“I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.”
– Bob Dylan
Every morning for more than eighty years till he died, Pablo Casals, one of the loudest opponents of oppressive governments and greatest cellists of all time, went for a walk, came home, and played two preludes and fugues by Bach on the piano.
“I cannot think of doing otherwise.” Music was “an affirmation of the beauty man was capable of.”
Casals believed in music like he believed in God and nature; as something greater, higher than laws, walls, borders. With music, he spoke for the poor, playing in the streets of Barcelona; the oppressed, refusing to perform in countries where citizens were mistreated: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy… and when General Franco took over Spain, Casals own country, the musician left, and in a stand against tyranny everywhere, stopped performing.
He kept playing, though, in private, every day: preludes, fugues… “Maybe music will save the world.”
It didn’t; Casals died, in exile, two years before Franco and his dictatorship. In any case, since Franco, there have been other tyrants.
There have also, since Casals, been other cellists. And pianists; singers; carolers; street-corner guitarists; pot-and-pan bangers in front of White Houses, parliaments; accordion players on the RER… There may have always been violence. There has always been music.
The song of rivers, trees, light rain, one raindrop on one leaf, wind, a sea breeze and then gust, a crashing wave, spray. Mist and fog and the flap of wings and scurry of ants … To be alive in the world is to sing. So too for humans:
“For the Homeric Greeks, kleos, fame, was made of song. Vibrations in air contained the measure and memory of a person’s life.
To listen was therefore to learn what endures.” An auditory history of the world, then:
epic poems; chants and hymns and odes and anthems; songs for rowing, plowing the fields, marching to war; rocking a child to sleep; God Save the Queen, and La Carmagnole to overthrow the king. Opera, gospel, the blues, jazz, Nueva cancion, hip hop …
“You can’t include it all. You might think, I’ll write a song…”
All songs are songs of protest, even those that are not. “Every song presupposes enough peace and quiet that the song itself can be sung, the guitar strummed, the words heard. There’s no way people can be dancing if there are explosions and cries of anguish outside.”
No song has ever saved the world, but—
Listen:
Imagine, Strange Fruit, Blowing in the Wind, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing, Big Yellow Taxi… in every protest song, there is a love song, hiding. Music has not saved the world, but maybe that is not its purpose.
Maybe the purpose of music—in rivers, rain, trees, pop songs on the radio at two in the morning—is “to remind us how short a time we have a body.
You start the song … it’s only going to last for four and a half minutes.” But in that space, listening, playing, a person is just a person.