How do composers address current social and political challenges through their musical practice? In an era marked by increasing globalisation, interconnection, and inequality, combined with the worldwide rise of right-wing ideologies and the threat of irreversible climate change, this question – that is by no means new in itself – takes on a new sense of urgency. Given the major ethical and political issues our societies are facing, how do today’s composers challenge hegemonic views on identity, history, and memory? How do their compositional and performance practices make their ethical concerns audible? Which concepts, discourses, and imaginaries do they mobilise when talking about music and politics?
This special issue explores these questions from the perspective of the creators themselves. In what follows, five composers with international career paths and a variety of musical backgrounds – Hilda Paredes, Andile Khumalo, Marisol Jiménez, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Philippe Manoury – propose very diverse answers, bringing to light how they consider their music tackles issues such as social justice, human rights, and the climate crisis.
Rethinking music and politics in the twenty-first century
In a reflection that is always firmly anchored in the specificities of their musical practice, the five composers develop their views on how their work engages with political topics including the public memory of violence, police brutality, and government corruption in Mexico (Jiménez); systematic prejudice and neocolonial pressures in South African culture (Khumalo); the injustice of migration policies in Europe (Manoury); human trafficking and femicide (Paredes); and the environmental crisis (Westerkamp). Throughout the five articles, music composition, performance, and listening are viewed as modes of action that produce knowledge and can change our perception of the world.
This approach complements the vast scholarship on music and politics that emerged in the late 1960s, and developed with increasing intensity over the past two decades – including in this journal, in which the nexus music/politics has been explored most prominently through three special issues since the 2010s (Music – Politics – Semiotics, 2012; Music and Socialism, 2019; Music and Democratic Transition, 2023). In previous research, the main focus has been to understand how various kinds of music can contribute to shape political identities, be it in democraticFootnote 1 or authoritarian regimes,Footnote 2 in the context of international relations,Footnote 3 or as a means of propaganda.Footnote 4 Several scholars have also explored the mobilisation of music in war,Footnote 5 postwar transitions,Footnote 6 and situations of extreme violence,Footnote 7 such as open conflicts,Footnote 8 far-right movements,Footnote 9 concentration camps,Footnote 10 genocides,Footnote 11 and terrorist attacks.Footnote 12 These studies have shown how music and musical practices are valuable ways of exploring subjective experiences of the recent past, particularly in relation to violent situations, political repression, and forms of resistance.
Most of this research, however, has been conducted from an external, theoretical perspective, and it gives little space to the voices of composers themselves. On the other hand, publication projects such as John Zorn’s series Arcana: Musicians on Music (2000–2022) and the collections of composers’ writings and interviews edited by Bálint András Varga, Philippe Albèra, Andrew Ford, and Virginia Anderson feature prominently the reflections of composers on their art, but they do not extensively explore the political dimension of music composition.Footnote 13 This special issue contributes to filling the gap between these two approaches by investigating from an internal point of view how composers consider their musical practices as forms of action that make collective struggles for human dignity and social justice audible, enabling them to participate through their art in the transformation of the common world.
Drawing on an extended definition of politics – or rather, the politicalFootnote 14 – which includes the concept of radical relationality, ‘the fact that all entities that make up the world are so deeply interrelated that they have no intrinsic, separate existence by themselves’,Footnote 15 we explore how composers’ musical practices disrupt what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ [partage du sensible].Footnote 16 This concept refers to the distribution of places and identities, the division of space and time, of what is visible and what is not, of what is audible, of noise, of speech, and of silence. By thinking of politics beyond the exercise of power and the apparatus of maintaining law and order, the relationship between music and politics is revealed in the way that musical practices and performances provoke dissensus and contribute ‘to the constitution of a form of common sense that is “polemical”, to a new landscape of the visible, the sayable and the doable’.Footnote 17 This is consistent, for example, with Hildegard Westerkamp’s conceptualisation of listening as a disruptive action that creates new experiential knowledge which can be used for rethinking our relationships with the world.Footnote 18 Referring to the ethics of listening and politics of recording in her soundscape compositions, Westerkamp’s political ecology explores the sonic agencies of human voices and more-than-humans – animals, minerals, plants, and every element that constitute an ecosystem – and how listening to them is essential for imagining and creating new, plural, and unforeseen realities.Footnote 19
This special issue incorporates recent interdisciplinary developments in music research, the humanities, and social sciences – many of them informed by indigenous knowledge and epistemologies of the South – which challenge the modernist separation between humans and more-than-humans,Footnote 20 investigate the ontological foundation of human rights,Footnote 21 and explore the politics of music performance through listening practicesFootnote 22 and socio-technical imaginaries of music.Footnote 23 Composers connect their musical practices to social struggles by disrupting hegemonic narratives and allowing co-creation of knowledge that drive actors to action. They use music technology and performance situations to create sensory knowledge, spaces for remembering, and counter-hegemonic narratives that contribute to global struggles for social justice. Listening to the rationales mobilised by composers when talking about the ethics and politics of their musical practices is fundamental to advance current debates about the political implications of artistic creation.
