This is the ninth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week Trump has been wagging the dog over the annexation of Greenland and busy filling up his cabinet’s clown car with what MAD Magazine would call “the usual gang of idiots.”)

Gara du Nord, the main passenger station in Bucharest. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

In the late afternoon, when I was back from Bánffy Castle and had inspected a 1990s memorial dedicated to those killed in the anti-Communist movement (many East European cities have one), I retreated to my empty hostel to pass time before dinner.

I had thought of riding out to the Ethnographic Park Romulus Vuia, a collection of old Transylvanian wooden houses (many with thatched roofs that would have thrilled my wife), but by the time I was ready to head there, it had begun to rain and the cobblestones were even more treacherous than before.

Instead, I read my Kindle until I could go to dinner. The best time to visit Cluj-Napoca is in the summer, as the city is full of outdoor restaurants and terraces, but still I found a good place to eat indoors, even though the waitress wasn’t thrilled to see me lugging my folded bicycle to the table. (I try to avoid locking it outside.)

Unlike Western Europe, Eastern Europe—and especially Romania—remains a bargain, and dinner out or a berth on an overnight train can be found for less than $100 (unlike Amtrak, which charges about $600 for many overnight compartments, some of them the size of coffins).

Politically, much of Eastern Europe has never been integrated into the West. Yes, many countries, including Romania, are members of the European Union and NATO, but on the ground they remain a world apart, and the big hole in the donut is former Yugoslavia; few of those republics are EU members, and all are outsiders, as would be Ukraine if admitted into the EU.

+++

The sleeper to Bucharest did not leave until 22:15. A few minutes before departing, the long train pulled into the Cluj-Napoca station. There was no indication on the platform where each numbered car would be stopping.

On the advice of a station officer, I lined up at one end of the platform, only to discover that my sleeping car was at the other end of the arriving train. With only two minutes to get aboard and not wanting to lug the folded bicycle the length of the fourteen-car train, I unfolded it, mounted my bags, and pedaled the length of the train in less than a minute.

I am sure I violated a few rules of Romanian station etiquette, but no sooner had I loaded my bicycle and bags onto the vestibule than the engine whistled and the train rolled into the night.

+++

My first visit to Romania, also on a night train, was in spring 1975, when my father and sister visited me—a student in Vienna—and together we traveled to Budapest and Bucharest. (Actually we went all the way to Constanza, a workers’ paradise of high-rise summer apartments on the Black Sea.)

On the overnight train from Budapest to Bucharest, we made up a bed for my sister (then thirteen) on the floor of the compartment rather than let her sleep alone in her assigned compartment.

That night train left Budapest around 10 p.m., and while waiting for it to back into Keleti station my father taught my sister and me the rudiments of boarding a moving train (we practiced on a few slow-moving locals backing along platforms).

A child of the American Depression, my father had acquired the skill in college, when he got around the United States by “riding the blind,” a perch behind the coal tender of steam engines and in front of the “blind” baggage car at the front of the train.

“Riding the blind” (sometimes also called “riding the blinds”) was a step up from hopping freights, which to bindlestiffs and other itinerants in the 1930s were known as “side-door Pullmans”.

After graduating from Columbia in 1940, my father and his close friend Bob Lubar (later managing editor of Fortune and my godfather) rode “the blind” from New York to Los Angeles for $40.

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As I had eaten dinner, there was little for me to do on board the night train other than to lock the door and go to sleep. The porter explained that we would arrive in Bucharest around 6:30 a.m., provided the train was on time, and that he would bring breakfast at 6:00 a.m.

On most night trains in Europe—even on some of the newer Austrian trains—breakfast is yogurt, a prepackaged croissant, and lukewarm coffee, which is what I was served at dawn’s early light.

Then, perfectly on time, the train pulled into Bucharest’s Gara du Nord, which both in name and spirit echoes a terminal from Paris in the 1930s.

On only one of my trips to Romania have I come by air. All the others have begun at this station, which has a stately exterior but inside exhibits the jumbled air of a flea-market with trains running out the back.

+++

Rather than spend the night in Bucharest, I had decided to fly later that day directly to Ankara, Turkey.

To be faithful to my plan of taking night trains all the way from Geneva to Armenia, I originally thought of catching a sleeper from Bucharest to Istanbul, and then the high-speed Turkish train to Ankara.

But when I gamed out the connection from Bucharest to Istanbul, I discovered that it would involve three changes at small intermediate stations in Romania and Bulgaria, as the through service—once a mainstay of the historic Orient Express—was no more.

In summer, the train schedule might have been more forgiving with a direct couchette, but in autumn, I was looking at twenty hours on Balkan day coaches and there was no guarantee that I would make all of my connections. So reluctantly I decided to fly.

+++

With the morning free in Bucharest, I assembled the bicycle and went for a city ride. I only had about an hour before I needed to catch a train to the airport, but I decided it would be enough time to make a loop through the downtown.

I began at the Palace of Parliament, by some reckoning one of the largest buildings in the world, conceived as a monument to its spiritual architect, President Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose ego would have been the only thing that might have filled all 365,000 square meters.

The president, however, was tried and executed in 1989, eight years before the building was finished. Twenty-five years later, it remains an endless ballroom in search of dancers.

Nominally, the Romanian parliament meets there, but there are still acres of empty marble rooms sufficient to display 480 chandeliers, not to mention the 1,409 ceiling lights and mirrors that found homes there, thanks to the labors of 700 architects.

Think of Versailles but without all the modesty. Perhaps its best use came in 1992 when the pop singer Michael Jackson put on a concert with the facade as a backdrop. On stage, Michael greeted the audience by shouting: “Hello Budapest, I’m so glad to be here.”

+++

From the Palace of Parliament, I weaved through traffic (it was rush hour on the larger boulevards, but fine to ride on some of the back streets) to the Athénée Palace Hotel, which is located in the city center on Revolution Square.

Down the road were various ministerial offices, which explained why, in the 1989 revolution, protesters tore apart the square and some of the hotel facade as symbols of repression.

I liked riding by the hotel (now part of the InterContinental chain), as that’s where we stayed in March 1975, when I was in Bucharest with my father and younger sister.

While at the hotel, we were joined by a close family friend and my sister’s godmother, whom we called Aunt Marge. She was then in her sixties and had spent a productive life as a social worker, with much of her career spent abroad in places like China and Japan.

She had warmed to the idea of a family trip behind the Iron Curtain to Romania, and had booked herself to London and Bucharest on various airlines. But something went awry when the airport taxi stopped in front of the hotel (then the best in town but still a little shabby).

I was waiting by the front door to greet her, but when the taxi arrived she flew out the rear car door, shouting at the driver and leaving her luggage untouched.

In waiting to get paid, the driver (who spoke no English) had used some gesture, which she interpreted to mean than he would accept payment in a more emotional currency, and she wanted nothing to do with such means of production.

I think part of the problem, lost in transaction, is that in those days the Romanian currency was called the lei.

+++

On this occasion, I ended my bike ride around Bucharest in front of the Museum of the History of the Romanian Jewish Community, which is located in the former United Holy Temple. It was only open between 10:00 and 15:00, but I didn’t need to go inside as I had been there on a recent visit and the display cases (of a vanished Romanian civilization caught in the vice of World War II) were fresh in my mind.

Later, in wanting to know more of this Holocaust story, I downloaded to my Kindle Paul Kenyon’s excellent Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania.

Kenyon is a celebrated broadcast and magazine foreign correspondent who has covered conflicts around the world, and he married into a Romanian family, which is the reason he wrote this history of Romania in the 20th century (the book ends with Ceaușescu and his wife Elena up against the wall of a firing squad in the city of Targoviste).

Of the internal war waged against the Jews Kenyon writes:

It was only in the months and years that followed that the full enormity of Romania’s Holocaust emerged. More Jews were killed by Romania than any other Axis state, aside from Germany itself. According to the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, the number of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews who perished in territories under Romanian control was between 280,000 and 380,000. Between 120,000 and 180,000 of them died as a result of deportation to Transnistria.

Part of the reason that the fascist leader of Romania, Ion Antonescu, threw in his lot with Hitler’s Nazis is because he hoped that such an alliance might bring back to Romania in a postwar settlement the lost paradise of Transylvania.

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Romania joined the Tripartite Alliance with Germany, Italy, and Japan in November 1940 (foreign correspondent Derek Patmore tells the the story of this treachery in his memoir, Balkan Correspondent, which I recommend to anyone who wants to wallow, as I often do, in the politics of betrayal).

Kenyon describes how in the early 20th century nativist anti-Semitism—plus fears of Jews emigrating from Russia and the nearby Pale of Settlement in what is now Ukraine and Moldova—produced toxic nationalism in Romania, no matter whether the leader was a king, a fascist, or a republican.

Of the late 1930s, Kenyon writes: “Jews were barred from marrying Christians and, no matter how long their family had lived in the country, could never acquire the status ‘Romanian by blood’, a term that was written on the official papers of all non-Jews. The policies of hate and discrimination were designed to flatter Hitler into keeping Hungarian hands off Transylvania.”

It all came to naught, however, when Hitler awarded Northern Transylvania (including Cluj) to Hungary in August 1940. After that, Romania could only prove its bona fides to Hitler by being more ruthless against the Jews than even some Germans.

It is not lost in modern European politics that in 1941 Romanian troops spearheaded the Nazi invasions of southern Ukraine, notably Odessa, where atrocities followed them.

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Image by Getty Images and Unsplash+.

Early December 2024. I’m taking the Amtrak Vermonter train down to Maryland. It’s a chilly morning right now. Cool is the word I choose to use. Like the tunes coming through my headphones. Bill Evans kind of cool. The recording is another primo production on Resonance Records produced by Zev Feldman—a man who knows how to make jazz sound better than it knows how. This particular disc is a couple sets from Bill Evans from 1970 in Norway. The two-disc collection is titled In Norway: The Kongsberg Concert. Eddie Gomez is on the bass and Marty Morrell is on the drums. Bill Evans is on the piano. The show was part of the Kongsberg Jazz Festival that year. The performance is crisp and the song selection is a dream that is fortunately quite real.

Although Bill Evans is the star here—the attraction as it were—Gomez and Morrell’s playing is equal to the wizardry one expects from Evans on the keys. The playing and the recording are democratic in fact and ideal. Evans’ piano dominates the song only until Gomez’ bass sneaks up to take the lead. Morrell’s snare shuffles in a manner that is both singular and an essential element of the music being made and heard. I am reminded of a chevron of flying geese, the bird at the point moving behind another when the needs of the wedge require it. No matter who is flying point, the birds continue their journey. No matter who is up front—Evans, Gomez or Morrell—the music moves on.

It’s a groove that is sustained through the entire recording. I can only imagine the response of that audience in Norway, whose attentiveness is proven in its occasional applause after a particularly adept styling by the band. The thirteen tracks include Evans originals, some standards and an engaging rendition of Miles Davis’ “So What.” The production is superb; no instrument is shuffled to the rear of the recording nor is there a heavy presence that often muffles certain moments in a live recording. Clear as a bell and present as a morning sun, the subtleties of the compositions are manifested in the trio’s spirited performance.

