Slow Learning

One can only be so serious setting a text about paper training, and there is certainly a disconnect between the earthy text and the gravitas of some of the solo vocal lines here. But Scott Cairns’ poem is ultimately about mercy. Concluding the work with an outsize and formally Bachian fugue is, on the one hand, of course patently ridiculous. And yet, viewed as a kind of “Miserere mei” (“Have mercy”) re-directed to the third person (“Forgive him”), it is perhaps less absurd and even rather spiritual.