The Revolutionary’S Playlist: A Lyrical Journey Through History

By Saumya Malhotra

Verse captures and portrays sentiment.

Revolution, on the other hand, is invariably a culmination of emotions: the tension and strife, hate and faith, and despair and hope of the people who make and are made by them.

For those who look back on it, verse can, therefore, serve as a chronicle of historical events and as a priceless look into the socio-political zeitgeist of an era. For those who sing it, verse may have the power to not only fan and fuel existing fiery whirlwinds but to actually ignite flames.

Tracing the most controversial, celebrated and lasting of historys musical treasures through four great revolutionsthe American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian and Bolshevik revolutions, and the Indian Independence Movementthis book explores the stories these compositions have to tell as well as the lives of the poets, lyricists, songwriters, and singers who wrote them.

Whether you are a music aficionado, a history buff or the everyday intellectual, learning from history and art about the human condition in a political and cultural framework is more important today, than ever before.

Come, listen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781482887716

Saumya Malhotra

Saumya Malhotra is an academically brilliant high school student who has won international and national essay writing competitions and has been playing the piano for a decade. She has a deep passion for music, history and languages, which led her to research revolutionary verse at the Stanford Summer Humanities Institute. This book is a culmination of her continued exploration of those interests.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Saumya Malhotra. All rights reserved.

ISBN

978-1-4828-8772-3 (sc)

978-1-4828-8771-6 (e)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/india

05/03/2017

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Contents

Preface

By Veena Talwar Oldenburg

Treble, Trouble: There Can Be No Revolution without Song

An Introduction

Pointless or Purposeful? The Role of Verse in Revolution: #Verse-atile

Evaluating the Significance of Verse: Direct Instigation Vs Reflection

Studying Revolutionary Verse

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The American Revolution: Setting the Tone

Introduction

The Nursery Rhyme

‘Yankee Doodle’

Wartime Whistles

‘War and Washington’, and ‘The British Grenadiers’

For the Love of Liberty

‘The Liberty Song’ and ‘Heart of Oak’

A ‘Dear America’ Letter

‘America, My Country ‘Tis of Thee’

A Choral Anthem

‘Chester’

What about the Women?

‘Revolutionary Tea’, ‘Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier’ and ‘Address to the Ladies’

The Conflicts Within

‘The Pausing American Loyalist’ and ‘The Congress’

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The French Revolution: Setting ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ to tune

Introduction

Anthem of Anthems

‘La Marseillaise’

Dancing away Despotism

‘La Carmagnole’

A Revolutionary Optimism

‘Ça Ira’

Mysticism, Apocalypse and the Revolution

The French Revolution: Book the First

THE RUSSIAN and BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTIONS

The Russian and Bolshevik Revolutions: The Spectre’s Playlist

Introduction

The Dream of a Utopia

‘The Internationale’

A War Song

‘Warszawianka’/ ‘Varshavianka’/ ‘The Warsawian’ (1905)

Muddle Instead of Music: Opera vs. Censorship

‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’

THE INDIAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT AND DECOLONIZATION

The Indian Independence Movement and Decolonization: Freedom chorus, 360 million strong

Introduction

The Independence Movement and Decolonization: Timeline

Uniting Diversity: From Ode to Anthem

‘Jana Gana Mana’

Ode to the Motherland

Vande Mataram

Better Than the Whole World

Saare Jahaan Se Achhaa

Portraying a Queen

Jhansi Ki Rani

The Dream of India

Where the Mind is Without Fear

APPENDIX

Directly Instigative Vs Reflective Verse: A Comparative Analysis

REFERENCES and NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY and FURTHER READING

To

Ma and Dad,

for believing in me so completely,

for having been as much part of this journey as I have,

and

for giving me love, coffee, dreams, music, words, and

the best of everything.

And to Dadi and Nani for their wisdom and strength, which have shaped me so profoundly.