Emily Remler lived an extremely short life. Born in 1957, she died in 1990, her place as a jazz guitarist well established and her time on earth much too short. She recorded seven albums as a bandleader or co-leader in her lifetime. In addition, she was featured on several other records. In 2024, Resonance Records released a two disc set of a couple live performances from what might be considered her peak. Titled Cookin’ at the Queens: Live in Las Vegas (1984 & 1988) the recordings once again feature producer Zev Feldman and his team’s work. The result is another example of the exceptional production one hears on the Bill Evans recording discussed above.

The ensemble Remler was working with in these recorded sets is another trio as tight as the one Bill Evans was with in the Kongsberg Concert recordings. The difference being Remler and her guitar are the focal point of the group. Together with Remler are Carson Smith on bass and John Pisci on drums. The fluid synchrony of this ensemble is present throughout the recording. Emily’s guitar seamlessly weaves in and out, nimbly maneuvering along the fretboard, chords and single notes sustained or sharp as the music demands. As I listened (I was back on the train returning to Vermont), I was constantly reminded of the jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery. Montgomery’s work is something I am relatively familiar with, having studied his technique ever since I first heard his 1960 album The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery when I was in junior high. As it turns out, Montgomery was the guitarist Remler referred to most often as an inspiration. Still, there are moments on these discs where I was also reminded of the guitar sounds of rocker Carl Perkins, jazzman Joe Pass and George Harrison, whose guitar playing blended rock, blues and jazz, not to mention Indian music.

Like Bill Evans’ Kongsberg Concert recording, this double disc of Remler’s includes originals, standards and, somewhat synchronously, a take on the Miles Davis tune “so What.” After listening to Cookin’ at the Queens: Live in Las Vegas a few times, I wondered why I had not heard of Remler before. It was then that I discovered how briefly she had been on earth. In releasing this set of performances, the chance of rediscovery is possible. I’m trying to do my part.

Regarding guitars, their tones and their players, the third recording I listened to during my December journey was another newly discovered live release: BB King—In France: Live at the 1977 Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival. King’s band at this festival featured Walter King on tenor sax,

Ronnie Wiliams III on alto sax. Eddie Rowe playing trumpet, James Toney on the organ,Milton Hopkins on the other guitar, the amazing Joe Turner on bass who together with Caleb Emphrey, Jr. on drums keeps the time for the ensemble. There is a sit-in or two from other musicians at the festival. The set times in a few minutes over an hour. In classic King fashion, the music is nonstop; he and his band keep the joint jumpin’ as it were. While BB is obviously the bandleader, it’s important to acknowledge the democratic approach to the tracks laid down here. Of course, the brass, the reeds, the organ and the rest step up for solos; they are also integral to the music throughout the recording. In other words, the listener doesn’t forget their presence, rendering them to a secondary place in their listening.

It’s a classic BB King set. The Thrill is Gone and That’s Why I Sing the Blues combined with a couple instrumentals and a dozen or so classics. The French crowd approves, clapping and one assumes “shaking anything they wanna’ shake,” just like BB suggests they should. It might be the blues, but the band and audience are certainly having a good time.

I enjoy riding the train and take the Vermonter line a few times a year. Suffice it to say that listening to these recordings made the trip seem like a ride on the magic carpet of Prince Husain, the eldest son of Sultan of the Indies, whose tale is part of the classic One Thousand and One Nights.

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William Byrd’s Preface to Psalmes, Sonet, & songs of sadness and pietie (1588).

Movie stars are singing again. From across a century of sound cinema there have been many leading women and men who have been winning vocalists, from the first talkie generation of James Cagney and Claudette Colbert to the Dolby days and nights of Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway.

Many of these actors had significant youthful training that equipped them with the excellent skills at singing and dancing that are crucial to their personal entertainment brands.

But the stories behind the two recent blockbuster biopics devoted to music legends, one living one dead, tell different tales of musical growth and awareness that might even usher in a broader popular renaissance in singing.

Much praise has been heaped on Timothée Chalamet’s performance in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Impressive indeed was the actor’s dedication to the task of learning to play the guitar and also to discovering his own singing voice in the process of doggedly modeling it on Bob Dylan’s. Both the accuracy of Chalamet’s vocal imitation of his model and his assiduity in attaining a convincing musical competency have been universally applauded. This particular set of talents had remained undeveloped by Chalamet until he undertook the project of becoming Bob on screen. The Bard himself even seems to have offered laconic, though still obscure, approval of his screen epigone’s efforts.

Those watching Chalamet do Dylan might now be encouraged to pick up a guitar on eBay or at the local Salvation Army Store, download a chord chart or the relevant apps, and get bardic themselves. It was this ethos of possibility that fueled the post-war folk revival and, thanks to Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, might just spawn a Second Great Awakening of Song.

Though some might be daunted, even discouraged by Chalamet’s apparently nonchalant ascent to the summit of songdom, anyone really can become a serviceable, guitar-wielding folksinger performing for the pleasure of self, family and friends. Learning just a couple-three chords, and with them opening up endless vistas onto myriad tunes and lyrics, is the work of hours.

To become an opera singer is, by contrast, a Herculean labor of years and even decades. In Pablo Larraín’s Callas (now streaming on Netflix), screen diva Angelina Jolie portrays the opera diva in her last week in Paris, moving through, and remaining still, in a world of aural and visual illusion, wandering through a labyrinth of memory and fantasy, ecstatic song and vocal failure.

In contrast to Chalamet’s unalloyed voice, Angelina Jolie’s ventriloquizes Callas’s with the aid of digital magic that artfully melds her singing voice with that of the exalted diva’s. The result is a pleasing mix of the two, a vocal fabrication that persuasively emerges from her speaking voice.

Where Chalamet had been at his Dylan musical studies for five years before shooting the movie, Jolie did a scant seven months of “intensive” vocal work in advance of Callas. Much of her tuition involved learning proper pronunciation and shaping the mouth properly in the various languages sung—Italian, French and German. Breath support and vocal production were also crucial to making her look believable on screen. Jolie was not an operagoer nor had ever sung in public before she embarked on the title role in Callas.

Jolie could never come as close to Callas’s sound as Chalamet gets to Dylan’s. Still, she has become an ardent convert and proselytizer. Famous arias now dominate her personal playlist and in many promotional interviews for the movie she has extolled the benefits of singing.

Last week she told ClassicFM that singing had transformed her in mind and body: “To be forced to get past that and make a full sound again was almost like shaking me out from years of holding, and having to confront and release a lot. It was really a gift. It’s very freeing. That’s why I say everybody should do it. I’m encouraging everyone [to learn to sing].”

Callas is as much about the body as the voice, which are, after all inseparable, even if the latter escapes the former in its journey to the ears of others. Callas’s extreme battles with her weight are obliquely portrayed in the movie when she hides pills in the pockets of the many sumptuous garments hanging in her vast wardrobe which are discovered, then confiscated, by her fondly severe butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri (Francesco Favino). The film depicts her fitful attempts at a comeback, following her to rehearsals in an empty theater where she is accompanied by her repetiteur (Steven Ashfield) at the piano. On the stage of the empty hall her voice has shrunk like her emaciated frame.

In a conversation with the film’s director Pablo Larraín hosted by Vogue, the Callas director begins by asking the actor if she is going “to open up a center” —Jolie responds with advice that must have echoed from the Hollywood Hills across the LA Basin and throughout the movie industry: “Skip therapy for a year and just go to opera class.”

The bodies of celebrity women have long been toned and tended to, modified and mocked, tailored for objectification on screen and red carpet, the fodder for tabloids and fanchat. But the voice has been neglected, and good on Jolie for bringing awareness to it.

But Larraín’s conjuring of a center immediately makes one wonder whether the current fitness trends, from spinning to rucking to hot Pilates, will now be complemented by vocal calisthenics. Will Muscle Beach become the site of weekly concerts with Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the well-oiled Barbell Choristers, blasting the Anvil Chorus out over the Pacific? Will home gyms from sea-to-shining-sea and across the smoldering plain be retrofitted as music rooms a la Jane Austen?

Canny capitalists must now be mobilizing in order to profit from what could be a huge new craze in self-improvement—monetizing the singing voice, that echo from our species’ distant past when melody and human language were born together—or so the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined.

An idealist might hope that these movies and the uplifting pronouncements of their stars will lead not to exploitation but to an explosion of choral singing and of individual expression—even to political revolution.

But these movies reject community, lauding Dylan for lifting the middle finger to the people and spirt of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and sympathizing with Callas as she collapses into herself and her own legend.

There is nothing new under the ever-hotter sun. Back in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, the towering Elizabethan musician William Byrd answered his own rhetorical question about the value of singing with eight airtight reasons that hit on all of Jolie’s, including pronunciation, circulation and breath, and mental health (in this case the proper worship). Let the world take this musical titan’s advice to heart, even as we await a Byrd biopic and the Psalmes, Sonet, & songs app:

Why Learne to Sing?

Reasons briefly set down by th’author, to perswade every one to learne to sing.

First, it is a knowledge safely taught and quickly learned, where
there is a good Master, and an apt Scholler.

2 The exercise of singing is delightfull to Nature, & good
to preserve the health of Man.

3 It doth strengthen all parts of the brest, & doth open the pipes.

4 It is a singular good remedie for a stutting and stamering in the
speech.

5 It is the best means to procure a perfect pronounciation, & to
make a good Orator.

6 It is the onely way to know where Nature hath bestowed the
benefit of a good voyce : which guift is so rare, as there is not one
among a thousand, that hath it.

7 There is not any Musicke of Instruments whatsoever, comparable
to that which is made of the voyces of Men, where the voyces are
good, and the same well sorted and ordered.

8 The better the voyce is, the meeter it is to honour and serve
God there-with : and the voyce of man is chiefely to bee imployed
to that ende.

“Omnis Spiritus Laudes Dominum”

Since Singing is so good a thing, I wish all men would learn to sing.

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Returning the Gold Plates to Moroni (1829), Linda Curley Christensen and Michael Malm, 2020.

Sacred Grove Welcome Center, Palmyra, New York,

Over my thirty years living in Upstate New York, I’ve raced past the Thruway exit for Palmyra dozens of times while driving the ninety miles from Ithaca to Rochester. Usually, I’ve been rushing to play a concert, or to listen to one, at the Eastman School of Music. But there have been plenty of times when I’ve been on my way to or from Rochester that have involved far less-pressing engagements.

These more relaxed journeys could easily have allowed me time to make an excursion to Mormonism’s Sacred Grove in Palmyra twenty-five miles west of Rochester. Even easier to reach is the Whitmer Farm where the Church of Latter-day Saints was founded in April of 1830. It is half-an-hour from Palmyra to the farm, which is just 40 miles northwest of Ithaca.

My grandfather was baptized in a creek in the Mormon town of Menan, Idaho in 1905. He was the great-grandson of David Dutton Yearsley, a wealthy Quaker merchant who was baptized by Joseph Smith in 1841. My forbear became a close friend of Smith’s and loaned him large sums of money—never repaid. Yearsley also financially backed Smith’s 1844 presidential bid. Smith was killed—martyred, in Mormon discourse—by a mob in Carthage, Illinois in the summer of that year, five months before the election. Yearsley continued west and died near Council Bluffs, Nebraska in 1849.