Compositional standpoints on music and politics
The five articles presented in this special issue have their origin in the online lecture series ‘Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Music’, presented by Universität Bern, McGill University, and Université de Montréal between October 2021 and March 2022. The lecture series was organised as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project ‘Political Ontologies of Music: Rethinking the Relationship between Music and Politics in the Twenty-First Century’, with the collaboration of the Canada Research Chair in Music and Politics at the Université de Montréal. The articles are not, however, mere transcriptions of the lectures; rather, they are the result of a careful reworking by the authors in dialogue with the three co-editors, Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis, Robert Hasegawa, and Luis Velasco-Pufleau. The resultant essays are new first-hand sources that exemplify how musicologists, music theorists, and composers can collaborate and co-create knowledge.
The online lecture series was complemented by a graduate seminar in a unique format co-taught by the three editors. We opened the seminar to students at both McGill and the Université de Montréal, with three-hour meetings every other week spread across the entire 2021–22 academic year. With the COVID-19 pandemic requirement to hold courses online and the increasing familiarity of videoconferencing, we saw an opportunity to invite speakers from around the world into the classroom virtually: each guest composer presented both a public lecture and a session for seminar students. In addition to the five lectures that developed into the essays published in this special issue, we also hosted talks by Raven Chacon, Anthony Davis, Fabien Lévy, and Georgia Spiropoulos. It was important to us to include both emerging and established composers and to maintain a balance of gender. We also sought composers representing a wide range of different geographical origins and aesthetic orientations.
The academic year 2021–22 seemed like a particularly important moment to focus on the intersection of music and the political: the summer of 2021 was a time of continuing protests against the 2020 murder of George Floyd and ongoing police violence, a wave of anti-racist and anti-colonialist actions worldwide including the removal of statues and other representations of slaveholders and colonisers, and demonstrations following the reports of hundreds of unmarked Indigenous children’s graves at Canadian residential schools. These movements were paralleled by an upsurge in social consciousness and self-reflection in music scholarship,Footnote 24 expanding the thought-provoking research developed since the early 2000s by scholars such as Kofi Agawu, Georgina Born, David Hesmondhalgh, Susan Cusick, Naomi André, and George E. Lewis.Footnote 25 All of these movements, exacerbated by the isolation and tension of the COVID-19 lockdowns, brought a sense of urgency to seminar discussions. Along with our students, we felt that recent and current events emphasised the need for the re-examination of our social structures and, more locally, our musical practices and pedagogy – as well as a strong sense that this moment of crisis could be an opportunity for change.
Voicing ethical concerns
These concerns are central in the articles that make up this special issue. Hilda Paredes (b. 1957, Tehuacán, Mexico) articulates the innate power of music to connect with its public in ways that the spoken or written word cannot, writing of music’s power ‘to unveil the unexplainable, free the imagination and keep the audience in touch with the humanity that makes us spiritual and hopefully intelligent beings’. While music, like all the arts, may play a fundamental role in keeping us grounded in our humanity and spirituality, its potential to express a political viewpoint and advocate for social change is another question. ‘Writing for the stage’, Paredes notes, is ‘an ideal platform’ to address human rights issues. In her article, ‘Silenced Voices: Addressing Human Rights Violations Through Musical Drama’, Paredes considers how music can take on pressing political and social issues including the repression and erasure of colonised peoples, gender inequality and misogynist violence, human trafficking, and slavery. Three of Paredes’s operas – El Palacio Imaginado (2003), La tierra de la miel (2012), and Harriet (2018) – are at the centre of this reflection.
