At the beginning of class every academic year, Peabody Professor Anna Celenza used to ask her students to take out their phones and talk about the last piece of music they listened to as an icebreaker. “When I started this, from 2010 to 2018 or so, there were five or six pieces of music that rose up, that a number of kids in the classroom had just listened to,” she says during a Zoom interview in March.
“By the time I got to 2021, if there were 15 kids in class, I’d get 15 different pieces,” she says. “I saw that, yes, we’re listening to music all the time, but there is this fracturing. We have access to so much music and so much diversity in music, which is great, but I think that also can make us push it into the background. Peabody students know how to do close listening, but that is rare. Most young people have headphones on all the time, but they aren’t really listening. My primary goal as a writer is to put music front and center again.”
A Musicology professor at Peabody jointly appointed in the Writing Seminars at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Celenza’s scholarship has examined the cultural history around composers and their works, from figures such as Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler up to George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and more. Her new book, On the Record: Music That Changed America (W.W. Norton), brings into sharp focus the complex cultural consideration of how art is created and experienced. In each of 12 chapters, Celenza focuses on a specific piece of legislation and/or Congressional discussion that arose in response to musical works.
“By the time I got to 2021, if there were 15 kids in class, I’d get 15 different pieces,” she says. “I saw that, yes, we’re listening to music all the time, but there is this fracturing. We have access to so much music and so much diversity in music, which is great, but I think that also can make us push it into the background. Peabody students know how to do close listening, but that is rare. Most young people have headphones on all the time, but they aren’t really listening. My primary goal as a writer is to put music front and center again.”
A Musicology professor at Peabody jointly appointed in the Writing Seminars at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Celenza’s scholarship has examined the cultural history around composers and their works, from figures such as Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler up to George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and more. Her new book, On the Record: Music That Changed America (W.W. Norton), brings into sharp focus the complex cultural consideration of how art is created and experienced. In each of 12 chapters, Celenza focuses on a specific piece of legislation and/or Congressional discussion that arose in response to musical works.
On the Record touches on the history of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a contrafactum—a song created by replacing lyrics in a previously existing work with new lines without futzing with the melody—up to the 1931 Congressional Act that made it the national anthem; Connecticut Congressman Donald J. Irwin celebrating composer Charles Ives from the House of Representatives podium in 1959 and Ives’ pensive The Unanswered Question; Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” immortalized by Billie Holiday, and the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022; President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime and West Side Story; the seismic impact of market deregulation on music from President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 President’s Task Force on Regulatory Relief up through the Telecommunications Act of 1996; and more.
On the Record is an engrossing, multilayered read that, rather than look at music through more conventional prisms—a singular artist, a specific place during a certain time, a single genre—bravely opts for tracing a political history of the country through a musical lens. It’s a book about music as experienced by people en masse. “In some ways, this book is a culmination of my teaching style,” she says. “I like to bring in a lot of cultural history and really try to get us in the era as close as we can to the piece so that we can better understand how the composition was experienced originally.”
On the Record touches on the history of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a contrafactum—a song created by replacing lyrics in a previously existing work with new lines without futzing with the melody—up to the 1931 Congressional Act that made it the national anthem; Connecticut Congressman Donald J. Irwin celebrating composer Charles Ives from the House of Representatives podium in 1959 and Ives’ pensive The Unanswered Question; Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” immortalized by Billie Holiday, and the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022; President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime and West Side Story; the seismic impact of market deregulation on music from President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 President’s Task Force on Regulatory Relief up through the Telecommunications Act of 1996; and more.
On the Record is an engrossing, multilayered read that, rather than look at music through more conventional prisms—a singular artist, a specific place during a certain time, a single genre—bravely opts for tracing a political history of the country through a musical lens. It’s a book about music as experienced by people en masse. “In some ways, this book is a culmination of my teaching style,” she says. “I like to bring in a lot of cultural history and really try to get us in the era as close as we can to the piece so that we can better understand how the composition was experienced originally.”
“I do feel that there are times when, if we listen closely, music makes us see things differently,” she continues. “While writing the book, not only was I interested in when can music really make a change, but what do the circumstances need to be for that to happen?”
She mentions protest songs as go-to examples of such intersections of music and politics, such as those from the 1960s and ’70s that she discusses in a chapter titled What’s Going On. “A lot of songs that really stand out to us did a great job of unifying people or drawing the general public’s attention, but they were the least effective when it came to influencing Congress,” she says. “Sadly, the most obvious example of that is Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman.’”
The Australian-American singer/songwriter’s 1971 hit reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned Reddy the 1972 Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy Award, and drew attention to women’s/reproductive rights. The song was played at rallies, marches, meetings, and was named the International Women’s Year anthem at the World Conference on Women in 1975.
“One of the last times she performed the song was right after Trump was elected,” Celenza says, mentioning Reddy’s appearance at the Women’s March in Los Angeles in January 2017. “She sang ‘I Am Woman’ with thousands of rallying women in pink hats, but it didn’t make much of a difference.”