No one on our stout branch of the spreading Yearsley family tree has been Mormon for a century now. A baptized and confirmed Lutheran, if non-practicing since his teenage years, my father had nonetheless wanted to name me David Dutton Yearsley. That would have made me the third person with that name over six generations. My mother refused.

All this probably has something to do with my fantastical fear that, if I visited Palmyra, commando LDS genealogists might kidnap me into the church or at least force me to explain my Mormon connections. Worse, I might even be visited by Moroni in the Sacred Grove, which, according to Wikipedia (citing the Patheos multi-faith religion project), is the 74^th “Most Holy Place on Earth.”

Unlike me, my daughters are native New Yorkers. The younger of the two, Cecilia, has long been fascinated by the region’s history, including the religious revivalism that spread across the so-called Burned-over District of central and western New York in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was in the course of this Second Great Awakening that Mormonism was born and from whence it proceeded to become one of the most dynamic and successful religious movements of the last two centuries. Cecilia is also a well-informed critic of the dubious sustainability schemes of present day to decarbonize the Burned-over District. During the pandemic, which coincided with her college years, Cecilia was home with us in Ithaca for a couple of long stretches. She had wanted to visit the Sacred Grove then, but it was closed. She now lives in London and returned this year for the holidays.

She ascertained that the Sacred Grove was open again, so the Sunday before Christmas we climbed into the white Subaru spattered with mud and headed to Palmyra.

It had gotten cold after a long fall and early winter of scarily warm weather. That Sunday it was 10F. The windshield wiper fluid nozzle had frozen, but through the salt-caked glass we could still see far across the snowy fields, past the leaning barns and rusty silos and the stands of leafless trees. After twenty minutes, New York’s largest landfill, Seneca Meadows, rose up at the north end of Lake Cayuga. The 350-foot-high snowcapped summit of trash could almost stand in for a cluster of western peaks spied and crossed by the Mormon trekkers of yore. Go West old man, but only as far as Palmyra!

There was much more snow north of the Thruway due to the increased precipitation coming off of Lake Ontario—“pioneer weather” the sexagenarian docent, a missionary from Boise coming to the close of a year-and-a-half stint at the Sacred Grove, would later call it as we traipsed across the snowy fields of the Smith Farm.

We still had a few minutes before the Sacred Grove opened at 1pm, so we pulled in first to the Temple, the first one in New York State. This classic example of Mormon architecture seems to share basic aesthetic principles with Fascist buildings, except that its boxy, concrete elements are crowned by a gilded statue of the trumpet-blowing angel Moroni. Dedicated in 2000, the bunker-like structure sits above the valley where the Smith Farm and Visitors Center lie. The site is a mile south of the village of Palmyra on the Erie Canal.

An SUV with Virginia plates had just pulled up in front of us and a family of six piled out. When Cecilia and I walked by the vehicle, we realized that they had left it running as they took their time talking around the temple. I thought of George Hayduke from Edward Abbey’s rollicking eco-terrorist novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang—the scene where Hayduke hops into an idling police car and wreaks some fabulous havoc. Hayduke’s nemesis is the nefarious Mormon, Bishop Love.

Across the flats from the Temple, on the next the wooded ridge is the Sacred Grove. It was here in 1820 that the teenage Joseph Smith saw a pillar of light and was visited by two figures, God the Father and God the Son, who told him that all then-existing churches in their various denominations were false and corrupt.

Later that afternoon, the Virginia family’s oldest boy was asked play the part of Joseph himself at the age, even made to hold up a replica of the plates hidden in a burlap sack.

The paintings in the one-room welcome center depict crucial moments of Mormon revelation: the godly visitation of in the Scared Grove, Jesus and his Father looking like identical twins. It’s a weirdly provocative theological image from this non-trinitarian sect. Another picture shows Moroni coming to the young Joseph in the attic of the family’s cabin. Canned Christmas carols emanate from hidden speakers, their saccharine glow artfully matching the painting’s pastel colorings.

I’ve tried to read the Book of Mormon but could never make much headway through its hokey biblicalisms and technical jargon—Urim, Thummim, Cimiter. Our docent throws around many of such terms and everyone appears to know exactly what they mean. There seems to be no inkling that any among us are non-Mormonism. Except for our ragged, vaguely Gorp Corps vestments, Cecilia and I definitely look the part with our above-average stature, good teeth and blond hair. Still, the learning curve is steep. We nod when the others easily answer questions like those about the weight of the plates and the hiding of them in the bag of beans when gold-hungry thugs stormed into the newer frame house built by the Smiths later in the 1820s and still largely intact.

Aside from elucidating Mormon doctrine, our guide identifies fox, deer and rabbit tracks for the young urbanites. These Western Missionaries come East cling to their connection to the agrarian past. The Mormon Church has been buying up large tracts of land in Palmyra since 1907 and even moved the state route off their property to return the ensemble of historic buildings to its rural setting. Say what you will about the preposterous revelations retailed by Smith, his followers have, with the exception of the menacing hilltop Temple, carefully preserved the natural beauty of the hills and valleys around the Sacred Grove.

After the tour,  we drive down Main Street in Palmyra past the Protestant Churches. They look badly neglected, especially when compared with the spotless indestructibility of the Mormon Temple we’ve just come from.

The sun sets through the Sacred Grove.

Harried by the authorities, Joseph Smith repaired first to Harmony, Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania before returning to Upstate New York and the Whitmer Farm, where he officially founded the Church of Latter-day Saints in 1830. We arrive at the farm just after sunset at 4:30, a half-hour before closing time.

Inside this Welcome Center, Sister Hope is thrilled to see us. She is in her fifties, also on a mission away from her farm in Eastern Washington. She takes us to another reconstructed cabin, this one where the Book of Mormon was written down, the barely literate Smith making use of scribes to produce the text. When Sister Hope asks us to imagine what it was like to hear the prophet dictating in the room above, tears well up in her eyes.

A new husband-and-wife team of missionaries has just arrived from Utah. They are in training for this latest posting and join our little tour in order to hear again Sister Hope’s ardent and richly informative descriptions of the church’s early history and these events’ enduring significance. After the tour of the cabin, she ushers us into a small screening room in the Welcome Center so that we can watch a four-minute film that “can only be seen here.”

The movie brings us back to the cabin in 1830, then on the trek to Utah. There are baptisms in creeks and displays of incredible toughness as pioneers in wagons brace themselves against the bitter Plains winds. Salt Lake City and the Tabernacle grow and grow across the decades.

Our day of LDS history begins and ends with music. The film’s soundtrack is provided by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and pursues an inexorable crescendo as thousands across the Pacific fill the new Temples of Polynesia and Southeast Asia. Moroni is hoisted by a crane atop a tower over the African rainforest.

After the movie, Sister Hope asks us what our connection to the Church is. Cecilia tells her that we are descendants of David Dutton Yearsley. Sister Hope is thrilled and says that during her time on the track team at BYU-Idaho, she was helped by the trainer, Nate Yearsley. “I’m sure he’s a relative,” I mumble. Before we leave, Sister Hopes reminds us that tomorrow is Joseph Smith’s birthday. We thank her for her tour and make our escape. The vast parking lot is empty except for a lone Subaru.

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NEW RELEASES

1) Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey, Compassion (ECM)

2) Julian Lage, Speak to Me  (Blue Note)

3) Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers,  Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens  (Red Hook)

4) Jenny Scheinman, All Species Parade (Royal Potato Family)

5) Matthew Shipp Trio,  New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz  (ESP-Disk)

6) Ethan Iverson, Technically Acceptable  (Blue Note)

7) Arooj Aftab, Night Reign (Verve)

8) Abdullah Ibrahim, 3  (Gearbox)

9) David Murray Quartet, Francesca (Intakt)

10) Charles Lloyd, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow  (Blue Note)

BEST VOCAL

Arooj Aftab, Night Reign (Verve)

BEST LATIN

Amaro Freitas, Y’Y (Psychic Hotline)

BEST DEBUT

O., WeirdOs (Speedy Wunderground)

RARA AVIS (REISSUES/ARCHIVAL)

1) Sonny Rollins, Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance)

2) Sun Ra, Live at the Showcase in Chicago, 1976-77  (Jazz Detective)

3) Cannonball Adderley, Burnin’ in Bourdeaux Live in France, 1969  (Elemental Music)

4) McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson, Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’ (1966, Blue Note)

5) Yusef Lateef, Atlantis Lullaby: the Avignon Concert  (1972, Elemental Music)

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Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

(T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1941).

There is no rubble.
There are no more fumes.
There has been no trouble.
There are no airless tombs.

There has never been a war.
No bombs on that house.
What are you crying for?
What’d you want to denounce?

There are no Palestinians.
There are no Palestinians.
There are no Palestinians.

There’s never been a bomb.
There’s never been a fire.
There is only that song,
That lifts my spirit higher.

You are not yet dead.
You are still alive.
I live awake in bed
Dreaming of your eyes.

There are no Palestinians.
There are no Palestinians.
There are no Palestinians.

– 25 December 2024.

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Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi, 1504.Uffizi, Florence. (public domain)

Christmas is a dangerous time, for it threatens social instability, political disorder, even revolution. At the culmination of the story, kings kneel before a helpless baby; the powerful pay tribute to the seemingly powerless. To understand the destabilizing potency of Christmas, one has only to recall Andreas Karlstadt, an iconoclast in the literal sense, shouting the words of institution in German—not Latin— and offering both the communion cup and the wafer to the trembling hands and lips of the unconfessed laity in Wittenberg on December 25, 1521, in the first years of the Lutheran Reformation.

Martin Luther’s 1522 sermon on the Epiphany can be read as part of his larger project to shore up the political order threatened by the radicalism of Karlstadt and others. In Luther’s view, the heavenly king had not come to earth in order to topple the political order, even though the tyrannical Herod and those invested in his authority misinterpreted the divine birth as a direct threat. Luther’s account of the Epiphany relies on his Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, which posits one realm ruled by God and the other subservient to worldly regimes. But Luther couldn’t help but be attuned to the restive spirit of Christmas, acknowledging that Herod “feared that an insurrection would drive him from his kingdom.” The great insurgency unleashed by the Reformation, the Peasants’ War of 1524-5, was itself propelled by the centrifugal social forces Karlstadt had helped to set in motion.

The elaborate music Bach produced for the Christmas season two centuries after Karlstadt was not intended to make explicit the latent political dimensions of the Christmas story. Yet they are there in the music.

Bach’s cantata for the second day of Christmas, Darzu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes (For this God’s Son has appeared), BWV 40, first performed in Leipzig on December 26, 1723, upends the political order, even while paradoxically buttressing it.

The martial tones, ringing with princely hunting horns, make clear that Christ has come to earth not to gurgle and coo, but to wage a bloody campaign against the devil’s influence. The babe will be a fearsome warrior for good:

For this the Son of God has appeared,
That he destroy all the works of the devil.

