As much as iconic folk and rock musicians like Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix , Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Neil Young, Bob Marley, Pearl Jam and many others did to advance music as a means to foment and focus popular dissent, rock musicians of the 1960s did not invent protest music. We will never know who the first musician was to use music to denounce their oppression or proclaim their issues with the ruling class, but we do know that some of the greatest composers of all time used music to inspire feelings of freedom and even to vent their rage against the machine. At the G20 summit in Toronto last weekend, you can be certain that protesters were putting together their playlists of protest music to inspire the masses — you can do the same every day of the year with a playlist including the greatest ‘symphonic’ protest music of all time.
No doubt the most famous to use music as a weapon was Beethoven. Beethoven had intended to dedicate his Symphony No. 3 to Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he believed at the time to be a creator of a new republic, a liberator of the common man, but when he learned that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself Emperor, Beethoven literally tore the dedication off the top of the page. The symphony was given the title “Eroica” and became a symbolic gesture toward the spirit of liberation. You cannot help but feel the pulse of freedom when you listen to parts of it.
This revolutionary spirit pervades much of Beethoven’s symphonic output, notably in the famous finale of his Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy,” which Leonard Bernstein used to celebrate the tumbling of the Berlin Wall and is employed regularly when people need to lift their spirits against forces of oppression.
Another fantastic composer who used music to channel feelings about the intensity of his political reality was Dmitri Shostakovich, who endured being a creative spirit in Stalinist Russia. Because wordless music is ultimately abstract, there has been endless speculation about what the ‘real meaning’ is behind some of Shostavovich’s most famous symphonic works. But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Is it possible to listen to these famous works except as a soundtrack to question authority? The final movement of his Symphony No. 5 begins almost unquestionably as a battle, a race of opposing forces. By the end of the movement, you know whose side has won: ours!
As with Beethoven’s symphonic works, much of Shostakovich’s symphonic output inspires and resolves these intense universal, geopolitical feelings. Listening to them, you find yourself working through the many emotions of protest and the quest for liberty, and in the end, you understand that music really is a weapon to focus and inspire the spirit that will not be dominated.
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