Liturgy Adapted from Mary Oliver's "Thirst" (mostly)

Every week, our Education for Ministry seminar (EfM) begins class with a worship service. We are encouraged to be creative, so long as our liturgy hits the same marks as ones authorized in our prayer book.

I'd been reading about Mary Oliver's collection Devotions and made the jump to creating a liturgy that would be a sort of collage of pieces from her work. I read her collection Thirst when it was new during the weekend of my first vestry retreat, and blogged about it. That post A Doorway into Thanks is a perrennial hit, read now by thousands.

A Short Worship Service Adapted from Poet Mary Oliver's Thirst (2006)

The ellipsis [...] marks my omissions from Oliver's text; two asterisks ** mark space breaks inserted for the purpose of group reading. Other spaces are Mary Oliver's own.

Opening from "Six Recognitions of the Lord" p. 26
I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.

Confession ibid
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour
me a little. And tenderness too. My
need is great. Beauty walks so freely
and with such gentleness. Impatience puts
a halter on my face and I run away over
the green fields wanting your voice, your
tenderness, but having to do with only
the sweet grasses of the fields against
my body. When I first found you I was
filled with light, now the darkness grows
and it is filled with crooked things, bitter
and weak, each one bearing my name.

A Song of Praise from "Messenger" p.1 (adapted for responsive reading - response after each asterisk)
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird -- equal seekers of sweetness,*
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled mud.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?*
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished,[...]*
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,*
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

Homily "The Summer Day" from The House of Light (1992)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.**

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.**

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Prayers from "Praying" p. 37
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Silence may follow. Worshipers are encouraged to speak their own petitions.

We sum up all our petitions in the words that our Lord Jesus Christ taught us, saying...
The Lord's Prayer

Collect to be selected from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

Closing "Thirst" p. 69
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers whic, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.

Theology for Breakfast: Fr. Adam Trambley in Forward Day by Day

After feeding the dog, birds and squirrels each morning, I sit with my coffee to do morning prayer ("Open my lips, O Lord" --sip--"and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise") and to read the meditation on the day's scripture from the quarterly publication Forward Day by Day. In August 2021, I especially looked forward to the insights of Adam Trambley, a priest in Pennsylvania.

Maybe because this was my first August in 40 years that I had no classes to plan for, I responded to his message that cultivating your inner life is a good and necessary thing but not the only thing. You have to get out of yourself, and our church has to get out of itself, too.

CalmOne message Trambley takes from scripture is calm down. The 5000, having just been fed, clamor for assurance that they'll always have bread (John 6); Trambley says they want a "silver bullet" to make everything fine forever, and that's not what Jesus offers. So calm down, and get on with life in Jesus.

Jesus takes the blind man away from the crowd in Bethsaida to restore his sight, then sends him away from town (Mark 8), because, as Trambley writes, "Our most profound experiences of God can initially feel quite fragile," so we need time alone to "process and appreciate what has happened."

For the Feast of Transfiguration, Trambley tells how disappointed he was to discover on a pilgrimage to Mt. Tabor that a modern church there has set aside three grottoes for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, just as Jesus forbade the disciples to do. But Trambley relents: how else can we "hold on to encounters with God that transcend what we can process?" (I call this blog my "word sanctuary" as I use it for that purpose.)

When Paul admonishes us to be "careful...how you live...making the most of the time" (Ephesians 5.15-16), Trambley says it's not about being more efficient in tackling our to-do lists:

A wise relationship to time means appreciating every moment and relishing it. Drunkenness and debauchery are shunned because they numb us to the beauty and wonder pregnant in every instant.

When we open our calendars, God would have us grateful instead of stressed.

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another (Mark 9.50) In these words from Jesus, Trambley sees instruction that we are responsible for nurturing our own souls, and we'll be "disappointed if we depend on others to make our lives complete." But when we do find "wholeness in ourselves," then "we can accept and love people for who they are" and be "at peace with one another."

"Silence" was Trambley's last word on this theme. Among myriad instructions for the building of Solomon's temple in 1 Kings 6, Trambley draws our attention to a detail in verse 7, that noisy cutting and hammering of materials for Solomon's temple were to happen off-site to hallow the site of the temple with silence. The reading was assigned for August 27, a day set aside to honor Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle, pioneering ministers to the deaf. Trambley challenged us to sit ten minutes in silence, eyes closed. (I tried all week and couldn't do it.)