The text is by an unknown poet, who, in the recitative that follows deploys formulaic courtly language to dramatize the inversion of political hierarchies:

… the great son of God
leaves the throne of heaven
and it pleases his Majesty
to become a small human child.
Consider this exchange, you who can think of it;
The King becomes a subject,
The Lord appears as a vassal
and is for the human race
– o sweet word in every ear –
born for our comfort and salvation.

The descending arc of the vocal lines, punctuated by upward exclamatory leaps, might be heard to convey the Godly movement from heaven to earth, that is, steeply down the ladder of power, from the throne of heaven and out into the world turned upside down.

This recitative is followed by an inward-turning chorale, which juxtaposes the suffering of sin with the joy brought by Christ. After the communal reflections of the chorale, a bass aria bursts forth onto the field of battle. With its galloping bass line, spurred on by jaunty unison violins and pointed appoggiaturas at phrase endings, the opening ritornello leads into the spirited bravery of the hero’s music:

Serpent of hell,
are you not worried?
He who will snap your head
Has now been born,
and the lost
shall delight in eternity.

In this bloodthirsty piece, melodic fragments are cut short with angular leaps and finished off with appoggiaturas as cutting as steel blades, rather than as soft as the aural silk more typical of these ornamental figures. Bach’s brutally graphic treatment of the word “zerknickt”— snap in two—with its sharp, dislocating scansion and bludgeoning repeated notes followed by gasping breaths is blood-curdling. This is ghastly, no-holds-barred combat. The unassuming baby is apparently capable—at least on the allegorical level—of bloody, violent acts.

In the cantata’s final aria Bach enlists a smaller contingent of hunting instruments—a bassoon and a pairs of horns and oboes—to sally forth with a single voice. Breathless and agitated, valiant and undaunted, they are eager to join battle with the foe. In this melee, Jesus offers protection and comfort. The metaphor of chicks taken under the wing of their mother offers protection from——or at least solace after—the grim combat depicted by the music. The music challenges the performers, for they too are locked in struggle with their instruments, Bach putting them to the test. This musical face is hot with bravery and flushed with the heat of hell:

Christian children, be joyful,
though the kingdom of hell rages,
Satan’s fury need not frighten you
Jesus will deliver you:
Will gather his chicks to himself
And enfold them with his wings.

An equally militaristic tone animates the swashbuckling chorus that concludes the last of the six cantatas that make up Bach’s most beloved seasonal offering, the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248): “Nun seid ihr wohl gerochen” —“Now you are well avenged, / for upon the host of your enemies, Christ has broken, that which was against you.” This is not music of peace and goodwill.

After the martial ritornello opens the movement, the chorus sings not in echoing polyphony, but presents the unadorned chorale in rhythmically unified four-part harmony, resolute and assured. The text is set to the melody of the Passion Chorale:

Now are ye well avenged
Upon your hostile host,
For Christ hath fully broken
All that which opposed you.
Death, devil, sub and hell
Are completely debilitated;
With God the human race
now has its place.

At the Epiphany, when the newborn baby is adored by earthly kings, the crucifixion looms. Marshaling his forces, Bach raises the cross above the battlefield.

Bach was not a revolutionary. He courted the patronage of princes and generally flourished under their aegis while chafing against proto-democratic civic authority as Director of Music in Leipzig.

But what if the musical weapons he fashioned for Christmas should fall into the hands of real revolutionaries?

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Sculpture, Wayne State University. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Cybernetic Society and the Descent of Dialectical Thought

We lack the tools to critically assess and interrogate our social institutions and our ways of thinking about and interacting with them. That is among the core claims of a new book by Michael J. Thompson, a professor of political theory at William Paterson University and a practicing psychoanalyst. In The Descent of the Dialectic, published earlier this year, Thompson argues that in our age of all-penetrating relativism and the “drastic decline of critical thought in Western culture,” we must attempt to put an objective ethics grounded in critical theory back on firm footing. Thompson wants to address the pervasive nihilism and “dull uniformity” he sees in Western culture, “with the logics of control, efficiency, consumption, and uniformity of all kinds” replacing the project of developing meaning and social values; these developments have tracked the observed decline in critical thinking.

Thompson’s goal, in part, is to address the separation between “objective rationality” and “a substantive and ontological account of human ethics.” Thompson’s book is an attempt to revive the dialectical method through an approach that unites and synthesizes “human value with objectivity rationality” in phronetic criticism. This idea is rooted in the concept of phronesis, which, in the philosophical tradition of the ancient Greeks, counsels a kind of prudence that recognizes the radical contingency and contextuality of life and decision-making. The dialectic recognizes our nature as “affine beings that are intrinsically related with others and shape and form our internal world via our relationality with others.” Students who have been trained in the dialectical approach will be more able to tap into, incorporate, and synthesize these two types of reason. “Increasingly,” writes Thompson, “modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness.” It is not enough for Thompson that we rely on deliberation or discussion within a nominally democratic process; this philosophical overreliance on process and dialogue, absent the reintroduction of “critical use of the dialogue,” leaves us stranded in social and political patterns that are not equipped to mount serious challenges to the status quo.

Dialectical thinking encourages us to confront and disrupt the orthodoxies of thought and practice that are “typical of one’s place in the world.” “Opposed to this,” argues Thompson, “is the passive acceptance of the basic structure of this world, of its categories that gradually come to shape our own.” Thompson associates these imperatives with an institutional and normative complex he calls “cybernetic society,” in which consciousness is increasingly absorbed in “this logic of efficiency and productivity.” The phase of cybernetic society we have entered has made it possible for the logics of capitalism “to colonize the deepest reaches of consciousness,” the self withering in a poisoned and atrophied social environment. Thompson returns to the idea of cybernetic society frequently throughout the book to describe a society in which the individual’s self-conception and way of life have been taken over and reconstituted by institutional imperatives and logics. Everything is quantifiable and trackable—your productivity and consumption patterns, your internet use and the ideological character of the content you consume, your personal relationships and connections, your physical location and movements, your biometric data and medical history, your finances and credit history. It is a world of measurable metadata in which very little is beyond the reach of the state and powerful corporations. And while the cybernetic society of the present stage of capitalism promises freedom and individual self-expression and self-realization, the psychological, material, and political conditions of real-life capitalism are profoundly unfree. As Thompson explains, “the subject is allowed to explore only that which can be delivered by the cybernetic society.” Thus, ways of expressing oneself in dress and appearance are increasingly tolerated and even imitated by the ruling class.^[1]

The objective, critical ethic Thompson hopes to revive draws heavily on the work of Karl Marx. Marx famously gave us new ways to think about the failures of philosophy to change the world, uniting philosophical interpretation on one side and action toward change on the other. Marx’s own career arguably follows this structure, with a divide between the philosophical early Marx and the political later Marx (debates about the merits of this distinction in his work are beyond the purview of this article). In The Descent of the Dialectic, Thompson is engaged with both, putting a critique of society as it is alongside the presentation of a philosophical approach capable of changing social reality. In discussing the dialectic as an approach to philosophy, it is important to point out that Hegel explicitly dismissed this way of conceiving his project. To Hegel, describing reality is hard enough without adding positive or prescriptive statements. The dialectic is not applied to phenomena from without, but is the attempt to follow and describe dynamics in reality in their immanent natures, to describe things in terms of the tensions that exist within and define reality. Hegel writes that “everything true, in so far as it is comprehended, can be thought of only speculatively,” a statement about the complexity and irreducibility of the world.

In dialectics, truth is associated with a process instead of being held as something fixed and objective one discovers. The goal is to begin to see reality not as a set of discrete facts, but as a complex of “interwoven tendencies.” Whereas the state’s schools teach obedience to various dogmas, a dialectical approach to education would instruct students to disrupt reified social concepts and categories, breaking them down into the component relationships from which they are composed. We can draw on the idea of emergence to help make sense of these relationships: the dialectic offers a way to think about the emergence of complex, unpredictable (and apparently non-deterministic) social patterns by analyzing them in terms of the conflicts and contradictions found within the overall system. By drilling down to these dynamics, we can develop a fuller and more accurate picture or model of the social ontological landscape; it takes seriously the role of power and structural inequalities in these tensions and dynamics. Rather than obscuring this role, the dialectic encourages students to probe the connections between social power and “the formation of our social world and the kinds of reality we experience.” Nothing in material reality is fixed in stasis, permanent, or unchanging. The world is in a state of ceaseless motion and change, right down to the elementary particles, themselves just ripples in energy fields. Dialectical reasoning attempts to take these facts about reality seriously by understanding things within their particular contexts. It is naturally resistant to permanent rules for all cases. It understands each social phenomenon as comprising a series of underlying relationships, which are themselves always in flux.

In practical terms, if there is any hope of a revival in dialectical approaches to social problem-solving, then it will necessarily depend on the way we educate children and introduce them to our social ontology. Key to Thompson’s ideas is his theory of social ontology, our understanding of the social world—its institutions, norms, centers of power, and their workings and patterns. A resurgence of the dialectical approach he articulates has special relevance to criticisms of the education system and efforts to make it more socially productive and responsive to students. Indeed, any serious rethinking of education seems to require the maintenance of the skeptical and critical posture recommended by dialectical reasoning. While it is not the focus of the book, Thompson acknowledges the connection between his project and our attitudes about the education system: social subsystems like education can only be grasped as “embedded in broader contexts of social reality.” He argues that “understanding how schools are organized is a function of the value or purpose that the broader society places on its function.”

The model of education prevailing in the West grows out of a series of social and cultural trends, particularly during the nineteenth century, associated with the rise of nationalism and attendant efforts to centralize power and government functions. The compulsory school was critical to these efforts to construct a cohesive national identity and consolidate power in the growing nation-state. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), enormously influential on these social and political movements, argued in his Addresses to the German Nation that the student cannot merely be instructed, but must be deliberately fashioned—and “in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.” The goal of the system was to create a pliable subject. The idea was to weaken and ultimately eliminate the student’s capacity to think independently or critically, to make him a vessel for the worldview, values, and material interests of government power. The school would be responsible for the creation and perpetuation of a secular religion, a kind of cult of the nation-state. The paradigm is well captured in the words of William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, in a lecture he gave called “The Literature of Education”:

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in every civilized nation are automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow prescribed custom. This is the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual under his species.

These ideas permeated the education movement in the United States, and the model they advanced was a rigid, authoritarian one characterized by discipline and uniformity, where the needs and interests of the student are ignored. Our society maintains a very strict order around its conceptions of learning and of what it means to be a student. This conceptual terrain is now carefully guarded, the site of enormous ruling class investment across government bodies, major corporations, and many NGOs. The federal government and global corporations know that fundamental changes in the education system could yield young adults who are insufficiently acquiescent. 

Education and Cultural Reproduction

Though we are uncomfortable with discussing the social function of the system of compulsory education, it is “the largest instrument in the modern state for telling people what to do.” The task of the education system is to inculcate a framing of the world that legitimizes the ruling class. Thus, history and social studies must be taught in a way that deifies the rich and powerful and all but ignores everyone else. But even more important than the subject matter is the school environment itself; this much more than any fact or theory consumed during a lecture is what is needed to reproduce the values of the ruling class and the systems that ensue from them. This is no small thing, as human beings are naturally critical, stubborn, smart, and sensitive to injustice—they are not easily corralled into authoritarian hierarchies. And contrary to the claims of oppressive rulers since time out of mind, such hierarchies are in no way “natural.”

