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Joshua Shank
Joshua Shank (B&F Music)
crisis of confidence
A Kyrie reimagined—confession, struggle, and transformation.
SATB, a cappella
Anchored in a repeated question, this reimagined (and secular) Kyrie moves through confession, struggle, and redemption. By the final bars, what began in grief resolves into something more luminous.
Composer’s Notes
This work is the stand-in for the “Kyrie” of my reworking of the mass ordinaries, there’s something i have to say, and because that movement of the genre has such a perceptible, repetitious form, my version offers a refrain. The question that keeps returning alludes to the notion that sometimes–to quote theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber–“I have only my confession…of my own real brokenness…to offer.” By the final bars of the movement, though, a transformation has taken place.
-Joshua Shank
Text
I feel full of anger.
Sometimes I hate.
I am vain, cruel, and ungenerous.
Do not come near me.
Lest you be tainted by this misery I have made.
I am unworthy, disqualified.
My heart seems to move through my life like a thresher.
How do I know what I’m doing is right?
That I am still here seems a miracle;
This world a lesson I’m not meant to understand.
There is a place in my heart that feels so
inhospitable that no sound can ever reach it;
a grief so thick it occupies every room I step into.
How do I know what I’m doing is right?
But only fool and fanatic are certain.
That I am confused is a good sign.
My brokenness is not the final word.
I am not the worst things that I have ever done.
How do I know what I’m doing is right?
To open a window from my heart to the world.
To be startled back to the truth of who I am.
To wake up laughing at what I thought was my grief.
I long to be forgiven
and returned to myself.
-Robert Ressler (b. 1988)
$2.15 per licensed PDF
Music from Joshua Shank (B&F Music)
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a fly and a mirror: this is a Friday
Difficulty: 4Duration: less than 3 min. -
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