Although elaborate hate speech laws can make it extremely difficult, we have the right to freedom of expression in Britain. Generally speaking, musicians are free to express their opinions. Morrissey can voice his opposition to mass immigration and concerns about the erosion of English identity while Stormzy can take the stage at Glastonbury and get his audience of over 200,000 people to yell ‘fuck the government’, both with impunity. The ability of artists to hold those in positions of power accountable is a fundamental civil liberty that ensures the maintenance of political equilibrium in a liberal democracy.

While our system has many flaws—cough, Scotland—we have never executed a musician for speaking their mind, as far as I can recall. And yet the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi must face the horrifying reality of that exact situation. Salehi was given a death sentence in April this year after the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Isfahan accused him of ‘waging war against god’.

Salehi is a vocal opponent of the Islamic Republic. The right to free speech is guaranteed to well-known socially conscious rappers in the West, such as Talib Kweli and Immortal Technique, but Salehi was not accorded the same protection to express himself. In Iran, hip-hop is strictly forbidden. Artists typically use pseudonyms to get around the regime; Salehi, on the other hand, has always gone by his real name. 

The 33-year-old is at the forefront of socially conscious hip-hop in Iran and was a pioneer of the Rap-e Farsi (Persian-language rap) movement. His lyrics advocate for greater rights for women and workers while addressing injustice and inequality. In tracks like ‘Pomegranate’, he sings ‘Human (life) is cheap, the labourer is a pomegranate, Iran is a wealthy, fertile land,’ alluding to workers as nothing more than fruit to be squeezed. However, the majority of his vitriol is aimed at the Islamic Republic itself. In his most well-known song, ‘Soorakh Moosh’ (‘Rat Hole’), he condemns all those who support the corrupt regime and turn a blind eye to oppression and injustice. 

It was songs like this that initially drew the state’s attention to him. Iran’s security forces detained Salehi on September 13 2021 and accused him of ‘insulting the Supreme Leader’ and ‘propaganda against the regime’. He was granted a six-month suspended sentence and released from prison after serving more than a week. 

Salehi’s case serves as a microcosm of the fractures that exist in Iranian society more than 40 years after the revolution of 1979. Since the overthrow of the Shah, the country has been ruled as an Islamic republic, with women required to cover their hair in strict compliance with Islamic modesty laws. The ageing clerical elite—Ayatollah Khamenei is 85— is at variance with the majority of its citizens, who were born after the revolution. Many of them are concerned with personal freedoms and financial security—50% of Iranians are living in absolute poverty—rather than religious purity. Salehi speaks for a generation of disillusioned youth. 

His activism extends beyond words: he has supported a number of social causes, most notably the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and the September 2022 protests, which were sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was detained by the police after she was accused of wearing an ‘improper’ hijab. Subsequent anti-hijab demonstrations, which saw thousands of people take to the streets calling for women’s rights and the dissolution of the Islamic Republic, with many of them burning hijabs, spread across the country and resulted in over 22,000 arrests and over 530 deaths.

To support the women-led uprising, Salehi released two songs. ‘Battlefield’, which was released in early October 2022, contains the lyrics, ‘Woman, life, freedom, we will fight to the death/ Shoulder to shoulder like a defensive wall/ I believe in solidarity like divine faith/…We are thirsty for freedom’. A few weeks later, he released a song containing the lines, ‘44 years of your government, it is the year of failure/… Someone’s crime was dancing with her hair in the wind / Someone’s crime was that he or she was brave and criticised [the government]’.

On October 30, 2022, Salehi was detained once more and charged with spreading ‘propagandistic activity against the government’. He received a prison sentence of six years and three months in July 2023. The Supreme Court granted him bail in November after he had been imprisoned for more than a year, including 252 days in solitary confinement. When he was free, he posted a video to his official YouTube account from outside the jail where he had been held, claiming he had been tortured—having his arms and legs broken and given shots of adrenaline to keep him awake. He was swiftly reimprisoned.

For the crime of talking, or, in the words of the Isfahan court, ‘spreading corruption on earth’, Salehi was sentenced to death on 24 April 2024. As of writing, the case is awaiting appeal.

This is not an isolated case. Saman Yasin is another musician who suffered a similar fate. The Supreme Court commuted the Kurdish rapper’s death sentence, which had been imposed after his arrest during the 2022 protests, to five years in prison. Yasin has allegedly been tortured and prohibited from interacting with others.

Under the iron fist of Khamenei, Iran crushes dissent. Amnesty International reports that 853 people were executed in Iran in 2023—the highest number since 2015 and a 48% increase from the year before. 74% of executions reported globally in 2023 occurred in the Islamic Republic. 

Women who violate the dress code have also been severely punished. Ironically, a few weeks prior to World Hijab Day this year, an Iranian woman and activist by the name of Roya Heshmati was detained for 11 days, fined $300, and whipped 74 times after she was caught on social media without a headscarf. Salehi is right to use his platform to expose the violent misogyny that permeates totalitarian Islamic societies like Iran. The hijab is, quite simply, a symbol of oppression, not liberation, whatever some in the West might think. 

Freedom of expression is essential for musicians. All artists must be free to question, challenge, and criticise authority. The tyrant’s empire is built on a foundation of censorship. Words mean little when no one can hear them. Salehi’s three million Instagram followers have contributed to the attention his case has received in the West. While we can all lament the loss of meaningful conversation on social media, we cannot deny its power to instantly connect millions of people. 

Music is a powerful medium for telling stories. And we can spread that message by using the internet. A new wave of youthful, politically engaged musicians is emerging thanks to social media, as shown by Salehi and many others. See also the rise of dissident rappers in Russia such as Oxxxymiron and FACE—the latter of whom Putin has designated as a foreign agent. 

Nobody should ever be sentenced to death or even arrested for speaking their mind. Those who foolishly believe they can use violence to counter the pen do so because they understand that most people will be intimidated into silence. His extraordinary bravery and conviction bear witness to the principles that Salehi has upheld throughout his life. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, ‘Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.’ 

While we in the West take the right to free speech for granted, we should praise courageous people like Saman Yasin and Toomaj Salehi—people who are prepared to risk their lives in order to challenge the hegemony of the Ayatollah and his despotic, theocratic regime. 

Related reading

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Image of the week: celebrating the death of Ebrahim Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, by Daniel James Sharp

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Faith Watch, November 2023, by Daniel James Sharp

When does a religious ideology become a political one? The case of Islam, by Niko Alm

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

The post Rap versus theocracy: Toomaj Salehi and the fight for a free Iran appeared first on The Freethinker.

It should have been a great weekend. I was staying with my friend Cal at her cottage on a moor. She’s a splendid person. She’s kind, smart, and intuitive, and her heart is very much in the right place. When she’s not chained to a bulldozer or up a tree protesting against a new road, she’s teaching infant school kids about flowers, playing her fiddle in a folk session, baking cakes for sick neighbours, reading to a blind woman in the village down the valley, writing poems of rare vision and pamphlets fizzing with righteous anger, swimming in the river, nailing up bird boxes, and finishing a novel too acute and interesting to be published.¹

It started well. On the Friday night, as I walked through the door, she poured out a pint of her Damson wine, shoved it into my hand, hugged me (spilling most of the wine), and it went from there. She was brilliant, funny, concerned, and wise. After dinner, we took a bottle and sat by the stream. There were fireflies and flickering bats, and a barn owl flew low to salute us. I went to sleep in my bivvy bag under a tree. She went inside to curl up with her dog.