The system begins with the forcible, mandatory confinement of the student’s physical body, a necessary precondition for the establishment of control over her mind. The student experiences everyday life as a morose exercise in abstention, repression, and humiliation, taught to believe that knowledge is transmitted in an unquestioned one-way stream from superiors. The vital feature of compulsory schooling today is alienation: the teacher, as a member of a special priestly class, has access to the truth, which the student must receive in the prescribed manner within the walls of the school.^[2] The radical tradition is brimful with incisive efforts to analogize the modern school to the prison; while these attempts have successfully demonstrated the many similarities between the school and prison as social institutions, it is time for critics of the education apparatus to reach beyond comparisons and accept that it is not merely that the school is like a prison. Rather, the school is a prison. The school calibrates the student to a state of mind and existence associated with the prison; she inhabits a “death-world,” “[a form] of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”^[3]

This institutional removal of the child from the household, the workplace, the city, and the public sphere more generally has catastrophic implications, both for the student and the broader society. The result is a student alienated from the processes of learning and intellectual development, a passive recipient of the dominant ideology, conditioned and destined to recreate it. The student is constructed socially not as an active participant and experimenter, but as a disembodied vehicle for an alien ideology—alien in the sense that the ideology does not reflect, but actively suppresses, the needs, desires, and values of the student. The training the student receives is training in unthinking compliance and in practical strategies for avoiding the discomfort that accompanies critical challenges to power. The primary goal of the school system is not to present arguments in favor of the status quo, or even to contradict through propaganda the claims of its critics, but to foreclose the possibility of argument itself by satisfying the student that no successful alternative to the status quo exists in the record or could exist in principle.

Education cannot mean merely preparing our children to recreate the ideologies and injustices of this system. The only legitimate remit of a system of education is to give children the tools to think critically about the natural and social world. Nothing can be placed beyond questioning, not even the institutional pillars of our own time and place. Dialectical thinking encourages students to adopt other perspectives and to challenge their own ideas by exploring the complex, internally contradictory nature of observed phenomena. Such a learning environment yields adults who approach society with an understanding of their own values rather than with trained skill in repeating the ideas and values of those in power. If we educate children to shore up ruling class power, we cannot hope to reclaim independence and autonomy as cultural values. When the dialectical process stops, inquiry comes to a dead end in concepts and institutions treated as unchallengeable and unalterable; this is reification at work.

Allowing dialectics into our approach to children and to pedagogy brings an openness that extends to other ways of life. New fields of possibility are opened to them; they are not beholden to particular worldview, religions, or ideologies. Thus a dialectical approach to education undermines the fundamental preconditions and standards of cultural reproduction. It gives society resilience because it teaches students to reflect on society anew and attend to injustices in real time. It threatens the ruling class, because the curious, self-respecting student cannot be expected to accept the answers we’ve so dutifully accepted. We also know that there are deep, measurable connections between student reports of mindfulness and unscripted experiences in adult society and in nature. In this mode of learning, the student is no longer the mere audience of a person in a position of authority; she is a participant in an improvisation, where the absorption of new information and the development of understanding are extemporaneous—and thus felt and remembered. As our ability to address these connections becomes more rigorous scientifically, anarchists’ ideas on education are increasingly vindicated. 

Alternative Models of Education

Radically anti-authoritarian education reformers have built alternatives to the dominant system alongside it and within its cracks. Whether they acknowledged it or said so explicitly, these anarchists and deschoolers were motivated by and encouraging a dialectical way of thinking. Anarchists in particular have centered the lives, experiences, and wellbeing of children in a way other movements have not, recognizing that the adult-child gap may be the deepest privilege divide in society. That important thinkers in the anarchist movement have taken such a keen interest in education says much about the anarchist worldview; among these thinkers, Colin Ward (1924-2010) stands out as presenting a bold and exciting criticism of education that reflects Thompson’s worries about the contemporary atrophy of critical thinking. Many of Ward’s most lasting contributions to the cultural dialogues on early education and the experiences of children are set forth in his 1978 book, The Child in the City. The book contends that “we have accepted the exclusion of children from real responsibilities and real functions in the life of the city,” condemning them to institutions and physical spaces that are unwelcoming and dangerous to them. In the prevailing model of education, obedience is the expectation, as students are prepared for successive rounds of standardized tests by rigid government-prescribed curricula. The school as we know it doesn’t take the child seriously as a fellow human being—its fundamental goals are incompatible with the dignity and autonomy of the child. Among the major social functions of the modern school is to preempt the child as an autonomous actor and creative force capable of imagining alternatives to the status quo. Part of Ward’s genius is that he attempts to adopt the perspective of the child; he has radical ideas about education and pedagogy because he has radical ideas about how society should conceptualize and honor children and childhood. Ward’s was a pragmatic and ecumenical anarchism informed by his observations of and respect for real-life liberatory practice—a “constructive antinomianism,” as one historian put it. Ward was notably much more comfortable than most of today’s mainstream with children engaging in productive work, and he believed that we should “make the whole environment accessible to them.” He held to the radical notion that if we want to help children grow into happy, socially competent, productive members of a healthy community, we must permit them more space within that community. “In the ideal city,” he wrote, “every school would be a productive workshop and every workshop an effective school.” Ward’s comfort and indeed enthusiasm for the employment of children should not be interpreted as an endorsement of full-time work for children. Quite to the contrary, he thought that they should spend most of their time engaged in free play and exploration. Confronted with the outside world—in particular, the natural world—students report more awe and excitement around learning, more sustained and authentic engagement, and better overall mental health. They are more likely to meet life’s challenges as puzzles to be solved and interesting opportunities to hone their skills. They appreciate that all patterns in nature are temporary. For these reasons, Ward’s vision was “schools without walls,” where the student is fully immersed in the broader social order.

The literary titan Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), an anarchist fellow traveler, was also deeply interested in building functional prototypes of new educational and pedagogical programs. An understanding of his approach to education requires a look at his worldview and motivating values. Part of what makes Tolstoy’s novels so captivating, heartfelt, and authentically human is his deep social criticism. But it is a criticism contained in Tolstoy’s unique ability to look at powerful institutions—social, economic, religious—in all of their many absurdities and contradictions. In Tolstoy, we find powerful leaders who are petty and misguided, driven by selfishness and vanity rather than commitment to the common good. His characters must try to appease various powerful and predatory institutions, and their best efforts often lead to puzzling, frustrating results. We identify with them both because Tolstoy paints them in fine detail, and because we still have to appease many of the same gods, even if their shapes have changed since his time.

Tolstoy’s political ideas are extremely radical, even by today’s standards. His non-resistance philosophy, much like that of the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (from whom he quotes at length in his The Kingdom of God Is Within You), does “not acknowledge allegiance to any human government” and opposes all uses of force, including even self-defense. Non-resistants like Garrison and Tolstoy abstained from voting and running for office; they refused to fight in wars or pledge loyalty to any state. They were devout Christians, but they held to a truer if more controversial picture of Jesus—as a deeply counter-cultural figure who infuriated the ruling classes by showing their self-contradictions. Like the historical Jesus, Tolstoy did not try to hide his contempt for the status quo.

Tolstoy saw education as an innate need to be met, with the adults helping to serve that need rather than dominating and punishing children. His approach to education put the students in the position of highest importance, their curiosities and interests driving the subject matter and process. Of a visit to a school in Germany, he wrote in his diary, “I was at school. Terrible. Prayer for the king, beatings. Everything by heart. Frightened, mutilated children.” He knew he had to try to formulate the child, education, and the school in a different, more socially responsible way. In 1862, describing the daily workings of his school, Tolstoy wrote,

They [the students] bring nothing with them no books and no copy-books. They are not required to study their lessons at home. Not only do they bring nothing in their hands, but nothing in their heads either. The scholar is not obliged to remember to-day anything he may have learned the evening before. The thought about his approaching lesson does not disturb him. He brings only himself, his receptive nature, and the conviction that school to-day will be just as jolly as it was the day before.

Tolstoy was an aristocrat, and for that reason, locals met his school with a level of mistrust, frequently well justified by lessons learned in interactions with predatory elites. He recalls the fear among parents that students “will be bundled into carts and carried off to Moscow.” This also reflects parents’ fears about the coincidence of interests between the education establishment and the government and military apparatus.

We hear echoes of Tolstoy’s remarkable libertarian voice in Emma Goldman (1869-1940), another anti-authoritarian defender of children and radical opponent of government education. In her essay “The Child and Its Enemies,” published in her anarchist journal Mother Earth in 1906, the first year of its publication, Goldman offers a radical alternative to the dominant institutional approach to education and the child’s education and development generally. Goldman believed that “every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself,” and that this self-denial and alienation led to social strife and antagonism. She anticipates later anarchists and radical critics of the state’s education system in seeing its primary goal and purpose as the creation of an unthinking, obedient conformist, “a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist.” Goodman argued that we should experiment with “different kinds of school” or “no school at open,” opening ourselves to a range of models including children and young people in everything from “practical apprenticeships” and community service to farm schools and the arts. Instead, he points out, we have seen sustained attacks on progressive educational models and adherence to the “mass belief” and “superstition” of the traditional, one-size-fits-all school.

Such radical visions of education open the way for a revival of a dialectical project to reincorporate critical thinking and serious challenges to increasingly oppressive cybernetic capitalism. Without a capacity to frame challenges to “our own beliefs and normative structures of thought,” in Thompson’s words, we are doomed to reproduce a destructive and manipulative system of intense alienation. Engagement with dialectical thought allows us to “free ourselves from pre-metabolized forms of meaning,” opening space for genuine creativity and liberatory practice. The school must be a key site for such critical interventions.

Notes.

^[1] If Thompson exaggerates here, his point is nonetheless valuable: “Corporate CEOs are now indistinguishable from those who work for them as well as those who serve them. All dress in standard street clothes, faces pierced with all forms of steely accoutrements, tattoos abound just as the dyed hair screaming for attentiveness from the depths of existential anonymity and a regressive adolescence takes hold of the self in what [W.H.] Auden refers to as our ‘jackass age.’”

^[2] In Anarchy in Action, Ward writes, “Bakunin made the same comparison as is made today by Everett Reimer and Ivan Illich between the teaching profession and a priestly caste, and he declared that ‘Like conditions, like causes, always produce like effects. It will, then, be the same with the professors of the modern school, divinely inspired and licensed by the State. They will necessarily become, some without knowing it, others with full knowledge of the cause, teachers of the doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the State and to the profit of the privileged classes.’”

^[3] Nicholas Fesette, “Carceral Space-Times and The House That Herman Built” in Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Shane Vogel, eds., Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke University Press 2020).

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Back in the mid-70s I had a friend who attended the New England Conservatory, a school for future musicians of all ilks — jazz, classical, guitar, sax, orchestration, composition, etc.  My friend, Mark, was an Army brat whose father was a colonel stationed at Ft. Devens just 40 miles from Boston. He had shown great promise as a child of cultured parents who pushed him to excel in music.  He played piano; I thought he played well; and he found himself attending the Conservatory to improve his playing standards to a professional level.  I admired him more than all the friends who had come and gone in my life.

I was essentially homeless around that time, having dropped out of Groton School, and living in a tent in woods not far from the school, like some scholastic ghost locals might talk about later.  For money, I spent some time picking apples in nearby orchards, and sometimes hung out (along with another friend) with the H2A Jamaicans brought in to harvest the fruit. They would start off their seasonal journey in Maine and work their way down to lower New England, orchard by orchard, and some would go on to strip peaches in Georgia, and others would end up in South Florida cutting cane before returning back to Jamaica. We usually hung out with Heady, a father of three, who would go into Groton town once a week and send money home, buy some stouts or Red Strip at the local packie, and meet up with an acquaintance who would supply them with ganja.

At one point, I cannot recall the details, I found myself even without a tent. Mark found out about this one weekend home and invited me to crash in his dorm at the Conservatory. I slept on the floor and was snuck into the food line in the dining room.  I had the room to myself a lot of the day as Mark attended classes.  In the afternoons, he earned money tuning pianos and helping to restore old pianos. To save pocket cash, he would frequent The Top of the Hub, the spinning restaurant atop downtown Boston’s Prudential Building, which had a cheap but delicious buffet array. The ambience was languorous and the speakers emitted jazz.

The biggest thrill Mark had at that time was his gig tuning the Steinway at Symphony Hall, just up the road from the Conservatory.  He was especially excited one time getting to be the tuner who had worked on the piano at the Jazz Workshop  just prior to one of Keith Jarrett’s concerts there in 1974, with Dewey Redman, Paul Motian and Charlie Haden, with whom he would jam regularly. Mark was a huge Jarrett fan.  And I would learn to hear the nuances and technical prowess of Jarrett’s playing, with Mark signaling as we listened to his records on special moments of seeming genius. My first impression of Jarrett was his store of energy and life; this guy was not morose but transforming his blues into abstract dances that were pleasant to listen to, interesting patterns and rhythms, and affirmative.

The one time I saw Jarrett in concert live was in Istanbul in 1993.  I’d moved there to teach English to Turkish kids who often didn’t want to learn English.  Especially from Americans.  I got that.  I was teacher living in a building with other foreign teachers, Brits and Aussies almost exclusively, listening to them carp and carry on and backstab each other, but jolly up  with each other at dinner chowing down a curry cooked by Bill, a legend-in-his-own-mind from Yorkshire, all of whom, I leaned later, would turn on me together when I was out of the room. When Jarrett came to Istanbul in 1993 he played solo at the Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall.  I attended the concert with Bill.  It was a lot of fun listening to the musical improvisation most jazz pianists could only fantasize about. But it was also fucking annoying having Keith stop at times and get up and walk away from the piano in ponderment or keening to hear how he would proceed or some secret genius business. Who the fuck knows? But since he was solo, when did that kind of thing, everything stopped.  And we all knew it was too early for the standing ovation, so we kind of looked at each other and kind of didn’t.

Back then I was listening to Belonging a lot. I loved Spiral Dance and Long As You Are Living Yours and The Windup. He was playing with top notchers: Jan Gabarek, Palle Danielsson, and Jin Christenson.  Lots of life.  I also loved listening to the legendary Köln Concert.  But I was also partial to the classical arrangements of the three-song Arbour Zena, especially Solara March (Dedicated to Pablo Casals and the Sun). But even then, those musical wonders were about two decades old.  Jarrett had gone on to new feats and heights.

Jarrett was part of a most exhilarating period of my life, homelessness mixed with high culture, living with different friends at different times in different homes in Groton, Back Bay, Dorchester, Concord, NH. Peterboro, NH, Hollywood, West Palm Beach, and the Northampton VA Hospital.  I fell into jazz, I knew by heart the blues, knew how to exchange food stamps for cash for smokes and booze. Slept out in a blizzard, Lived in a tent. Practiced composing my Stücke after Robert Schumann and Oscar Peterson, smiling like Casablanca Sam when the Smith College girls walked in. In LA, learning violin, Suzuki style. Playing an extra in Raid on Entebbe, an Israeli on a mission….

I might have forgotten all those years ago; they all eventually fall away, as new flaws in the human project absorb one’s remaining attention in a long life of many disappointments and a few crucial stand-out moments of love.  Jarrett, now almost 80 and debilitated by a couple of strokes that left him partially paralyzed and unable to play the piano, last month released a “new” album, The Old Country: More from Deer Head Inn.  It’s a trio album featuring musicians Paul Motian and Gary Peacock providing rhythm. But it is not new really. The album is a compilation of “more tracks” from the concert of 1992 at the titled venue. It features songs like “Solar” (Miles Davis), “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (Gene de Paul, Don Raye), and “It’s Easy to Remember” (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers).  Mostly bright, sprightly finger dances you could listen to all-night as you make light conversation with the love of your life sitting across from, who you just met about an hour ago .

Jarrett played with everybody it seems — Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Dewey Redman, Chick Corea, and Art Blakey, and many others.  He brought new life to jazz but also put new spirit into Bach, Beethoven, Scarlatti, and Shostokovich.  He could play piano and saxophone. He also composed pieces for brass, string orchestra, and other non-jazz instrumentations. He was extraordinarily prolific, putting out dozens of albums.

He had amazing technique, especially in the left hand, where he seemed to own ostinatos, described as a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm (see Pierre Piscitelli’s explanation of how Jarrett went about ostinatos below).  He could improvise all day long.

Also, he had an annoying habit of humming and buzzing along to his own tunes, which you can hear on The Old Country: More from Deer Head Inn. You think maybe he has a touch of autism and doesn’t even give a shit if you’re listening once he gets cooking. The Old Country’s not a great album, but it is not dated either after some 30 years.  Listening to Jarrett again brings back a lot of mixed memories and the beginning of my musical education in jazz. This is a good thing. And the album’s worth a listen. Want some inspiration in these bleak times to be human, give it a turn.

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King’s College Chapel, University of Cambridge, c. 1907.

The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols fills King’s College Chapel at Cambridge University every year on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The service is broadcast by the BBC and heard, according to some estimates, by 400 million worldwide listeners. Expats, Anglophiles, far-flung members of the so-called Commonwealth and countless others tune in to hear Christmasy words and music delivered with superlative English diction, immaculate intonation, seriousness of purpose, and carefully packaged joy and wonder. The sleek, precisely staged solidity of the performance is like a giant log pitched onto the yuletide fire, the heft and crackle of its warming morality stoking belief in a timeless tradition that, in turn, conjures an ordered world.

During the service, favorite Christmas carols are sung by the famous college choir and the packed congregation in arrangements that culminate in ecstatic final-verse descants from the boy choristers, their arcing melodies lofted up towards the exquisite fanned vaulting on harmonic feints undertaken by King’s Chapel organ. The fun for the amateur singers beyond the rood screen comes in cleaving to the beloved melodies against this glorious sonic assault.

The carols alternate with the choir’s motets ranging across the many centuries of Anglican church music. These musical numbers are interleaved with nine readings running from Genesis to the Gospel of John that predict, chronicle and, finally, take metaphysical stock of the Christian Savior’s birth.

Many, perhaps most, of the millions who listen, might well believe that the Festival of Lessons and Carols, at least in some form, is as old as King’s Chapel itself, which, along with the choir, was founded in the 15^th century under the aegis of Henry VI. But like so much else in the Olde Country and among its New World epigones, this “ancient” tradition was invented relatively recently. The first Lessons and Carols service was held a few weeks after the armistice that ended the First World War. This year marks the festival’s 105^th edition at Kings’ College.

The impetus for the Kings’ College service, as musicologist Jacob Sagrans demonstrates in a chapter entitled “’What England Has Done for a Thousand Years’: Medievalism in Christmas Lessons and Carols Services” in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, came during World War I. British army chaplain and King’s alumnus, Eric Milner-White, wrote from France to the provost of the college:

“At the present moment of utter chaos … we have a chance which, boldly taken, might make King’s one of the most important churches in the land. … It is my passionate conviction that if we could catch and crystallize the wisest principles of liturgical reform in the worship of our Chapel, we should be doing a great work, not only for the college and university, but also for the Church and the Empire. … Colour, warmth and delight can be added to our yearly round in many ways.”

A century on, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is the foundation of the King’s brand—a sonic equivalent of the Nike Swoosh. It is not just the classy English vibe that appeals, but also the echoes of the geo-political glories of a bygone Britain. The Empire is dead, but Lessons and Carols endure. That the service is especially popular in the USA and Canada speaks to the enduring myths of Anglo-American hegemony. Christmas Eve from King’s marks an especially special moment in the Special Relationship, though you can bet Donald Trump won’t be listening through his earbuds on his mid-morning round of Christmas Eve golf at Mar-a-Lago.

The King’s service has been taken up by many American churches, including those at elite universities and colleges, which have long sought to emulate the rituals practiced back on the Mother Ship. Christian liturgical chronologies have to be shoehorned into the American academic calendar. God goes on holiday over Winter Break; He doesn’t hang around for Christmas on campus.

As a result, these Lessons and Carols typically happen, as at the outpost of the Ivy League where I joined in the service, in the midst of Advent, a season of expectation and penitence, rather than celebration.

The readings mostly follow the order of service laid out by Milner-White a century ago. But some concessions and adjustments have to be made, as in the frequent inclusion of British-American poet Denise Levertov’s “Annunciation,” which extols the courage of Mary’s consent to accept God’s child in her womb. Likewise, the choral offerings proceed from the solemnity of Elizabethan master William Byrd to a potpourri of cosmopolitan styles that this year included a folksy arrangement of “Go Tell It On the Mountain.” This number added requisite American flavoring to complement the traditional English fare.

At the beginning of this year’s service at Cornell University in Upstate New York, the director of what was previously called United Religious Work but a few years ago was repackaged as the Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making reads an acknowledgment that we are on the  land of the indigenous peoples of the region. He then tells us that the Nativity narrative about to be retailed took place in what were then occupied lands. The statement comes in the past tense and refers to the Roman occupation.

It seems clear that the congregation is being prompted— if gingerly and implicitly—to reflect on the present horrors in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The sixth, seventh, and eighth readings (the first two of these from Luke, the last from Matthew) take us to Bethlehem in the Occupied Territories. One can’t help but think of the ongoing violence, death, displacement, and destruction. The ninth and last lesson comes from the Gospel of John and echoes the opening of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.” Of Palestine in our time not a single word is heard.

The indigenous land acknowledgement is delivered from the stone pulpit at which Martin Luther King, Jr. had preached in 1964, as did his father fifteen years later. Would King have been silent on the matter that hung over everything during these Lessons and Carols?

The sixth reading describes Emperor Augustus’s imposition of a tax and his requirement that all the world’s residents be “registered,” as it is put in the New Revised Standard Version used in many American college chapels (in contrast to the King James text heard at King’s). This imperial dictate sends Joseph and the pregnant Mary back to Bethlehem. Listening to that reading, one thinks of safe zones and the modern technologies of the IDF’s “population management” as far more advanced and lethal than the Roman census-taking of yore.

