This article is excerpted from Peabody Magazine.
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.
"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.
Celenza will continue this conversation on Tuesday, April 7, with Chris Richards, pop music critic at The Washington Post, as part of the Humanities on the Hill series at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.; registration is required.
Image credit: W. W. Norton & Company
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. Celenza notes that one of the last times Reddy performed the song was during her 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 v. Wade.
"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."
Celenza discusses On the Record and charts the complicated history of America through music with Peabody Magazine—read the full interview and Q+A at this link.