I was woken early by the sun, sat for a couple of hours listening to the wind and the birdsong, and then went to the car to get an MP3 player and some headphones. I was plugged in when Cal came out, carrying the morning coffee. Then it all went wrong.

She didn’t like the headphones.

‘How can you prefer whatever’s on there to the martins and the skylarks and even the bloody sheep?’

It was a fair point—one that I’m always making aggressively and counterproductively to the children. I smiled and said that I’d had quite a bit of natural sound while she’d been snoring happily away.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

‘What are you listening to?’

I was listening, I told her, to the Bach B Minor Mass—’one of the best things that humans have ever done. Don’t you agree?’

‘I do not,’ she snarled. ‘And I can’t believe your hypocrisy. All that talk about only being a fulfilled human if you’re intimately connected with the natural world. All that stuff about our “porous boundaries”—that’s your expression, isn’t it? All that denigration of “progress”. That idea that human history’s gone downhill since we settled and started farming. That sermon of yours—I’ve heard it so often—that we all now live in virtual worlds rather than the real one, courtesy of our left brains and our technology. And here you are, plugged into a machine, drowning out the birdsong with human junk: music written by a very male man, made from merely human ideas of what’s beautiful. It’s the product of patronage. It’s designed to prop up patriarchy, can’t you see? And the rule of dreary neurotypical Protestants. It’s about power and control. It’s Christian propaganda. So turn it off.’

That, anyway, is the publishable version.

It was a long and scary indictment. I didn’t know where to go from there, so I drank up my coffee, tried to turn the whole thing into a joke (Cal wasn’t having that), and went home.

The exchange worried me. Mainly because I wondered seriously if Cal was right. Is there a duty—particularly in these troubled times where a war rages between the human and the non-human world—to declare clearly, by rejecting human culture, that we’re on the side of the wild?

I was reminded uncomfortably of tense exchanges with my mother, who has now gone to join the wild world that in life she so feared and distrusted. Her atoms have long since been transpired by real trees. That’s a vertiginous thought. Perhaps she thought it. Perhaps that was why she preferred trees painted by one of the great geniuses of Western art. She wouldn’t have dreamt of climbing a real mountain, but sat for an hour, entranced and exhilarated, before a painting of the Alps. She was beluga-white, despite her Sicilian blood, because she hated the sun she celebrated in Van Gogh.

She loved farm labourers in Thomas Hardy, but sped up as she drove past a farm because she couldn’t bear the smell of cows. Folk music smelt of cows too, and so it was banned from the house: proper people listened to the Great (and always capitalized) Classics. Elemental struggle was fine if it was in French or Italian and between the covers of a book. But the real thing? Oh no! We’ve come a long way since we daubed those crude caricatures of cow-like things on cave walls, Charles, and we must never go back: never, ever go back.

She gently mocked my atavism: the mud on my knees, the leaves in my hair, the skulls on my wall, the tunes of dead farmers and the songs about hanged highwaymen playing in my head, my childish talk of noble savagery. I slept with the window open so that I could breathe the air that had been blown out by foxes: she closed it to keep out the germs.

And I mocked her back, but less gently. Our conflict entrenched our positions. I must have sounded like Cal. I certainly thought I was on Cal’s side against my mum. I was upset, that morning by the stream, to be told that I’d switched off the birds, and alarmed to hear myself saying that the Mass was the pinnacle of human achievement. What did I believe? Did I believe anything at all? Did I really have to choose between a woodland epiphany and a Baroque epiphany? Did taking the side of the badgers really mean torching the Louvre?

There was obviously some work to do.

I started to ask around, hoping and expecting to find that Cal was a maverick. She wasn’t. Amongst the people I really like she was mainstream. I don’t know how I’d missed it before. The rhetoric was the same: the ‘high’ art of the West was fatally compromised; the fruit of a Faustian bargain with the Establishment. Switch on the Brandenburgs and you were switching off the rain cycle over Peru. If you went around the Renaissance churches of Tuscany on your holidays, you’d be bound to have a fetid portfolio of Monsanto shares. You couldn’t support the rights of indigenous people and also applaud Piero della Francesca.

The result, I’m afraid, was a thoroughgoing philistinism; a fulminating inverted snobbery. Of course Donatello’s David isn’t beautiful, they’d say: there’s more beauty—because more honesty—in a homespun llama-wool hat. The Sistine Chapel is trash: not a patch on the roof of a yurt.

Of course many disagreed, but they tended to keep their heads down, scared of being cancelled, hiding the Mozart in a drawer and having the Tibetan chant and didgeridoo music out on the shelves.

Their philistinism rarely extended to literature. This is odd. I’ve expressed before my suspicion of language. Language has power out of all proportion to its capacity to represent reality. It uses that power to codify the cosmos: to make it manageable; to recreate it in the image of the writer or speaker; to create cages for surging and squawking and whooping things; to domesticate waves and tides, suppress the chemistry of intuition, and block out the smell of halitotic whales. And yet Cal’s friends and my friends had groaning bookcases, full of really clever classic novels. Perhaps they thought that writers were more countercultural than painters or musicians. If so, I’m sure they were wrong.

Was my sample skewed? I hope so. But even if it wasn’t, isn’t it worth trying to work out what Our Side (by which I mean Cal’s side, the side of the ragamuffins, surf-tumblers, peasant farmers, canal-boat dwellers, old-tune hummers, fire-starers, fox-followers, felt-makers, tree-whisperers, category-confounders: the people who carve unicorn horns and watch clouds but never the news, who have unwashed children in trees and happy thin dogs; the un-centrally-heated and non-air-conditioned ones who hold your gaze and walk with the long loose stride of the free; the side my mum thought she was fighting) should do with the so-called high culture of the West? For we’re on the back foot, the wrong side of history, government and the bloody free market. We need all the help we can get, and if it turned out that Beethoven’s with us, I’d feel a lot more secure.

To know where we should live, what music we should make, what pictures should be on our walls, whom or what we should worship, and what should be the proper relationship between our language and our ideas and our ideas and the world, we need to know what sort of creatures we are. To know that we need to know where we’ve come from. To know where to go we need to know where we’ve been.

We first see signs of us (at least in Europe), around 45,000 years ago. (There’s a huge Eurocentric bias in the literature. Our story started in Africa and no doubt much more of our cognitive evolution happened there than we recognise.) When I say ‘us’, I mean ‘behaviourally modern’ humans: humans whose cognition seems, from the traces left in the archaeological record, to have produced a way of being in the world that is like ours.

We were distinguished from non-humans by our colossal brains.

Brains are metabolically very expensive. The space inside the skull is prime real estate. A company with a Fifth Avenue address has to justify the address by an exceptional return, and the brain had to justify its tenancy of the skull by conferring a massive selective advantage. It did.

Big brains are mainly important for relationship. To be good at relationship you must be fluent in inchoate languages, remember slights and favours, calculate deals, and make and execute judgments. If you can engender and sustain a large number of relationships you’ll be safer from actual and metaphorical sabre-toothed tigers and be an effective hunter, gatherer, and trader. You’ll have influence beyond the borders of your own body. Our big brains gave us a huge capacity for relationship. Most of us today don’t use much of it: we’ve outsourced to electronics the running of our personal communities. The neurological software built so arduously over millennia is atrophying fast.