Preface

By Veena Talwar Oldenburg

In times when the political spectrum across the globe seems to be tone deaf it is refreshing to be reminded of the different times when tyrants fell, ancient regimes toppled, heads of aristocrats rolled, and nation states came into being from the shambles of empires—to the sounds of inspired lyrics set to rousing music. In drawing from the themes of four major revolutionary events and the songs that marked them, Saumya Malhotra has fused her own passion for music and for language into a fine analytical reprise of the anthems of revolution in The Revolutionary’s Playlist.

Saumya, now in the final year of High School, is remarkably mature beyond her years in the scholarly seriousness and the talents she brings to this project: playing the piano from the age of seven, studying musical theory, and reading literary works in English, Hindi and French. She combed through primary materials that range from old soviet newspapers, English hymnals and psalm books, and the letters of Rabindranath Tagore, the author of India’s national anthem to recreate the revolutionary ethos of the works she has selected to illuminate the power of song to carry a political message. Her book is a keen distillate of these enthusiasms and explorations. Vividly written, it has captured the spirit of the many songs and poems Saumya has so painstakingly translated and analyzed in their varied historical contexts over time and space.

While there are several scholarly treatises on the music of these separate revolutions, I think that this particular group of historical events—as disparate as the blood soaked French (1789) and Russian Revolutions (1917) against their own aristocratic classes and the two colonial wars of independence against the British that created the United States of America (1776) and modern India (1947)—has been brought together between the covers of a single volume for the first time.

The stories retold here will interest the music lover, the history buff and the everyday reader alike. It veers engagingly from the often-dry narratives of nationalist history to transport us to the back room dramas and the action on the streets that involved the millions of subjects and natives who chanted their way to citizenship to the clash of cymbals and the beating of drums.

Veena Talwar Oldenburg

New York,

December, 2016.

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 soulful spirit of ‘Vande Mataram’ from the Indian Independence Movement, and even the tumultuous angst of modern-day political rap and spoken-word poetry from the Arab Spring and Gaza conflicts…Verse is near-ubiquitous in political revolutions, and virtually no revolution has been bereft of its power and purchase.

Pointless or Purposeful? 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 ¹.

Another aspect of the role of verse in revolutions is mass communication. In a world of lightning-speed virtual conversation and the dissemination of news on social media and the internet in general, information is, to use one of today’s myriad colloquialisms, a click away. In contrast, the grand days of the pre-2008 world were, of course, bereft of Facebook. Consequently, the methods of mass communication that the Founding Fathers of the United States and the Jacobins of the French Revolution had access to, were limited to pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and, indeed, music and poetry. When the speed of media could not reach the unfathomable heights of that of the internet, verse was at least the more emotionally rousing and more accessible sister of print.

In particular, verse in vernacular languages and dialects proved especially useful during the revolutions of the past. In India, for instance, verse effectively carried the modern nationalist message to the vast, largely illiterate common populace in a cultural vernacular that was conveniently alien to the foreign colonizers and comfortably familiar to its audience.

This nature of verse as significant and potent for a culture is also strong testimony to the role of verse as a contributor to collective national identity. The 1830-1848 period of widespread liberal-nationalist revolutions across Europe saw newly defined notions of the nation state, the citizen and patriotism permeate the intellectual atmosphere of Europe. In tandem was the advent of supporting cultural and intellectual or artistic movements such as Romanticism, which soon became inextricably linked to the notion of nationalism. German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder ² notably emphasized the importance of ‘das volk’ – the common people – in discovering ‘true German culture’ as a unifying bond for the German states and regions. He asserted the power of language and cultural traditions in developing national identity, and extended this to include folklore, music, dance, and art. Herder’s vast collections of folk poetry, published as Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs ³ meant that this concept transcended theory and treatise and did in fact see the light of common day. It famously inspired the lexicographers and cultural researchers, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, to tour villages and collect and record ancient fairy tales ⁴, which were, to them, expressions of a pure and authentic German national spirit (‘volksgeist’).

