Notes&Music Links - Marilynne Robinson "Gilead"

1. In 1956, 76-year-old Reverend John Ames, a Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa, is aware that he is nearing the end of his life due to a heart condition. Wanting to leave a testament for his seven-year-old son, Ames writes a long letter filled with reflections on his past, faith, and the history of his family.

2. "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson is a novel that explores themes of spirituality, faith, routine, rest, and redemption. The opening line, "I'll pray, and then I'll sleep," suggests a character who finds solace in prayer as a routine before bedtime.

3. Gilead is a novel about four generations of men in Iowa. In chronological order: a firebrand anti-slavery pastor in league with John Brown, his more cautious son who resented his recklessness and intensity, a third generation pastor who navigated the tension between his father and grandfather (this is the protagonist, aging and soon to die in the “present” time in the 1950s), and his young son, for whom he’s trying to record his history before he dies.

4. According to Robinson, the fictional town of Gilead ("Gilead" means 'hill of testimony' in the Bible – Genesis 31:21) is based on the real town of Tabor, Iowa, located in the southwest corner of the state and well known for its importance in the abolition movement.

5. What is the central idea of Gilead? The main message of Gilead is the beauty and meaning of ordinary life and the importance of forgiveness and love.

6. Reflections, narration, sermon, storytelling. The small, beautiful details. The voice’s charming and halting uncertainty.

There are so many quietly profound moments in Gilead that end up feeling completely natural in the context of the narrative.

About Lila&Jack:

Lila is John’s second wife and the mother of their son. Addressing his son, John usually refers to her as “your mother”; her name is only revealed when Jack addresses her as Lila late in the novel. Lila is more than 30 years younger than John and is 41 during the time of the novel. It’s hinted that her life before meeting John was one of poverty and hardship, though she never talks about it, and John doesn’t elaborate. John met Lila when she showed up in his church one rainy Sunday when he was 67. Lila didn’t know anything about Christianity, but after attending church for a few weeks, she approached John about getting baptized. Sometime after her baptism, it was Lila’s idea to marry John—she quietly suggested it one day after tending John’s garden, and he agreed. Lila is a devoted wife and mother who worries constantly about their boy’s upbringing. He describes her as having a “settled, habitual sadness,” seriousness, and quiet dignity. She is self-conscious about her unrefined way of speaking and therefore tends to be reserved, though this leads people in the church to regard her as rather distant, and she makes an unconventional minister’s wife. Perhaps because of her background, she is also quietly sympathetic to Jack Boughton’s restlessness and religious doubts.

“You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.”

Jack (John Aimes) is Boughton’s most beloved child and John’s namesake. Knowing John might not have children, Boughton intended that Jack and John would have a kind of father-son relationship (Jack even called John “Papa” growing up). However, through much of the novel, John hints that he and Jack have a fraught relationship, though he doesn’t explain why until near the end of the novel. He describes Jack as a “prodigal son,” a lifelong troublemaker, and it bothers John to see how much Boughton loves him when Jack clearly doesn’t deserve it. John eventually reveals that 20 years ago, in his youth, Jack had a relationship with a young woman and fathered her child. The woman’s family was extremely poor, and the baby, whom Jack never acknowledged or offered to support, was brought up in squalid circumstances and ultimately died. Yet despite his anger at Jack’s transgressions, John also perceives that there’s a deep loneliness and sadness in Jack. At one point Jack admits to John that he’s never been able to believe in God, though he doesn’t necessarily disbelieve, either. Jack and Lila seem to understand each other instinctively. At the end of the novel, Jack reveals to John that he is married to Della, who is Black, and that they have a son together, Robert Boughton Miles. Because of anti-miscegenation laws in Missouri, their marriage isn’t legal, and they are ultimately harassed out of their home in St. Louis. Though the novel doesn’t reveal how, it’s clear that Jack has changed for the better over the course of his life. However, he leaves Gilead in the end, after it’s implied that Della breaks off their relationship; he never tells Boughton the whole truth about his life, and he doesn’t know where he’s headed next. Despite his ambivalence about Christianity, he willingly receives John’s blessing before he goes.