This reading is followed by “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and then “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” in which the choir sings of shepherds who “feared and trembled.” The shepherds of today fear and tremble not because of angels singing above and at the sight of a miraculous star in the night sky, but because of tanks, snipers, bombs, vigilantes, drone strikes, and famine.

The Roman client-king in Judea, Herod, learns of the Savior’s birth in the penultimate lesson and dispatches the Wise Men to Bethlehem to bring back intelligence of this potential threat to his regime. Conscientious objectors, the Wise Men, don’t report back. Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents will come after Christmas. Hear Herod’s name and think of the slaughter of children now.

Cornell’s nineteenth-century chapel could be in England. It draws architectural inspiration from the same Victorian medievalisms cataloged in Sagrans’ essay on Lessons and Carols. Come Christmas, it is far easier to live in the past.

Sagrans begins his article by directing us towards a propaganda film from World War II called Christmas Under Fire. It begins with the sounds of the King’s College choir singing “Ding Dong Merrily on High.” The narrator tells us that he’s bringing the canister of a film chronicling Britain’s Christmas of 1940 back to America. As the German Blitz continues, this Christmas will be celebrated “underground” in subway shelters. The adults do all they can for the kids at Christmas. The British upper lip has never been stiffer. Eager to have America join the war in Europe, FDR must have watched this movie in the White House.

For his part, Biden won’t be viewing Al Jazeera’s new documentary All That Remains this Christmas. The film tells the story of thirteen-year-old Leyan Abu al-Atta, who lost a leg to an Israeli airstrike.

Near the close of Christmas Under Fire, the narrator proclaims the island nation’s Christian resolve: “On Christmas Eve, England does what England has done for a thousand years: she worships the prince of peace.” We see a silhouette of the spires of King’s College Chapel and are ushered inside as a lone chorister intones, “O Come All Ye Faithful.” The choir and organ join in, invincible. That Christmas, like this one, was not about peace but about war.

One evergreen carol that isn’t heard at this year’s service at Cornell is “Silent Night.” The omission is unwittingly telling. The hush from the moral vacuum of these Lessons and Carols is louder than the massed forces of organ and choir Hark-ing and Hosanna-ing at full tilt.

This Christmas silence is deafening.

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Organist and other musicians accompany gladiatorial combat. Roman mosaics, 2nd Century C. E., Zliten, Libya.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II boasts plenty of convincing weaponry and legions of CGI effects that recreate the carnage of the Colosseum and the architecture, if not the vibrant color, of Ancient Rome.

Even more amusing sport is to be had watching the parade of ahistorical fantasies pass by: from the digital sharks and mega-rhinos made to participate in the deathly games, to newspapers (paper hadn’t yet been invented) read by a toga-clad patrician in a Senate Starbucks. The face-lifts of the actors who re-upped for the sequel a quarter century on involve plastic-surgical techniques way beyond the skill-set of a Galen. The famed Roman doctor lived during the historical time of both movies, and even served as personal physician to Commodus (the evil Emperor played by Joaquin Phoenix in the first film) and accompanied Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) to the German frontier, which is where Gladiator began. Galen didn’t appear in the first film and doesn’t in the sequel, though a kindly medic undertakes some necessary stitching of the battered hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), in Gladiator II. These wrinkle-and-sag-proofed countenances are modern in aspect, yet they do remind us of the vanity of the Roman ruling class.

Hollywood has long taught us how to suspend belief, just as in Imperial America, realism is not the point.

Nothing is more fantastical yet also crucial to cinematic success in the globalized movie market than the soundtrack. The verisimilitude of the chariot and trireme is far more important to filmmakers than the sound and sight of the Ancient Roman tuba, cornu, and hydraulis, the musical instruments that accompany gladiatorial combat in so many of the depictions that survive from Antiquity.

In his PR-spot for the soundtrack of Gladiator II, Director Scott asserts that “music is a language” that “gives the film that added dynamic, as and when you need it.” Both the Romans and Barbarians speak English in this movie. The language of the music is equally anachronistic: Romantic—not Roman—symphonisms with select updates. As befits a would-be epic, the sonic scenery is grandiloquent, sentimental, manipulative, and excessive, the music toggling between the slily subliminal and sledgehammer obvious.

Heavyweight Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer scored the first Gladiator in 2000 and duly received one of his many Oscar nominations. In that soundtrack, Zimmer proved his mastery at marshaling soft-focus Wagnerian motives to conjure the requisite plot and personality points. The doomed hero of that picture (Russell Crowe’s Maximus) is at pains to remind the legionnaires under his command and, later, his fellow gladiators that “what we do in life echoes in eternity.” And so, Zimmer’s score does lots of echoing—ringing and reverb being the default signifiers of portent and promise.

Over his many decades in the movie business, Zimmer has proved himself an assiduous scorer of sequels. But he did not re-enlist for Ridley Scott’s latest sword-and-sandal campaign, claiming with supreme self-assurance that he had already, Zeus-like, “done that that world” and, in his not-so-humble estimation, “done it well.” Rome was not built in a day, but the original soundtrack didn’t take too much longer than that, maybe a few months. Gladiator was just one of four blockbusters that Zimmer scored that year. Even a less-than-discerning listener can’t help but notice that the main theme of that “world” is hardly distinguishable from that created for Pirates of the Caribbean, which came out a few years later. Zimmer’s swashbuckling symphonisms continue to prove lucratively fungible, from the sands of the Colosseum to the beaches of the Bahamas and beyond.

But rather than risk his reputation and fail to measure up to the musical glories of the first Gladiator, Zimmer handed the baton—or perhaps papyrus scroll— over to his protégé, Harry Gregson-Williams. In Gladiator II, we see the occasional image of Maximus flashed in from the first film, and Gregson-Williams also takes that hero’s theme and deftly transforms and reclads it as the motive for his successor, Lucius.

Gregson-Williams’s score for Gladiator II spreads to one hundred minutes—more than two-thirds of the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour running time. At his disposal are a chorus and orchestra phalanxes, each a hundred strong. From these massed forces, the composer draws misty anticipations before clangorous battles, selfless strivings, hymns to Republican ideals, woozy dreams of the Elysian fields, dark schemings, and scratchy subterfuges. Gregson-Williams is a canny musical strategist, executing his battle plan with a marketable mix of the expected and the ingenious.

Even with the many New Age lessons learned from his mentor, Hans Zimmer, Gregson-Williams’s work is fundamentally as Romantic as so many of the scores in Hollywood’s catalog from a century soundtracks. His symphonic gestures have been carefully calibrated to make the viewer identify with the hero, despise the villain(s), feel the stirrings of love, the creeping dread of oncoming danger, and the noble demands of destiny. In the first Gladiator of 2000, Zimmer used serpentine melodic figures heard on a wooden flute to conjure the mystique of Iberia (Maximus was a Spaniard and assumed that sobriquet after being enslaved as a gladiator) and visions of the afterlife.

Like Zimmer, Gregson-Williams loves winding, exoticized cantillations, as when the Roman fleet arrives to conquer the African kingdom of Numidia at the outset of Gladiator. But the composer is also intent to add antique flavors to his symphonic palette. He discovered Spanish instrument-maker and performer Abraham Cupeiro and his Roman horn (cornu) and Greek flute (aulos). These instruments, described as “weird and wonderful” by Gregson-Williams, give texture and punch to the orchestral score, notwithstanding unconvincing claims that these sonic elements also add a layer of period authenticity. As if to acknowledge these musical adventurers and experiments, Scott even offers us a glimpse of some Roman street musicians doing some period piping as we follow our hero on the way to the amphitheater.

What is never heard in either Gladiator is the real instrument of the Colosseum: the organ. Scott fills the Colosseum with water for a thrilling naval clash, but his historical advisers didn’t add the vital water-organ—the authentic sound of the so-called games.

This mighty noisemaker and musical marvel had been invented in the 3^rd century B.C.E. by the Alexandrian engineer Ctesibius. He devised a system in which a cistern filled with water was used to equalize the pressure of the wind supplied to the pipes by pumping two cylinders. This strong and steady wind pressure helped produce high decibels from the hydraulis (water-organ). Most of the forty or so surviving images from Antiquity place the instrument alongside gladiatorial combat. In the Satyricon by Petronius, the confidant of Nero, a slave seen carving meat at a party, is likened to “a gladiator in a chariot fighting to the accompaniment of a water-organ.”

The evil emperor from the first Gladiator film, Commodus, was known to be an organist, but none was more obsessed with the instrument than Nero, as Harry Morgan details in a recent article in the Classical Quarterly. One account describes how the Emperor, having hastened back to Rome to deal with a major slave revolt, “suddenly summoned the foremost senators and equestrians as a matter of urgency, as if to make some communication to them regarding the present situation, and then said to them (I quote his exact words): ‘I have discovered a way by which the water-organ will produce louder and more tuneful music.’”

Unlike horn or trumpet players, the hydraulis would not crack or waver. The near-miraculous machine could always outlast human breath, so long as slaves were pumping the cylinders and an adept organist, like Nero, operated the pipes. A multi-instrumentalist on aulos, lyre, and organ, Nero fancied himself not just a fabulous performer but a technical innovator, eager to make the hydraulis more impressive to the plebes in the circus and the amphitheater. Nero piped not just because of his artistic mania but for political purposes.

The water-organ was loved by the masses and obsessed over by more than one power-hungry Roman emperor. With what for Hollywood would be a mere modicum of license, Gladiator II could have let loose the crazed and musically adept emperor Caracalla (played by Joseph Quinn) to vamp on a fabulous reconstruction of the hydraulis as men slaughtered each other on the sand below in a scene to rival, indeed surpass, Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea with James Mason as a Captain Nemo playing not a water-organ, but an underwater-organ.

Mozart called the organ the Queen of Instruments; now, it’s thought of as the King. If the aged Scott or some future Hollywood Centurion mounts a third Gladiator, let that film help the organ regain, at long last, its throne as Emperor of Instruments.

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Mary Vetsera, the doomed lover of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, who in 1889 shot her and then himself at his hunting lodge in Mayerling, in the woods outside Vienna. Photo of a museum photo by Matthew Stevenson.

By the Grace of God Emperor of Austria

King of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria;

King of Jerusalem, Archduke of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, arniola and Bukovina;

Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia;

Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, ofAuschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friuli, Ragusa and Zara, Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of   Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca;

Prince of Trento and Brixen;

Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and Istria;

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Photograph of choreographer Clarence Yates rehearsing a musical sequence with Olive Stanton for the Federal Theatre Project production of The Cradle Will Rock, as other cast members look on. Photo: Library of Congress.

In award-winning historian James Shapiro’s excellent book, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, he makes the case for how the twenty-first century’s culture wars follow a playbook established during the culture wars of the twentieth century. To illustrate his argument, Shapiro directs a spotlight on the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), one of five arts-related Federal One Projects formed within the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Set up to help the nation recover from the Great Depression by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 7034 on May 6, 1935, the Federal One projects that supported the arts are generally viewed as a golden period in our nation’s cultural history. Under the WPA, arts were made accessible through presentations of dance, theater, and music performances, visual artworks, literary publications, and classes in all forms of performing, visual, and literary arts. These New Deal arts programs made it possible for many of the most iconic American artists of the 20^th century to fulfill their promise, besides starting others on their careers.