Reddy passed away in 2020, two years before the Supreme Court struck down Roe. “Pete Seeger said, ‘the right song at the right time can change history,’” Celenza notes. “But [‘I Am Woman’] is an example of what happens if we don’t really stay active and keep thinking about political implications. A song isn’t going to save us if all we do is listen to it. It might make us feel good and united with others in the moment, but there are limitations. We have to act on a song’s message if we really want to see change.”
Peabody Magazine caught up with Celenza to discuss On the Record, Kendrick Lamar, Aaron Copland, and charting the complicated history of America through music.
You’ve been working on this book over a topsy-turvy period of American political history—and for some time now. How has it evolved?
It took longer than I thought. I first got the idea for this book in 2016, when I started to do these lectures on works that changed America—and it was mostly [the musical] Hamilton. Hamilton came out in 2015, [Kendrick Lamar’s] To Pimp a Butterfly, same year, then Beyoncé’s Lemonade [in 2016].
I saw all this music that people were reacting to and, when I first pitched the book in 2016, it was very optimistic. It was very much in the era of [then-President Barack] Obama and Hamilton. And, I’ll be honest, a certain election happened at the end of 2016 and I thought, OK, clearly I was delusional, and I put [the book] aside. I had pitched it at Norton to an editor who really liked the idea. She retired, and about two years later, the editor who took over from her found her notes, read my pitch, and contacted me. He was really interested in this project, but I didn’t know if my heart was still in it. It was a pretty dark time, and by this point, COVID had kicked in, so it was tough. But he encouraged me, and I started to rethink the structure.
There are chapters that I had to completely rewrite, because politics was changing underneath me—sometimes for the better. The “Strange Fruit” chapter originally was very depressing, because Congress still hadn’t passed any anti-lynching legislation, and then, thank goodness, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was actually passed in 2022.
Hearing you speak about politics constantly changing underneath your feet brings up one of the compelling aspects of the book: it’s about music as experienced. How were you deciding and defining “change” in this context, as it relates to music?
I think a lot of times people hear ‘music and politics’ and they think, protest songs. Protest songs can be very effective for creating a sense of community with the general public—but there can be a danger to that, too, because if everybody feels like, Oh, I’m singing this song, I’m making the world better, then maybe you don’t get politically involved. Maybe your political involvement is going to this rally but then not doing other things that can make a difference.
When writing this book, I had to put some limitations on what I was going to explore. This book isn’t focused on music that is reacting to politics. This is music that changed political debate in Congress: On the Record is both the Congressional record and the vinyl record. And there aren’t tons of pieces that do that. A lot of music is reacting to politics—and some of the pieces in the book are reacting, too, but then they make a change.
This book looks specifically at music composed by Americans. There is a lot of music we might say is “American” even though it is not written by Americans—the film scores for most Westerns, for example. Ennio Morricone wrote a lot of great music for Westerns, but he’s not American. So that was the other limitation that I put on myself while writing the book.
And to be honest, these works [in the book] are simply music I deeply respect and love and that I have taught over the years in various contexts.
Can you talk about the research methodology a bit? The book is episodic in that each chapter deals with a specific work, and within each chapter you explore the context of its creation, its reception, public response, and its artistic life. But you, personally, can’t go back in time and hear Rhapsody in Blue at the premiere—before it has accumulated the cultural history that it has acquired.
For every chapter in this book, and especially for the Rhapsody in Blue chapter, I took The New York Times and read it for 1924, or read it for when “Swanee” came out in 1919. You see what’s in the news that’s happening around the US—in the same way that if someone were to read the news from 2020, it would be the pandemic, lockdowns, the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter—and all of that is impacting a lot of music. And 100 years from now, if nobody is looking at that history, they might interpret the music that came out in a very different way.
At each turn, I was looking for ways to put myself back in time, and the best way to do that was to read not only newspapers but other things. [Bandleader Paul] Whiteman wrote a biography—what did he say about what his plans were and what he was trying to do? And when Gershwin wrote articles about jazz, what did he say it was at the time? How did composers like Duke Ellington respond to Gershwin’s music?
And, yes, each of the chapters starts with its origin—so for Rhapsody in Blue it’s 1924 and it ends in the present. The book is arranged chronologically according to when each piece was originally created, but then each chapter stretches into the modern day. I think layering the chapters in this way helps us to kind of time travel. We can see connections, how many of these pieces overlap. This was something I found surprising. I was shocked at how many times, you know, you’ve got Bernstein popping up in all these pieces, Gershwin popping up in these pieces, Ellington, James Weldon Johnson popping up again and again. There is this sort of network, because they’re listening to each other’s pieces.
That narrative and thematic layering is both a great benefit and, from a writer’s perspective, a great deal to juggle.
I wanted there to be a narrative that went through the book, even if there’s not a single character that runs all through it. But there are definitely themes that aid in getting at what is American about these pieces, I think. It had always been my idea that there would be this layering, but it took a lot of editing.
I structured each chapter in slightly the same way so that readers get a sense of rhythm—such as opening [each chapter] with the actual legislation that will get talked about. I put in road signs so readers know what to expect, such as chapter titles. Chapter 5, which mostly deals with the creation and history of “Strange Fruit,” is called Witness for the Prosecution because it was about people speaking up. So I wanted to have that legal-ese in people’s heads as they read that chapter.