We weren’t restricted only to relationships with humans. We had a vibrant, useful (in the dinner-delivering sense), and apparently ecstatic relationship with the non-human world. We saw ourselves as part of it. The woods bled into us and we bled into the woods. As we discovered and explored the miracle of our own agency we attributed agency to the cosmos, and a careful, respectful choreography evolved. We didn’t doubt that we had enduring souls. Agency, indeed, seemed to increase when we died.² If we had souls, so too, we decided, did other things. That was companionable, but it was also a problem: it meant that whenever we ate, we relocated the souls of the dead things we’d eaten. This demanded an elaborate liturgy of thanks, expiation, and propitiation. It made us sacramental creatures. Shamans, after figurative but agonising apprenticeships of piercing, dismemberment, and death, used their knowledge of the geography of the spirit world (often on the other side of a cave wall) to travel there on behalf of the community. They shuttled to and fro, seeking knowledge, blessing, and forgiveness. And the rest of the community wandered after the herds, and from bush to bush; each footstep in somewhere as different from the last step (if we could only see it—and once we could) as Antarctica and Angola. Life, quite literally, was a journey.

The signs of behavioural modernism in the record are signs of symbolism: a piece of reindeer bone could be shaped into a human face while still remaining a reindeer bone. If that kind of alchemy was possible, was anything impossible? The world was kaleidoscopically complex. Excitingly, nothing was only what it seemed. Or perhaps ‘seeming’ itself was different then.³

By then, and probably long before then, we were musical animals. Music, as the biologist David Haskell puts it, is neurologically prior to language. The musical centres in our brains are close to our movement centres embryologically and in terms of evolutionary history.⁴ Dancing probably made us appreciate music: we may have danced into behavioural modernity. 

Language, too, played a part in this symbolical revolution. Just what part is unclear: we don’t know if language ignited symbolism, or symbolism secreted language. In any event, language and symbolism became synergistic partners. Language eventually arrogated to itself a power it should not have had, but that was still to come. In the early phases of behavioural modernism language was still a tool, not a master. It helped us to manipulate the world. And with language came metaphor and story.

Consciousness—the sense of the subjective—broadcast that most thrilling and deadly of words: ‘I!’ And consequently, and even more thrillingly, ‘You!’ Otherness spurted into the world. We started to tell ourselves stories about ourselves, and who we were, and why we were. We told stories because we were stories. We too had a beginning, a middle, a sort of end, and we too could be told forever. The best story-tellers, with the greatest ability to enter the minds of others, and so tell the most compelling stories, got the best bits of the caribou, the most sex, and the most children, and so evolution smiled on them and on story.

There were no straight lines in this world, just as there are none in nature—except an erect penis, that most transient phenomenon. Reality was circular and cyclical. The seasons turned. The flowers faded and came again. The herd left and came back. Humans died and returned, though somehow enhanced.

Minds, even now, are surely not imprisoned in skulls. They roam far beyond, romping lasciviously and grappling bracingly with other minds. They are parts of Mind as an inlet is part of the sea. When the tide goes out, we call it loneliness and meaninglessness. In the Upper Palaeolithic, I suspect the tide was usually in. This didn’t just mean epiphany: it was useful. If you could tune into the intentions of a roving gazelle herd, you could cut them off at the pass and your clan would eat. Modern hunter-gatherers, until they get their iPhones, know from miles away what the hunting party has killed. Altered states of consciousness (induced by plants or fungi or physiological stresses or dancing or mantras) no doubt played some part in catalysing modern consciousness: they certainly played a significant part in its evolution. We wandered through our minds and through other minds as we walked over the earth. Self-exploration was easier then, and otherness more accessible.

It’s harder to be arrogant if you know you’re a little inlet. It’s harder for a man to be a sexist pig if, as is typical in hunter-gatherer communities, his wife brings home most of the calories. And indeed, though there were hierarchies, they were more fluid and less toxic in those Upper Palaeolithic times than they later became.

And there was leisure. There’s always food for a superb naturalist (we were all superb in those days) who knows when and where to look. If there’s no food in that valley, you go to the next. You needn’t worry about feeding your children. You can paint bison, talk with your dead uncle, and perfect your metaphors.

Leisure, the absence of rigid hierarchy, connection with an infinite number of other minds and with Mind itself or Himself or Herself, a passion for story and for symbols of all kinds, a conviction that everything signifies, a conviction that there are other more real, or at least more powerful realms beyond death and beyond the cave wall (meaning that what you create endures and matters and is part of a greater whole), and deeply ingrained music, governing the way you walk and what you hear in the wind. It all sounds artistically promising.

Yet even in this Eden, trouble was brewing. Each of the human hemispheres, as big as the whole brain of many quite sophisticated primates, has a very different function. The right is the big-picture hemisphere, concerned with context and holistic understanding. It knows that the stand-off between black and white, on and off (the very dualism upon which the digital world of ones and zeros is built) and north and south doesn’t rightly represent the world.

The left hemisphere is a nerdish, petulant, binary-obsessed, conservative bureaucrat, fond of its procedures and its paradigms, good at filing, narrow focus, and formulaic responses. Most unfortunately it controls the right hand: the grasper. Its role is to support the higher-order functions of the right hemisphere: to execute the commands delivered by its wiser master. But the left side became discontented. It came to resent its secretarial function, and got delusions of grandeur. As language—and so speech—became more and more important, the left hemisphere’s prospects improved, for the left hemisphere controls speech. It planned a coup.

The history of that coup has been brilliantly charted by Iain McGilchrist in his The Master and His Emissary (2019) and The Matter with Things (2021). The coup took many millennia. The left hemisphere’s victory has only neared completion in the last couple of hundred years. Now the remaining right hemispherists have been driven into exile. But the first obvious sign of the left’s advance across the corpus callosum was in the Neolithic.

When was the Neolithic? It depends on where you look. And of course there was no obvious seam between the hunting and gathering Upper Palaeolithic and the more sedentary Neolithic. Hunter-gatherers started to control and to cultivate, while still hunting and gathering. Farmers often continued to hunt and to gather. They still do: think of the farmer taking a turn round his field with his gun and his dog. But nonetheless things changed. We settled down, as mud settles on a river bed when the current slows. We made fields. We built fences and walls across the land to keep animals close to our huts, and no longer walked far to find our food. It is in the nature of embodied life and part of the magic of metaphor that physical things lead to psychological things. And so we built walls across our minds too. We became compartmentalized creatures, living mentally in one room at a time. One part of our mind didn’t know what the other parts were planning, let alone what the red deer herd in the wood fifty miles off was thinking. We lost our integrity.

We presumably thought at the time that the physical and mental walls were a good thing. Many of us still do. At some level, we don’t like freedom. It’s too much of a responsibility. Like imperial mapmakers, we carved up the big free lands of our minds into tiny territories, stuck razor wire across the borders, and set up passport controls.

Our horizons shrank, and so did our brains. The limbic system—the part of our brain responsible for alertness—shrivels in all domesticated animals, from humans to fish. (For discussion, see James C. Scott’s 2017 book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.) This was an age of sclerosis: of hardening, of simplification, of the perceived incompatibility of opposites. Hierarchies became more important. Women were subjugated. Leisure ebbed away, for corn and the law of supply and demand are harder taskmasters than the bountiful seasons.

The left hemisphere, which had engineered the whole era, liked it that way. The new, inflexible categories, the straightforward dualisms, the loss of the time and the faculty for imagination: that all makes for easy control, for neat ledgers. It doesn’t make for a scintillating artistic culture.

