I recently performed Wynton Marsalis’ A Fiddler’s Tale, a contemporary musical reimagining of the classic Faust story, and was struck by its relevance to my own life and work, given Marsalis’ twist: The Faustian subject is an artist, a fiddler. In discussing the work with Mr. Marsalis and our colleagues, I found that (contrary to a popular opinion), deals with (and temptations by) the devil still resonate, perhaps even more so in our “disenchanted” age.
Speaker/Author: Harrison Hollingsworth
The Value of Being an Artist
Like many New Yorkers, I lived (and often still live) from a place of unhealthy reliance on my work as a source of my identity, rather than as a healthy expression of it. So I went through a process of relearning to hold my identity (lower-case i) as a performing artist in New York much more loosely in particular. I had to hold that gift out to God and say “Lord, use this gift (and me) as it seems best to you.”
Forming a Changed Community through Music
We’ve learned that exclusively singing as a scattered church is woefully inferior to regularly singing as a gathered church. For eight months, I never heard my brothers and sisters voices join mine as we sang our sorrows or proclaimed God’s praises. In our perfect resurrection bodies, in God’s perfectly restored creation, we will sing together more skillfully and joyfully than we can imagine.