El Palacio Imaginado, with a libretto by Adriana Díaz Enciso based on a 1990 short story by Isabel Allende, examines the legacy of colonialism in Latin America and the repression of Mexico’s original cultures. The voices of these peoples are invoked through the incorporation of contemporary poetry in Mazateco by Juan Gregorio Regino, in Zapoteco by Natalia Toledo, and in Maya by Briceida Cuevas Cob. These texts, read by their authors, as well as other voices in Indigenous languages and excerpts from the Maya text known as El Ritual de los Bacabes, are part of an eight-track electronic part surrounding the audience – a ghostly and disembodied presence representing communities ‘reduced to shadows’. The fate of the character of Marcia, abused by the dictatorial ‘Benefactor’, represents the linkage of the repression of women in patriarchal systems to the oppression of original cultures under colonialism.
The use of Nahuatl in La tierra de la miel similarly reflects the vulnerability of members of Mexico’s original cultures (and especially women) to other forms of exploitation and abuse.Footnote 26 The opera – part of Cuatro Corridos, a music theatre project created in San Diego under the direction of Susan Narucki with a libretto by Jorge Volpi – recounts the horrors of human trafficking, based on journalistic reportage on the organised human trafficking, prostitution, and slavery around the US/Mexico border in the early 2000s. In recounting Violeta’s story about her friend Iris – raped, forced into prostitution, and murdered as she fled – Paredes uses Nahuatl (the language of many of the victims of trafficking) to ‘give voice to Iris’s soul… as she sings from the afterlife’. As Paredes notes, music offers a particularly powerful way to ‘give voice’ to the victims of atrocities, serving not only to memorialise silenced voices but also to move audiences profoundly and ‘raise awareness on human rights issues in the concert hall’, using music’s emotive power to urge political action. The loss of language due to abuse and trauma is conveyed vividly and intimately in La tierra de la miel, representing the shattered sense of self of the victim: ‘language is destroyed, and the remaining fragments are distributed between the voice of the singer and members of the ensemble’. In the timbral dimension, noise ‘destroys’ and replaces pitch.
The eloquence and emotional power of music theatre and opera make them a particularly effective vehicle for political expression. But what of wordless, instrumental music? In the final section of her contribution, Paredes describes two recent works of chamber music – Serpientes y escaleras (Snakes and Ladders, 2018) and Juegos prohibidos (Forbidden Games, 2019) – written for commissioners in the border states of the US and commenting on the children kept in detention and separated from their parents by American border agents. The powerful and moving characterisation of the operas is shifted into a more abstract realm where the musical dramaturgy alone must carry the message. In Juegos prohibidos, the childhood tune ‘Dale, Dale’ (sung for the breaking of piñatas at parties) is assigned to the pizzicato cello, but repeatedly ‘fractured’ in the flow of the music. The piece, like La tierra de la miel, gradually shifts from pitch to noise, here ‘to symbolise the destruction of childhood’. A similar strategy of fragmentation of the familiar is used in Juegos prohibidos, invoking both the innocence and joy of childhood and its tragic and inhumane curtailment. As in Paredes’s operas, these works seek to evoke our shared humanity and to bring an awareness of injustices and abuses, giving a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves in order to inspire political action.