Today, as the ragged troops of the right hemispherical resistance set out from their secret woodland redoubts and mountain eyries in what often seems to be a hopeless fight against the zeitgeist, it is easy enough to see the first signs, in those Neolithic fields, of the swelling hegemony of the left hemisphere. But are there signs too in the art of the millennia between the Upper Palaeolithic?

There are indeed, but they are complex and hard to interpret. We can confidently chart the jackbooted march of the left hemisphere through the history of ideas and in political philosophy. It is plainly there in burgeoning polarity, in the admiration of power, in the expansion of bureaucracy, in centralization and the suppression of itinerants and edge people, in the preference for procedure over substance and the quantitative over the qualitative, in the suspicion of the ambiguous and the unspoken, and supremely in the Enlightenment’s reconception of the cosmos as a machine, with its related declaration that there are no souls in anything—let alone in everything. But it is not at all so clear in the arts.

It can be argued coherently that in all the arts there has, overall, been a steep downward (and leftward) trajectory since the Enlightenment, but there are huge numbers of outliers (think of Beethoven, the Impressionists, and Dickens, among many, many others). Nor will it do simply to compare the glories of Lascaux with the digitized jingles of a 21st-century advertising campaign, sniff disgustedly and say: ‘There you are.’ Upper Palaeolithic cave art is, to my eye, some of the very best there has ever been, and I’ve suggested that Upper Palaeolithic life was more conducive to the artistic adventure than any subsequent human era (yes, including the Italian Quattrocento), but it would be laughably wrong to pretend that in the last 10,000 years or so there have not been many triumphs of the human spirit, evidenced in artistic production. I’ve been rude about sedentism, and I don’t repent of that rudeness, but without sedentism there would have been no Florence.

There’s a clear picture. The artists—or at least the ones we would agree are great—are the main fighters in the battle against the left hemisphere. They’re often working behind enemy lines, in deep cover. Cal mistook the cover for betrayal. She’d have hanged Michelangelo as a collaborator with the Medici, and so she’d have hanged one of the great undercover generals of the anti-left-hemispherical resistance.

The debate about what constitutes ‘great’ art is almost completely sterile. The little that can usefully be said is as follows. A great work of art does not fit neatly into any category. Anything that does is by definition not great. It is certainly not necessarily produced or appreciated by a social or intellectual elite. Much unquestionably great music is made in pub sessions or with tins and drums at a campfire. ‘Great art’ always flows primarily from the right hemisphere, and represents uncompromisingly the perspective on the cosmos of a fizzing and informed right hemisphere, but is executed with the aid of a skilful left hemisphere as joyfully fulfilled in its subservience to the right as a working sheepdog is to its human master. It hints; it never asserts. It suggests; it never states. It knows that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, that all is process—in which what we perceive as true emerges in the course of a conversation between an infinite number of participants and is influenced by each—and that the truth is not at all the same as the total amount of data. It knows that opposites coexist, nesting inside one another, co-dependent, as the Yin and the Yang encompass and empower one another. It knows not only that opposites can co-exist, but that they must, and that all life and all wisdom depend on this co-existence. It knows that the positive pole of a magnet wouldn’t exist without the negative pole. North requires South.

Heraclitus observed that a lyre can make music only when its strings are tensed by being pulled in two different directions. (For discussion, see Jane McIntosh Snyder’s article ‘The Harmonia of Bow and Lyre in Heraclitus Fr. 51 (DK)‘.) This fact, central to everything that we identify as authentically artistic, is invisible and offensive to the left hemisphere, whose vector calculus insists that opposites cancel one another out, rather than resulting in a net plus.⁵

The tectonic fact of the lyre string is most obviously true in music. This, along with music’s early evolutionary association with our movement and so with our most basic mode of enfleshment, gives music supremacy in the arts. Until music prostitutes itself to vacuous or directive or non-allusive language, as of course it often does, it can only allude; can only invite and curate a conversation. And in alluding, it eludes, as the true love always does. It may permit a glimpse which suggests—but only ever suggests—the whole voluptuous body. It may tell a story, but it is a story that has the conditionality and uncertainty that are the most salient threads in the web and weave of all reality. It also (forcing us to mix and transcend metaphors) embodies that most characteristic part of hunter-gatherer living: a journey. ‘The slow movement of Schubert’s mighty Ninth Symphony is like those vast mountainous landscapes that Schubert loved trekking through in southern Austria,’ writes the musicologist Michael Spitzer. ‘Walking through a landscape is intrinsic to Western music; it is not a metaphor.’

That resonates with my experience. Forced to choose one word to sum up life and the natural world, I’d choose symphonic.

Reading what I’ve written I note that I’m starting, tentatively, to suggest another argument for that much-maligned ‘high Western culture’. It is that that culture is derived from and often refers explicitly—and always implicitly—to the non-human world.

This is sometimes hard to see, for it’s often hard to penetrate the cover of the right-hemispherical guerrillas. The impression on a quick scan is that the non-human world was—at least until Romanticism began its campaign against anthropocentrism and reductionism—a stage on which human dramas were played out. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in the natural world for its own sake—though there are some honourable exceptions, such as Aristotle and some of the Renaissance polymaths (I discuss this issue in detail in my Being a Human; see footnote 2). There are trees, mountains, fur, and feathers in the pictures, but the trees and mountains are there to frame the human characters; the birds and beasts look on approvingly.

But it is easy to fail to see the real trees for the anthropocentric wood. Perhaps the dominant message of those pictures is precisely that human endeavours are explicable only in their non-human context; that we are, as the hunter-gatherers know, indivisibly part of the non-human world; that human dramas make sense only when they’re on a wild stage. Even when an aristocrat is being flattered, a victory celebrated, or a myth retold, distinctly non-human shoots erupt into the picture, mocking the hubris and threatening to steal the show. In the great cathedrals of Europe, grave Green Men and insolent nature spirits look down on the altar as the catechism is recited, forcing its propositions into the context of the whole created order. Deer graze in the margins of holy and learned books. The art of the mediaeval elite smelt of gorse, musk, and wood smoke. And outside the courts and the monastic libraries the wild was even more unavoidable: even more the real master. The city centres wriggled with live eels, the suavest urbanite knew the sound of a stuck pig, dung blocked the streets, and cycling kites recycled the dead. Outside the city gates (as most people were), everyone knew and felt the pressure of the farmer’s contingencies; everyone looked anxiously up to the clouds for rain, and knew that the frost was out to kill.

‘High’ and popular culture often sprang visibly, audibly, and olfactorily from the wild. The farmers’ songs and tunes seeped directly from the ground, borrowing their cadences from the wind, the swaying treetops, and the sea. And those songs and tunes were in turn borrowed by bewigged and flouncing metropolitan maestros, and became the only parts of oratorios that anyone really likes.

Terroir obsesses me. I know a man who is such an expert on the wines of Bordeaux that he can often tell not only which vineyard and which year produced a wine, but which corner of which field. That sort of skill, though it’s associated with smart suits and high net worth—though it’s a prime example of the stuffy ‘civilization’ so loathed by Cal—is like the skill of an albatross winding through the scent-valleys of the southern Atlantic, or a wolf knowing in its head, from the leaking smell, the landscape on the far side of a mountain. My friend tastes the sun and the rain from a couple of decades ago and from over the sea. He listens to the muttering of the grape and the barrel. That sounds weird: not at all the sort of talk that would go down well with the stockbrokers who buy his wines. Yet they love him. He’s a particularly potent undercover agent.