7.Music:

Links:

1. Lang Lang - Liszt's Consolation No.3 - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWnWZcTuqW4

2. Lang Lang — “Rêverie”, Claude Debussy - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouYT5OEPfRI

“Perhaps Gilead” is a three-movement (35 minute) composition by Marion, Iowa native and internationally renowned composer Harvey Sollberger. Perhaps Gilead was inspired by the companion novels Home and Gilead written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Iowa novelist Marilynne Robinson. Red Cedar Chamber Music commissioned Perhaps Gilead and performed it in a series of 27 concerts and educational events – culminating with official premiere concerts at First Presbyterian Church in Cedar Rapids on May 21, 2011 and at St. Raphael Orthodox Church in Iowa City on May 22, 2011.The project was made into a short film by film maker John Richard.

Perhaps Gilead is in three movements:
Movement I, Constructing a Horizon: Prairie Sunset and Moonrise, was inspired by an incident described on page 14 of Gilead where the boy who will become Reverend Ames, on a visit with his father to the wilds of Kansas to find his grandfather’s grave, looks up and sees the setting sun and rising full moon balanced on their respective horizons with “the most wonderful light between them”. “I never could have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that,” says his father. I saw this myself on January 29, 2010 in Strawberry Point, Iowa.

Movement II, The Armed Man references the conviction and near-Biblical intensity of Ames’s grandfather, an abolitionist and fighter – in a literal sense – for slavery’s end. In Gilead, William Faulkner’s words – “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” – return to doubly haunt us as we perceive slavery’s ongoing legacy both in the novel’s 1950s setting as well as in our present historical moment.

Movement III, Medley-Potpourri: Sunday Afternoon Music at Reverend Boughton’s, is set as an opera scene without words, and draws its scenario from pages 188 and 189 of Home from “they ate their pie” through Lila’s saying, “that’s a good song, though.” The three characters who speak in this passage, Reverend Boughton, his son, Jack, and Reverend Ames’s young wife, Lila, are “sung”, respectively, by the first violin, cello and viola in a series of recitatives. The text, though not spoken or sung in performance, is written beneath the notes so that each player knows what he or she is “saying”. I think that much of Jack’s essence is captured in this scene – his mercurial imagination and playfulness, his sense of humor and self-wounding bitter irony and, finally, his despair. This is counterbalanced here by the serenity of Lila and the yearning severity of his father.
The medley-potpourri aspect of the title refers to the music Jack performs on the piano at this Sunday gathering – a succession of hymns as well as a sentimental ballad (“potpourri” in French means literally “rotten pot”, and refers to a stew made of different kinds of meat; it later came to refer to a medley of different musical works joined together and played in succession). Movement III references and quotes all of the music mentioned in the novel’s text, making, in effect, a potpourri of the pieces performed in Reverend Boughton’s parlor. To further tax the opera metaphor, we might see Perhaps Gilead‘s quoted hymns and songs as equivalent to the arias set between and counterbalancing characters’ recitatives in eighteenth-century opera.
Can Movement III makes sense if the audience can’t hear the words and follow the “libretto”? I’m betting that it can, as a kaleidoscopically-evolving mosaic of the new and the familiar, the exotic and the mundane, powered (I hope) by elements of musical contrast and design, change and surprise that allow the music to penetrate beyond and behind the words to the emotional truths and experiences that called them into being.
And finally, I think I should address the topic of musical quotation – or borrowing. During past years I’ve frequently found myself quoting from others’ works. I do this not from some rejection of the concept of authorship (hardly!) or from lack of inspiration, but to open a door to a broader context of musical reference and expression than I’d have without the quotations. Each quoted work or passage draws new and extended meaning from its relation to the music of mine in which it’s embedded, and in the tiny space between the incited/new and the recited/quoted, a charge of metaphysical lightening is coiled -up, one which when released flashingly illuminates the musical landscape through which the listeners, performers and I are passing. In broader terms, the quoted works already reside in me and form part of my mental and spiritual furniture. To reference them in my music is, in my terms, to supremely compliment them, and I do so with full respect for their uniqueness and creators.

This is an All-Iowa Project

Our Iowa composer:
• Harvey became a leading exponent of contemporary composition and expanded instrumental techniques on the flute while at Columbia University where he co-founded (with Charles Wuorinen) the Group for Contemporary Music in New York at Columbia University in 1962 and directed that ensemble for 27 years.
• Sollberger was born in Cedar Rapids but was raised and attended elementary through high school in Marion and then attended the University of Iowa.
• Sollberger has had numerous major commissions but is recently retired from University of CA San Diego.
• Sollberger now lives in Strawberry Point, Iowa and is Red Cedar Chamber Music’s composer in residence.
The Iowa Inspiration of Perhaps Gilead : Red Cedar Chamber Music commissioned Harvey Sollberger to write a 15 minute work for flute, guitar and string quartet and he became so immersed in the project he wrote us a 30 minute work.
• Harvey became engrossed with the Iowa-based novels Home & Gilead by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
• His new musical work interprets the philosophical and emotional content of these novels in soundscape.

