​Wishing for a Song

reflections on the power of music

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Contents of Page

​1.   Wishing for a Song (Anne Goldberg)
2.  The Spiritual Side of Anthems  (Jay McDaniel)
3. ​ NPR Podcasts on Anthems
4.  Anthems as the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (Shana Redmond's Book)
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"Is it strange to say that I am wishing for a song? I am wishing for music that pulls me close to the person next to me. I would like that person to be different from me — younger, older, a different race or religion. Maybe you’ve found that song. Maybe you wrote it. Feel free to share it. I’d love to hear it." (Anne Goldberg)
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Dr. Anne Goldberg

Wishing for a Song
​
by Anne Goldberg, PhD
​​also posted in Medium
​

​If you are like me and 23 million other people, you’ve seen James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Paul McCartney. At one point, they sing “Let It Be,” and Corden dissolves into tears. He says, “Aw man, it got me emotional there, it was too much for me . . . I couldn’t see that one coming around the corner.”

Paul McCartney replies, “That’s great, man. I tell you, that’s the power of music. It’s weird, isn’t it, how that can do that to you.”

He’s not talking about a song that he wrote. He’s talking about music and being human. And while I teared up during “Blackbird,” I don’t think there’s something miraculous and transformative about that particular song. When my daughter, who is ten, watched that video, she really didn’t get emotional at all. Those songs don’t have a meaning for her, and that’s perfectly fine. But the video did get me thinking about how music is so powerful and transformational.

I show a video in my anthropology courses about the Kayapo, an indigenous group in Brazil who are fighting the government’s effort to flood their land by building a hydroelectric dam. At one point in the video, Sting arrives and speaks on their behalf to the international press. My classes usually giggle at this point and roll their eyes (if they even know who Sting is).
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My generation, too, has rolled our eyes plenty at activist rockers. There goes Bono again, being passionate about something, right? We loved “We Are the World,” but we’re sort of embarrassed by it too. It seems silly, musicians thinking they could or should change the world.

I was shoved out of this position, though, when I visited Chile and Argentina in 2011. Another professor and I brought a group of students to learn more about the dirty wars. In Chile, a young tour guide in his 20s insisted on copying many albums for us of Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. Parra popularized Chilean folk songs, and was embraced by revolutionaries fighting oppression. Jara was tortured and murdered for his political activism through music by Pinochet. We were told about Jara by many people in Chile, and his legacy continues. He was killed in 1973, and a kid born 20 years later still needed to share his music with us.

In Argentina, we received a lecture from three social scientists, and all were about my age. They are the elder generation of social scientists in Argentina, not because the fields are new in Latin America, but because the generation ahead of them were murdered. Disappeared by the state. They were talking about moments of change in their lifetimes. The anthropologist in the group started talking about when Sting had performed in Buenos Aires in 1988 on an Amnesty International tour. Suddenly, all of these scholars began to wipe tears from their eyes when they spoke of his song, “They Dance Alone.” This song was written about women who protested through dance in Chile, but during his performance in Argentina he brought onto stage Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. These women protested daily in the main plaza of Buenos Aires, demanding an accounting for their children and grandchildren who had been disappeared by the government. Our hosts spoke of the profound impact of that concert on them.

I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t roll my eyes at Sting. I had listened to that song about a million times, and I’d liked it. But that song had spoken a truth to these new friends. It hit a chord in their hearts, and that chord was resonating anew in them, together, at that moment.

I have had those moments, too. In high school, we were allowed to select a class song. I recall our meeting, our class of fewer than 60 squeezed into one room. I do remember some suggestions before the song we ultimately chose, but none after it. Two male classmates stood up without ceremony and started to sing. “Lean on Me,” originally by Bill Withers, had just been remade by Club Nouveau. I don’t know how, but we all started singing along. It seemed like we all knew the words, whether from hearing our parents play the original or from the new version. I don’t remember voting. I think we all just knew it was for us.

We were told, though, that we couldn’t play it at graduation. Our teenage outrage was great! We made a plan. The moment after we graduated, we filed out of the auditorium, quickly shut the hall doors behind us, and grabbed each other. Gleefully, we sang that anthem to ourselves, holding onto whoever happened to be next to us. We were one, and no one could tear us from each other. I can’t listen to that song silently, even today. I doubt anyone from my class can.

I’ve had a few of those moments recently. I sobbed when Kate McKinnon sang “Hallelujah” on Saturday Night Live. I saw many tears on the faces around me when Alicia Keys sang “Girl on Fire” at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. And, as I said earlier, “Blackbird” got to me. But, honestly, I feel somewhat musically bereft in this moment.
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Is it strange to say that I am wishing for a song? I am wishing for music that pulls me close to the person next to me. I would like that person to be different from me — younger, older, a different race or religion. Maybe you’ve found that song. Maybe you wrote it. Feel free to share it. I’d love to hear it.
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-- Anne Goldberg


The Spiritual Side of Anthems
​
Jay McDaniel
​

American "Anthems"
I'm "wishing for a song," too.  I love the phrase and identify with it immediately.  There are many songs that make me feel close to people different from me, but sometimes -- these days -- I feel bereft of songs. 

