Even Merry Christmas Has a Dark Side: My Quest to Tell World History in 50 Pieces of Music | classical music

TThe idea was always ludicrous: to condense thousands of years of human musical history – not to mention thousands of years of Earth’s acoustic geology – into a book of fifty pieces of music. However, this is the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? My answer to him was that the project’s inevitable failures and loopholes were precisely what its interest lay in.

The next concern was how. The book is called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, and it is neither a brief history of music, nor a list of my favorite songs, performances, or recordings. Instead, he focuses on the definition of a “piece of music.” This is a democratic principle – the belief that works not only belong to their creators, but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians over distances of time, geography and technology, in ways that the original composers and performers could not have imagined.

A piece of music is not intended to exist in a final version – be it a recording, a solo performance, or even a fixed score – but to be constantly reproduced in a cycle of transformation, where the experience of the piece belongs to whoever plays or hears it. This way of thinking sparks unexpected and serendipitous connections. Before writing the book, I didn’t think there were echoes between Beethoven, Mildred, Patty J. Hill, and Shostakovich. However, they all wrote music that reveals what happens when, whether by accident or design, you dream up a musical utopia 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 force of Beethoven’s message. The melody of “Ode to Joy” appears first as a hymn for cellos and bass, before the melody takes over the entire orchestra – beginning with the sounds of Beethoven’s chorus. “Ode to Joy” is Beethoven’s theme that defines Friedrich Schiller’s initial revolutionary text. It is a dream of universal compassion, a sublime message of connection that conveys the basic humanistic philosophy of Beethoven’s music.

His own drawings 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 curse—of the melody of “Ode to Joy” is that Beethoven fulfilled his wish. The idea of ​​”Joy” may seem apolitical, but the tune itself can be linked to any ideology you want.

Ode to Joy was used to music hopes for freedom and democracy at Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, where students blared it from makeshift speakers as tanks rolled in. It was sung after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the same year, with the song “Freude” (Joy) changed to “Freiheit” (Freedom).

But the tune was also turned into a hate poem, distorted by the Nazis to mean, as Beethoven’s biographer Jan Swafford put it, not that “all men must be brothers” but that “unbrothers must be exterminated.” Beethoven’s tune is the national anthem of the European Union, but it was also the national anthem of apartheid Rhodesia. After one performance, Stalin declared: “This is the music for the masses.” That’s not to say that Ode to Joy didn’t work as a song that anyone could sing, just that it worked very well. This is the problem with musical utopias: they can easily be mobilized for political propaganda purposes, whatever ideals their creators espouse.

As for Mildred and Patty J. Hill, the only utopia they dreamed of when they wrote the tune we now know as Merry Christmas was to compose a song for kindergarten students to welcome the new day. The words were originally “Good morning everyone,” and were changed only on a whim when the sisters wanted to wish a friend a happy birthday at a cabin in Kentucky in the 1890s. From this simple act of creative generosity, the Happy Birthday tune became the most recognized tune on the planet, the one tune that unites cultures, communities and families.

But the story of “Happy Birthday” isn’t just a celebration of how a humble tune reached the world’s consciousness — thanks to printing, early broadcast technology, and an absolute earworm. It’s also a story of corporate greed and courtroom drama. The Hale sisters wanted the tune to be part of our creative commons, but after 1933, when the tune appeared in the Irving Berlin musical As Thousands Cheer, lawyers and publishers began filing claims to pay for its use.

In 1988, Warner Chappell became the legal guardian of Happy Birth, having purchased the rights for $22 million (£16 million). The music publisher made an estimated $2 million (£1.5 million) a year when the tune was used across public media and in places where the music was licensed, including restaurants. Thanks to filmmaker Gene Nelson, who won a case in 2016 that asserted that the tune belongs not to the publisher, but to all of us who sing it, the tune and its lyrics have become a legal and musical part of the world’s “common property,” in Patti J. Hill’s words. Where she and her sister always wanted to be.

But the tunes that everyone can remember, that we can all sing or sing, are not always expressions of our shared humanity. They can also represent the coagulation of society into crowd violence. The virus of everyday evil grows unchecked to take over the entire society. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, “Leningrad,” was performed in that besieged city in 1942, after the world’s most courageous work in building an orchestra, in the face of the Nazi onslaught.

After a sufficiently conventional opening, the music in the first movement dissolves into individual lines of woodwinds. In this seemingly calm and peaceful moment, Shostakovich’s symphony becomes a place of malignant terror. A military percussion tattoo appears in the distance on a side drum, before the melody begins on a solo flute. The mundane, instantly memorable melody doesn’t do anything “symphonic”: it repeats and repeats, louder and louder, eventually turning into a violent orchestral force.

It’s a sarcastic, deliberately stupid tune, inspired by the music of Franz Lehár, who was Hitler’s favourite. The melody of “We’re Heading for Maxim,” from Lehár’s frothy operetta The Merry Widow, seems to be trying to squeeze the symphony out of existence, echoing what the Nazis were trying to do in Leningrad. But it’s more than that. Speaking of this devastating passage from his symphony, Shostakovich said: “Music can never be linked literally to a theme. This music is about all forms of terror, slavery and the enslavement of the soul.” His article was not just about Nazism, but also about Nazism [Russian] regime, or any form of totalitarian regime.”

This passage represents a traumatic experience from which the rest of the symphony will attempt to recover. In its finale, the music vindicates the optimism of its opening moments in one of orchestral music’s most surprising scenes of hard-won victory. This is how this piece was played and interpreted by audiences around the world during World War II, when it was broadcast from London and New York, after the piece was microfilmed and secretly transported out of Russia.

However, the symphony finds itself in a contested position today. There is Shostakovich, the composer and freedom fighter, versus the Shostakovich who was used by Putin’s regime in the 2020s for nationalist propaganda. In a speech in August 2022, six months after the all-out invasion of Ukraine, Putin spoke on the 80th anniversary of the symphony performed by the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra: “Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony continues to arouse the strongest emotions in new generations.” “He shares with them the bitterness of loss, the joy of victory, the love of the homeland, and the willingness to defend it.”

Putin was recruiting the Shostakovich symphony, and the young orchestral players who performed it, as replacement soldiers: part of the same war effort that is sending Russia’s youth to the front line. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, the symphony is being played to embody resistance to the kind of tyranny and tyranny that Putin’s Russia represents.

These are melodies for the whole world, capturing our complex history. This collective production of music reflects all of humanity: it will not be limited to parts or readings that some individuals may wish to defend, however praiseworthy and virtuous they may be. Instead, for better or worse, it encapsulates the entirety of who we are.