When has music been used for violence and when it has been used for harmony? A look at the collective nature of music particularly through Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said, and the East-West Divan Orchestra.
11th Nov 2023
As the bombing continues in Gaza, this gloomy winter Saturday in London seems to pass much like the rest. Mist, rain, and a chill so bone-deep the sun becomes a distant concept. If you take a moment to look closely however, you’ll see that this particular Saturday is different. The air has a strange tinge in it. I can see it reflected in the puddles on the road, even as they drench my legs, ensuring every next step I take is accompanied by a strange atonal piece. I am late; I must run to make the performance in time.
The sound of Mendelssohn can be heard on the Southbank. Not a unique occurrence in the slightest, the Royal Festival Hall draws orchestras from many walks of life to its doors. No, what is astonishingly unique to this String Quintet is that it is being played by musicians from both Israeli and Palestinian heritage. Directing them is Michael Barenboim, son to concert pianist and former musical director of both the Berlin Staatskapelle and Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim. The repertoire is packed, much like the venue itself on this night and as the last few notes of Beethoven lull into silence the audience erupts. There are many tears, for this orchestra has come to represent – for better or for worse – so much to many people, but especially to people dying 3000 miles away.
In the mid 1990s Palestinian academic Edward Said and the aforementioned Argentine born Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim met in a London hotel. A remarkable friendship soon ensued and by late 1999 the East-West Divan Orchestra was born. This was a personal project of theirs, in which musicians from all over the Arab world would come to play together. This includes musicians from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Israel and Palestine. Their base was set in Seville, the heart of former Arab Spain, a place where once Arab, Jews, and Christians had lived in harmony for seven centuries. Their name taken from an anthology of poems by German writer Goethe, in which themes of the Eastern ‘other’ play a crucial role. All these details were important to the two founders, who understood the significance of sending the right message.
As international media stirred and tours cemented the quality of the music, the orchestra reached a major milestone when in 2005 they held a concert in Ramallah. The performance was held in the Palestinian Cultural Place to a very divided Palestinian crowd. Some seeing the orchestra as a model of what peaceful coexistence could look like, of the harmony among the players, of which you could not decipher who was Palestinian and who was Jew. Others, as a tangible reminder that life before Israeli checkpoints is over, they would never again be free of their oppressor.
The real curiosity of this orchestra lies in what the music represents to the players. In the process of making music, these irrevocably different people work tangentially to each other. Where they intersect is at a respect for the musical hierarchy as dictated to them by the sheet music. Written in Barenboim’s book Everything is Connected “They know which note must stand out when and honour that note. The individuality of the musical lines are all expressed within this hierarchy but more than this all these lines are of equal value; one may stand out more to the audience than the other but the way the line presents itself is coloured by harmony surrounding it.” As utopian as this all is within the sphere of a musical piece, practicalities prevent its implementation in anything other than music. I’m certain the continuous musical dialogue has made the more stagnated verbal dialogue between these people in the orchestra considerably easier. Barenboim himself attests to that. Yet, the question that all this prompts me to ask is this: is music really all that peaceful?
In recent years the debate on the morality of music has reigned supreme. As Alex Ross, author of the popular book The Rest Is Noise writes: “In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language.” However, in the age of the highly political and ‘cancel-culture’ the ability to play as Switzerland is lost. The impact that music has, not only on the deeply personal, but also on the global, has inspired much recent academia.
It has been said, by no less than Edward Said himself, that all music is a little bit subversive. This of course, like everything he has said, is true. By this breadth we often discuss the unifying nature of music, the speech of failed words, the food of love, the soothing of the savage beast. We discuss Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Its synonymity with both protest and peace. We discuss its playing on New Year’s Day of 1918 commemorating the end of the first world war, or more recently its 1989 Christmas Day recital, to mark to fall of the Berlin Wall. What we admittedly discuss less is that at the time of its composition, there was a great effort by the government of Austria to censor performances of the piece due to its ‘Napoleonic sympathies’ and ‘ability to entice riot.’
Music as Harmony
Sprawling in many shapes across my desk are stacks of academic papers. Their content all pertaining to musical censorship practices in various places and circumstances around the world. I pick apart from the stack a paper by Fred Mazelis, titled “The legacy of Dmitri Shostakovich.” Shostakovich is perhaps our most well-acquainted example of a musician working under musical censorship. His legacy is a contested one, with arguments ranging for him being a fierce Stalinist all the way to him being a firm anti-communist. The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in between these two extremities. It is said that if you play Shostakovich with a mournful austerity and ostentatious mocking his sound transcends into something perhaps not relatable to all, but for certain understood by all. Mazelis sums it up brilliantly in his paper, “Shostakovich suffered and testified. His music conveying a shared experience of the people at the time, one of demoralisation to the 1917 revolution and of the fear of living in Stalinist Russia.”