*

I shared Anne Goldberg's essay with a friend and explained that I was wishing for a song, and my friend wondered aloud if I might want to try out some classical anthems.  She sent me the playlist on the left called American Anthems from NPR's All Songs Considered.
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​But of course I wondered, as might you: "What is an Anthem?"  So I went to the NPR music website and found the following:
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What's an anthem? It's a stirring call to arms or an expression of collective emotion. Sometimes it's a recognition of injustice, a representation of an oppressed group, or an inspirational message of hope. But it always captures something much larger than itself — the spirit of a community, unified in its common feeling or cause, like the time a gay men's choir sang "Make Them Hear You" at a rally in Tennessee.  Or the time counter protestors sang "This Little Light Of Mine" in Charlottesville, Va. to a group of white nationalists.

-- American Anthems: Songs that Unite Us, July 3, 2018

​NPR offers examples, too.
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​The bugle call of taps. The swell of voices spontaneously joining to sing "We Shall Overcome." The urgency of "Fight The Power." Anthems are songs that tap into the collective emotions that listeners and performers have around an issue, whether it's joyful pride in one's country or rage over injustice...The stories behind these musical manifestos — why they are written and how they are embraced — can reveal much about the cultural pulse of the societies that create, share and celebrate them. Beginning July 4, NPR will zero in on 50 different anthems across a range of themes: patriotic, civil rights, anti-war, female empowerment, sports, mental health and more, in a series we're calling American Anthem. 

-- What's Your American Anthem?, May 28, 2018

Given NPR's definitions, I may well be wishing for anthems, too.  I wan to understand and appreciate the anthems of like-minded folks, and also those who are on the other side of the political spectrum.  I want the voices of "others" in my ear.  It's a religious thing.
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​Here's what I think I know. I know that music does have an amazing capacity to do several things that we ordinarily associate with religion.  It offers people a sense of identity, it gives them a worldview, it provides a sense of community, and it offers momentary touches of transcendence in the sounds themselves.  And music can widen their souls.

I borrow the idea of soul-widening from the process philosopher Bernard Loomer.  He writes of a soul with S-I-Z-E as follows and encourages us all to grow in width of soul, as best we can.
​​"By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships.  I  mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure.  I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness.  I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions.  I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature." (Bernard Loomer)
In combination with other factors, music can transform us by helping us grow in the depth and capacity for relationships and sustain enriching tensions with strength and courage.  It can hep us appreciate others in their uniqueness, and also ourselves.  It can make us wider souls.

Sometimes Music can help us grow in spiritual wisdom.

In addition, one of the functions of music in human life is to help us grow in emotional intelligence.  We know what humans, ourselves and others, can and do feel, emotionally.  This is because music is what feelings sound like.  Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality and Practice have identified some of the positive emotions which music can communicate and evoke:
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I close with a theological word.  Insofar as songs and anthems do function in this way -- insofar as they introduce us to the emotional depth and range of human life -- they function as sacred music: that is, as music through which the lure of the universal soul, the lure of God, finds its way into the hearts of people.  Thus music need not be 'about' religion or God to be sacred.  It can be about love, or being seventeen, or being frustrated, or loving your community.  It is sacred in its function: in its capacity for soul-widening and its capacity for introducing (what seem to me to be) the positive spiritual emotions of which all humans are capable, quite apart from questions of religious affiliation or the absence thereof.  Yes, Anne Goldberg is exactly right.  Music can transform us. 

NPR Podcasts on Anthems

Anthems as the Sound of Solidarity
​in the African Diaspora

​"Anthem succeeds in foregrounding the significance of music as an oral tradition, and its ability to move people who may not be literate in the written word.  Redmond ably traces music’s elemental power to move humans, and how it connects people to ideas, movements, and other activists.  In general, the book succeeds admirably in making readers think about these songs in new ways.”
--American Historical Review

Publisher's Description of Anthem by Shana Redmond

For people of African descent, music constitutes a unique domain of expression. From traditional West African drumming to South African kwaito, from spirituals to hip-hop, Black life and history has been dynamically displayed and contested through sound. "Shana Redmond excavates the sonic histories of these communities through a genre emblematic of Black solidarity and citizenship: anthems. An interdisciplinary cultural history, Anthem reveals how this “sound franchise” contributed to the growth and mobilization of the modern, Black citizen. Providing new political frames and aesthetic articulations for protest organizations and activist-musicians, Redmond reveals the anthem as a crucial musical form following World War I.  Beginning with the premise that an analysis of the composition, performance, and uses of Black anthems allows for a more complex reading of racial and political formations within the twentieth century, Redmond expands our understanding of how and why diaspora was a formative conceptual and political framework of modern Black identity. By tracing key compositions and performances around the world—from James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” that mobilized the NAACP to Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted & Black” which became the Black National Anthem of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)--Anthem develops a robust recording of Black social movements in the twentieth century that will forever alter the way you hear race and nation."
Open Horizons