The Iowa Author and Novels that Inspired Perhaps Gilead :
Home & Gilead are companion novels by a renowned Iowa author Marilynne Robinson about her fictional small town of Gilead, Iowa. Set in the 1950s, Home & Gilead deal with important social & philosophical issues ie. slavery/integration as seen through the eyes of two ministers in the town who are lifelong friends.

About the Composer, Harvey Sollberger

Composer, conductor and flutist Harvey Sollberger has been active in many world musical centers. Performers of his music have included the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, Tanglewood, June in Buffalo, Interlink (Tokyo), Radio France and Pierre Boulez’s Domaine Musical (Paris), TRANSIT (Belgium) and Incontri di Musica Sacra Contemporanea (Rome).
Among his honors are the Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim Fellowships and commissions from the Fromm, Naumberg and Koussevitzky foundations, Music from Japan, the NEA and various state arts councils.

Sollberger was a co-founder of the New York Group for Contemporary Music and has led the Contemporary Ensemble of the Manhattan School of Music, Indiana University’s New Music Ensemble and SONOR and Sirius at the University of California, San Diego, where he served, as well, as Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus from 1997 to 2005. His orchestral performing credits include appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, the San Diego Symphony, the American Composers Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic.

His work as composer and performer is represented on over 150 commercial records. He has been Resident Composer at the American Academy in Rome and Composer-in-Residence for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Red Cedar Chamber Music. He lives in Iowa where he feeds hummingbirds and is at work on plans for a 30-acre sound garden.

https://redcedar.org/perhaps-gilead/

2. Acclaimed composer Caroline Shaw, whose second album with Attacca Quartet includes a piece influenced by Robinson's writing.

While "First Essay: Nimrod" takes its title from a biblical figure, Shaw said it "began as a simple exercise in translating the lilt and rhythm of one of my favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson, into music."

8.Excerpts:

“It is my birthday, so there were marigolds on the table and my stack of pancakes had candles in it. There were nice little sausages besides. And you recited the Beatitudes with hardly a hitch, two times over, absolutely shining with the magnitude of the accomplishment, as well you might. Your mother gave a sausage to Soapy, who slunk off with the unctuous thing and hid it who knows where. She is beyond doubt the descendant of endless generations of vermin eaters, fat as she is, domesticated as she ought to be. I hate to think what I would give for a thousand mornings like this. For two or three. You were wearing your red shirt and your mother was wearing her blue dress. And your mother has found that sermon I was wondering about, that Pentecost sermon, the one I gave the first time I saw her. It was beside my plate, wrapped in tissue paper, with a ribbon on it. "Now, don't you go revising that," she said. "It don't need revising." And she kissed me on the top of the head, which, for her, was downright flamboyant. So now I am seventy-seven.” P109

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable–which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Maybe I should have said we are like planets. But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations. The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us. I am old enough to remember when we used to go out in the brush, a lot of us, and spread out in a circle, and then close in, scaring the rabbits.” P115

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) (81years old) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Early life and education

Robinson was born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Ellen (Harris) and John J. Summers, a lumber company employee.^[7]^[8]^[9] Her brother is the art historian David Summers, who dedicated his book Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting to her. She did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her BA magna cum laude in 1966, and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Brown, one of her teachers was the postmodern novelist John Hawkes.^[10] She received her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977.^[11]^[12]

Writing career

Robinson has written five highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home and Lila are companions to Gilead and focus on the Boughton and Ames families during the same time period.^[13]^[14]

Robinson is also the author of many nonfiction works, including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018). Reading Genesis was released on March 12, 2024. Her novels and nonfiction works have been translated into 36 languages.

She has written numerous articles, essays and reviews for Harper's, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books.^[15]^[16]^[17]

Academic affiliations

In addition to her tenure from 1991 to 2016 on the faculty of the University of Iowa, where she retired as the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing, Robinson has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many colleges and universities, including Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets and Writers.^[18]

In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, where she delivered a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. In May 2011, Robinson delivered the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[19] Robinson was selected by the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University to deliver the 2018 Hulsean Lectures on Christian theology. She was the fourth woman selected for the series which was established in 1790. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2023, Robinson received the Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus from the University of Washington, the highest honor bestowed upon a graduate of the university.^[20]

The Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of writer and essayist Marilynne Robinson.^[21]

Honors and awards

Robinson has received numerous literary, theological and academic honors, among them the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the 2013 Park Kyong-ni Prize, and the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2021, the Tulsa Library Trust presented her with the Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. Robinson's alma mater, the University of Washington, honored her with their 2022 Alumni Summa Laude Dignata Award.

