Grace, and what it does

What’s So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are so many books out there that purport to teach us how to live. Every one starts from some premise, some basic assumption or other: the self-help books that insist it’s all a matter of attitude and determination; the psychological treatises; and perhaps more in America than Britain, the unashamedly biblical.

Here are two of the latter that actually do what they say on the tin. What’s So Amazing About Grace? is Philip Yancey’s 1997 classic, examining grace as “the last best word” – the one great theological word that has not been distorted and devalued over the generations.

Never assume you know why…

Last Sunday night my daughters were singing in a performance of Fauré’s Requiem. Quite right too. Nothing unusual or alarming in that.

Except that the concert blew my mind.

Fair enough. The Fauré Requiem is a moving piece. But the piece still echoing in my head at 48 hours’ remove is the piece that opened the programme: Bach’s Partita no. 2 for solo violin, superbly executed by Adrian Adlam, its movements interspersed with a series of chorales performed from the back of the auditorium by a semi-chorus. The final movement, the chaconne, saw four of the semi-chorus weaving the chorales into the violin part, to extraordinary effect.

This interpretation of the Bach is based on the work of musical cryptologist Professor Helga Thoene. There is a recording available by the Hilliard Ensemble, and a review which discusses Prof. Thoene’s theories, not all of which are entirely convincing.

Nevertheless, the interpretation turns the Partita, which Bach wrote shortly after his first wife’s death, from a sublime piece of absolute music into a moving reflection on loss, grief and hope.

The programme note was quite clear: there’s no evidence that Bach intended it to be performed this way, but it offers an intriguing insight into how he might have heard it in its own mind.

I will certainly never hear the piece in the same way again.

Here’s the thing, though. It was all a complete surprise. We had a series of letters from our daughters’ school telling us only that they would be singing in a performance of Fauré’s Requiem. Even Winchester College, where the concert took place, only had on their website: “Fauré Requiem 7.30 pm”.

What a pity that nobody thought to mention the Bach beforehand. I have a friend I could have invited who would have loved it. Part of me wishes I’d known how they were going to stage the Bach, with the semi-chorus moving round the sides of the auditorium as the piece progressed.

What a pity, too, that nobody mentioned beforehand the fact that the Fauré would be followed by the première of a piece by the concert’s conductor, Oliver Tarney. A fascinating and thought-provoking piece, it was, drawing together several of the musical and thematic components of the Fauré and the Bach, and setting several of the chorales we had heard earlier in the evening. It’s one of those pieces that begs to be listened to carefully and repeatedly, though as always, no amount of listening to a recording will re-create the impact of its live performance.

The schools’ assumption was–quite rightly–that we would turn out to hear our little darlings sing. But that wasn’t the only reason I would have gone. And it certainly didn’t do the evening justice, or prepare me for what to expect.

There is a parallel here with those books that are marketed as “the next…” (fill in the blank) – the ones that the publicists pay thousands to place on the front tables in Waterstones, with some generic six-word strapline that is supposed to encapsulate the content. (Take Robert MacNeil’s Burden of Desire, for example, which is saddled not only with a title that makes it sound like tired erotica, but also with a strapline from a review, “An intricate, satisfying romance”, which would stop most men from being seen reading it in public. A pity, because as I’ve said elsewhere, it is actually a thoughtful historical novel of depth, complexity and insight, as well as being a thumping good read.)

It’s a parallel with the soundbite-based approach to life that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Give the punters a one-line message – “An intricate, satisfying romance”; “Your daughters are singing the Fauré Requiem” – and that’ll be enough.

Er, no. What if that isn’t enough? What if your six-word strapline doesn’t hook the reader? What about my friend whose daughter wasn’t singing the Fauré but who would have loved the Bach?

The strapline is an invention of the ad-man. It presumes that the book or the concert or whatever is a commodity, to be piled high and sold cheap. I’m writing this in a pub, listening in to a quiz round about corporate slogans–Every Little Helps; I’m Lovin’ It; And You’re Done–which are noteworthy for being instantly recognisable rather than because they convey much of a message. Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, you can’t sell a book or promote a concert on that basis.

(Mind you, there really are no words that could adequately convey, whether in the pre-concert publicity, the programme or anything I could say, that can adequately convey the impact of Sunday night’s music. That is how music works.)