Identities, influences, and self-definition
Paredes also addresses questions of identity and the expectations that the ‘classical music industry’ places on composers from Latin America. She comments on how the industry often expects a Mexican composer to write ‘music that makes reference to rhythmic syncopated ostinatos like those often found in salsa music, or perhaps music that invokes regional traditional Mexican music’. Paredes is not interested in superficial or facile expressions of Mexican identity, but rather seeks to express Mexico’s ‘rich cultural history’, working ‘to address cultural and human rights matters that have made our culture richer and our history a more complex one, without compromising the ongoing exploration in my musical language’. Like many composers born outside Europe, Paredes has been forced to confront what George Lewis has called ‘the spurious “identity or excellence” binary’,Footnote 27 the Eurocentric notion that the expression of other, non-European cultural identities is incompatible with musical quality (with the implicit suggestion that cultural identity is entirely irrelevant to the ‘excellence’ of the European canon). As Lewis writes, these ‘baleful binaries’ are ‘aimed at pre-emptively foreclosing initiatives by non-majoritarians to win space, while portraying women and people of colour as the only identity politicians around’.Footnote 28 Paredes’s music is exemplary in its expression of a deep engagement with Mexican culture, language, and history which also, without contradiction, develops a personal and highly sophisticated musical language.
Andile Khumalo (b. 1978, Umlazi, South Africa), in ‘The Current Situation of an African Composer’, also speaks of external pressures to conform to a certain notion of ‘Africanness’. Africa is too often, he writes, subject to overgeneralisations, presuppositions, and prejudices: for example, that African music is rhythmically complex but simple in other ways. For the composer, the outwardly imposed idea of ‘an African musical aesthetic’ can be stifling and the source of unfair judgements: ‘African creators suffer from what people view as an African musical aesthetic, with which they can rubber stamp your work as either a betrayal or a confirmation of Africanness’.
Khumalo asks, ‘How do our compositions represent who we (as Africans) are?’ The long-term effects of colonisation are still felt strongly across the continent, and racist divisions between Black composers (often working in specific and limited contexts such as choral music) and university-educated composers (until recently mostly white). He stresses the importance of ‘a self-regulated’ rather than externally imposed perception of self, ‘a self that is always defined by the now and not how it used to be’.
He also recounts being advised by a former colleague that to win a significant award ‘your music has to sound more African’. Even today, modernist or experimental works by Black African composers are sometimes critiqued as ‘not authentically African’ if they do not meet certain expectations. The result is often a silencing of Black composers in South Africa and beyond, the ‘systematic exclusion’ of Black composers from contemporary music spaces. Both Khumalo and Paredes seek to avoid facile or externally imposed markers of cultural identity but at the same time seek profound ways to express their culture ‘without compromise’ (Paredes). As Khumalo writes,
I felt that it was important to strip my music of all that could be considered superficial in the definition of African music, and to produce music that assumes its own identity. Perhaps, even, to produce music that assumes a global identity: music that can carry traces of anywhere in the world. This was important for me because it put the focus on the music (the artwork itself), and not the geographical origins of the creator.
Inscribing politics through compositional techniques and technologies
Khumalo recollects engaging deeply with questions of identity during his studies in Germany in the early 2000s, including the importance of defining his ‘identity as an individual, one whose identity includes Blackness but is not exclusively defined by Blackness’. For Khumalo, this self-definition often means exploring South African influences in highly abstracted ways, exploring concepts and strategies of music making that capture ‘a fleeting and unpredictable feeling of African music’ yet without direct quotation or stylistic imitation. For example, he describes his 2004 work ISO[R], a trio for flute, cello, and piano, as inspired both by concepts from spectral music and his study of amaXhosa bow music, ‘in which the melody is developed out of the filtered spectra of the bow instrument’. In other works such as Bells Die Out (2013), the idea of melodic fragmentation or hocketing, as in the Tshikona dances performed by the Venda people of South Africa, is transferred into a radically different musical and stylistic context. However, the central notion of an ensemble of sound makers each seamlessly contributing a small part to an integrated whole is maintained: ‘we lose the identity of any single instrument against other instruments, and instead we focus on sound as an object in space’. Colour Me In (2014) draws on features of the renowned Latozi ‘Madosini’ Mpahleni’s interpretation of the traditional amaXhosa song ‘Modokali’ in a similarly abstract or oblique way. Here, an asymmetrical rhythmic cell combining durations of 3 + 2 + 3 semiquavers recalls the 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 metre of ‘Modokali’. The recurrences of this cell are then progressively transformed through the interpolation of intervening slower pulses, which are then filled up with faster semiquavers. The original cells become obscured, perceptible only as ‘shades’ of the original pattern.