Fun with ScriptureThen Trambling picks up on some fun things in scripture that I had not noticed or at least had not savored before.

• Psalm 136 is a litany of thanksgiving that gets weird in the middle where a slew of obscure kings get slain, each killing followed by the refrain "and [God's] mercy endures forever." Trambley takes comfort from the knowledge that "the geopolitical events of ancient Israel were as problematic as our own," and, God's mercy endures forever.
• Trambley compares Shimei, son of Gura, to a scrappy baseball manager leaving the dugout to scream at the umpire. I'm glad he picked up on this obscure episode in the 2 Samuel 16, where Shimei runs out of his home to curse David and his soldiers. With so much screaming, name-calling, and mockery in our media today, David's response is cool: either he really deserves it and God will let the curses rip, or David will earn credit for his restraint.
• "Wily" isn't a word we associate with Jesus and St. Paul, but Trambley does. He sees wiliness in the readings that go with Psalm 18.27, With the pure you show yourself pure, but with the crooked you are wily. For example, when Jesus tells the disciples to follow a man with a water jar to the unnamed place where he'll meet them for their Passover seder, "he ensures that his disciples receive the gift of the first eucharist since Judas cannot tell the authorities where to find him until after the meal." Then, Paul tells a centurion to "jettison the ship's lifeboats rather then let sailors sneak away and leave his party to their deaths." Then Solomon uses "a wily trick" to identify the infant's true mother. Trambley asks us to think when we were ever "wily for Jesus."

Prayer Walks I was so taken by his insights and easy writing style that I bought a book that he co-edited and contributed to. His collaborators take turns drawing lessons for the Episcopal church in this time of declining membership from the building up of the church in Acts 8. So, for example, in Philip's ministry to the city of Samaria, Trambley sees an apostle responsive to the needs he finds. "Loving, thriving churches see themselves as being called to give away their resources to meet the needs of the community," he writes in Acts to Action, compared to dying churches that keep trying to draw support from the community for what they've been doing for decades.

Trambley tells how his spiritual director pushed him to get involved with the city council soon after moving to his new church. Soon, he was offering the church to the council for some community needs, and then there was reciprocation and mutual gratitude.

Trambley also describes taking "prayer walks" sometimes alone, but more often with officials and parishioners. All that's required is

...to take a thirty- to sixty-minute walk in the community or neighborhood and to be in coversation with God about what you see. As you encounter places where things are going well, give thanks. Where you see problems, ask God to intervene. When you find the beginnings of new life, ask God's blessing. The more you walk and pray, the more you will see in the community and what you see will draw you deeper into prayer.

And prayer changes the person who does the praying, especially in growing their awareness.

He seems to be a wise and humble priest working with the Acts 8 Movement to find a way forward for our national church. I'll look for more. See acts8movement.org.

"Fire Shut Up in My Bones": Opera Makes a Man

The opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones puts everything out there in the first three minutes. Before the curtain rises, we see a projection of a verse by the prophet Jeremiah from which the title comes, a signal that a truth "shut up like fire" will be spoken. The curtain rises on a young man with a gun singing to us "they're here," the tears and anger walled in since childhood. A woman enters his space but stays behind him as she urges him to use the gun to fulfill his destiny. We understand that she personifies Destiny, and that she is tempting him the way the Devil tempts Everyman in the medieval drama.

But where's the angel who should be standing on this Everyman's other side? When the scene is repeated in the dramatic context of Act Three, the identity of the character who fills that angel space has meaning and great emotional impact.

[I'd forgotten many specifics of the opera when I revisited this article months after the broadcast, but just re-reading the previous sentence brought back the impact full force, with tears.]

Based on the 2014 memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, the opera's three acts tell of his childhood in rural Louisiana before an incident of "betrayal" by an older cousin, his adolescence after that incident, and his freshman year at Louisiana's Grambling State. In an inspired choice, the librettist Kasi Lemmons has grown-up "Charles" (baritone Will Liverman) on stage shadowing his childhood self "Char'es-Baby" (13-year-old Walter Russell III), to amplify emotions and interpret the significance of certain memories.

Lemmons writes mostly in couplets, the rhymes assisting us to follow the development of each thought. She re-introduces certain phrases throughout the story so that different scenes "rhyme" in a way, too. I recall Kiss me, hug me... You've got to break up the dirt to make things grow... sometimes you have to leave it in the road... love with a laugh [isn't worth much -- pardon my incomplete memory of this and the other phrases].

Composer Terence Blanchard propels the action with a variety of colors and tempos in the orchestra with incidental references to gospel, blues, and even disco. From repeated phrases in the libretto, he creates musical "hooks" that, like the opening scene, gain new meaning as they repeat in new contexts. Like rhymes, these repetitions serve as benchmarks for the development of the protagonist. For the specially-paired "Charles" and "Char'es-Baby," Blanchard has written vocal lines that the boy handles with power and self-assurance and the baritone enriches with his trained sound.

During the Live in HD broadcast Saturday October 23, different singers and members of the creative team spoke of what the piece says about perseverance and survival of trauma.

For me, the theme that emerged even more than perseverance is an exploration of what it means to "be a man." From the first time we see "Char'es-Baby," he's being told not to skip, not to be such "a mama's boy"; older Charles describes him as "a child of peculiar grace." For his father, being a man is about playing around. His sons echo him, showing their youngest brother that love is something men laugh and brag about.

His brawny uncle Paul models physical strength, but more than that, a man's responsibility to provide for his sister's family when the boys' father cuts out.

The mission to "make a man" out of Charles opens an opportunity for the traumatic betrayal. His older cousin Chester rooms with Charles and teaches him to steal candy, because, he says, a man makes up his own rules. Then Chester introduces a new "game" behind the closed door to Char'es-Baby's bedroom. The creative team makes the tension of the scene unbearable. There is no enactment: the actors stand apart from each other, facing the audience. But the effect is powerful and painful to watch (or recall). The music draws out the tension while lyrics repeat what the cousin said about a game, stealing candy, implying what's happening from an oblique angle.

[By coincidence, I saw the opera on the same day that I heard an interview on NPR's Fresh Air with actor/singer Billy Porter, whose stepfather abused him under the same pretext of "making a man out of him."]

Keeping the event as a secret shame, Charles continues to doubt his own manhood. When his brothers learn that he "got laid," they say, "You're a man, now." But he's disturbed by erotic dreams suggested on stage by an ensemble of male dancers, and thinks something's wrong with him. The Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, step-dancing with their "Kappa canes," presents another model for masculinity that involves service, military discipline, and self-sacrifice for sake of brotherhood.

In the very satisfying resolution, being a man isn't about sex or sexuality, physical strength or dominance. Charles has the courage to be honest and the strength to leave those other games behind.

Terence Blanchard, composer / libretto by Kasi Lemmons
adapted from Charles M. Blow’s moving memoir
co-directed by James Robinson and Camille A. Brown. Brown also choreographed the production.
Baritone Will Liverman as Charles, soprano Angel Blue as Destiny/Loneliness/Greta, soprano Latonia Moore as the mother Billie, and 13-year-old Walter Russell III as Char’es-Baby.

On a Bike to Updike's Childhood Home

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147 miles from Washington DC to Shillington PA
October 14-19

Heading towards Boston on my virtual world tour, I've taken a side trip to revisit a town where I've never set foot, Shillington PA. John Updike's childhood home opens there as a museum this very week. Updike fans know the place well enough from his fiction, poetry, and essays for it to feel like a home they remember.

[PHOTO: With most, but not all, of the Updike books I've read, I'm pictured in front of the old Updike home in Shillington, PA, now a museum.]

When I covered the last 24 miles on a bike trail near Atlanta yesterday, the sunlight was so clear and the October air so clean and dry that I could count the needles on a pine 100 feet ahead. That's how John Updike's writing is, precise to the tiniest detail, spacious to encompass an entire time and place. It's been refreshing to read his work again to prepare for this visit.

In his poetry collection Endpoint, completed during his final illness, Updike tells why he returned so often to his Shillington years in his work. "I've written these before, these modest facts, / but their meaning has no bottom in my mind" (27). Updike expresses gratitude that his words have "formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts" (19).

That same desire to praise and preserve what I've loved is what drives me to write this blog. Updike wrote elsewhere that it's an act of worship to describe as accurately and honestly as possible what the Creator has made.

In his last years, Updike returned to the old place in valedictory stories and poems that are deeply moving. See my blogposts Endpoint: Light at Sunset (04/2009), My Father's Tears: The Updike Variations (07/2009). In Jung Over: Geography of the Self (04/2013), having re-read the Shillington part of Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness, I reflect on a dream of my own personal "Shillington." See my Updike page for a curated list of blogposts about his work and about him.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow my bike tour from the start.

Missing Janet Jackson

Sam Sanders, the ebullient host of NPR's broadcast-podcast It's Been a Minute always ends his show asking us to send him a message about the best thing that happened all week. The best thing that happened to me was that he programmed a whole hour on Janet Jackson (October 9) introducing me 35 years late to her album Control. Since then, her music has added a swagger to my step wherever I've gone. I feel 27 again.

Sam interviewed Jackson's producers James Harris III ("Jimmy Jam") and Terry Lewis. They chose the assignment to record an album with Janet Jackson because they saw in her TV sitcom performances an "attitude" that didn't show in her two lackluster pop albums. They thought that she would be interesting to write songs for.

Their collaboration started with "therapy," just hanging out with her at restaurants and movies, asking her questions. After a week of that, she asked when they were going to start work. They presented her these lyrics from "Control":

When I was seventeen,
I did what people told me.
Did what my father said
and let my mother mold me.
But that was long ago.
I'm in control...

Other verses were about regaining control after losing it over first love -- "I didn't know what hit me" -- and her determination to take control of her career. Incredulous, she asked, "Do you mean that you're going to make songs from everything we talk about?" Yes. She said, "Then I want to talk to you about this and this...!"

The songs that resulted are all different in character, "but they hang together," Sanders says. From taking control, kicking back against "nasty boys" and the lout who hasn't done anything for her lately, she looks for someone better. She surrenders some control when she finds someone who gives her joy. She warns, "Let's wait awhile / before we go too far," but undercuts that message when she ends the album with a make-out song "Funny How Time Flies (When You're Having Fun)."

Listening to the album for the first time, I hear what makes Harris and Lewis call her "fearless, relentless, beautiful." Hers is a supple voice capable of both piercing high notes and of a low whisper so sensuous in the last song that my mouth goes dry. The one song that I recognized as hers before this week is "Nasty Boys," more growled than sung, but I marvel now at how she draws the word "boys" out to four expressive syllables.

Janet's work with Harris and Lewis shares some qualities that I'd loved in Michael Jackson's work with Quincy Jones. In their songs, you get some bright colors, a layered texture with some fast-moving parts, some over-arching slow melodies, and unexpected bits of punctuation from brass or percussion. Other 80s acts used this layered approach -- and so does Mozart! -- but I hear more care for variety and surprise in these early works by Michael and Janet. Also, these dancers' voices dance: breaths, cries, and segmentation of some phrases amount to a solo rhythm track like a tapper's tattoos.

Sam's radio show moved on to the incident that halted Janet Jackson's career in 2004. Sam plays a clip of Justin Timberlake's admission that their "stunt that went too far" was a 50-50 mistake, but, he said, "I'm only getting 10 percent of the blame."

I hear that Janet's doing well in Europe and winning awards for previous work. I'm planning to catch up with her. Only 34 years of music to go.

Kennedy Center's Summer of Sondheim 20 Years Later

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258 miles from Durham NC to Washington DC
September 9 - October 13

Kennedy Center is where I found my tribe. It was 2002, summer of the center's "Sondheim Celebration." Cycling around Atlanta this month, I've covered enough miles to take me to Washington, where I can virtually revisit this place and that time.

On the shuttle from the Metro to Kennedy Center, I overheard conversations among Sondheim fans from as far away as Australia who, like me, had donated $2000 to the Center in 2001 for the privilege of buying $500 seats to six Sondheim shows being staged at the center during the summer of 2002. I subscribed to The Sondheim Review and I checked out a couple of Sondheim web sites, but I still felt pretty isolated in my fandom. Sondheim himself called his work "caviar to the general," an acquired taste. So what a joy it was to be in a space where so many of us shared the same appreciation for his work.

We rose to our feet as one to roar our approval for Jonathan Tunick when he took the podium to conduct Company. The hall was filled with people who, like me, knew Tunick's orchestrations for 30 years of Sondheim shows, had probably read all the same interviews with him that I had read, appreciated the nuances of his work, and wanted him to know how much the music meant to us.

At Sweeney Todd, the plucky understudy who took Christine Baranski's role of "Mrs. Lovett" went up on a line during the song "A Little Priest." All of us shouted the cue; she said, "Thanks," and finished the song with applomb.

Seeing so much Sondheim back-to-back at one venue brought out some commonalities in his work.

• What was the same is how it was all so different in subject, look, sound, and tone.
• At least one number in every show challenged actors to perform some combination of multi-tasked staging, multi-layered character, rapid patter, and vocal athleticism that earned them huge heartfelt hands. I thought again and again how much Sondheim gives to the actor.
• Different as the shows are, one common theme emerged: we don't have a lot of time on earth to connect to others, so get to it. (Autumnal leaves in the otherwise summery setting for A Little Night Music tipped me off to this one. I'd thought of it as a romantic comedy. At Kennedy Center, I realized, it's about death!)

My Sondheim summer wouldn't have happened without Gloria Friedgen, a dynamic and innovative science teacher who had been my colleague at The Walker School in Marietta, GA. I'd taught her daughters Kristina and Katie in class, and had spent hundreds of hours with them in the after-school drama club doing Midsummer Night's Dream, Little Shop of Horrors, cabarets, and Into the Woods, Jr. which featured Gloria as the cow. For two weekends at different ends of the summer of 2002, Gloria hosted me at her home in Maryland, where I met her charming Italian mother and Coach Ralph Friedgen. While he worked with his team, Gloria and the girls took me to DC to see Sondheim shows.

The shows that we saw, though not the specific productions, are covered in other posts on this blog. Here are some samples: Company, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Passion. See my Sondheim page for a curated list of many, many articles about Sondheim, his shows, and his collaborators.

Since then, I've returned to the Washington area two more times for Sondheim shows. Read about those in my blog reflections Follies Haunting and Haunted, and Road Trip for Road Show.

More Kennedy Center connections: The center opened in 1970 with Leonard Bernstein's Mass, (11/2013) about which I have many very strong very mixed feelings. Then, for many years, my colleague Julia Chadwick and I took 8th graders to see the play Shear Madness on the rooftop theatre of the KC, a model for audience participation that I used in my own series of mystery dinner theatre plays (05/2014). Finally, Julia let me skip a night to go with student Buck C. to a concert hall nearby to see singer Cleo Laine (05/2009) whom I'd been trying to see for 20 years.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

How John Adams Composed for 9/11

Before John Adams composed a single note for his commissioned commemoration of 9/11, he took a month to map a strategy and gather words and images of people close to the events of that day. His thinking for this one-of-a-kind assignment could be a good model for any artist with a public responsibility.

His plans worked.  When Robert Spano conducted On the Transmigration of Souls for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in 2007, I was there with a group of teens and teachers in the balcony startled when sounds of New York streets surrounded us. A distant siren cued a boy's recorded utterance, "missing," looped to make a pulse over which the orchestra played extended chords. Soon other recorded voices spoke some of the names of the victims, then sentences about lost loved ones, such as

He was extremely good-looking...
She had a voice like an angel...
His mother says "He used to call me every day."

On his website Earbox.com, Adams says that, for occasions like these, "words fail." He chose, instead of poetry or rhetoric, these "humblest expressions" of feeling without adornment or drama. Adams writes that we

know how to keep our emotions in check, and we know how to mask them with humor or irony. Music [can] unlock those controls and bring us face to face with our raw, uncensored and unattenuated feeling.

Even now the memory of hearing a hundred voices in harmony singing those phrases in a conversational rhythm breaks my heart.

When the text came down to irreducible words "I loved him," "light,""day," and "sky," the music brought catharsis with turbulent strings and keening voices before subsiding into sounds that convey what Adams intended, "gravitas and serenity," through chimes, whispered voices, and eerie celesta. When sounds of New York returned, we, too, had "transmigrated," not from state of body to state of soul, but from sorrow of remembrance to ordinary time and life going on.

On the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last month, a critic placed Adams's work above the "musical ambulance chasing" of other composers' 9/11 pieces.

Adams tells how he prepared for the composition in his memoir (Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). He foresaw that any composer who might seek to amplify the "tortured emotions" and "iconography" of that days' events would produce something in poor taste, an embarrassment. (I heard an egregious example in the same concert hall, the only time I was ever embarrassed for Robert Spano.) Adams was also uneasy about how our grief on that day was mixed with indignation at "the temerity, the outright flamboyance of the attacks" (263). He resolved to "make a public statement that went beyond the usual self-centered auteur concerns" without getting into the political debate over the meaning of the event.

Instead, he wanted to create "a memory space." He writes "I decided that the only way to approach this theme was to make it about the most intimate experiences of the people involved" (265). He took his text from notices for missing people papered around the city soon after 9/11 and from short memorials printed in the New York Times over the months that followed. He recorded the sounds of the city himself. He took inspiration from silent amateur video footage of "millions of pieces of what looked almost like confetti [that] drifted gently amid the clouds of dust and smoke," paper from all those offices (266).

Form followed content as Adams conceived his piece with Charles Ives in mind. Adams had recently conducted the maverick composer's work, appreciating how his compositions are like landscape paintings with foreground, middle ground, and background all visible at the same time (227).

In my mind, Ives was the first composer to approach the orchestral setting as if it were a giant mixing board. Objects, be they fragments or tunes, atmospheric effects, or enormous blocks of sound, appear on the listener's radar as if the composer were moving faders in a grand mix. This is a radically different way of treating musical materials from the traditional rhetorical procedures of European art music, where the discourse is far more linear and logically spun out.

Also, he adds, Ives "kept the vernacular roots of the art alive within the context of formal experimentation," unlike other twentieth-century composers who were "super-refining" their ideas and "following self-imposed protocols that robbed the experience of its cultural connectivity" (228). Hence Transmigration's layers of action: taped sounds, orchestral music, text spoken and sung. Adams also quotes from Ives's piece The Unanswered Question, its elongated chords in the strings and its probing trumpet call (266).

Early performances in New York and London had Adams thinking his piece was "a dud," but the performance that I heard in Atlanta and another in Cincinnati encouraged him. There were better balances of the digital sounds to the live ones. "The pure American quality of [the choruses'] enunciation and their perfectly balanced sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the words to a transcendental level" (267).

I remember hearing the piece's premiere in a radio broadcast from New York. Already very familiar with Adams's work, I was disappointed because I thought that Adams had only put together the most obvious things using some tools of his post-minimalist style, taking us on a predictable, inevitable emotional journey; he hadn't really composed anything. Now I see, that's the beauty of his achievement. 

[See a curated list of many more articles about Adams on my page The Minimalist Zone. One of the best is Slow Motion Emotion about the piece "Christian Zeal and Activity."]

Cork O'Connor Mysteries: Suspense and Joy in Books 2 and 3

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Detectives' personal lives often become a drag as their series wear on. So it's a twist that, three novels into the Cork O'Connor mystery series by William Kent Krueger, the detective has grown more physically fit, more connected to his family, and more confident that crime-fighting is something he loves and does well. 

Perhaps other authors confuse complication and darkness with authenticity, but at least so far into the series, Krueger finds authentic joy in his created world:

Sunlight dripping down the houses on Gooseberry Lane like butter melting down pancakes. The streets empty and clean. The surface of Iron Lake on such a still morning looking solid as polished steel.
God, [Cork] loved this place. (PR ch.1).

Fresh air and clean living help. Cork (short for "Corcoran") lives in Aurora, Minnesota among mountains, lakes, forests, and members of the Ojibwe tribe. He has cut back on cigarettes and alcohol. He stays in touch with his spiritual roots in the tribe and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic church.

Krueger takes the crime genre out of dank bedrooms and arid offices into the beautiful but dangerous realm of wilderness adventure stories. In novels Boundary Waters (1999) and Purgatory Ridge (2001), Cork's work involves rowing, hiking, swimming in icy waters, and running a long distance.

Cork's quarries do strenuous outdoor activities, too. When Cork joins a search party for a celebrity singer gone missing in Boundary Waters, we follow her steps and know her thoughts. In Purgatory Ridge, it's a kidnapper with a score to settle for the death of his beloved kid brother. Because Krueger engenders sympathy for both hunter and hunted, our suspense builds as we wonder, "Will Cork figure out what's really going on and catch up before it's too late?"

Cork's wife Jo is a lawyer who often represents the Ojibwe tribe in court, so her work complements her husband's. She grows into the role of being a co-hero, a great development in these early books of the series.

Their children include two competent teenaged girls and a much younger boy Stevie who has some special needs, a family reminiscent of Krueger's stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace (see my post More than a Mystery (07/2019)). With an especially vulnerable child in jeopardy, emotional stakes are high for readers as well as for characters. When such a child steps up to do something remarkable for others, it's a joy, as happens in Purgatory Ridge and also in Boundary Waters when the young son of an ex-convict guides his dad and law enforcement on their grueling expedition. Krueger captures the complicated feeling when he writes that Cork feels "the sweet weight of his son's trust" (PR, ch. 12).

With many more books in the series ready for me to read, I'm hoping that Krueger's Cork stays buoyant.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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