As John Gilhooly, chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society, balefully revealed on Tuesday night’s RPS awards, for all their cultural, musical, and music-educational good intentions, the main parties’ manifestos devote scarcely a few paragraphs between them to culture and music (in fact, only the Conservative Party’s manifesto mentions “music” at all, a total of once).
But music and politics weren’t always such strange bedfellows – in times past the two have been symbiotically connected, as these 10 pieces reveal. (As proof that this idea of music and social change is a vital creative catalyst for today’s composers, head to the London Sinfonietta’s Notes to the New Government concert on Saturday, which will feature the premiere of 16 new songs with composers’ visions of what social renewal they would like to see.)
Hanns Eisler: Solidarity Song
Written with Bertolt Brecht in the early 1930s, Eisler came up with one of the most memorable tunes in political-music history, an anthem of Weimar-republic militancy that hymns the unity of the workers of the world.
Cornelius Cardew: Smash the Social Contract
Cardew’s revolutionary songs from the last years of his tragically short life are explicitly designed to provoke and promote the socialist society he dreamed of realising.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Hymnen
Stockhausen’s piece creates a supra-political, supra-nationalist, supra-ideological utopia from its mixing of electronic music and 40 of the world’s national anthems, creating and climaxing with a massive avant-garde anthem of the cosmos, or rather, a utopian realm of “Hymunion in Harmondie Inter Pluramon”, as Stockhausen puts it.
Ethel Smyth: March of the Women
The suffragettes’ anthem, penned by Smyth in 1910 and acclaimed by the suffragette newspaper, Votes for Women, as both a “hymn and a call to battle”. Of its innumerable renditions that Smyth herself led, including at the Royal Albert Hall in 1911, the most famous must be the performance she conducted at Holloway prison in 1912, leaning out of her cell window and directing her fellow inmates with a toothbrush.
Alan Bush
One of Britain’s most politically committed composers in the 20th century, Bush composed a Piano Concerto that concludes with a choral setting of part of the communist manifesto. This Fantasia on Soviet Themes might be less overt, but was composed in 1943 as a tribute to Russian revolutionary heroism.
Sibelius: Finlandia
The unofficial anthem of Finnish independence from Russia, and written in 1899-1900 as a protest against the censorship of the Russian occupation, Finlandia became the symbol of the emergent country’s identity – and it still is today, nearly a century after Finland won its independence, as this performance from the opening of Helsinki’s concert hall in 2011 proves.
Beethoven: Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony
Beethoven’s universalist politics, embodied in the unifying motive of the “Ode to Joy” tune, have been variously co-opted and corrupted by successive autocratic and democratic regimes; Beethoven’s deliberately unforgettable tune is now the anthem of the European Union.
Arne: Rule, Britannia!
Thomas Arne’s tune from his opera Alfred was so popular in the mid 18th-century that the Jacobites turned it into one of their songs of protest against the Hanoverians – a long-forgotten association now that it has become the anthem of whatever it is that British patriotism means today.
The East Is Red
All of the above, however, pale in comparison for sheer political and populist power next to this tune, the anthem of Mao’s China, arguably as close as we have in the music-historical record as the sound of pure ideology turned into song. Not that the communists had a monopoly on musical tub-thumping – the fascists knew the power of a good (or rather, a bad ...) tune.
D:Ream: Things Can Only Get Better
D:Ream’s dream lies in tatters around their synthesisers, their reveries of third-way ideals as ruinous as Peter Mandelson’s dancing, as exploded and atomised as one of Dr Brian Cox’s supernovae, their anthem to hope and prosperity now coming over like an ironic smirk on the lips of Anthony Blair’s well-holidayed visage … Still, things can, er, only, you know, get – well, a little bit good-er, after today, can’t they? Can’t they ...