Now that I notice it, so many of the uncontroversially great human artists had distinctive terroir that we might well say that it’s an essential criterion of artistic greatness. We must be careful here, of course. We must beware the obscenity of the blood and soil fascism that’s growing malignantly in some organs of the folklorish community. Martin Shaw (a sworn and doughty enemy of that fascism), rather than using the language of terroir, speaks instead about the importance of being claimed by a place. If one is claimed, he says—if the place trusts you and hugs you and confides in you—you are heir to immense resources, and hence immense responsibility. For the land is old, and has seen much. But let’s be clear: there is no bar at all to anyone being claimed by anywhere. By a great act of wholly undeserved grace I—a kid from an industrial city in Yorkshire—have been claimed by a remote part of the Peloponnese. If my ancestors’ bones are in a hill they might help me to be claimed, but their absence is no impediment. And we can be sure that anyone who thinks that the hill can be represented by a flag has no prospect whatever of being claimed, or of tasting the terroir. Every hill there has ever been is far, far too complex and dignified to need a flag. Flags are tawdry things: hills are not. You might as well put a paper party hat on a Blue Whale and say that the hat is a useful symbol of the whale.

So, then, there are many explicit examples of the wild creeping into the most urban and urbane citadels and determining their shape and colour and scent and the whole way of human being inside them, just as ivy, crawling over the facade of a brutalist building, makes it soft, habitable, and even lovable, and the smell of wisteria coming in through a window changes the mood and the mind of everyone in the room.

Yet these influences, powerful though they are, are not the main means the great arts use to wild us covertly. Here’s the scandalous secret: proper, free, honest creation is itself wild: and wild promiscuously begets wild.

Pan is a musician, and I know a few places where you can still reliably hear him. A relaxed adult trachea has the same diameter as Pan’s marble pipe in a crumbling and overlooked statue in southern Greece. The sea, sucking and blowing through a rock in the bay just below the statue, wheezes out a perfect fifth.

The tone of a whistling thorn in a part of the East African bush I love is the same as the top organ pipe in a high Baroque church in southern Munich (when the diapason stop is out).

In that church, counterpoint curls like bindweed round the melody. The pieces they play there are often long enough to be significant journeys, like the journeys of migrating swifts. Dissonances resolve, as the rough edges of rocks are shaved by wind, water, and time. Dissonances don’t last long, either in nature or (if that’s different, which it’s not), Baroque music. Many of the themes in those pieces speak to one another like birds in a forest canopy; and they recur cyclically, for in music, as in biological life, ends are beginnings.

As I sit in the pew, listening to the organ, the music, as a matter of fact, not fancy, makes my cells vibrate. I suppose everyone else since the mid-17th century who’s heard that Toccata has vibrated at the same frequency. That’s a pretty intimate connection with the dead. Everything vibrates all the time, and everything affects everything else all the time. The spin of the electrons in my spleen modifies, instantaneously, the spin of the electrons in the galaxies on the far side of the universe⁶, and so the Toccata is changing the universe.

The composer stood on others’ shoulders. Cal calls this contemptible human tradition. I call it evolution—recruiting and developing the innovations of others. It’s at least one—if not the only one—of the engines generating natural complexity. The mathematics of this toccata are fairly basic, to be honest, but the same species of mathematics is encoded in snowflakes, double helices, and the mechanics of a hyena’s hock. Chartres Cathedral is rumoured to enshrine the arcane geometry of Pythagoras. My body does too, which might explain the shimmering frisson of a Sung Mass there.

The composer of the Toccata, along with Pythagoras, Leonardo, and every human creator you’d think of as ‘great’, lived and worked at the edge. It might not always look that way (that’s the cover), but it’s true. Nothing important in any domain (ideas, music, visual arts, literature, cooking, comedy, taxidermy, kite-flying, potting-shed design, plumbing, or whatever) has ever, ever come from the centre. It’s the same with biological innovation. Evolution works on the margins; with odd configurations of bodies and molecules and behavioural traits. The flying buttresses that make you gasp (and look, incidentally, rather like mangroves) came from wild minds; edge minds; the sort of minds with which natural selection can do serious and novel business.

Everywhere in the Toccata, in the buttresses, in the spin of my splenic electrons, in the bark of a fox in the field outside Chartres, and in my response to all these things, there is story—story of the same kind that we call literature. It cannot be otherwise, for consciousness is everywhere. The cosmos is a web of stories. Individual minds are examples of what happens when universal consciousness collides with matter⁷, taking for a while the shape of that matter, conditioning the matter’s qualities forever, and creating characters in a story. A good human story is one that reflects the way that characters really are in the cosmos. Good human language takes its cue from that way (perhaps by onomatopoeia; at least by a repudiation of the abstraction so beloved of the left hemisphere). 

The epic of story-making, and its parallels with biological processes, is shown nowhere better than in jazz. The paradigm example for me is the Bach-based jazz of Jacques Loussier. There you have the mathematical bottom line: the equation: the statement of the connection with the snowflake and the hyena hock. Round it coils the riff, always heedful of the baseline equation, but sometimes offending it for a delicious anarchic moment to explicate it; to show the possibilities inherent in the equation that ordinary obedience would have missed.

This riff is itself possible only because of the clairvoyant connection between the pianist’s fingers and the notes and the keys, and between the pianist and the other members of the band; a connection surely like that inside a flock of murmurating starlings, and faster than thought. It shows that intuition far outstrips sluggardly light and is stronger than tungsten rope, and when you’re playing anything like this you know the atomistic model of the self on which all our politics and economics are based is laughable and that there’s no very obvious reason why, with the same quality of attention, you shouldn’t persuade a distant cedar tree to switch a few of the base pairs in its DNA and turn purple. The riff around the theme is how genetic variation happens. This is how plants talk to plants, electrons to electrons, and proper lovers to one another. No wonder tyrants are terrified of jazz.⁸

They’re also terrified of ‘high culture’, because they’re terrified of the wild from which it comes. They know that they came out of the wild, and will one day return to it when they’re burned or eaten by worms. For the same reason, they’re terrified of real folk culture; the sort that oozes out of the hill with the brown peat water. Their control depends on pastiche: depends on pretending that humans are far simpler than they really are. That they are nowhere near as complex and dignified as a real human, whose appetites and stories and epiphanies can only be hinted at by the most adept agents of the right hemisphere. This doesn’t demand artistic complexity, needless to say. ‘If you play more than two chords,’ said Woody Guthrie, ‘you’re showing off.’ In many situations he’s right. But it does demand an ear for the concordance between human art and the way that things really are. And the way that things really are is wild. The way that things really are is only appreciated by the right hemisphere.

The war on the wild is being waged by the same tyrants, and for the same reasons, as the war on the arts. If you want to fell a forest and build a car park or put beef cows there, I’ll wager that you’re also agitating for the defunding of museums, art galleries, and classical concerts. That should show us, if nothing else does, where we need to take our stand. This is obvious, too, when we look at the aesthetics of the left-brainers who prop up the tyrants. Fundamentalist Protestantism, remember, smashed up the mediaeval churches, reads the crass and deeply disturbed Left Behind novels, and worships in breeze block garages.

The tyrants use fake art in the campaign, of course: buildings of unutterable ugliness and pretension, praised by the left-brain critics using words like ‘iconoclastic’, ‘stark’, and ‘uncompromising’: bold, clever words that make us embarrassed to point out that our architectural emperors have no clothes and obscene paunches: computerised music that appeals to the motor-drive dance centres of our impoverished brains but nothing else, and is repetitive without the fractal beauty often associated with repetition in the real world of cells and molecular lattices. In The Silmarillion there were two types of music before the seat of Ilúvatar. They ‘were utterly at variance’, Tolkien tells us:

‘The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.’

