As I jokingly alluded to below, last weekend was Easter weekend, and another important anniversary was that of Marian Anderson singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s been 70 years since Anderson sang there, and everyone ought to go out now and read Richard Powers’s 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing, which uses the concert as the basis of the entire novel, setting a family’s course spinning out into the future. (The relevant passage begins on page 38 here.) An aspiring African-American mezzo meets her Jewish physicist husband there, their two boys become musicians and carry that recital’s promise forward into the bitter divides of the 20th century, and along the way are passages so powerful that every musician worthy of the name needs to read it to understand the power music can have on listeners.
“When we did talk, all I could talk about was concert music. She loved music as much as the next Boylston student. But it didn’t grip her like movies or magazines or the Kitchen of the Future. She grasped it long before I did: Classical music wouldn’t make you American. Just the opposite.”
In a similar vein of artistic coming-togetherness-and-dividingness is Wynton Marsalis’s speech at the Kennedy Center last month. (PDF transcript) It may be the finest summation of American music told through its tumultuous history. It’s certainly one of the finest addresses, and examples of rhetoric, written since Churchill.
“Now the challenge of this generation is to find the frontier of our collective souls. And though it is a soul with a history of slavery and injustice and struggle, it is a soul with freedom and striving and triumph. And you can’t get past the truth of yourself. It’s always there because it was there and it is there. And when you acknowledge that truth, you understand it’s not something you have to hide, but something to proudly show…because where you come from ain’t where you’re going.
But if you don’t know where you been, you might just end up where you started…or further back. And as we forward our agendas for our various arts causes, let’s remember there is only one cause. And whether that cause is expressed in artists visiting schools, or museum trips, or arts curricula, or master classes, or community bands, or artist diplomats, or swing dance competitions…the agenda is larger than our individual agendas.” (Emphasis Wynton’s)
And the agenda is nothing less than teaching people how to be free, which is what Anderson embodied those 70 years ago.