Meanspeed® Music Review

Are there family television dramas these days as I write on November 24, 2008? Not many. All the “drama” on television seems to be “reality” television and shows where families act in 20 minute bursts of writers’ imaginations.

Amazing Grace

I am not being negative, because all this means is that we have the means from Netflix® to YouTube® to iTunes® to Direct TV® to watch *so many* different families, we forget most of them. The Sopranos were hot. Very – for “Five Seasons” – which a television show as the of THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS®, presenting an hour of drama every weekday, would film in about three months. As it is written in the Wikipedia® Files, “

The Young and the Restless is a Canadian television soap opera, first broadcast on CBS on March 26, 1973. Young and the Restless was created by William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell, who set their show in a fictional version of Genoa City, Wisconsin, a town near their annual vacation home in Lake Geneva.

When it debuted, the show originally focused on the personal and professional lives of two core families in Genoa City: the wealthy Brooks family and the poor Foster family. After a series of recasts and departures in the early 1980s, most of the original characters were written out and the show shifted to the Abbotts, the Newmans, and the Williams families. Y&R is one of the very few TV shows to successfully write out their original cast, and to replace them with new ones. One basic plot that has run throughout almost all of the show’s history is the rivalry between Jill Abbott and Katherine Chancellor.

The series was originally broadcast as half-hour episodes, five times a week. It was expanded to one-hour episodes on February 4, 1980. Young and the Restless is currently the highest-rated daytime drama on American television. As of 2008, it has appeared at the top of the weekly Nielsen Ratings in that category for more than 1000 weeks since 1988.^[4]

Thanks be to God, Katherine has a look alike, and so the funeral, elements of tempo seen here, was actually for her look-alike, Marge, as the car in which they were both driving accidentally crashed into a wooded area of Genoa City, Wisconsin. G.C. *is* Green Bay. So, to my fellow Jets fans – and thanks for letting Brett go a year too soon. Your act, as well as the act of giving a billionaire’s funeral to a homeless alcoholic were truly acts of grace.

AMAZING grace, though, what’s that all about? In short, the English slave trader John Newton, whose story is again better told by the friends at the Wikipedia than me – “

John Newton, the author of the lyrics to Amazing Grace, was born in 1725 in Wapping, Britain. Despite the powerful message of “Amazing Grace,” Newton’s religious beliefs initially lacked conviction; his youth was marked by religious confusion and a lack of moral self-control and discipline.

After a brief time in the Royal Navy, Newton began his career in slave trading. The turning point in Newton’s spiritual life was a violent storm that occurred one night while at sea. Moments after he left the deck, the crewman who had taken his place was swept overboard. Although he manned the vessel for the remainder of the tempest, he later commented that, throughout the tumult, he realized his helplessness and concluded that only the grace of God could save him. Prodded by what he had read in Thomas à Kempis‘ Imitation of Christ, Newton took the first step toward accepting faith.

These incidents and his 1750 marriage to Mary Catlett changed Newton significantly. On his slave voyages, he encouraged the sailors under his charge to pray. He also began to ensure that every member of his crew treated their human cargo with gentleness and concern. Nevertheless, it would be another 40 years until Newton openly challenged the trafficking of slaves.

Tempo Graphic:

Some three years after his marriage, Newton suffered a stroke that prevented him from returning to sea; in time, he interpreted this as another step in his spiritual voyage. He assumed a post in the Customs Office in the port of Liverpool and began to explore Christianity more fully. As Newton attempted to experience all the various expressions of Christianity, it became clear that he was being called to the ministry. Since Newton lacked a university degree, he could not be ordained through normal channels. However, the landlord of the parish at Olney was so impressed with the letters Newton had written about his conversion that he offered the church to Newton; he was ordained in June 1764.

In Olney, the new curate met the poet William Cowper, also a newly-born Christian. Their friendship led to a spiritual collaboration that completed the inspiration for “Amazing Grace,” the poem Newton most likely wrote in Kineton, Warwickshire around Christmas 1772. The lyrics are based on his reflections on an Old Testament text he was preparing to preach on, adding his perspective about his own conversion while on his slave ship, the Greyhound, in 1748.

Newton’s lyrics have become a favourite for Christians, largely because the hymn vividly and briefly sums up the doctrine of divine grace. The lyrics are b

Meanspeed™ Music Graph, © 2008

ased on 1 Chronicles 17:16-17, a prayer of King David in which he marvels at God’s choosing him and his house. Newton apparently wrote this for use in a sermon he preached on this passage on New Year’s Day 1773, and for which he left his sermon notes, which correspond to the flow of the lyrics. (He entitled the piece “Faith’s review and expectation.”)

The song has also become known as a favorite with supporters of freedom and human rights, both Christian and non-Christian, in part because many assume it to be Newton’s testimony about his slave trading past.

The hymn was quite popular on both sides in the American Civil War.”

SO: Also amazingly snuck in was a celebration of the victory of Barack Obama as President. As I was listening to it, I thought, I know there are 7 or 11 verses, and they cannot fit but two in time, yet there was one strange verse that I never had heard before, even in my tenure as a church composer (http://www.heavenlyrest.org). This mystery is again solved by the folks, friends and library types at the Wikipedia, and it fits as well as the Young and the Restless, with their family relationships, fits into talking points about contemporary American life. They sang the verse referred to below:

Extra verses

In her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe quoted three stanzas as seemingly from one hymn, two of them corrupt versions of Amazing Grace stanzas, and one reading:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining like the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.

Despite its relatively poor mesh with the rest of the hymn (the change from “I” to “we,” change of subject, no reference for “there”), a form of this stanza became common as part of Amazing Grace in hymnals in the early twentieth century, due in large part to the influential hymnodist and publisher Edwin Othello Excell. While the stanza is often credited to John P. Rees (1828-1900), it antedates his birth. It was in print by 1790, added to an old and widely-varied hymn most usually beginning “Jerusalem, my happy home” , and was still appearing as part of this hymn in books published around the time of Stowe’s book.”

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
hymn=”Amazing Grace”
performers=Bryton, as Devon Hamilton and Jamia Simone Nash, as Anastasia Hamilton
television event=Young and the Restless character Katherine Chancellor’s funeral
average beat=0.857 seconds
mean speed/average tempo/median velocity=70.0 beats per minute
emotional concept as predicted by the meanspeed conjecture=grace
emotional concept as performed=grace

Ian Schneider Esq
November 24, 2008