Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer

We’ll keep the red flag flying here

Some zealous patrioteer or patriotrine, it appears, recently criticized the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow for not singing the English national anthem at its concerts. The conductor had enough Scots pluck to get his back up and make an extremely spirited reply, saying that it would be just as suitable to charge the choir with anti-Socialism because it did not sing “The Red Flag.” As a matter of fact, he declared, neither the national anthem nor “The Red Flag” are great songs, and, therefore, however much one may agree with the sentiment of either, neither one has any place in a concert. “Thus we sing the music of the Greek and Roman churches because it is great music; no one suggests that we subscribe to their tenets. . . . Music knows no frontiers and no politics.” This is something like! If a few orchestra-conductors in this country had possessed this worthy Scotsman’s grit and gumption, the music-loving ones among us might fortunately have been spared one of the minor horrors of the late war.

The Freeman Book; Albert Jay Nock, 28 September 1921

Nock makes a point here which has not ceased in its relevance in the hundred-or-so years since he expressed it and which I have myself, independently, note, made on many an occasion.

I recall from my schooldays being instructed by the music master in how stirring a tune is the hymn Jerusalem, the emphasis of whose lines shifts between the first and second verses. The first verse is a series of questions, and each line starts falteringly, as if the questioner is not quite sure whether he should even be asking the question. The verse starts—as if mimicking the modern tendency to open a paragraph with the word so—with a conjunction, as if to underline its inherent discombobulation:

And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England’s pastures green?
And was the holy lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here among these dark, Satanic mills?

I am myself a bit of a John Ruskin when it comes to renovating and re-invigorating the remnants of ancient language, not to mention ancient times, so I will henceforth be regularly repairing to use of the ancient spelling of the past tense of the word build. William Blake’s hymn, however, has no time for ancientness, as in the second verse it plunges, sword-like, into bossing other people around to go and retrieve a number of lost items, whilst the singer engages in psychological anguish to answer all these various, miscellaneous questions so hesitatingly aired in the first verse:

Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! Oh, clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built [or builded] Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

The question that hangs over any stirring bit of lyric, or even of wordless music, is whether the composer is giving vent to sentiments that are cherished by those for whom the tune was even conceived, whether the composer is baring the emotions of his soul in supplication to the listener to sympathise and, if possible, empathise with his dilemmas, or whether the composer has been enjoined by his masters to compose a ditty designed and intended to inveigle.

It was on another occasion that said music master challenged the class to watch suspenseful films without the soundtrack turned on. His point, and a well-made one it was at that, was that the composers of film soundtracks have the means to intensify the emotions only partially conveyed by the cinematographer’s visual techniques.

What he in some manner was saying in all of that is that films wouldn’t be half as thrilling as they in fact are without the accompaniment of a soundtrack. And, by the same token, marching off to war would not be half so thrilling without the accompaniment of a tiddly-om-pom-pom brass band.

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