as the Aurora concert.
As Saturday’s concert drew to a close, the surrounding hills that were clearly visible at first faded in the growing dusk. Visitors drove off into an evening whose clouds suddenly burst into a short but intense rainstorm. Water, once more that evening, celebrated itself.
Towns 