Marisol Jiménez (b. 1978, Guadalajara, Mexico), like Paredes and Khumalo, seeks to engage with political questions in her music without sacrificing musical complexity or sophistication, and to embed political intent deep into the structures of her works. In ‘Memory, Resistance, and Liberation in XLIII Memoriam Vivere and Other Works’, Jiménez recounts how her music expresses a resistance to oppression and a liberation from repressive social systems. The article begins with a close study of the composer’s XLIII Memoriam Vivere (2015), a composition for chamber orchestra memorialising the 2014 kidnapping and disappearance of forty-three young students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, Mexico. The students, preparing to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, were forcibly abducted by organised crime gangs with the collusion of police and government officials. The kidnapping was met by widespread protests and accusations of cover-ups in the investigation of the case. In the work’s commemoration of lives lost to an appalling crime, one might see a parallel with Paredes’s La tierra de la miel. But in XLIII Memoriam Vivere, Jiménez’s approach is quite different: the goal is not so much to give the disappeared students a voice as to keep their memory alive, as in Luigi Nono’s Como una ola de fuerza y luz (1972). Memory is tied to resistance, to the refusal of the victims’ loved ones and the broader public to silently accept such an atrocity. The power of music in this case lies not in heightened characterisation or emotional drama, but rather in a reflection on memory itself and the conscious act of keeping memory alive in subtle (and perhaps hidden) ways. Solidarity is expressed with the families of the disappeared, as is a resolve to demand answers.
As Jiménez notes, her approach is not narrative, literal, or programmatic, but rather about ‘compositional strategies to evoke the essence of the Ayotzinapa tragedy’. These strategies include the use of the number 43 (which became a symbol of political activism in Mexico in the wake of the tragedy) to determine the proportions of the work’s five sections as well as many other aspects of the formal construction. Some of these manifestations of the number 43 are woven into the score in ways that will only be audible to a listener following the score, for example the placement of voices whispering ‘bebos’ (the Mexican pronunciation of ‘vivos’ [‘alive’]) in bar 43 of the score. A central point of the piece’s dramaturgy is the 43-second (near-)silence near the end of the piece, a bold and tension-filled musical (non-)event that is movingly expressive of ‘the void left by the students’ absence’. The sense of absence and loss is further conveyed through the brief moments of pitch clarity in an otherwise noise-based texture, ‘evoking the search for a truth that seems to be buried in the chaos of reality’. Through these and other compositional concepts and techniques, Jiménez seeks to ‘engrave [the atrocity] in our memories, and motivate us to fight’, to ‘awaken in us the desire to bring change’, to ‘create awareness and reflection’, and to ‘[bring] us hope and [encourage] us to continue an endless search’.
Jiménez continues with an exploration of other works that address ‘the oppression imposed by social structures’ and ‘the mental constraints built in our minds, particularly those imposed by patriarchal systems, religion and traditional gender roles’. In Caro Cibus (2013) she reflects on her own path towards liberation from a religious Catholic upbringing, using the overarching metaphor of the consumption of animal meat and the cruel treatment of farmed animals to ‘symbolise the repression of minds subjected to such religious thought’. Through four contrasting movements for various combinations selected from the ensemble – voice, bass clarinet, cello, prepared piano, electric guitar, percussion, electronics, and video – Jiménez traces a path through agony and violence to death and transcendence, the liberation of the soul equated with ‘overcoming repressive beliefs through critical thought’.
In Jiménez’s reflection, oppression is not only external to the subject but also internalised in our own thought processes. Her Maŝinika Deliro (2024), ‘an experimental opera fragment for cybernetic voices and electroacoustic sculptures’ written for the voice-centred ensemble PHØNIX16, also seeks to break down repressive patterns of thought, in this case ‘mechanising’ the human voice through electronic processing and blurring traditional gender distinctions through a wide range of vocalising techniques. The goal is to subvert the many dualisms that characterise patriarchal and capitalistic thinking – ‘man/woman, machine/human, soloist/orchestra, character/scenography, protagonist/collective, electronic/acoustic, and definite/indefinite’ – to embrace instead ‘multiplicity, diversity of thought, and a range of perspectives’. Like Paredes, Jiménez speaks of the positive social and political effects of music in general – its tightening of the ‘threads of social interdependence’, its ‘resistance against homogeneity’, and its ‘affirmation of life and freedom’ – as well as its ability both to critically interrogate the status quo and to suggest new and hopeful paths, ‘to confront the pressing issues of our time’ and ‘to illuminate pathways to a brighter future’.
