The Politicization of Music
hello everyone
we’re going to be talking about music
and politics
which is a little ironic for me
because the whole reason i went into
music was so i could avoid politics to
me
music is the ultimate expression of our
shared humanity
kissed by the divine
it’s not to say that music and tribalism
haven’t existed well
ever since people started gathering
around the bonfire
i mean sociologists believe that playing
of rhythms
singing were the very first forms of
human communication
uh it was the first bonding experiences
uh that helped develop hunting skills
agriculture i mean it’s at the very core
of of our social existence as humans
music is our universal language you
can’t
touch it you can’t see it
and the moment we recognize it it goes
away and yet something
remains in our psyche a sense of pure
emotion and i can look out here and i
can know that there are probably a
couple people who wouldn’t
exist if it wasn’t for that sense of
pure emotion that their parents or maybe
grandparents
felt when they heard marvin gaye singing
let’s get it on
uh the the music is also extraordinary
at communicating knowledge on all of us
uh when we’re at the age of three or
four we
learn 26 distinctive
sounds that are at the core of
our language and we learn it so easily
because we all sing it and you all know
what that song is now and you could sing
it with me
a b c d e f g h
i j k element am i am i right
so um music to be able to impart
both knowledge and also emotion
it’s no wonder that in religion and
politics that music has been
a most effective tool our american
landscape
is is wrapped in songs
and anthems that are beloved by most
everyone
and yet now in this day of
uh political polarization
it pains me so deeply because a lot of
our great music
has become polarized as well i’m a
conductor
i have two big responsibilities one is
to the musicians in the orchestra to
make sure that we perform well together
the other is to the music itself and
those composers to make sure
that i represent them with veracity and
good heart every musician in the
orchestra has their single line of music
i have all the lines of music for
everyone
in my score and i spend most of my time
studying
my score i get that music on the written
page
and i hear it inside
of my head sounds tricky and it is
uh but there are some people who are
extraordinary at it like ludwig von
beethoven the great german composer
uh and beethoven spent
a big chunk of his professional life
stone cold death
and so he wasn’t just recreating music
in his mind
he was composing it in his mind
and i think one of the touchstones to
his genius is the fact
that he wasn’t shackled to the physical
world of sound that we all live in
he was able to imagine things that none
of us could even imagine
and then he’d write it down and then we
play it
and then it blows our mind so i have
this sound in my head
of uh a given piece that i’m performing
and in rehearsal
uh i listen to the physical sound that
comes from the orchestra
and to make things line up i might use
hand gestures to speed things up to slow
things down
to bring up the french horns have a
little less violin
but then every once in a while a
musician will
come up with a certain turn of phrase a
certain something that will be really
special
and in an instant i’ll throw out the
sound that i wanted in my brain
and pick up what someone has just
offered and this is a cool thing
about orchestral music is there’s always
this give and take as we are all working
together
to create a unique performance as a pops
conductor i perform mostly
american music everything from popular
classics
to broadway
hollywood pop tunes
and patriotic music a lot of patriotic
music
especially that first week of july you
put together a patriotic program
uh you have a couple susan marx’s you’ll
have
my country tis of these and patriotic
anthems you’ll have a little big band
jazz and broadway and you finish
with the 1812 overture you might not
recognize
the title of this piece but you know it
it’s used in
tv and movies in v for vendetta all of
london is exploding to the sound
of the 1812 overture
yeah it’s got cannons literally the
pieces got cannons
fireworks church bells and what a
perfect way to
end a fourth of july concert well not so
quick
the piece was written by a russian
composer peter
tchaikovsky and uh tchaikovsky is a
brilliant composer
but it’s about the russian war of 1812
the one where they defeated the french
well and
i mean it’s kind of ironic because
really if it wasn’t for the french we
wouldn’t be
celebrating independence day and
uh in the middle of this overture
is this great russian anthem god
save the czar which we’re playing as we
celebrate democracy
that’s kind of crazy but what’s really
crazy
is the way that many of our american
patriotic anthems seem to
uh have been co-opted by the political
french
god bless america by irving berlin
a jewish immigrant seems to now have
become the anthem of the far right
something like this land is your land
this land is my land
uh seems to be some sort of communist
manifesto
i’ll put together a patriotic program
and include some
some r b and soul little funk and people
will say
the program is not american enough well
like the 1812 overture is
or uh that uh we might be considered
jingoistic
for performing the armed forces salute
well even though the military did save
us from worldwide fascism
and abolished slavery in this country
for a terrible
cost but this is not to say that
all patriotic anthems are
uncontroversial
i mean i think back i mean this goes
back for ages
like martin luther in the 16th century
