The War on Music

Douglas Murray shows how we are squandering our greatest gift.

Douglas Murray’s The War on the West does a lot of things in one book. Like The Madness of Crowds, it is divided into long sections with single-word titles like “Race,” “History,” “Religion,” and “Culture.” To some extent, it overlaps with material from his last book, The Madness of Crowds. Much of it covers familiar territory for anyone generally familiar with Murray’s work.

Still, I learned some new things, and some of my favorite new material comes at the end, in the “Culture” chapter. Here, Murray covers the depressing “cancellation” assault on Western culture-makers. This includes many Western artists and composers. In music studies, it includes an attack on the foundations of Western musicology itself, including the Western system of musical notation.

Murray himself happens to be a musician, a would-be composer, and a deeply-read music historian. This chapter applies that knowledge to instructive effect, walking the reader through a history of the conversation between Western and non-Western music. A fascinatingly rich tapestry emerges, weaving together names famous and obscure to demonstrate that “the history of Western culture is not a story of cultural appropriation. It is far more accurate to describe it as a story of cultural admiration.” Western artists looked to the art of other cultures not as something to be exploited, but as another way to understand what it means to be human.

As an example, Murray discusses the moving story behind Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time—not strictly a marriage of “Western” and “non-Western,” as Tippett was working with the American black spiritual, but carrying something of that flavor since the black spiritual is a product of African diaspora. The British composer had long been moved by the form, and in the late 30s, he was seeking inspiration for a new work that could be a light in the descending darkness of Nazism. He conceived the idea of a song cycle where black spirituals would be interwoven the way Bach interwove Lutheran chorales in his Passions. Listen here to the triumphant finale, “Deep River”:

The oratorio became Tippett’s most beloved and successful work, performed all around the world for decades. But the performances that touched him the most were those he attended in America. Audiences would sing along with the spirituals as they came up, which moved him to tears. In 1966, he conducted a particular favorite performance himself, by a mixed-race choir in a Baltimore school.

It boggles the mind that such a transcendently unifying work, written by a gay British pacifist leftie no less, could be “cancelled” today. But as Murray shows again and again, the new barbarism has no limits. Already as far back as 2000, people were beginning to raise the complaint of “cultural appropriation.” The work was well-meaning but “worrisome.” It risked “turning spirituals into afternoon tea,” to quote one conductor. And in Tippett’s time, they were called “Negro spirituals,” which of course is “problematic.” Students have successfully campaigned to take the work out of consideration for school performances. Never mind the irony that we have now come full circle with Nazi Germany, who also would have banned any performance of the work in its own time.

Murray goes on to name many other composers who drew deeply on the artistic traditions of Africa, China, India, and other non-Western cultures. All were driven, like Tippett, by that pure creative energy that is constantly searching for some new thing, some unmapped territory to explore. Sometimes, this new inspiration came at a personal low point for the composer, as in the case of Gustav Mahler, who threw himself into his work while mourning the death of his daughter. Over an agonizing summer, he began composing his song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which drew on a translated volume of Chinese poetry from the Tang dynasty. It would become one of his great masterpieces.

Reading this section, I thought of one of my own favorite examples of an artist who found renewed creative inspiration in a culture not his own. In the 1980s, the celebrated American songwriter Paul Simon faced a fizzling marriage, a fizzling solo career, and a waning desire to continue making music. Then, on a road trip, he listened to a bootleg tape of some African musicians. This struck a deep chord, planting the seed for what would later become his landmark album Graceland.

In the apartheid era, it was considered politically correct to boycott South Africa. But Simon created controversy by breaking the boycott to collaborate with African musicians. He wrote the new album in an unorthodox way, first laying down long improvised tracks, then gradually shaping them into songs with lyrics. It would introduce a whole new listening public to his collaborators’ music, giving them a level of professional status and earning power they could only have dreamt of. Simon would later recall their utter amazement as they first walked through New York with him, staring at the plenty all around them.

In time, public opinion would shift, and Simon’s collaborative gesture would be seen as a contributing factor in the end of apartheid. This was sealed when Nelson Mandela himself invited Simon back to the country several years later. But politics hadn’t been what drove Simon to make the creative journey in the first place. The journey began on a lonely road trip, with a bootleg cassette tape, playing a strange new sound that he simply had to chase down. Because he was an artist, and that is what artists do. We glimpse the artist’s epiphany in the third verse of “You Can Call Me Al,” when a shaft of light pierces the bitter autobiographical rumination:

A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the third world
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound, the sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages

He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says, “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!”

In Africa, Simon rediscovered not only the joy of creative collaboration, but the joy of human connection, the spark that passes from one soul to another. Even more than an artist in search of a sound, he appears here as a pilgrim in search of a city, a restless soul in search of rest.

One of my favorite tracks on the record is “Under African Skies.” You can watch Simon perform it in Africa with his band, including special guest vocals by Miriam Makeba. A verse originally written for Linda Ronstadt is modified here to fit Miriam’s story. (Ronstadt, incidentally, also drew criticism for breaking the South African boycott.)

This is the story of how we begin to remember.
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.
After the dream of falling and calling your name out,
These are the roots of rhythm, and the roots of rhythm remain.

Then perhaps most famously, there was the introduction of Ladysmith Black Mambazo in “Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes,” which Simon would perform with the group into all their old age:

I watch Simon and his collaborators here, radiating pure energy and joy, and I think of what would have been lost if Simon had been afflicted with the divisive, soul-killing malaise that afflicts us in the West now. I think how much poorer, stupider, and lonelier we will all be in a world where such effortless connection across cultural divides is increasingly rendered impossible. I think how much we must hate ourselves to deny ourselves that which has the power to transcend, to lift up, to unify.

Murray’s historical survey is a reminder and a warning. A reminder of what the West once was, a warning of what it will become if it continues to erase itself—something altogether less beautiful, altogether less human.

I’ll conclude here with a bit of my own “appropriation,” reflecting my own love of the American black spiritual. I apologize in advance for the production quality, as it was quite literally recorded in a basement and mixed together with freeware. (I am playing and singing, though not at the same time.) But I’m not displeased with what I was able to do with limited resources here. The arrangement is my own but shamelessly borrows bits and pieces of different arrangements I liked, perhaps owing most to Marian Anderson’s version. Classical music folks will recognize a hat tip to Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” in the beginning, which was itself set to a “fake” spiritual, “Going Home.” Leonard Bernstein, in his Young People’s Concert on American music, noted that some people still mistakenly thought it was an authentic bit of Americana. In fact, it was really “a very nice, patriotic little Czech tune.” But to my ear, it always seemed to flow together well with “Deep River,” so I decided to toss it in. I hope you enjoy.