There is great comfort in that final sentence. It is my conviction and (almost) my conclusion.

This has been a long article, but it needs to be slightly longer. Cal delivered a broadside against Christianity—or what she saw as Christianity. I can well see why. But she is assaulting a great ally.

This is no Christian tract, but no defence of any of the ‘high’ arts of the West can fail to mention Christianity. It would be like trying to stage Hamlet without once mentioning Hamlet. Nor will it do to say that what we have to admire in Western art is the work of imaginative pagans who cynically took Christian money but were unmoved by the central doctrines. There is unmistakable piety in the Gothic cathedrals, in the mediaeval Miracle plays, in the Toccata that transfixed me in Germany. These are right-brain works, which should at least raise the presumption that the creed itself is right-brain—or represents a fecund marriage between the left and the right. The Reforming zealots were and are the stormtroops of the left brain. If we know our enemy, perhaps he can point us to our friend?

Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers would recognise immediately the figure of the pierced shaman who goes to another dimension on behalf of the people and returns, bearing great gifts. The fact that Jesus’ resurrection body was more solid and more powerful than his fleshly body was entirely in accord with the Upper Palaeolithic belief that death increased agency (see footnote 2). The caveman would be unsurprised at the unity of opposites (the defining right brain insight) in Christian orthodoxy: the virgin who is also a mother; the beginning who is also the end; the Alpha who is also the Omega. Hunter-gatherers would nod approvingly at the Greek Orthodox morning prayer which expresses belief in the immanence as well as the transcendence of God: ‘O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things…’ ‘Fillest all things’ includes mushrooms, rocks, and badgers: it mandates a kind of animism.

It is tragic that the environmental movement⁹ has for so long identified Christianity with the shrill perverted pastiches of Christianity that have hijacked religious discourse in North America. Yes, many unfortunate things have been said by real historic Christianity too—most notably in misconstruing the Genesis mandate to ‘subdue’ the earth. But they shouldn’t make us cold-shoulder Christianity. That’s just what the left brain, expert in dividing and ruling, wants us to do.

There are signs that we’re finally starting to realise what an ally we’ve been missing. This isn’t, by and large, because of the efforts of green movements in Christianity, but by personal reflection. Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth, for instance, faithful priests of the Green Man and superb writers, have recently been baptised.

I hope it goes without saying that a comparable case can be made in relation to the other great religions, and I’d be very happy to make it. The reason I don’t make it here is because this article is primarily about Western Europe and North America, and because many thoughtful Westerners have a particular problem with Christianity, as we all tend to have problems with the things closest to us. 

Our crises—environmental and otherwise—are spiritual at root. Political solutions put plasters on gaping wounds, allowing and possibly causing the wounds to fester. We need far more radical solutions that speak deeply to deep. I’m not pretending that all the ills of the world would be cured if Bach were broadcast in all shopping malls, but the sort of attention that causes you to listen to Bach and is cultivated by listening to Bach would, if sufficiently widespread, put the world right. Whatever you think of the Sistine Chapel, it’s pretty spiritual in a way that the Keystone pipeline is not. We need a culture that acknowledges the place of soul, that knows that surface meanings are not the whole story, and that we are wild. We need the executive skills of the left hemisphere, but we need to keep it in its place. We need to know that real atavism is high culture, and that high culture is atavistic.

At the root of Cal’s diatribe was, though she’d deny it, a corrosive misanthropy. She loves the natural world, but one of her ways of loving is to hate humans—and so hate the ‘high art’ that she sees as distinctively human. ‘I love not Man the less,’ declared Byron, ‘but Nature more.‘ For Cal and many others, you can’t love both: nature-loss is human-hate.

This is a terrible error. There are many reasons to have confidence in humans. If you can’t quite swallow the Imago Dei, at least see, in any decent art gallery, what we can do.  

Kenneth Clark observed that what destroys all cultures and civilizations is a lack of confidence. We can have no confidence in our current left brain culture. Few really do—hence our queasy fears about the future. That culture will fall. It must, for it is no culture at all: it is no civilization at all. It is a pure secretion of the left hemisphere, and that hemisphere is at war with culture and civilization. But this need not and must not mean that we lose confidence in culture and civilization themselves: that would be the ultimate triumph of the left brain. We need instead to have renewed confidence in true human civilization. For that, we have to look back. And not just to the glories of the Renaissance or Periclean Athens—though we must look there and claim those glories as our own; look and say: ‘We did that!’ If we do, and know what sort of creatures we are, we won’t easily go back to daytime TV.

But to find out even more about what we are, we need to look further, to the normative humans: to what we were before things started to go wrong. We need to befriend the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer in all of us, for that’s what we really are when all the artifice is stripped away.¹⁰ We’ll find that he agrees wholeheartedly with us about the Birth of Venus and the Temple of Athena Nike.  

**

Have I managed to broker some kind of peace between my dead mother and the caveman? Well, possibly. I’ve been eavesdropping on their conversation (over my mum’s scones (with doilies) and a still-steaming raw caribou rib). He played her a lament on his swan-femur flute: she put on Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Mozart Requiem, and he listened silently and thoughtfully.

I’m still working on Cal. She hasn’t spoken to me since, but I hope she’ll meet the Highbrow Caveman too. We all need him.

1. No, Cal is certainly not Jay Griffiths. ︎
2. Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist specialising in the Upper Palaeolithic, observes: ‘For most humans death is not conceived of as an abrupt end of the individual but a transformation from one state to another, one which usually results in an increase in the power of their agency as they ‘transcend’ the biological world.’ I discuss this in detail in my 2021 book Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness. ︎
3. I set out this thesis in detail in Being a Human. ︎
4. Haskell writes: ‘It seems that preceding both [music and language] is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centres of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about. An epistemology that is grounded in muscle, nerve and bone is perhaps, then, what we need.’ (Cited in Being a Human.) ︎
5. Another example: per Sun Xidan ‘The qi of Earth ascends above, while the qi of Heaven descends below. Yin and Yang rub against each other, and Heaven and Earth jostle up against each other. Their drumming creates peals of thunder.’ Cited in Eric Fox Brindley’s Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (2012). ︎
6. I’m thinking of the notion of quantum non-locality, whereby if X has been very close to Y, X will ever thereafter, and instantaneously, however far it is from Y, affect Y. And vice versa. ︎
7. Whatever ‘matter’ is. What it is is very mysterious. No one has any real idea. ︎
8. Jazz, for instance, is banned by the totalitarian regime in Howard Jacobson’s 2014 novel J. ︎
9. By using the word ‘environment’ I’m breaching one of my own rules. ‘Environment’, which suggests something around us, as opposed to something in us and part of us, is a dangerous and unfortunate word. I’m using it here just as shorthand. ︎
10. In Being a Human, I say: ‘Suppose that behavioural modernity began 40,000 years ago, that the Neolithic began 10,000 years ago and that we became modern, in the sense we now are, 1,000 years ago… Assume that each generation is twenty-five years. There have then been 1,600 behaviourally modern generations, 1,200 (75 per cent) of them Upper Palaeolithic or Mesolithic. There have been forty modern generations: that’s 2 per cent of the total human generations. If a human life time is seventy years, 75 per cent of a human life time is about fifty-three. Most of our development as individuals is done by the age of fifty-three. And most of our development as humans was done by the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. We’re Pleistocene people… If we start the story when anatomically modern Homo sapiens first appeared, 200,000 years ago, 95 per cent of our history has been as hunter-gatherers…’ ︎

The post The Highbrow Caveman: Why ‘high’ culture is atavistic appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Frank Turner is an English singer and songwriter whose music I have loved for years. His songs are wild and varied, sometimes sad and sometimes happy but always somehow life-affirming. He is a patron of Humanists UK and his secular and humanistic style, while rarely explicit, shines through all his music (at least to my ears). His tenth studio album, ‘Undefeated’, is out on 3 May, and in February I interviewed him about it.