Exploring listening positionalities
In ‘Compositions That Listen’, Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946, Osnabrück, Germany) describes selected moments from an illustrious career in electroacoustic music, field recording, soundscape composition, and radio. Reflecting on her work, she notes that almost all of her compositions are political in some way, or at least carry ‘a social, political, or environmental message’. The works selected in her chapter are among the most overtly political, addressing themes including poverty, violence, and environmental degradation.
Westerkamp’s earliest compositions emerged in the context of the World Soundscape Project, founded by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s and particularly focused on issues of noise pollution, ecology, and liveability. The project stressed the profound importance of listening as a mode of discovery:
But our belief was that if we really did that kind of listening, we would be able to discover crucial information beyond numbers, figures, and measurements: how a soundscape impacts us and other living beings, how it may or may not interfere with communication, how we react to its sounds, what our relationship is to the soundscape, and ultimately even how we listen.Footnote 29
Recording is not a passive or mechanical task, but reflects ‘the recordist’s position and perspective, the physical, psychological, political, and cultural stance shaping the choices when recording’. In addition to a renewed relationship to the environment and ‘gaining information through perceptual inquiry’, much of Westerkamp’s work seeks self-discovery and liberation from habitual mental barriers or ideologies, echoing the concerns of Jiménez: ‘further ear openings and expanded consciousness of environmental sounds’. Concentrated listening is a step towards greater awareness of self and also the structures (including problematic or oppressive ones) within which the self is situated.
Westerkamp’s 1981 A Walk Through the City, a commission of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, exemplifies her approach to integrating soundscapes into her composition to raise awareness of social issues, in this case the crisis of addiction and homelessness on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. Like Paredes, she seeks to give a voice to those rarely heard in the media, in this case through integrating the harsh city sounds that formed a daily backdrop to the residents of the neighbourhood. Westerkamp recalls feeling a conflict between the desire to show a harsh reality and that for aesthetic beauty: ‘How then do you create a composition about such a place of suffering that attracts people’s ears so that they are drawn into the listening and are not tempted to turn off the radio?’ Her solution in this case is to explore transformation of the field recordings through tape manipulation, in ways that uncover within the screeching brakes of a truck some ‘rather melancholic sounds’ that, she muses, might ‘soften listeners’ hearts’ towards the Downtown East Side and its residents.
École polytechnique (1990), like Paredes’s La tierra de la miel, addresses misogynism and femicide, in this case the mass shooting of fourteen women at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989. Written just a year after the event, Westerkamp’s work commemorates the victims and their memory (like Jiménez’s XLIII Memoriam Vivere), ‘confronting the listener with the horror of the situation’ and expressing a deep anger at the senseless loss of life. The piece is an examination of grief and the process of healing, as well as a call to stop the all-too-frequent repetition of such events. Finally, The Soundscape Speaks – Soundwalking Revisited (2021) is a retrospective look at fundamental themes explored throughout Westerkamp’s career: interconnectedness, ecology, respect for nature. For Westerkamp, a recurring concern is the recognition of our relationship with nature and each other, the acceptance that we are part of the natural world and must live in a ‘reciprocal relationship’ with it. Political engagement in Westerkamp’s work is inseparable from relationship building: ‘relationships to the environment, to each other, to community’.