I’m pretty sure Sunday’s performers didn’t see their concert as a commodity. But the one-line publicity begs the question, Why did they perform the Bach? And when someone chose this very interesting and unusual–and no doubt controversial–interpretation, who were the audience they had in mind?

I’m pretty sure Sunday’s concert was intended for an audience who were willing to stop and think, to listen to something new, to listen anew to something familiar. I’m reminded yet again of Salley Vickers’ comment that until the reader engages with it, about 45% of a book isn’t even there yet.

I can easily believe–and this is no reflection on a magnificent performance–that a healthy proportion of the impact of Sunday night’s concert lay in the audience’s response. Not in our applause, but in the quiet way the music worked on us and has continued to work on us. No doubt others reacted to it differently, but that is one of the things about art: its creator cannot predict or foresee or circumscribe its effects.

Note to school, therefore, and to every author or maker of art who has swallowed the sleeping-pill peddled by the ad-man:

Don’t believe your own PR.

Don’t fall for the old lie that the strap-line will sell your work. Your work is worth more than a strap-line.

Please don’t assume that you know why people will want what you have made.

Expect your work to transform and surprise your audience, sure. But then expect your audience, and your work, to surprise you.

Lives less ordinary

When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every once in a while you read a book that passes straight into your bloodstream, and you are hardly aware of how it happened.

When God was a Rabbit describes itself as the story of a brother and sister, “about childhood and growing up, friendships and families, triumph and tragedy and everything in between…about love in all its forms”. That is a perfectly fair description as far as it goes. What it doesn’t say is anything of the quiet and kindly magic with which Sarah Winman defines her characters.

Elly, her brother Joe and her childhood friend Jenny Penny are all outsiders – not the angry and embittered kind, though, but the kind who know they are in some small way different, unique, set apart.

The next ten words

Some time ago I posted an article called Precision Tools. It covered quite a complex sequence of ideas that had been taking shape in my thought for a few months. And yes, it’s longer than the average blog post, at just under 2,500 words.

One reader commented that he thought there was material in there for two or three posts. Perhaps it should be broken up into parts, he suggested, to allow each idea to be discussed properly. 

We seem to have accepted that blog posts shouldn’t go much beyond 800 words, and that that they shouldn’t cover more than one main idea. Why? Do we not risk losing our ability to construct (or, as readers, to follow) a complex argument? Is this perhaps a symptom of a society that fails to nurture polymathy?

My correspondent told me that on another site, one devoted to SME business people, he’d been told that his posts were too complex. He’d been advised to run them through some special software to determine the reading age at which they were targeted, and to reduce that age to 15/16.

As a litmus test of how society is operating, I find that rather scary.

Another excellent reason to live to one hundred

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gloriously absurd and implausible, with a charmingly diffident hero who manages to bumble through the twentieth century, from one major world event to the next, leaving political turmoil and outbreaks of peace in his wake. Now he has climbed out of the window of his residential home to avoid his own hundredth birthday party, and bumbles instead into an adventure involving a suitcase, an international criminal gang, a redhead, a yellow bus, an elephant and an increasingly frantic state prosecutor.

It has the same delightful, dry, straight-faced narrative voice – lightly seasoned with irony but with not a shred of sarcasm – of the best children’s literature (A.A. Milne comes to mind). Everyone, or at least everyone who matters, is going to live happily ever after, says the narrator’s tone (a phrase which will never quite mean the same to me again!), but we’re all going to have some thumping good adventures along the way. And so we do.

To be read when you’re in need of a laugh or when you need to believe in a truth that is as strange as fiction. Or indeed at any other time. Superb.

View all my reviews

Expanding our vocabulary

First please listen to this. It’s an extract from Gesualdo’s Tristis est anima mea, from his Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday. Listen in particular, if you will, to the section from about 2:07 to 3:07.

Not a happy man, Gesualdo. He had murdered his wife and her lover, and spent his later life in increasing isolation and, it would appear, psychological turbulence. Even without knowing the details of his personal life, though–and they aren’t for the faint-hearted–you cannot listen to this piece without realising that this is a composer with something out of the ordinary to say.

And he has created a new vocabulary with which to say it.

“I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.” – from the Harvard Business Review

An interesting take on the value of good grammar from Kyle Wiens in the Harvard Business Review.

“…Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts…”

Read the whole article at I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. – Kyle Wiens – Harvard Business Review.