Topics covered include Frank’s artistry; humanism and atheism; history and cancel culture; the greatness of Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift; raucous middle age; the perils of social media; and defiance.

The Freethinker has not interviewed many creative artists lately. As someone who believes that godlessness and art are entwined, in that art is one of the things that makes life in a purposeless universe worth living, I could not resist the opportunity to talk to Frank. As such, this interview might feel a little different—not least because there is a lot more casual swearing than usual. So, be warned. Frank is a rebellious singer with a punk background, after all. Indeed, his individualism, discussed below, is an example of freethinking in an artistic context.

I have also tried to keep the informal verbal flow of the conversation intact in the edited transcript. Selected audio excerpts are included alongside the transcript.

You can pre-order ‘Undefeated’ here.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: ‘Undefeated’ marks your return to independent music and it was recorded in your home studio. Why did you make that choice and what effect do you think it has had on your music?

Frank Turner: It’s a funny thing, the whole independent label business, because I’m not sure how much anybody else really cares about it. But it’s important to me. I have always been with Xtra Mile Recordings. For five records, starting in 2012, I was licensed to Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company. It was an experiment, and I expected it to last for maybe one album. I imagined I’d be dropped instantaneously!  

I am quite proud that I finished my deal rather than getting dropped. At the end of the deal, they were keen to continue, and I was not. I don’t have any ill things to say about the past, but it felt like the right moment to return to the warm embrace of the independent world on the label side of things, and I feel very good about it.  

It’s not that I was ever really creatively constrained per se in the licensing years. But there were moments when I had to expend some firepower, if you like, on maintaining my creative independence, and that is no longer the case. I’m the wild, drunk captain of my own ship now, and very nice that is too.  

So I have now produced a record, which was awesome. That is not to say that I think I should have produced all my albums—that’s not true at all. Another part of it is that one of my lockdown projects was to learn how to produce music in order to produce other bands, and I’ve been doing that with the likes of The Meffs, Pet Needs, and Grace Petrie, among others. And I thought, ‘Wait, hold on, I could do this for myself.’ And I had demoed my last few records in more and more depth before the recording. So even for my previous album ‘FTHC’, it was a process of replacing my demo tracks with better quality, better-played performances. And I thought, I can supervise that. My band are amazing, they can be part of that. And on we go.  

I don’t want to use the word ‘comfortable’ because that sounds kind of flaccid, somehow. But I feel confident in where I’m sitting creatively at the moment, and that feels good, and I feel like I’m putting my best foot forward.

On your blog, you wrote that you ‘still have something to share with the world’ in ‘Undefeated’. So, what exactly is it that you want to share?

It’s important to say that it’s entirely legitimate for certain sections of the world to say that they don’t give a fuck about what I want to share, and that’s all good.  

In ‘Undefeated’ there is a lot of stuff about nostalgia. There was a moment in time when it was going to be a concept record about an argument between me and my 15-year-old self. It didn’t quite stay that high concept, which is probably for the best. But there is a fair amount of that kind of thing running through the creative DNA of the record. And there are songs about impostor syndrome, life in the creative arts, London Tube stations. So, lots of different things!  

I try to be quite strict on checking myself on whether I am repeating myself, or whether I am making a record just because that’s what I do. That seems robotic to me. And it seems creatively indefensible somehow. People can argue as to how successfully I’ve checked myself on this. But personally, I feel that I have new things to say, and people can listen to the songs and judge for themselves.

You are very keen on having a distinctive creative voice in your music. One of the pre-released songs from ‘Undefeated’, ‘No Thank You For The Music’, is very much about having an individual voice and having things to say as opposed to bowing to musical conformity. Where does that spirit come from?

I had the fortune or misfortune (to be decided at a later date) of being obsessed with punk and rock music when I was growing up. There is a sense of independence and defiance and rejection that comes with a lot of that music—everything from The Clash to the Sex Pistols and Black Flag through to all the modern stuff like Bob Vylan.  

I would also say that in terms of making a life out of being a writer and being a performer and all the rest of it, I don’t really see the point unless I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m not trying to complain about my lot in life. There is a fair amount of costs in my cost-benefit analysis of what I do, but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs. That is why I still do this. It’s fantastic. I’m very privileged. I’m not complaining. But if I was not free to have my own voice and to be my own writer and my own artist, then I’m not sure what the point of doing any of this would be for me. I’ve never been doing this because I want to be famous or because I want to be rich—fucking lol [as in ‘laugh out loud’, pronounced ‘lawl’]. The sense of being under my own steam is very much the point.  

‘No Thank You For The Music’ is a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the gatekeepers of this world, and I’m very proud of it. I’ve always thought the idea of ‘cool’ in the creative arts was dumb. Fuck off! What does that even mean? And how lame would you have to be to care? More than a few times in my career, people have attempted to throw the insult at me that what I do is not ‘relevant’. I just think, what kind of a fucking loser cares about whether art is, quote-unquote, relevant. I don’t listen to music and I don’t engage with other types of art while looking over my shoulders to check whether other people agree with my opinion. Don’t be such a fucking coward. 

There are people who make it their business to try and gatekeep what is and isn’t ‘cool’ or ‘in’ or ‘hip’ or ‘permissible’. I just think that that is laughable. Those people should be laughed at. I think that they should be hounded from polite society with jeers. Just fuck off and leave everybody alone. I hope that that comes through in the way that I present my music, but it’s also about how I listen to music and how I engage with music as well. And I hope that younger people have the courage to ignore those types of people.

I love the line ‘Bees shouldn’t waste their time telling flies that honey tastes better than shit’.

I must admit, and in public for the first time [this interview was conducted on 8 February 2024], that that is actually a line from a friend’s grandmother. When I heard that, I thought, ‘I am putting that in a fucking song, goddamn.’ Credit where it’s due!

You are a patron of Humanists UK and, though your music is not explicitly godless (with some exceptions, like 2011’s ‘Glory Hallelujah’), it is very secular and humanistic. It’s about the love of life and humanity in the here and now. Is that conscious on your part?

It’s a reflection of how I see the world. My maternal grandfather was a priest, and he was a very smart and a very wise man, and I loved and respected him very much. In a way that the historian Tom Holland would endorse, I’m obviously culturally Christian—that is, in the way that Western culture broadly is post-Christian at the very least, up to and including modern progressivism. So that informs the way I see the world. But I don’t believe in the supernatural. I think that nature is super enough, thank you very much! But I’m wary of getting too deep into the Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens type of angry, finger-pointing atheism. That just seems a little needless to me a lot of the time.  

‘Glory Hallelujah’ was intended as a sort of atheist hymn. But at the same time, I never really wanted that to be my central cause in engaging with the world. But we play it from time to time and people enjoy it.  