This idea and means of fostering national ties, more directly applied to music, is embodied in the cultural climate of Poland at the end of the 18th century, when the country was partitioned by the Great Powers – Russia, Prussia and Austria. In this period, national sentiment was kept alive through music, such as operas, music and folk dances ⁵. One of Polish composer Karol Kurpiński’s pieces, ‘Litwinka’, which later influenced Chopin, was composed during the November Uprising ⁶ and commonly sung among the Polish emigrants in Paris, who felt that 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 rule.

The concept translates well into the modern-day world. The book, ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation’ by Gene Sharp, the man who changed the world (The Boston Globe), was translated, copied, and distributed like wildfire among revolutionaries in the Arab Spring states and used as a quasi-‘How To’ guide or blueprint for subverting oppressive dictatorships by non-violent means. Among the methods listed in the book’s Appendix of the Methods of Nonviolent Action are, ‘Drama and music’ ⁷ and ‘Processions’, which have the core musical component of marching music. ⁸

As a direct consequence of the capacity of music to connect so profoundly with its audience as to not only disseminate information accessibly but also inspire patriotism, rebellion and change, music and poetry have often suffered from the gag of state censorship. If political authorities did not view it as fairly evident that verse has the power to inspire change, and make common knowledge what was once hidden in treatises and petitions, would they go to the harrowing trouble of censoring something so dear to the masses?

The role of verse in the revolutionary context is evident, and by no means limited. Quite on the contrary, it is diverse, and significant – as both an excellent medium of mass communication and emotional expression, and a symbol of national identity and unity.

***

Evaluating the Significance of Verse: Direct Instigation Vs Reflection

Though it is evident that revolutions and socio-political movements produce a deluge of art, the extent of its influence and significance on people during a revolution is often dismissed as marginal. Could the friction of clashing cymbals potentially kindle revolutionary flames? Or can it only fan and fuel an existing, fiery whirlwind?

Here I would like to broach to the readers for their evaluation, critique and use, a broad system or module for attempting to categorize verse, analyze it, and understand the ways in which it operates or impacts history.

In an essay on Shakespeare published in 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder ⁹ wrote, A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world. ¹⁰ This statement not only reflects Herder’s conviction that verse is crucial to the development of nationalism in popular sentiment and imagination, but also illuminates the way in which verse can legitimately accomplish this goal. The fact that the poet ‘gives (the people) a world to see’, presumably through information, indicates the awareness that lyrics chronicling or reflecting facts, events, feats of great leaders, and opinions can generate among people. Moreover, she can also ‘lead them to that world’, which elucidates the directly inspirational or instigative power of verse.

Categorizing music as ‘instigative’ or ‘reflective’ can help analyze the impact of a piece and whether certain kinds of compositions are more significant than others.

For a detailed analysis, I would refer you to my comparative study of the role of opera in Europe during the French and Belgian revolutions and that of particular pieces of poetry during the Indian freedom struggle. In this analysis, I elucidate the broad identifying characteristics of the two proposed categories, and contend that both reflective and instigative pieces can be equally significant, although the latter kind may appear more so than the former.

This analysis may be found in the appendix of this book.

***

Studying Revolutionary Verse

Thanks to the sheer multitude of purposes they fulfilled, poetry and music are veritable archives – textured, rhythmic and altogether fascinating archives – of the day and age to which they belong. Verse serves as a chronicle of historical events, as a time machine to history’s most momentous periods, and as a priceless look into the socio-political zeitgeist of an era. Most especially, the poetry and music that transcended propaganda have become symbolic of cultural, national and ideological identities and continue to define and unite people today.

Studying music that is a product of turbulent times can provide great insight into the angst and hopes of the general populace. Moreover, revolutionary verse can provide invaluable insight into the opinions and motives of intellectuals who drive the revolution ideologically.

Tracing the most controversial, most celebrated and most lasting of history’s musical treasures through four ‘Great Revolutions’ – the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the twin Russian Revolutions, and the Indian Independence Movement– this book talks about the stories these compositions have