Contemporary music and the world
In the fifth article in this special issue, Philippe Manoury (b. 1952, Tulle, France) asks specifically how contemporary art music can engage with the outside world. Is music an autonomous ‘world in itself’?Footnote 30 Do the complexity and abstraction of contemporary compositional practices make them incapable of addressing our contemporary lives and social issues? Manoury notes that political questions have been ‘overwhelmingly expressed by voices from the realm of popular music rather than art music’: not only does popular music reach a broader audience, but it also tends to communicate more directly through its lyrics and more familiar modes of expression. What, he asks, are the specifically musical modes of engagement open to composers of contemporary music wrestling with political issues? Ideally, Manoury proposes, the musical work
must grasp the complexity of the subject that led to its creation, show its tensions and intricacies, and, if possible, bring out its tragic, comic, and even absurd elements. While it may not have the power to reach as large a mass audience as popular music, it does possess a different power, that of integrating these external contents into its very structure.
Manoury’s Kein Licht (2017), a ‘Thinkspiel’ based on texts by Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1926) written in response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster striking Fukushima in 2011, explores an imagined future in which humankind’s voracious appetite for energy has brought us close to extinction.Footnote 31 The form of ‘Thinkspiel’ (Manoury’s own term) combines spoken theatre and music, allowing the clear communication of the spoken voice and the heightened expression of music (as well as fusions and transitions between the two). Jelinek’s text does not mention Fukushima explicitly, but plays on the sense of unimaginable loss after an unnamed nuclear catastrophe. The semi-staged Lab.Oratorium (2019) reimagines the concert hall as a boat, ‘a cruise ship on which rich people travel for pleasure and others travel in order to flee a terrible situation’.Footnote 32 The work addresses the recurring humanitarian tragedies associated with migration into Europe, mourning and commemorating the drowning deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean. Incorporating a selection of texts by the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73), Georg Trakl (1887–1914), Hannah Arendt (1906–75), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the form of the work is a voyage, punctuated by the sudden emergence of a chamber choir seated unnoticed with the audience and symbolising the refugees hidden aboard the boat, and later the entrance of a large amateur chorus. ‘If it is political,’ Manoury comments, ‘it is certainly not in the sense of committing to a party or ideological activism; rather it would be in a philosophical sense. It talks about poor management of human affairs. I would like it to raise people’s consciousness’.Footnote 33 The end of Lab.Oratorium argues, with its quotations from Nietzsche (‘Weh dem‚ der keine Heimat hat!’) and Arendt (‘Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum’), considers what Manoury calls ‘the only possible utopia: the refusal of any kind of nationalism’. Despite reservations about the suitability of contemporary art music to reach and affect a large audience, Manoury recognises its unique potential to explore complex issues and provoke reflection: ‘in the face of unacceptable situations, music can provide food for thought, stimulate the imagination, and serve a moral, political or even philosophical purpose’.
This notion of music’s power to encourage reflection, interconnection, and empathy is shared by many of the other authors in this issue, including Jiménez and Westerkamp; perhaps this position is best summed up by Paredes, who comments on the ability of music to ‘unveil the unexplainable, free the imagination and keep the audience in touch with the humanity that makes us spiritual and hopefully intelligent beings’. Several of the collected articles recount works that speak out against violence and the violation of human rights, whether ‘recovering the voices’ of the silenced or victimised (Paredes), ‘keeping their memory alive’ (Jiménez), or ‘confronting the listener with the horror of the situation’ (Westerkamp). Bringing these events to the audience’s consciousness is not only a call to prevent the repetition of such violence, but also to address its root causes and enabling factors. Colonialism and its contemporary legacy (including systemic racism, the plight of refugees in Europe, and growing global inequalities) are also a major concern of the composers whose writings are featured here; explorations of post-colonial identity and its political challenges are central for both Khumalo and Paredes, albeit their very different approaches to the subject. And of course, as Westerkamp reminds us, all of these human issues unfold against the unprecedented environmental crisis of climate change.
Music making is no panacea to these problems, but while all authors in this issue comment on its limitations, there is a broad consensus that contemporary composers need to address the urgent demands of these crises. As composer Marisol Jiménez comments, ‘While music may not single-handedly transform society, it has the undeniable potential to inspire reflection and action to pursue a more equitable and compassionate world.’ The five composers featured in this special issue explore different ways to achieve this goal. Their texts should be read not as definitive and all-encompassing perspectives, but rather as situated and personal reflections on their own musical practice and its transformative potential.