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was instituted to create a national theater, by employing theater workers on public relief, and having them create live performing arts events throughout the nation. The high unemployment rate among theater workers had occurred because the film industry shifted from silent to sound technology. Theaters suffered, causing many to close or significantly reduce the number of presentations in a season.

At one point, during the Federal Theatre Project’s existence, from 1935 to 1939, it employed 12,700 people. FTP job titles encompassed actors, writers, directors, designers, theater musicians, dancers, technicians, box office staff, ushers, maintenance workers, and the accounting and secretarial force necessary to support around sixty thousand performances.

The majority of these performances were free and seen by thirty million people (close to one out of four Americans). They took place in streets, parks, schools, baseball fields, and theaters, produced by various units within the project, including African American, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, French, and German units. New York City, Boston, and California were the most active centers:  New York City had a payroll of 5,000 people early in its history and thirty-one producing units; Boston had thirty-three producing units; California’s thirty-two units employed 1650 people. 900 plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, and other classical and modern playwrights of American and international renown were presented, besides puppet theater, group improvisations, dance, vaudeville, and circus events. (A young Burt Lancaster was documented in photographs performing as an aerialist and on parallel bars in the FTP’s Circus Unit.)  New works were encouraged, including one 1937 Detroit performance at a Jewish Community Center of They Too Rise by Arthur Miller, then an unknown playwright. A rewrite of his first play, it was described as “an unbearably dull play” in one play reader’s report. Nevertheless, Miller remained with the FTP until it ended, writing radio plays and scripts. The Living Newspaper Unit, in an alliance with journalists in the Newspaper Guild, provided another source for new plays. Since Living Newspaper plays dramatized current events, addressing such issues as public health, slum housing, sweatshops, and the rising threat of fascism, this particular FTP unit was to become a popular scapegoat of Congressional conservatives.

A young theater professor, Hallie Flanagan, appointed the National Director of the FTP, wrote from Nebraska in 1936: “Our actors…found that 90 percent of their audience had never seen a play and could not believe that the actors were not moving pictures. After each performance they would wait in the doorway to see ‘whether the people are real.’”  Studs Terkel, one of the great artists whose career was nurtured by the WPA, reminisced about the FTP: “It proved that there is a hunger for good, alive, pregnant theater in this country, no matter where it is performed.”

One of the most famous FTP productions, to which Shapiro gives considerable focus, is New York’s Negro Theatre Unit’s 1936 production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Reset in a Haitian jungle and known as the “Voodoo Macbeth,” it was produced by John Houseman, employed an all-Black cast of 150 actors, dancers and musicians, was directed by a twenty-year-old wunderkind, Orson Welles, with choreography and drumming by Sierra Leone born Asadata Dafora, a highly regarded dancer and musician of that time. After Macbeth had a sold-out ten-week run in Harlem, it moved to Broadway for a brief run and then toured the country in WPA-sponsored performances. Although Richard Wright, active in the Chicago unit of the Federal Writers’ Project, advocated for Black plays that “create a Negro theatre literature and at the same time create and organize an audience for itself,” he saw some progress in the New York production of Macbeth, commenting that: “‘The long evolution of the Negro actor from the clowning minstrel type to Edna Thomas’ lofty portrayal of Lady Macbeth represents a span of years crowded with abortive efforts.’ As such, Macbeth, in which ‘talent long stifled rose to the surface and compelled public attention. . . presented a compromise,’ providing ‘Negro actors a wide scope for their talent’ while dealing ‘with a theme which was acceptable to a white theatre-going audience.’ (76)” In a 1982 BBC interview, Welles said, “By all odds my great success in my life was that play.”

Another famous FTP performance project Shapiro features is the staging of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 best-selling novel, It Can’t Happen Here, about the rise of a fascist dictatorship in America. Adapted by Lewis with John C. Moffitt, twenty-one productions were viewed by over half a million people from its opening “in eighteen cities on the evening of October 27, 1936. (102)” “In the Yiddish production in New York, seen by over 25,000 playgoers in all, the future film director Sidney Lumet played young David [Greenhill, a character seduced by the propaganda of the Minuet Men, a private militia similar to the SS and SA in Hitler’s Germany], and several playgoers, perhaps refugees from Nazi persecution, fainted during the concentration camp scene (103).”  By the end of its run, nearly 500,000 people had seen a production of It Can’t Happen Here. Hallie Flanagan described the play’s mixed critical reception: “There were stories and editorials for and against from one end of the country to another. Some people thought the play was designed to re-elect Mr. Roosevelt; others thought it was planned in order to defeat him. Some thought it proved Federal Theatre was communistic; others that it was New Deal; others that it was subconsciously fascist. (96) Sinclair Lewis stated “It is propaganda for an American system of Democracy. Very definitely propaganda for that. (96)”

In 1938, Congress appointed Representative Martin Dies, a Republican from East Texas, as Chairman of the Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, later renamed the Committee on Un-American Activities. Popularly known as the Dies Committee, their task was to investigate if Communist Party members or sympathizers had infiltrated New Deal programs. Although basically created by Dies to provide a forum to heighten his own profile and power, he pioneered the right-wing political playbook now called “culture wars.” Even then, a surprising three-quarters of the American public supported the Dies Committee’s investigation of the WPA and their debate about “the place of theater in American democracy (242).”  When the committee found that un-American Communist activities existed within WPA meetings and activities, Representative John Martin of Colorado denounced their report, saying, “This committee is having the effect of identifying in the public mind New Dealism, liberalism, and labor, with radicalism and Communism…If it keeps on, it will dig more graves for Democrats than for Communists.” (248).

Shapiro writes that what “…conservative commentator Jeane J. Kirkpatrick later said about Senator Joseph McCarthy’s war on Communism was even more true of Dies’s battle with Flanagan: McCarthyism was not so much about Communism as it was a struggle for ‘jurisdiction over the symbolic environment….What was at issue was who would serve as the arbiter of culture and whose narrative would prevail. (238)”

In the 1930s, the anti-arts focus centered around cutting funding for the WPA’s Federal Theatre Program. By June 1939, it was the first and only WPA project whose funding was eliminated. All appropriations for other WPA activities were cut by 1943, mainly due to US engagement in World War II, besides the efforts of Dies’ Committee on Un-American Activities. Our nation has never been able to replicate the WPA programs’ expansive vision in support of the arts.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), established in 1965 during the Johnson administration along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, became the nation’s successor to the WPA’s arts programs. Learning from the WPA’s administrative history, NEA administrators recognized that offering Federal Theatre projects in just twenty-seven states was a weakness to avoid, as the more states their programs touched, the more likely it would be that their Congressional representatives would defend funding these programs. Although, over the years, conservative Congressional attacks slashed the NEA’s budget to a fraction of its original size, starting in 1981 with the Ronald Reagan administration (266), this strategy has helped the NEA continue to exist as a line item in every federal budget.

However, motivated by both extreme right grassroots and political agendas, the arts have continued to be the first culture wars’ scapegoat. The 1990s was an especially virulent time, when the bugaboo was the NEA’s funding to individual visual artists. Citing their themes of sexuality, gender, subjugation, and personal trauma, Congress ruled that some artists’ works were criminally obscene. The Congressional campaign to cut certain individuals’ grants also extended to cutting funding of museums that exhibited their works. Four solo performance artists–Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller–sued the NEA and its chair, John Frohnmayer, for violating their constitutional right to freedom of expression. Although the four artists won a partial out-of-court settlement, Congress stopped the NEA’s funding of individual artist programs. The four performance artists continued their legal challenges when Congress amended the federal funding statute for the arts with a “decency clause.”  In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the language of the “decency clause” was “advisory” rather than “obligatory.”

In the 2020s, writers, teachers, and librarians are being targeted through book bans, focusing on removing from the curriculum or library shelves any books considered “sexually explicit,” containing “offensive language,” or material “unsuited to any age group,” such as books with LBGTQ+ characters and people of color, and those presenting the factual history of slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, or the WW II Holocaust. The 2021 Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin, featured banning Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved from school curriculums as a central talking point of his successful campaign. Although students and teachers have waged protests and publishers and librarians have filed lawsuits to defend their First Amendment rights, by 2023, 4,240 unique titles were prohibited nationwide. Libraries that shelved these titles have received bomb threats, and librarians, parents, teachers, and school board members have been doxed, threatened, and even sued or fired for challenging these bans.

Shapiro closes his book with cautionary examples of how, in recent years, theater has again become a hot-button issue. School districts across the country have canceled high school productions of plays, such as The Crucible by Arthur Miller in Fulton, Missouri, after community complaints about theater encouraging “immoral behavior”; August Wilson’s Fences, in Iowa, for not including white characters; The Laramie Project, in Texas, for its subject of the 1998 murder of a gay student in Wyoming. Florida’s 2023 Parental Rights in Education Act demands the removal of any material concerned with gender identity and sexual orientation from classrooms. Even readings of some Shakespeare plays, long a standard subject of College Board exams, have been censored: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is completely banned in Florida’s middle school classrooms and only excerpted scenes from Romeo and Juliet are allowed to be taught. The plays are not even permitted to be shelved in Florida’s school libraries (268).PEN America reported that during the 2023 to 2024 school year,  more than 10,000 books were banned in U.S. public schools. This tally is nearly triple the amount from the previous year, although the actual number of books banned is higher than those reported. []

Conservatives’ treatment of the arts is a harbinger of their attitudes toward other aspects of American life. The Dies Committee’s 124-page official report to Congress caused the termination of the Federal Theatre Project funding in 1939, although the FTP was barely mentioned in their report (248). Flash forward to the conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, funded by Gulf Oil, which has tried to eliminate the NEA for many years, issuing “Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts” in 1997.  This review mentions right-wing tactics to ban books and plays during the Biden administration years. Were the arts culture wars waged in some part to prepare the nation for instigation of the policies proposed during the 2024 Trump/Vance campaign and those goals discussed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an agenda prepared in partnership with 140 former Trump administration staffers? It includes: raids and mass deportations in immigrant communities; targeting of protestors and journalists who question Federal law enforcement practices; criminalization of standard voting processes; censorship of school curriculums with warnings that infringements will result in cuts in federal funding if discussions of race, gender, and our nation’s historical practices of systemic oppression are presented; and mass firings and even incarceration of bureaucratic, political and judicial adversaries. By reminding people that these tactics have a long history, The Playbook is right on time, confirming the maxim, frequently invoked by both Republicans and Democrats, that liberty must constantly be fought for and defended by each generation. Shapiro’s 69-page bibliographical essay documenting his research offers readers sources to go deeper into the culture war stories he explores in his book–of idealistic dreams to make the arts accessible to all Americans juxtaposed with the often-successful strategies to stop these efforts.

The right wing comes for the arts first, the most vulnerable of American institutions. Then they go on the prowl for other targets.

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