NatSec at the Symphony

A couple months back a student of mine wrote a paper about orchestral music and the national security state, which put me into a contemplative mood. My students are grad students and I give them a great deal of latitude with respect to the topics that they write on, a policy that has required a bit of adjustment in the Day of Chat GPT but that nevertheless pays off well when it pays off. I was familiar with the intersections between music and state power that were present in Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikovsky and the great Soviet composers, but hadn’t really thought in a systematic way about how the ways in which that relationship still mattered today.

Anyway, around the same time I happened to read this essay about the use of On the Nature of Daylight in Hamnet and other films and learned that probably the most famous orchestral work of the 21st century was written in response to the Iraq War. And again around this same time one of my daughters advanced in a local concerto competition and chose to perform Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. I listened to it once and thought to myself “I bet I know when this was written,” and turns out I was right; 1919.

All of that served as more than enough justification to do a pod on the intersection of national security and orchestral music. Here is that pod, hosted by Patterson graduate Lauren Ho and including Dr. Nathan Jasinski, Professor of Cello at Eastern Kentucky University and myself. Transcript is here.