There Can Be No Revolution Without Song Analysis

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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…show more content…
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

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