There Can Be No Revolution Without Song Analysis
Treble, Trouble: There Can Be No Revolution without Song
An Introduction
‘There can be no revolution without song.’
It is 1970, in Santiago. A banner flutters in the triumphant spring atmosphere: pithy, telling. Socialist Salvador Allende has just been elected President of Chile, and right now, he stands on an open-air stage amidst a group of musicians.
That banner above him asserts a simple but significant truth, one that finds incontrovertible evidence in the cultural output of revolutions worldwide. The eternally evocative tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’ from the American Revolution, the fervently patriotic choruses of ‘La Marseillaise’ from the French Revolution, the thundering power of ‘The Internationale’ from the Bolshevik Revolution, the piercingly …show more content…
The Role of Verse in Revolution: #Verse-atile
Verse has an unparalleled capacity to capture and portray sentiment. Revolution on the other hand is invariably a culmination of mass emotion: the tension and strife, hate and faith, despair and hope of the people who make and are made by them. And so, verse and Revolution have forever been entwined in a bond that spans time itself. Rousing lyrics, married to the chilling modulation of a minor key, the soaring complexity of a violin or the beat of a martial drum can make a whole generation swing and march together to create defining change.
Of course, sentiment and expression are no substitutes for the harshness of reality that effects furious dissent, and revolutions are too massive to be caused by a piece of art, in and of itself. However, music, through which the lone common artist can instill a spontaneous collective identity among thousands, can certainly act as a motivating catalyst in periods of inactivity. Take, for instance, the opera, ‘La Muette de Portici’, which instigated an enraptured audience in Belgium so piercingly and directly that they suddenly broke into mobs, stormed out of the opera theater and joined the street riots that eventually led to Belgium’s secession from the Kingdom of the Netherlands! Similarly, Henze’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ in 1968 in Cuba nearly ended in a riot …show more content…
In this period, national sentiment was kept alive through music, such as the operas, music and folk dances . One of Polish composer Karol Kurpiński's pieces, ‘Litwinka’, which later influenced Chopin, was composed during the November Uprising and commonly sung among the Polish emigrants in Paris, who felt as though they could participate and demonstrate their allegiance to their homeland through the composition.
A principal reason for the surge in the importance attributed to national culture in periods of foreign occupation and colonial rule is also the fact that it can effectively undermine the authority of the alien power and motivate the public to question its legitimacy. The more that songs and poetry proclaim the unity of a people that share a common culture, the more the public is awakened to the unjustness of external
An Introduction
‘There can be no revolution without song.’
It is 1970, in Santiago. A banner flutters in the triumphant spring atmosphere: pithy, telling. Socialist Salvador Allende has just been elected President of Chile, and right now, he stands on an open-air stage amidst a group of musicians.
That banner above him asserts a simple but significant truth, one that finds incontrovertible evidence in the cultural output of revolutions worldwide. The eternally evocative tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’ from the American Revolution, the fervently patriotic choruses of ‘La Marseillaise’ from the French Revolution, the thundering power of ‘The Internationale’ from the Bolshevik Revolution, the piercingly …show more content…
The Role of Verse in Revolution: #Verse-atile
Verse has an unparalleled capacity to capture and portray sentiment. Revolution on the other hand is invariably a culmination of mass emotion: the tension and strife, hate and faith, despair and hope of the people who make and are made by them. And so, verse and Revolution have forever been entwined in a bond that spans time itself. Rousing lyrics, married to the chilling modulation of a minor key, the soaring complexity of a violin or the beat of a martial drum can make a whole generation swing and march together to create defining change.
Of course, sentiment and expression are no substitutes for the harshness of reality that effects furious dissent, and revolutions are too massive to be caused by a piece of art, in and of itself. However, music, through which the lone common artist can instill a spontaneous collective identity among thousands, can certainly act as a motivating catalyst in periods of inactivity. Take, for instance, the opera, ‘La Muette de Portici’, which instigated an enraptured audience in Belgium so piercingly and directly that they suddenly broke into mobs, stormed out of the opera theater and joined the street riots that eventually led to Belgium’s secession from the Kingdom of the Netherlands! Similarly, Henze’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ in 1968 in Cuba nearly ended in a riot …show more content…
In this period, national sentiment was kept alive through music, such as the operas, music and folk dances . One of Polish composer Karol Kurpiński's pieces, ‘Litwinka’, which later influenced Chopin, was composed during the November Uprising and commonly sung among the Polish emigrants in Paris, who felt as though they could participate and demonstrate their allegiance to their homeland through the composition.
A principal reason for the surge in the importance attributed to national culture in periods of foreign occupation and colonial rule is also the fact that it can effectively undermine the authority of the alien power and motivate the public to question its legitimacy. The more that songs and poetry proclaim the unity of a people that share a common culture, the more the public is awakened to the unjustness of external