Occasionally I get people who write me letters telling me that I’m going to hell. We got protested in Norfolk, Virginia, many years ago by some evangelical Christians who said that I was Satan. As somebody who grew up listening to Slayer and Iron Maiden and the like, I thought that was fucking awesome. It made my day. An absolute career highlight.

I think that ‘humanism’ is a useful word, though in many ways it is quite a nebulous word. The idea of attempting to engage with the world in a morally and ethically coherent way that is not reliant on theism, broadly writ, is something that interests me, and something that I support. But again, I’m at pains not to batter people over the head with this stuff.  

There’s a clergyman in the US who writes appreciatively about me and my music, and I think that’s great. I think it’s lovely. A little bit more pluralism and ecumenism in the world at large would be a good thing. I’m very comfortable hanging out with people who I don’t 100% agree with. And I think more people should get behind that.

And that clergyman isn’t the only one. There is a Catholic guy, a friar I think, who writes me private correspondence. He sends me long philosophical discourses which, when I have the free time to engage in philosophical debates, I will get into. There’s a lot of mutual respect in the room, I like to think. I find it very flattering that somebody wants to engage with anything that I put together in that kind of depth. It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, dude, you’ve thought about this a lot!’

I absolutely agree about engaging with people who disagree with you. As it happens, we’ve published a few articles quite critical of Holland’s views on Christianity recently.  

The first thing to say is that I’m an abject fanboy for The Rest Is History, the podcast Holland and Dominic Sandbrook host. I think it’s phenomenal. I’ve been to see them live. I want to be their friend! They’re very good, and their approach to history is refreshingly dogma-free. History is something I care about a lot.  

I remember that there was a wonderful moment when I saw them live. Sandbrook commented that the business of being a historian is not a judgemental business. We shouldn’t judge the behaviour of people in the past and weigh them in a balance and try to find ways of feeling superior to them.  

That’s a misapprehension of what the study of history is supposed to be, in my opinion, and indeed in Sandbrook’s opinion, and it was quite comforting to hear somebody say that and see him get a standing ovation for it. That gave me a little bit of hope because the flipside is a kind of airbrushing, Maoist approach to history (and I know that’s a loaded description). That approach is bad news, both for our own historical record and culture and for the people who engage in that way with the world. I don’t think it’s very healthy.  

Another pre-released song from ‘Undefeated’ is ‘Do One’, which is another ‘fuck you’ type of song, isn’t it?

I’m glad you put it that way because I think it is a ‘fuck you’ song. ‘Do One’ is the first song in the album, and the first line sets the tone: ‘Some people are just gonna hate you’. There’s a wonderful quote that I read a few years ago, which was very psychologically useful to me, which came from, of all people, Eleanor Roosevelt. She essentially said that it takes two people to be humiliated. Ultimately, to be hounded, cancelled, chained, or whatever word we want to use, you have to agree to play the game on some level. And there’s something really liberating about being able to say ‘fuck off, I’m not playing.’

In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty unimportant, but I’ve had people come at me on various issues over the years. There have been times when it was fucking horrible, and deleterious to my mental health, and there have been times when it has felt really unfair and done in total bad faith.  

There have been times when I have felt that people were picking up on an ill-phrased thing that I said. I do think it’s important to take that on board sometimes, but more often than not it’s a bad-faith form of argument.  

It’s been something I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with and being affected by. And, as I say, it’s been catastrophic for my mental health at various times. But there’s something liberating about just saying, ‘don’t care, not playing, will not engage’. In practical terms, I don’t reply on social media and I don’t read the comments.  

There were days when I would be losing my fucking mind because of a couple of tweets from someone. And my wife would just be like, ‘What are you doing? Stop caring about this one person.’ That’s the other thing about the human mind. You can scroll past a hundred people telling you you’re great, but one person calls you a bastard and three days of my life goes down the toilet thinking about it.  

So the point of ‘Do One’ is essentially that I’m not playing that game anymore. And it took me more time than I would like to admit to figure that out, as the song says. I don’t want to be one of those people who just feeds off the hatred. With a certain kind of mindset, the people coming at you just become flies bouncing off a windscreen. You sleep better once you reach that point.

I think I have learned how to pick my battles a bit. There are days when one wants to engage with the good-faith arguments. In my line of work, it’s easy for people to confuse bad faith cancel culture and legitimate criticism, and I try to steer the right way through that. I’m certainly not above being criticised in terms of my ethics and actions and music.

I’m actually really interested in good music criticism. There have been times in my life when I’ve read a critique of an album of mine and I think, ‘Yeah, that’s a fair point’. There’s value in that. Historically, you can look at some of Bob Dylan’s output as being part of a conversation with Greil Marcus. There are fewer and fewer music journalists who write music criticism at that level these days, which is a sadness, I think.  

I’m not trying to sit here and say that I’m fucking perfect or anything like that, but hopefully, I can tune out the haters to a degree as well. In many ways, ‘Undefeated’ is saying, ‘I’m ten albums in, motherfucker.’ After that amount of time successfully touring and successfully releasing records, my music can’t be meritless. It’s landing with someone, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here.

So you feel that you have earned your place, to put it another way?

Hopefully, yes. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

You said of your previous album ‘FTHC’ that it was an attempt to be more rawly personal. Can the same be said of ‘Undefeated’?

I would say so, but in a slightly different way. I’m still at the point of figuring out the vocabulary to describe exactly what I mean by that. I’ve been using the word ‘defiant’ quite a lot. But ‘FTHC’ is quite an angry record, in retrospect. There’s a fair amount of bitterness in it. There are a lot of tracks about childhood and stuff that are not happy-go-lucky songs. In ‘Undefeated’, there is definitely a fair number of middle fingers being shown, but there’s a smile on the face at the same time. It’s a more fun place to be.

That’s not true of the whole album, though. There’s a track towards the end called ‘Somewhere Inbetween’ which is one of the rawest pieces of writing that I’ve ever done in my life. I’m both excited and nervous for that song to be released because I think that it’s…’unforgiving’ might be the word. Hopefully, the record is not monotonal, not monochromatic.

It’s an age-old question, and it applies to writers not only of music but of essays and memoirs and even novels, but how do you find the right balance? How much do you reveal? Can you ever fully reveal everything?

It depends on what type of art you are trying to make. I don’t think the Scissors Sisters spend very much time thinking about making confessional music, but they make great art. My taste of music leans towards the confessional, towards the raw and the brutally honest. Arab Strap is one of my favourite bands. I remember hearing their album ‘Philophobia’ for the first time, and just staring and thinking, ‘Is this motherfucker for real? Is he really saying this stuff out loud? Like, we can hear you, man!’ So I’ve always been interested in that sort of art.  

There are constraints on it, of course, one of which is consideration for others. It’s perfectly legitimate for me to be as raw as I want about myself. How legitimate it is for me to be raw about somebody else in the public forum is a more complicated question. In 2013 I put out a break-up record that had 13 songs about one person, and she was not appreciative of that. And I think that that is a legitimate response.  

It’s important to note that there is some artistry involved in the confessional style. I could sing out my diary, but I’m not sure anyone would give a fuck. The creative trick, the magic trick at the heart of it all in some ways, is to take the personal and make it feel universal, or at least that’s how it is in my corner of writing. Art is about empathy to a large extent, and I’ve spent most of my time as a writer trying to find a way of expressing my feelings that is useful, or that is interpretable, by other people who live different lives. I want it to be raw, and I want it to be honest, but I also want it to be accessible. And that’s a neat trick, and it’s not an easy one. If it was, we’d all be writing better songs. