Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 2, "The Taming of Smeagol".

Last night, a group of us from RUF went to Karl's recital in Tyrrell Hall. Philip insisted that Tyrrell should be converted into a mead hall, complete with enormous fireplace, several large boars roasting on spits, long tables, rushes on the floor, dogs, shields, and tapestries.

This was Karl's senior composition recital, so all the music on the hour-and-a-half long program was music he had composed himself. The opening and closing pieces were from a musical he's writing entitled Paul's Waltz, a piece dealing with homosexuality, Christianity, and male friendship. The pieces in between explored lying, sex, murder, deceit, anger, pain, and so on, with a dash of very strange parodic humor.

Kent and Karl played piano, and Karl sang with Kirsten and one of their friends. A string quartet played some of the pieces, including a movement from the incidental music Karl wrote for TU’s Hamlet. Poignant, the movement for Ophelia. Dark themes, conveyed at times with nearly grotesque humor; the audience laughed quite a lot (the performance opened with the typical “please turn off your mobile phone” announcements expanded, with ironic commentary, into a full-blown musical number).

As Mrs. P said afterward, “I just went through so many emotions.” She said that she was proud of him for being so personal and honest. She said that displaying one’s sin so openly takes a lot of courage and a huge understanding of God’s grace, how much one has been forgiven.

He was speaking for so many people so powerfully. It became harder and harder to listen: to see this open display of sin, so honest, so forthright, with parody, irony, humor, anguish, pathos, outrage displayed onstage. At times I hated the audience for laughing.

Why does humanity find its sin so enthralling? Because we are thralls, I suppose. Carnival? We can mock our master, mock ourselves and thus construct the façade of freedom for a few moments. Lampoon our sins and set ourselves farcically free. Make the beggar king for a day, social critic for a day.

Also, in the face of what was at times pure genius, I felt my own worth as an “artist” dwindling away into nonexistence. Music and words perfectly fitting, yes, but even separately, either words or music, exactly conveying harsh intense emotion. Conveying the gaps between sin and forgiveness, the tensions between ought and is, between desires and realities. In light of something so much more skillful: entertainment, commentary, conviction, indictment, all at once—why bother writing what has already been said?

Also, the words ripping out my own fears. Listening to others’ sins, my sins become more potent. And guilt: a good little church girl shouldn’t do or imagine such things.

Of course we all applauded thunderously when it ended, and then everyone stood round chatting for ages in the warm, humid hall while the performers deconstructed the cluttered stage.