uh the great theologian while he was
rebelling
against the catholic church wanted to
have nothing to do with the latin masses
in chance
so instead he went to the taverns and
started collecting melodies
he said why should the devil get all the
good tunes and then he put words to the
german liturgy
on top of those melodies and thus the
reformation was born
four hundred years later the reverend dr
martin luther king jr
did a very similar thing with the
leadership of the civil rights movement
and they took hymn tunes like if my
jesus wills composed by louise
shropshire from cincinnati ohio
and they refashioned it into we shall
overcome
they used uh songs
from folk music and pop music everything
from bob dylan to aretha r-e-s-p-e-c-t
but even some of our old-timey anthems
like
yankee doodle or the battle him of the
republic
john brown’s bodies a moldrin in the
ground
or helen reddy i am woman hear me roar
or bruce springsteen born in the usa
these are
all protest anthems and today
we have a whole new generation of
composers creating protest anthems i
mean
we have kesha and the artist’s common
lady gaga i mean who’s to say that
uh in a generation or two we won’t be
playing childish gambinos this is
america
right next to glory glory hallelujah
but what makes american music
uniquely american after all a lot of
people
talk about the american experience as
being a melting pot
i prefer a mosaic
everyone comes here with something
special and unique and we put all of
those things together
and it creates this vibrant diverse
picture of our country that is so much
greater
than the summation of its parts
take music for example the vast
vast majority of american music
comes from africa in west africa musical
traditions that go back hundreds of
years
all use the same unique scale it’s
called the pentatonic scale it’s got
five notes
you can play it on the black keys on the
keyboard
that pentatonic scale came to these
shores in the belly
of slave ships and buried deep
in the loam of slavery and injustice
and over the centuries there were two
musical ideas that came from the earth
the spiritual and the blues both
based wholly upon that same pentatonic
scale
those two branches had blossoms
that were cross-pollinated by
music from the british isles hymn
tunes immigrant songs
native american instruments but all by
evolution or appropriation still have
that musical dna from africa
the dna from the music of africa
is in everything uh from
country western bluegrass jazz
rock and roll r b soul funk hip hop
gospel broadway salsa and latin
this music exists because we
exist it is our american musical mosaic
that is beloved
around the world it is our greatest
cultural export
so how did music get caught in the
political crossfires i had the
opportunity of working
with common with the cincinnati symphony
orchestra
and he told me that music
is a great soundtrack but music in and
of itself
is not activism
music that that inspires us
and unites us and excites us has nothing
to do with the politics
that divides us the music that has
been used abused and abducted by
politicians
to deliver their message is invariably
the antithesis of that message
we have to separate the message from the
messenger like beethoven we have to shut
out the noise
around us and find that inner music
that we all share that’s been forged by
centuries of a shared experience
the good the bad and the ugly
in music there’s a term we use often
philharmonic
it’s usually referred to an orchestra
comes from the greek word filos
love harmonic harmony all of us on stage
performing we are lovers of harmony
because we want to sound
good but there’s another level and that
is
the harmony that’s created with audience
members and the orchestra
that unites us in music that the harmony
that we all have in the same space
together
and then another layer of harmony the
harmony that we all
take with us as we go outside into the
world
and interact with people this
is a power of music and in this age of
covid we are so desperately
in need of that harmony
we’re going to finish things up with the
star-spangled banner
yep i’m going to go there the melody to
the star-spangled banner was
composed by john stafford smith
british composer he wrote it at the
height of the american revolution for a
british
social club it’s a drinking song imagine
during the siege of savannah as
colonists are dying
that john stafford smith and his buddies
are clinking glasses
and singing the melody to our national
anthem
it’s a very difficult song to sing and i
encourage you to go check out the flub
reels on youtube it’s a lot of fun
uh the words were written by francis
scott key
for our war of 1812. well we got that
right
uh the first verse we all know very very
well but there are a lot of other verses
and in those verses
some of the words are controversial at
best and racist
at worst and it has only been
our national anthem for the length of
one
lifetime i’m going to suggest something
else
america the beautiful by katherine lee
bates
here is an anthem that celebrates the
fabric
of our american society not a piece of
fabric
it sings about our home our community
purple mountain majesties fruited plains
alabaster cities gleaming
and it has the greatest patriotic lyric
of them all
crown thy good with brotherhood
from sea to shining sea here’s another
great lyric
god mend thy every flaw confirm thy soul
in self-control thy liberty in law i
mean here’s an anthem that freely admits
that we are not perfect but
empowers us and impels us to do
better not just for now but from one
generation to the next
and to the next now that is a bedrock
of patriotism thank you