Music To Die For
Stirring, Thrilling
For a better view in your browser, click here.
It’s been a week when an egotist given extraordinary power abruptly stopped programs and food aid and that support people in desperate need.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” gloated Elon Musk.
What a fitting image for today’s morality: a billionaire, the richest man in the world, abruptly yanking food aid from the mouths of the world’s poorest people. And boasting of it. Meanwhile, his boss promotes ethnic cleansing.
In the face of a world going headlong in the wrong direction, we naturally look for places of sanity and refuge. Can we still find solace in music?
I duck, fast. The pointed wooden object hurtles past my right ear. Nearly hit me. The intended targets are in the row in front of me, but he missed. When he hurls his baton, he has a lousy aim and every kid needs to be ready to duck.
“JeeSUS,” he bellows. Mr. Rutherford has red hair and a ruddy face that glistens with sweat. He glares at the kids that his missile missed.
“What is the matter with you? I can’t believe you did that again!” Some of the flute and clarinet players came in a beat too early.
He throws his exasperated, baton-free arms up in the air.
“You… are...impossible!” We hold our breaths, steal glances at each other.
When the orchestra practices began a month ago, older kids in the school warned us about Mr. Rutherford’s “Irish temper”. Whatever its nationality, our goofs inflamed it to the breaking point. It didn’t help that the rousing piece we were practicing, “March of the Sardars”, was so stirring.
The march has a military mood. Would Mr. R. have yelled and heaved his baton if we had fouled up while playing slow, romantic music?
Stirring Music, To Die For
I recently came across a YouTube channel, “Best military motivation songs.” I listened to the music from various countries that’s designed to spur on their warriors. It reminded me of the lines from Shakespeare’s Othello:
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, …
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
Fife and drum, spirit-stirring. Powering soldiers to march, kill, or be killed. In glorious war.
Steady the Drums and Fifes! (Peninsula War, 1811) by Lady Elizabeth Butler
In the summer I turned 13, I went to a famed all-boys camp in the lakes-and-forest wilderness of Ontario. It prided itself on turning boys into men. It would be good for me, my dad said. One day after breakfast, the staff assembled all the boys outdoors on the grassy lawn between Camp Ahmek’s big dining hall and the lake. They lined us up in rows and columns, like an army battalion. They taught us a song, then drilled us on how to march in step with its rhythm.
We marched, our bodies pulsing to a common beat, and we sang, full-throated:
We are those men, Who are stout-hearted men, Who will fight for the rights we adore. Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder, We will soon be ten thousand more…
This was inspirational, manly. The music surged in us marching boys, awakening something new: we could be warriors. Valiant ones. And passionate for our righteous cause—though we had not the slightest idea what that might turn out to be.
It had been sung by Nelson Eddy in a 1940 movie, New Moon. Nelson, an opera singer before being discovered by Hollywood, studied voice in Germany and loved Wagner. He learned the technique of helden, the heroic sound—noble, exhilarating. Listen here to him singing the charged, rousing We are those men, Who are stout-hearted men, Who will fight for the rights…
Who could not want to join his cause?
The Glory of Mortal Combat
As the years went by, though, I became increasingly skeptical about the glory of mortal combat. Blood-stirring music began to arouse conflicting emotions. An example is Joseph Haydn’s inspiring music that became Germany’s national anthem. The words began with Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt: Germany above all, Above all in the world. The words were exploited by the Nazis to stir up fervent nationalism, and we all know where that ended up.
Due to its association with Nazi Germany, the verse that included “Germany above all in the world” was dropped after the war. Yet—in my mind, the murderous use of Haydn’s wonderful music makes if forever contaminated.
The Allies snatched a big prize from the Germans by adopting the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as their trademark. They are the famed Da-da-da-daaaaa, three Gs and an E-flat. They correspond to three dots and a dash in Morse code, the letter “V”—and everybody knew that “V” stood for Victory. This musical signature served as a recurring theme in Allied propaganda broadcasts. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda czar, must have been galled not to have thought of it first!
However, Goebbels’ propaganda machine had plenty of other music to hype up German morale. Les Préludes by Franz Liszt was used as the soundtrack for the film footage of German dive bombers. And famed symbols from Richard Wagner’s operas were used to glorify Nazism, and its racist ideology. Hitler was equated with the Wagnerian hero Siegfried.
Wagner has been a favourite of “our” side, too. In the movie Apocalypse Now, Wagner’s powerful, triumphant Ride of the Valkyries accompanies footage of American helicopters dropping napalm to burn Vietnam. You can see it and hear the music here.
Thrilling and Bloodthirsty
There is no end of examples. The stirring French national anthem, La Marseillaise, is positively bloodthirsty. Marchons, qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons! Let us march! Let (the enemy’s) impure blood water our fields!
During the genocide in Rwanda, 800,000 people were killed, mostly by machete. Radio broadcasts used songs demonizing the Tutsis to stir up the murderous génocidaires. They sang the songs like anthems while they hacked people to death.
In the summer I turned 15, I was thrilled to be able to go to another camp, the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. My skin tingled when I played my trumpet in the National High School Band. We were in the middle of the giant Mackinac Straits Bridge, in the ceremony for its official opening. The piece was Victory at Sea, composed by Richard Rodgers. It was skin-tingling. We did not think about our soaring music celebrating battles to the death.
The other day as I stood washing dishes, the radio beside me was playing Tchaikovsky's exciting 1812 Overture. My heart began to quicken with the exhilaration. Then came the music’s famed climax, a volley of cannon fire. And suddenly I was 12 again, marching.
We are those men who are stout hearted men, who will fight for the rights…
Suddenly a little voice in my head whispered: Hold on. Calm down. Mr. R didn’t, and his baton barely missed you.
And those stirring cannons, they tore bodies apart.
To see other posts on Musings on Medicine and More, click here.
Another interesting, well written essay, Peter. I was unaware of your militant period in those early years. You still managed to turn out alright.
How interesting it is to think of how visceral and intrinsic to the human spirit music is, so that it has been used throughout the centuries, not just for relaxation or pure joy, but also to rouse the killer in us.
Perhaps the very beating of our own hearts gives us an internal rhythm we cannot eschew, and how ironic that it can bring out the worst and the best in us.
Thanks for that awareness.