The idea was always a ludicrous one: to reduce millennia of human musical history – not to mention billennia of the Earth’s sonic geology – into a book of 50 pieces of music. And yet that’s the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? To which my answer was: the inevitable failures and gaps of the project are precisely where its interest lies.
The next concern was how. Called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, the book is not a digested history of music, nor a list of my favourite songs, performances or recordings. Instead, it’s centred on the definition of a “piece of music”. This is a democratic principle – a belief that works don’t belong only to their creators but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians at distances of time, geography and technology, in ways their original composers and performers could not imagine.
The point of a piece of music is not to exist in a definitive version – be it a recording, a single performance or even a fixed score – but to be continually remade in a cycle of transformation, in which the experience of the piece belongs to anyone who plays or hears it. This way of thinking throws up unexpected and serendipitous connections. Before writing the book, I wouldn’t have thought there were resonances between Beethoven, Mildred and Patty J Hill, and Shostakovich. Yet all have written music that reveals what happens when, whether by accident or design, you dream of musical utopias and write tunes for the whole world.
Let’s take Beethoven first, and his Ninth (“Choral”) Symphony. The final movement is the moment when instrumental music alone cannot sustain the full power of Beethoven’s message. The Ode to Joy melody emerges first as a hymn for the cellos and basses to sing, before the tune takes over the whole orchestra – and ushers in the voices of Beethoven’s chorus. The Ode to Joy is Beethoven’s theme of themes, setting Friedrich Schiller’s proto-revolutionary text. It is a dream of universal compassion, a message of sublime connection conveying the essentially humanist philosophy of Beethoven’s music.
His own sketches show how hard the composer worked to arrive at a tune that could be simple and satisfying enough for a new world to sing. And it worked. The success – and the curse – of The Ode to Joy melody is that Beethoven achieved his wish. The idea of “joy” may seem to be apolitical but, taken on its own, the melody can be attached to any ideology you want.
The Ode to Joy was used to soundtrack the hopes for freedom and democracy in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, with students blasting it from makeshift speakers as the tanks rolled in. It was sung after the fall of the Berlin Wall the same year, with “Freude” (joy) changed to “Freiheit” (freedom).
But the tune has also been made into an ode to hate, twisted by the Nazis to mean, as Beethoven’s biographer Jan Swafford puts it, not that “all people should be brothers” but that “nonbrothers should be exterminated”. Beethoven’s tune is the anthem of the European Union, but it was also the national anthem of apartheid Rhodesia. And, after one performance, Stalin declared: “This is the right music for the masses.” It’s not that Ode to Joy hasn’t worked as a song that everyone can sing – it’s that it’s worked too well. That is the problem with musical utopias: they can be all too easily mobilised for political propaganda, whatever the ideals of their creators.
As for Mildred and Patty J Hill, the only utopia they were dreaming of when they wrote the tune we now know as Happy Birthday, was to compose a song for their kindergarten students to welcome the new day. The words were originally Good Morning to All, and were only changed on a whim when the sisters wanted to wish a friend happy birthday in a cabin in Kentucky in the 1890s. From that simple act of creative generosity, the Happy Birthday melody went on to become the planet’s most recognisable melody, the one tune that unites cultures, communities and families.
But the story of Happy Birthday isn’t only a celebration of how – thanks to printing, early broadcast technology, and sheer earworminess – a humble melody got into the world’s consciousness and stuck. It is also a story of corporate greed and courtroom drama. The Hill sisters wanted the tune to be part of our creative commons, but after 1933, when the melody appeared in Irving Berlin’s musical As Thousands Cheer, lawyers and publishers began to make claims for payment for its use.
In 1988, Warner Chappell became Happy Birthday’s legal custodians, having bought the rights for $22m (£16m). The music publisher made an estimated $2m (£1.5m) a year when the tune was used across public media and in places where music was licensed, including restaurants. It is only thanks to the film-maker Jenn Nelson, who won a case in 2016 that asserted the melody didn’t belong to the publisher but to all of us who sing it, that the tune and its words became legally as well as musically part of the world’s “common property”, as Patty J Hill put it. Where she and her sister always wanted it to be.
But tunes that everyone can remember, that we can all hum or sing, aren’t always expressions of our common humanity. They can also represent the curdling of community into the violence of crowds; the virus of everyday evil growing unchecked to take over the whole of society. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, “the Leningrad”, was performed in that besieged city in 1942, after arguably the world’s single most courageous act of orchestra-building, in the face of the Nazi onslaught.
After a conventional enough opening, the music in the first movement dissolves to single lines of woodwind. And, at just this moment of seeming calm and tranquility, Shostakovich’s symphony becomes a place of insidious terror. In the distance is the tattoo of a militaristic rhythm on a side-drum, before a melody begins in the solo flute. The instantly memorable yet ordinary tune doesn’t do anything “symphonic”: it repeats and repeats, louder and louder, building eventually into a violent orchestral juggernaut.
It is a satirical tune, deliberately stupid, based on music by Franz Léhar, who was a favourite of Hitler’s. The “we’re off to Maxim’s” melody, from Léhar’s frothy operetta The Merry Widow, seems to be attempting to steamroller the symphony out of existence, echoing what the Nazis were trying to do to Leningrad. But it’s more than that. Talking about this devastating passage of his symphony, Shostakovich said: “Music can never be literally tied to a theme. This music is about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit.” His piece wasn’t only about Nazism, “but about our [Russian] system, or any form of totalitarian regime”.
This passage is a traumatic experience from which the rest of the symphony will try to recover. In its finale, the music vindicates the optimism of its opening moments in one of orchestral music’s most jaw-dropping spectacles of hard-won victory. That’s how this piece was played and interpreted by audiences all over the world during the second world war, when it was broadcast from London and New York, after the score had been microfilmed and flown in secret out of Russia.
Yet the symphony finds itself in a contested position today. There’s Shostakovich the composer and freedom-fighter versus the Shostakovich used by Putin’s regime in the 2020s for nationalistic propaganda. In a speech in August 2022, six months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin spoke at an 80th anniversary performance of the symphony by the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra: “Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony continues to evoke the strongest feelings in new generations,” he said. “It makes them share in the bitterness of loss and the joy of victory, love for the Motherland and readiness to defend it.”
Putin was enlisting Shostakovich’s symphony, and the young orchestral players who were performing it, as surrogate soldiers: part of the same war effort that sends Russia’s youth to the frontline. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, the symphony is performed to embody resistance to exactly the kind of autocracy and despotism represented by Putin’s Russia.
These are tunes for the whole world, capturing our complex history. This collective music-making reflects the whole of humanity: it will not be limited to parts or readings that certain individuals may want to champion, however laudable and virtuous. Instead, for better and for worse, it encapsulates the entirety of who we are.
• A History of the World in 50 Pieces: The Classical Music That Shapes Us by Tom Service is published by Ebury (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
