Guilt by association

Music's power can uplifting... or dangerous

I’ve played English country dance music for years. It’s a lovely repertoire, and playing for dances creates a wonderful synergy of sound and movement. My previous band, Crooked Sixpence, featured a fiddler who is an exceptionally talented musician. She hails from England, and is married to an Irishman from west Cork, so she is deeply familiar with the music of both the UK and Ireland.

One day, the dance caller we worked with sent us the set list for the next gig, and on it was a tune called “Lilliburlero.” I played through it, and it’s a sprightly little thing, but I didn’t know it by that name; I’d heard it as the tune to a bawdy seventeenth-century song called “My Thing is My Own.” I’ll leave to your imagination what the “thing” was the singer is laying claim to, but... it’s meant to be sung by a woman, and here’s one verse as a clue:

A master musician came with intent
To give me a lesson on my instrument;
I thanked him for nothing, and bid him be gone,
For my little fiddle must not be played on.

The tune, I found out, is often attributed to Henry Purcell, but apparently predates him by at least three decades. (The link is to a lovely performance of the song by Ann and Nancy Wilson, of Heart fame, if you want to hear the whole thing.)

So I was surprised when Kathy, our fiddler, told the caller, “I’m not playing that.”

Upon inquiry, it turned out that “Lilliburlero” also goes to a different set of words, lyrics that were written during the invasion of Ireland by the troops of William of Orange and which are meant to ridicule Irish language, culture, and religion. Read through the lens of history, you can easily see why they’re deeply offensive, and remain so to many people 350 years later—to the point that just playing the tune can raise hackles, even though it existed as a dance tune, and then a (non-bigoted) bawdy song long before the ugly anti-Irish lyrics became attached to it.

Songs and tunes can be powerfully evocative, both positively and negatively. I recall the issue coming up a few months ago, on the birthday of late nineteenth, early twentieth century British composer and musician Hubert Parry, most famous for writing a gorgeous musical setting of William Blake‘s poem “Jerusalem.” That day I heard a performance of it on the satellite radio classical station on my way home from my volunteer gig (sorting books for the Friends of the Library used book sale), and later saw it posted more than once on social media.

The commenters on the posts seemed evenly split between “I love that piece” and “I hate it.” This by itself isn’t that unusual, considering how variable musical tastes are, but it got interesting when I read why some of the latter disliked the piece so intensely. I kind of figured it out when one person wrote, “Yes! England’s second national anthem!” and another responded, “Goddammit no it isn’t, it’s jingoistic trash, and people need to STOP SAYING THAT.”

Parry wrote the music at the height of the British Empire and English colonialism, and for many, it has become associated with that spirit—“the sun never sets on the Empire,” “the White Man’s Burden,” and the exploitation of indigenous people and their land to serve the power-hungry and the bigoted. What’s interesting is that Blake’s poem was written in 1808, and if you read the lyrics, it’s not clear—to me, at least—that it’s at all celebratory of any desire for the English to run out and conquer everything and everyone:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant land.

To my reading, the lyrics are not saying that the English are The Chosen People 2.0, but that they have a long way to go before God would find the place worthy of building a new Jerusalem there. After all, it’s pretty clear that Blake’s answer to the four questions in the first two stanzas was a resounding “no.”

William Blake, Ancient of Days (1794) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And it bears mention that Blake himself was more of a mystic than a politician. In fact, he was arrested (later acquitted) of uttering “treasonous and seditious statements against the king,” and was notable for being anti-war and critical of the damaging effects of the Industrial Revolution on both the natural environment and public health. (Thus the line about England’s “dark Satanic mills.”) I find a lot of his writing kind of obscure at times, and certainly evocative—but hardly jingoistic, like much of the work of Rudyard Kipling.

What seems to have happened here is guilt by association. A mystical poem is set to music, and then becomes famous during a time when that pro-Empire sentiment was at its height. It became used as a recessional on Saint George’s Day. It’s a staple of the choral repertoire, meant to stir the hearts of loyal Brits the world over. The 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 Olympic Games, got its title from the lyrics, and the song is played at the end of the film. In fact, it was played at the opening of the London 2012 Summer Olympics—as well as at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. In 2019, it was voted “Britain’s favorite hymn,” although if you read the lyrics, it’s debatable whether it even qualifies as a hymn in the traditional sense.

Music has a tremendous capacity to evoke emotion, and when lyrics are attached, even more so. This causes the music itself to gain an additional layer of meaning that persists even when it’s performed as an instrumental. It’s no accident that even whistling the lovely German folk song “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” (“Thoughts are Free”) during the Nazi years could get you shot on sight. The Nazis recognized all too well that music is a cultural marker, and as such, it has significant symbolic power—a power which might be positive and empowering to some, negative and dangerous to others.

The interplay between music, words, meaning, and emotional response is complex and highly individual. As I described in Monday’s post, creativity is a dialogue, and each person brings to the experience their own background, opinions, worldviews, and tastes. So it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the same piece of music can set the heart pounding in one person, anger the absolute hell out of another, and leave a third unmoved either way.

Like with other matters of the creative relationship, chacun à son goût—and the checkered history of some pieces of music make the matter even more complicated.