On the other side of the Iron Curtain; another kind of censorship was happening. The civil rights movement of America was in full swing. During this time the U.S radio enforces a ban Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
For whoever could forget lyrics such as,
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit.
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
Its sympathies to black people killed by lynchings in the South left a sour taste in the mouth of white mainstream radio producers, who worried the song advocated a little too strongly for black rights.
In the theme of protest and of revolution I pick up another paper from my desk, written by William Yu for the South China Morning Post, it transports me to 2019. News headlines accompanied by images of blue dyed water sprayed by cannons aiming at amassed protesters plastered all across my TV screen. The 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy movement is impressive in many ways. Their novel ‘flow like water’ police evasion technique, their unity, and their determination in the face of wanning autonomy. Impressive too, is their music. ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ is a protest song that became the unofficial anthem of the pro-democracy protests. It’s primary composer, only known as the elusive “Thomas” remains anonymous, much in theme with the leaderless movement. The song was first found on the LIHKG forum – likened as the Hong Kong version of reddit. Originally written in Cantonese it was composed in order to unite and boost the morale of protesters. Yu writes about the song: “since its composition it has been heard in most demonstrations; Its sound becoming synonymous with the protests.”
Although, for Vivienne Chow, it runs much deeper than just that. A prominent pro-democracy protester for many years she writes in her article for The New York Times: “Never had I imagined there could be a song, sung in my native tongue of Cantonese, rather than English, or Mandarin, that could evoke such a sense of pride and belonging.” The language the song is written in – Cantonese – is a key theme here. For many, Cantonese is political. It has been made so by the many years of pro-Mandarin policies by the Chinese Communist Party, and conversely the repression of the Cantonese language – post the 1997 handover – in public spheres, such as entertainment and education. The language of the song is a form of protest in itself, synonymous with the Hong Kong identity. Chow expands: “under British colonial rule and then struggling to find my place after Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1997, the experience of hearing “Glory to Hong Kong” has been transformative.”
Clearly “Glory to Hong Kong” has been transformative to many people as in 2023, the Hong Kong Department of Justice attempts to ban the song, citing it’s promotion of subversion, collusion, and terrorism. Authorities have been erasing traces of the song online, removing it from streaming platforms such as iTunes and Spotify, going as far as petitioning to Google to have the song removed from the search engine. The high court however has rejected an outright ban, ruling that granting it could have “chilling effects” on freedom of speech.
The common thread running through all these papers is this: music acts to empower marginalised communities and therefore becomes something an authority must fear and regulate. What I found here verifies music’s use as a potential tool ‘by the people, for the people’ has always been understood. It’s censorship only confirming its subversive nature as a benefit to the people it serves. Music’s essence – as by these examples – is profoundly social, emerging from a need within a given social and cultural context.
Amongst these handful of cases however, there are inconstancies. Beethoven, Shostakovich, and Billie Holiday are known to have inspired people to greatness, but what about those who haven’t?
Music As Torture
Richard Wagner, born 1813, is a German composer. Considered ‘the father’ of modern music, his work revolutionised more formal types of musical construction. For some, he is known for The Ride of the Valkyries’ piece, used in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now.’ For others, his fame stems from being the favourite composer of Hitler.
Wagner was openly very antisemitic. So antisemitic infact, that published in 1850 were a series of essays by him, one of which was titled Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music). It is one long and vile rambling, arguing that Jews have degraded European music and art. In-between that, and his nationalistic operas, he was a hero under Hitler and Nazism. Every Nuremberg rally opened with his overture from Rienzi, uniting the crowd. Evidence even suggests his music was used at the Dachau concentration camp in 1933 for the purpose of ‘re-education’ of political prisoners.
Complex dissections to separate head from heart, or morality from art, are unnecessary. In modern philosophies commonplace is the notion that the artist does not have to be nearly as beautiful as the art. We can also all understand that Hitler loved music because many humans – including evil ones – love music. However, in the case of Wagner his adaptation into Nazi ideology has traumatised too many people. Paul Lawrence Rose, author of Wagner: Race and Revolution goes a step further. He writes “There was a Holocaust and Wagner’s self-righteous ravings, sublimated into his music, were one of the most potent elements in creating the mentality that made such an enormity thinkable.” Although the argument that Wagner made Nazism possible is far-fetched; It is true that the regime’s use of his music did contribute to some of the nationalistic conditions necessary for Nazism to thrive.
In Israel today an informal ban on his music is still ongoing. Only broken twice, of which once is over ten years ago, under Daniel Barenboim’s tutelage. Speaking to journalist James Rampton a few years after the event, Barenboim recollects hearing a ringtone during the Israel festival that year. “The telephone’s ring was ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ by Wagner,” the conductor recounts. “And I thought, ‘If it can be heard on the ring of a telephone, why can’t it be played in a concert hall?’”
Rather ironically, the music that harmed became an invitation to heal. How true this is for everyone is a personal matter but for Barenboim, he has always maintained “there is a crisis in Israeli society because we’re not getting rid of certain taboos; we must move on.”
