JAVS Spring 2013

S TUDENT L IFE R OCKING THE B OAT : T WENTY -F IRST -C ENTURY M USIC FOR THE V IOLA THAT I NSPIRES S OCIAL C HANGE

by Gregory K.Williams

Depression and the New Deal brought the compo sitions of Marc Blitzstein to the foreground with his 1938 musical, The Cradle Will Rock . 2 Benjamin Britten, a committed pacifist during World War II, wrote his War Requiem as a protest to the devasta tion caused by war. Luigi Dallapiccola composed his work Canti di prigionia as a response to fascism and Mussolini’s government, specifically incorpo rating the vibraphone at a time when there weren’t any available in Italy. 3 Arnold Schoenberg’s 1947 cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46, was a response to accounts from witnesses who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. 4 Frederic Rzewski’s 1975 work for piano, The People United Will Never Be Defeated , was inspired by uprisings and protests that took place in Chile. 5 Throughout much of my adolescence and my undergraduate years, I felt I was born into the wrong era. I was in the minority (of Generation y and the seemingly apathetic American public) when I spent my nineteenth birthday on a bus heading to Washington, DC, on a cold Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to protest the Iraq War, two months before it started. I was chastised by my teachers for not spending that time practicing and scolded by my parents for not spending my birthday with them. At the outset of my college years, I felt too many of my generational cohorts were more concerned about what was playing on their iPod and who posted what on Facebook or Twitter (at times I too have been absorbed by the social media frenzy).

Introduction

Decades from now, historians will look back on the beginning of this decade as a period of significant tumult. When examining our present epoch, we are reminded of past watershed moments: the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the com mencement of the French Revolution and a quarter century of war and sweeping changes throughout Europe in 1789; the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that began World War I in 1914; the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Soviet regime crushing the Prague Spring , and the height of the Vietnam War in 1968; and the destruc tion of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that led to the col lapse of the Soviet union. September 11, 2001, is a day etched in the mind of most Americans; a day that revealed how vulnerable we were. As 2013 springs forward, we have witnessed over four years of economic stagnation in much of the Western world, political volatility in Greece and Hungary, nearly two years of remarkable revolutionary struggles throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and America’s first African-American President re-elected to embark on a second term in office. When one thinks of “classical” music that inspires social change, which composers come to mind? Charles Ives, the American composer of the early twentieth century was an ardent anti-war oppo nent, who wrote numerous songs for voice and piano expressing his disappointment with the American involvement in World War I. 1 The Great

Over the years, I realized that many of my musician friends did have passionate views on certain topics.

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