Jeffrey Olmsted

Jeff says this about The Surprizing Work of God.

I’m not a historian or musicologist, and I didn’t want to write a period piece. I have long been interested in religious enthusiasm, as well as religious delusion. To be enthusiastic is, literally, to be filled with God. I wrote a lot of songs based on the poetry of Rumi, the 13th century Sufi genius who embodied this kind of enthusiasm in its most elevated artistic expression. I wrote a musicalization of Moliere’s Tartuffe, which exposes the shadow side of enthusiasm, manifest as religious delusion and subject to grotesque manipulation.

In Jonathan Edwards, I have a subject about whom my own opinion is not so clear. Was he a theocrat? A democrat? The last Puritan? The first Evangelical? A revolutionary Enlightenment thinker? An early New England Transcendentalist? An annoying scold best-forgotten? Let’s talk about it! And hear beautiful music!

Of heaven, Edwards said, “There shall be no string out of tune to cause any discord."