Robinson has received honorary degrees from over a dozen universities and colleges, starting with Oxford University in 2010 and Brown University in 2012, and followed most recently by the University of Iowa, Yale University, Boston College, Cambridge University, and the University of Portland.

Commendations

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists", adding that "Robinson's is a voice we urgently need to attend to in both Church and society here [in the UK]."^[22]

On June 26, 2015, President Barack Obama quoted Robinson in his eulogy for Clementa C. Pinckney of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In speaking about "an open heart," Obama said: "[w]hat a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'"^[23] In November 2015, The New York Review of Books published a two-part conversation between Obama and Robinson, covering topics in American history and the role of faith in society.^[24]^[25]

Personal life

Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City.^[26]^[27] Her Congregationalism and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin have been important in many of her novels, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister.^[28] In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: "I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker."^[29]

In 1967 she married Fred Miller Robinson,^[30]^[31] a writer and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Robinsons divorced in 1989.^[32] The couple have two sons. In the late 1970s, she wrote Housekeeping in the evenings while they slept. Robinson said they influenced her writing in many ways, since "[Motherhood] changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself."^[33]

Robinson divides her time between northern California and upstate New York.

Bibliography

Novels

· —— (1980). Housekeeping. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374525187.

· —— (2004). Gilead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780312424404.

· —— (2008). Home. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780009732997.

· —— (2014). Lila. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781844088812.^[34]

· —— (2020). Jack. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374279301.^[35]

Short Fiction

· Connie Bronson - published in The Paris Review, 1986

· Kansas - published in The New Yorker on September 6, 2004 (Extract from Gilead')

· Jack and Della - published in The New Yorker on July 13, 2020 (Extract from Jack).

Nonfiction

Book

· —— (1989). Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374526597.

· —— (1998). The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Picador. ISBN 9780312425326.

· —— (2010). Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300171471.

· —— (2012). When I Was a Child I Read Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374298784.

· —— (2015). The Givenness of Things: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781250097316.

· —— (2018). What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374282219.^[36]

· —— (2024). Reading Genesis. Abacus. ISBN 9780349018744.^[37]

Essays and reportage

· "Bad News From Britain: Dangerous Chemicals, Awful Silence", Harper's Magazine, February, 1985

· "A Great Amnesia", Harper's Magazine, May 2008

· "On 'Beauty'". Tin House. 50. Winter 2011.

· "On Edgar Allan Poe", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 2 (February 5, 2015), pp. 4, 6.

· "Humanism, Science, and the Radical Expansion of the Possible". The Nation. November 2015.

· "Fear". New York Review of Books. 62 (14). Fall 2015.

· "Save Our Public Universities", Harper's Magazine, March, 2016

· "Which Way to the City on a Hill?". New York Review of Books. 66 (12). Summer 2019.

· "Is Poverty Necessary?", Harper's Magazine, June, 2019

· "What Kind of Country Do We Want?". New York Review of Books. 67 (10). June 11, 2020.

· "What Does It Mean to Love a Country? (online: Don't Give Up on America)". The New York Times. October 9, 2020.

· The Gun-violence Plague is Evolving, Dangerously, The Washington Post, June 17, 2022

· One Manner of Law, Harper's Magazine, July, 2022

· Glories Stream from Heaven Afar, New York Review of Books, December 25, 2022

· Dismantling Iowa, New York Review of Books, November 2, 2023

· "And It Was So: Creation in Genesis", Harper's Magazine, February, 2024

Interviews

· "Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction, No. 198", The Paris Review, Fall 2008.

· A September 2015 interview with Barack Obama in Des Moines, Iowa, recorded by the New York Review of Books and published in the October issues of the magazine in two parts

· "Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Beauty, Human Evil and the Idea of Israel", The Ezra Klein Show, March 5, 2024

Awards

· 1982: Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel for Housekeeping^[38]

· 1982: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction shortlist for Housekeeping^[39]

· 1989: National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlist for Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

· 1999: PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for The Death of Adam

· 2004: National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Gilead

· 2005: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gilead^[40]

· 2005: Ambassador Book Award for Gilead

· 2006: University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion^[41]

· 2008: National Book Award finalist for Home

· 2008: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction for Home