By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

I am spending a week this summer playing for a youth event taking place in Wildwood, New Jersey. Wildwood is the very southern tip of the Jersey shore, about fifty miles south of Atlantic City. Each day when I leave my hotel room, I am assaulted as I walk down the boardwalk by the sounds of the roller coaster, the tramcar, hot dog vendors and the video games.

Video games??!! Why in the world would you have an entire pavilion of video games only a stone's throw from the mighty Atlantic Ocean? Why would you not want to be on the beach listening to the waves, being soothed by that eternal rhythm of water against shore? Why would you not want to be running in the salt water, bucking the waves, letting your body be pummeled by gallons and gallons of water? Why would you not want to be walking down the beach thinking, reflecting, wondering as you listen to the mighty Atlantic? Why would you want to be inside a pavilion going from one video game to another, or riding a scary roller coaster, or riding a little tramcar down the boardwalk? Surely there must be other places to do those things.

This whole scene calls to mind words from the second movement of my choral piece Let There Be Time. The movement is called Time Wars:

"I could dream of a world where the keepers of time are the sun and the sea, and the rhythms and rhymes of the changes of nature, and the faces in the moon. But we're strangers in an alien land, and they've bombed our bridges home!"

I want to go and hear the ocean.

Ken Medema Summer, 2001