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Words & Wonderings

Reviewed by Philip Joy.

A product of the Iona Community’s in-house publishing department, this set of 15 conversations – hosted and edited by Iona member, writer and activist Joy Mead – offers insights from the world of community and features such figures as Colin Tudge, Satish Kumar, Lesley Saunders and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. At convenient points between the chapters there are reflective poems, and the book is really a celebration of the wonder of being alive as well as a treatise on the necessity of rebuilding community in our world.

As a music-lover and composer, I was immediately drawn to the interview with Maxwell-Davies – Master of the Queen’s Music, living in Orkney and composing for the Proms and other events since I was a teenager. He is also a man whose music underwent a radical overhaul, going from the heights of the Harrison Birtwistle type avant garde to a thoroughly more accessible tonal style first exhibited in his violin concerto premiered in Orkney by the great Isaac Stern – a style which, had he begun his career with it, would ironically have consigned him immediately to the dustbin of musical history. “What ‘words and wonderings’ would emerge from this contemporary prophet”, I asked with curiosity?

Well, it’s a bit of a tall order being advertised as a contemporary prophet, for a prophet speaks into the present as well as the future and maybe I expected too much, but I was disappointed. The fact that music flourishes in community is not an earth-shattering insight, and there have been calls for years within the Classical Music world for composers to get back in touch with their audiences. True, Maxwell-Davies has gone in for the community thing in a big way – he writes for the ordinary people of Orkney and inaugurated the St Magnus Festival, all in a way which has built up their musical and communal life. True, for Classical Music not to become a ‘museum culture’, we need to recover the levels of musical literacy, teaching and arts funding of the pre-Thatcher years. But the most profound thing was not said by him, but by Joy Mead, and that was a quote anyway: Nadia Boulanger’s perceptive remark that composers need to “think with their heart and feel with their intellect.” This was, I admit, new to me, and made me think that it might well apply to the way we do theology in the churches. However, it doesn’t say much for the prophet himself in this case, and one would have thought that a musician like myself would be ready to hear genuinely challenging ideas without throwing the speaker down the muddy pit of generalized rambling.

As for the other ‘prophets’, there was nothing really profound to warrant the title: Satish Kumar, the ecologist, whose criticism of our Cartesian values – what cannot be measured does not exist – is true, but not new; Andrew Whitely of the Real Bread Campaign who somehow seemed to think that all our problems would be solved if we made our own bread; Iona Chef, Julia Ponsomby, whose most radical comment was to say that meals taken together improve conversation and community; St Magnus Festival director, Glenys Hughes, raising the self-esteem of impoverished Malawi children by making music with them, because, I reflected, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is patently rubbish. Here is little more than a general “let’s reconnect with one another and with our earth” and “rediscover the wonder of God’s creation” type-thing, which does not really address our age or the church or the churches or Western Culture with anything arresting. Prophets were listened to and recorded because they said pretty outrageous things – think of Jeremiah telling everyone to surrender. But I found this book tedious, and anyway, there are plenty of people out there of many faiths and none who are working really hard at community – sports clubs, folk music festivals and even your local pub in its way. Apart from the Nadia Boulanger bit, I merely shrug my shoulders at this book: and worst of all, I put it down...