Folias Duo is the celebrated pairing of flutist Carmen Maret and guitarist Andrew Bergeron are renowned for their seamless fusion of classical, jazz, world music, and improvisation. Their original compositions, inspired by life on the road and the beauty of the natural world, transport audiences with vivid storytelling through music.

This week in The Summer of Sound, we go behind the curtain of musical beauty to ask what it takes to make something difficult look effortless. With musical guests Diane Penning and Henry Koperski, both classically trained artists with remarkable careers, we’ll explore the hidden world of practice, pressure, breath, repetition, and presence.

In The Beat of My Drum, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji says that, "rhythm is the soul of life, because the whole universe revolves around rhythm.”

We reflect on the progress that we have made towards LGBTQ+ rights, both nationally and in Michigan, while at the same time focusing on the challenges that we currently face, in light of the political attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the transgender community.

Brad Ruggles explores how our musical tastes begin forming early in childhood, then keep changing through relationships, culture, memory, and experience.

How do we begin to listen and to respond when our soul is trying to tell us that ritual would be helpful?  How can we listen to our longings, and then find ways to express and respond to those longings?  We explore following the natural world that surrounds us, and find ways to lean into ritual “bit by bit.”  

We explore how rituals can help us mark life’s thresholds, whether they come as beginnings, endings, fresh starts, difficult goodbyes, or strange in-between seasons. Threshold rituals give our big emotions somewhere to go besides our shoulders, stomachs, jaws, nervous systems, and late-night Amazon carts.

We explore how small, repeatable practices can become containers for growth, healing, and attention. Drawing from traditional wisdom, modern science, and reflections on ritual in the African Dagara tradition, we look at how rituals create thresholds between one way of being and another.

In this opening week of our series, The Ritual Life, we explore why human beings have always turned to rhythm, repetition, gesture, song, silence, and shared practices to create connection and make meaning in a chaotic world. Rituals help ground us

This week, we’ll explore what happens when that way of seeing begins to soften how we move through life. Humor, laughter, and exuberant joy are not distractions from reality. They can be ways of meeting reality with greater spaciousness, resilience, and wonder. Laughter helps us zoom out, unclench our butt-cheeks a little, and better appreciate the strange, beautiful, and often ridiculous experience of being human