I greatly appreciate how you don’t come out and say, “This is what American music is.” We gain a cumulative understanding of what makes music American over the course of the book, but you’re not trying to define it—you’re simply showing some aspects of it.
I have my opinions about things, and I think the only time [in the book] that I step out and say, “Here’s what I think we should do,” is about our practice of listening more closely to each other and paying attention to what’s happening in the world. We also need to be aware, as people who vote, of what’s going on. For example, voting on some transportation bill might not seem important for the arts, but if you’re a musician, a sustainable public transportation system is important if we want to support music venues—that’s the only time when I kind of put my two cents in.
I didn’t want this book to feel preachy. I didn’t want it to feel like I was defining what American music is. My goal is to lay out the facts and let folks interpret them as they see fit.
That element is very apparent in the chapter about Aaron Copland being summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. As somebody born in 1970, I experienced Copland as an artist whose as-American-as-apple-pie aura was already established, and you discuss his much more complicated career.
With great composers I think we have an image of who the composer is, and it might be built on one little segment of their life that has come to represent them. Copland is a great example. He lived almost a full century. His views of politics, or at least his affiliations, changed—why that is, I can’t say. I never say Copland did this because of that, but I’m definitely showing how he reacted to what was happening to him.
He was very left-leaning in the 1930s, before we had Social Security, and before we had any sorts of welfare at all. And if you were living then, you couldn’t help but see the horrors of poverty and inequality that plagued the country as the economy collapsed. Abel Meeropol saw that, too. Ives and Gershwin as well. And Copland very much wanted to have a world where we all take care of each other.
And in the ’30s, communism was seen by some as a governmental structure that could do that, that promoted that—and that was fine until World War II was over, and the political structure associated with the USSR and alliances we had with Russia began to be seen as suspect.
Copland is responding to what is happening politically. If you sit down and listen to Copland’s music from his earliest pieces to his later pieces, it’s interesting, because he was very experimental with atonality and all this stuff early on. During the ’30s and the war, he wanted to bring people together, and his music is suddenly tonal—it’s that Copland sound that we think of.
After he was brought up before Congress and questioned by McCarthy for being a communist in the early 1950s, he stopped writing that kind of music, because in the ears of many, that tonality equaled Soviet or communist sounds. And I think that’s really fascinating, because that’s still the Copland everybody knows—a decade and a half of his very long career.
The final Who Tells Our Story chapter is a fitting place to end the book, with its invitation to consider, what is America and what is an American Sound? Were you always planning to end with Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda?
No, I thought it would end with To Pimp a Butterfly and Lemonade—the original pitch had 13 chapters. Why I left those out is not because I don’t think those works are incredibly important and impactful, but when I first considered this project I thought Congress was going to be talking about those works and they didn’t. The albums had a huge impact on the public, but if I was going to talk about To Pimp a Butterfly, I really had to talk about Damn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in music, the first non-classical or jazz piece to do that. And even in its title, it was responding to politics, not changing it So far, Congress hasn’t been paying attention to it.
And then Beyoncé recorded her country music album. It’s about defining what is American music and challenging who gets to sing what—and that is a hugely important message, one that I would not be able to cover adequately, given the overall structure of this book. It was one of those moments when I thought, I’m not only not going to do the music justice because I’ll be trying to fit those pieces into a narrative that I don’t have enough distance from yet. And maybe it’s not my story for me to tell. When you’re writing, sometimes you have to ask yourself, Am I the best person to write this—or would it be better to be, like, a cheerleader for someone else who could write it better?
In doing this research and thinking about music and composers and performers in this cultural history manner, has it influenced how you think about or experience music?
Actually, yes, but it’s in response to things that I’m reading in the news. A good example is [recent New York Times’ reporting about] the Metropolitan Opera being really underwater, spending 30% of their endowment, and looking at what the director is doing to reach out to Saudi Arabia and Elon Musk to try to fund it. At the same time, the Washington National Opera left the Kennedy Center but the National Symphony Orchestra decided to stay.
There are people in the artistic field that are thinking about, How do I need to engage with politics? and How do I need to engage with those in power in order to keep this thing running?
And the question is, well, is it worth it? Of course, opera is incredibly important, and I want it to continue, but I think we have to step back and ask, Just because we’ve been doing it this way forever, does that mean it always has to be that way? Could this crisis help us find a better way to support and present the music?
In the book chapter about [Ferde] Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite I talk about preservation versus conservation. I think Peabody’s doing a great job of conservation. We’ve still got those things that we think are important that we’re continuing, but we’re doing so in a variety of different ways, and we’re talking about music and music theory differently, and we’re supporting a wide range of genres. Not just classical but also jazz, new media, and now a hip-hop major.
I think the Met is still in preservation mode, and if opera is going to survive, part of the process is going to require stepping back and thinking, How can we make it sustainable? Because the model that’s set up right now is not sustainable.
Anna Celenza speaks with Chris Richards, The Washington Post pop music critic, as part of the Humanities on the Hill series at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., April 7.