If we take a moment to look beyond the misuse of composers with grotesque personal beliefs, we encounter new issues still. A flurry of academic studies all cluster on my computer screen to warn me of the many problems with specifically modern music. More Nazi musical sadism, noise pollution, psychological operations, where to begin? As extensive a list as music’s strengths included, it’s more recent violence seems to stretch just as far and wide.
Conclusions on the contemporary politics of music was first thrust into the mainstream on Christmas Day of 1989, when the media’s attention turned to a curious story happening in Panama. When the US army attempted to forcibly eject Manuel Noriega from his seat as the Panamanian leader, he took refuge. His location of choice was the Holy See embassy and much like the recent Julian Assange case, the international treaty of diplomatic relations prevented the U. S’s forced entry. For many days Noriega refused to leave. When reporters arrived onto the scene, they struggled to make sense not only of what they saw, but of what they heard. AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” was blaring from the many loudspeakers set up around the perimeter.
The Psychological-Operations unit within the army troops had agreed that an “acoustic bombardment” would aid in his surrender. They believed that Noriega, a known fan of classical music and operas, would have a particular distaste for “those American thighs,” hoping the roaring timbre of heavy metal would drive him mad. For three days and three nights the sound of screaming voices and loud helicopter landings reigned supreme, that is until The Holy See called in a favour from then President George Bush Sr. The President was not a fan of the spectacle, or the media frenzy surrounding it, calling the whole thing “irritating and petty” ordering it immediately stopped. A few days later Noriega left the embassy of his own volition, where he was then detained and taken to the U.S. Their job done; the Psychological-Operations unit was left unperturbed by the President’s criticism. They were of the opinion that they had stumbled upon something far more valuable.
Since then, music has been readily adopted into American military campaigns, becoming a defining feature of the Iraq war. It has also been used as a form of ‘non-lethal’ torture by the CIA in high security prisons such as Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners of war, mostly alleged Muslim terrorists, were often played popular songs for days on end. Heavy metal and rap are thought to be the more popular choice by the torturers, including Eminem’s The real Slim Shady and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. “Generally coded masculine in mainstream US culture, metal and rap are musics that those who don’t identify with them often hear as embodying the sounds of masculine rage.” Writes music historian Suzanne Cusick in her 2006 paper, Music as a Weapon. She continues, “thus they may seem, to soldiers in the field, to “torture” Muslim men by creating a soundscape in which US men defeat them in a struggle of masculinities.” And torture them they did, for many days and many nights the detainees were subjected to this music on repeat until it broke them. Once broken, prisoners are much more likely to hand-over information.
Specific accounts by a handful of detainees also mention Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time and Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty distinctly feminine pop with sexually provocative lyrics. The focal point of torture is much similar to the heavy metal example prior: continuous cultural offence.
The objective is for the prisoners – willingly or unwillingly – to talk. This is achieved by the disintegration of identity. What is curious about this ‘non-lethal’ torture methods is that it relies wholly on isolation in order to be effective. First, the prisoners are separated, second tied, third blindfolded. Sensory deprivation denies them any form of solidarity and it is in these cases that music aids in shattering primary beliefs of self. Conversely, the same music, to a crowd of adoring fans, collectively enjoying the music, has a distinctly different effect. Britney Spears is thought to be the founder of ‘girlie pop’ a genre many women have not only enjoyed but felt empowered by, me included. The thought of “my loneliness is killing me” meaning anything other than the teenage angst of a young break-up I find difficult to grasp. Yet, I’m sure that everyone has their own personal Guantanamo Bay torture music. Ponder on it perhaps? A song you find so distasteful, its hard to get to the end without cringing at least once.
The Peace Process
Back in the Royal Festival Hall, the East-West Divan Orchestra finished long ago. I am yet to break-off my applause, perhaps an overzealous reaction for I have been following the orchestra for a long time, but my self-awareness does nothing to stop me. Michael Barenboim bows for what must be the tenth time. I look around to the rest of the audience, they too still clapping. This night, we have had the privilege in becoming part of this collective. All of us distinctly aware how much this orchestra has overcome to be here.
The events of October 7th loom overhead above us all, filling the air with a strange tension. The two-state solution in tatters, and a dwindling Palestinian population dwindles even further. Acts such as The East-West Divan Orchestra provide very little to the people it aimed to help. What is a collaborative orchestra to you when you’re loved ones are recently dead and buried by air strikes?
There is no credible response to this statement. An orchestra cannot bring about a ceasefire. That pure logic could tell you. Nonetheless, The East-West Divan orchestra’s existence is evidence of the great depth of music. Music has taken the role of diplomat. It has fostered productive conversations primarily driven by understanding of the polyphony, both in life and music. It has done this by providing something so unique only music could have provided it. A suitable foundation. As Barenboim conducts it, “all are equal before Beethoven.”