An initial meeting with books like "How to Write a Chorus: A Guide to Choral", or at least with their title, always arouses suspicion.
After all, the market is saturated with crunchy-weight literary works, full of proven recipes for energetic balance, a smoke-free life, the ability to filter out environmental noise and economic well-being.
On the face of it, there is something pretentious in the title of the book by Uri Peretz-Sharon, a man whose professional training is that of an industrial and management engineer. Not exactly the material from which people like Ehud Manor are cast, let's say. It's almost daring, some songwriters will surely say, trying to find the textual and musical mix to create a catchy hit. If there is one thing that every person in a music industry knows, it is that the secret is that there is no secret. When it comes to chanting, the ability of a song to touch the public, to become a wide-ranging hit or a canonical anthem, depends on far too many moving parts, certainly not just in the application of operating instructions or the right text. And testify to the fact that Netri Barzilai's "Blue" ("De Ba Di") "Nana Banana" or anything that Skatman John has ever stammered.
But this is not exactly true of "how to write a hymn".
Because the pretense of Peretz-Sharon, who also published "How to Write a Story: A Guide to Writing Prose" in 2015, is not to teach his readers to write a hit that captures parades, as he breaks down existing ones with analytical tools.
And that already sounds like something an industrial and management engineer certainly knows how to do, even if the encounter between lyrics and methodology can cause some of us some discomfort.
"'How to Write a Hymn' presents for the first time to Israeli writers a structured overview of the writing theory of sung songs - for its variety of techniques and tools," says the press release.
"The guide is based on extensive professional literature written by well-known musicians and songwriters, and is accompanied by more than two hundred examples from classical and contemporary Hebrew songwriting on how the best writers in the country applied the techniques and tools presented in the book."
Not exactly Hemingway, but more like a practical craft guide.
Maybe too practical.
It's not that there are no interesting points to think about in the book, which is spread over 320 pages.
Breaking down songs like "This Star Is Dead", "Children Are Joy", "Noa of the Sea" or "Clinging in the Air" to their metaphorical structure ("I am a guitar", "You are my country", A is B) definitely helps in understanding Of the mathematical structure that is repeated in quite a few Israeli classics, and these are certainly mentioned here and are presented in huge quantities for the purpose of illustrating the point.
But applying those tools to art creates a feeling of not entirely authentic creation of an overly engineered product.
Phrases such as: "If during writing you want to create a visual rhetorical connection between two concepts that come from different semantic worlds and do not meet in reality, you can use the table below to examine different ways to create a verbal connection between them."
It is not that the author of the book is necessarily a robotic machine that breaks down processes into technical terms.
Quite a few passages here show Peretz-Sharon's understanding of musical texts ("When Yahli Sobol writes in 'A Touching Distance From Here': 'She is calm when horses run in her blood', he means she is calm when heroin is flowing in her blood").
And he is also precise in the chapter that deals with rhyme, when he claims that the less we reduce it - the more freedom we will have in choosing the exact words.
But perhaps this is a principle that should also be applied to books of this kind, which come to teach mechanically those who do not have enough emotion or poetic bone in their bodies, like a set of written rules that must be obeyed intelligently in order to achieve the best result.
And where the mind works - the heart is not the one who leads, and what is a great song if not one that at least tickles the capillaries of emotion.
A song that speaks to us on an educational level, even if characterized by textual juggling (hey, Eric Berman), doesn’t really feel natural in any cultural pantheon.
In interviews with him years ago, Uri says that he is "both humane and realistic" and opposes the dichotomous perception that people belong to only one of the two camps. Nor does he assure you that the story he taught you to write or the chorus you will produce after reading his book will make you the next Yossi Gispen. But what he is trying to do is explain through tables of categories like "line length diversity", "simulations and characterization" and "examples of worn and used expressions", how to create a "correct" song. And most of the time the feeling is that this is a reference to art in a very rational way.
Even the many quotes from Dolly Parton, Sarah McClellan, Hunter Hayes or Nick Cave, do not really make readers feel as if they are being exposed here to the secrets of the great writers.
"The guide is based on a wide repertoire of hymns and extensive professional literature," reads the back of the book.
"'How to Write a Hymn' is intended for both novice and experienced songwriters, who want to develop the skill of writing a real, touching song, which gives us an experience. That has something deep in it that is beyond. A song that continues to accompany the listener for life."
It is not clear how many such songs were actually written thanks to such guides, but one can guess not many.
If your ambition is nevertheless to integrate into the singing and chanting industry, you can always take advantage of the special benefit that appears at the end of the book, which entitles you to experience working with a choral editor at a nominal price.
Just send a draft song to the email address attached to the page.
Just like Dylan does, presumably.
How to Write a Hymn: A Guide to Hymns / Uri Peretz-Sharon, 320 pages, Christian Writing Publishing