Great art makes no concession to MAGA sensibilities
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra recently performed two pieces that could easily be banned in states like Florida.
I love about great cities like Chicago. The energy and industry. The diversity and creativity. The order and the chaos. And I love the devotion big cities have to artistic performance at the highest level.
I know plenty of people think ballet and opera and orchestral music are elitist. Maybe they have been. But great art has power that transcends its patrons, makes all our lives richer, and even confronts the political realities of our current era.
Two pieces I heard performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recently make this point.
Banner is the name of the first piece. It was written in 2014 as a tribute to the 200th anniversary of the Star Spangled Banner. Composer Jessie Montgomery is young black woman who grew up in Manhattan. For those of you have think classical music is either really old or really hard to listen to, think again. A lot of contemporary classical music, music written in this century, is easier to experience than music written after World War II. While these pieces, like all art, become more meaningful when you have time to contemplate them, their immediate impact is not off putting like many post war pieces, and instead draws listeners in. Today, much of this music is composed by women.
Photo courtesy The Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Banner takes the form of a marching band but is much more complex and layered. It sets a group of four musicians, a quartet, up against a large orchestra. The smaller group is striving to be heard. Through the piece we hear the interplay between that group and the larger society. By the time the piece ends, the group has maintained its identity and yet contributed greatly to richness of the larger ensemble. That’s a music making a powerful aspirational statement for our country. And it feels right.
Strains of the Star Spangled Banner are heard, as are parts of Lift Every Voice and Sing, which is known as the Black national anthem. I caught some other bits of sound evoking more groups of Americans, from our folk songs to our martial rhythms. These all exist both self-referentially and as part of the music’s collective forward motion. Again, the music moves us emotionally as it tells us we make progress when every voice is heard.
The composer wrote that “a tribute to the US National Anthem means acknowledging the contradictions, leaps and bound, and milestones that allow us to celebrate and maintain the tradition of our ideals.” In my view that’s a bar she cleared with Banner.
The second piece, Cantus arcticus, is a concerto for birds and orchestra by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. He went up to Arctic marshlands in northern Finland to record bird songs for the piece. These recorded sounds and the composed music then work together. In some ways you can think of the composed piece like a film score underneath a nature scene. But that isn’t quite right. The music is not commentary on the natural sounds. They recorded bird sound and the musicians notes form one coherent piece.
It is impossible to hear this music without taking away a strong sense of our connection to the natural world. Not that the environment exists separately from humanity, but that our own humanity requires the connection.
Many people think classical music has nothing to do with the fights we are in. That’s not right. Great art speaks very directly to our world, and these two pieces are good examples.
They are also both pieces of music that could very easily now be banned in the state of Florida and in other places where MAGA autocrats want to determine what you think. One is overtly multicultural and makes claims that American history and Black American history cannot be disaggregated. The other tells us that we cannot corrupt the environment without corrupting ourselves.
There is truth in this great art. And it is so much more interesting than speculating on the date of Mr. Trump’s indictment.