Music as Free Speech

William White

Music has always been a way for people to express themself and convey a message that they may not
have been able to communicate in other ways. Because of this, music falls very much under the protection
of free speech that we have under the first amendment of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. constitution.
People will primarily convey emotional meaning through there music, but there are times when they need
to use their music to try and say something else and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

All too often we are faced with some kind of injustice, whether it’s the rights of immigrants being
suppressed, an entire culture being oppressed, or being forced to live under a harsh regime. All of these
issues lead to people speaking out against them, and trying to bring about some kind of positive change.
One way that people go about this is by writing music. In the 1930-1950 a composer by the name of
Dmitri Shostakovich was writing music under the regime of Joseph Stalin in Soviet era Russia. He was
tasked by government officials to write music that celebrated the ‘grand country’ that he had the pleasure
of living in. Shostakovich wrote what they wanted but he had a sneaky way of going about it.

After the premiere of his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, he was met with serious pushback
from Stalin himself who despised the work. He was barraged with negative reviews and personal attacks
in the press, and while this sounds bad, it is a much better fate than some other artists met during this time
when Stalin would just have them killed if he didn’t like what they wrote. When writing his next
symphony, his fifth so far, people were expecting a more optimistic, happier sounding symphony as it
was written with the critiques of his most recent opera in mind, but what they were met with was a very
dark, morose and powerful work.
His fifth symphony was met with much acclaim from both the general public and the government
officials who attended the piece’s premiere. For Shostakovich, it was very much an expression of the dark
times that he and the rest of the citizens of Russia were experiencing at the time, whereas the authorities
seemed to interpret it as more what those who tried to mess with the Soviet Union would feel after they
were crushed by Russian forces.

I could talk so much more about the music and subtle rebellion of Shostakovich, but I just wanted to
highlight one instance of how he used his music to help convey a specific meaning that would’ve likely
led to his execution if he had chosen to express that with words. There are several other instances where
musicians use their music to try and highlight issues that they couldn’t otherwise express. So maybe you
aren’t directly speaking when you perform a piece, but for both the performer and the composer, the
ability to write and perform that music as a part of their freedom of speech is an incredibly important
liberty that we have.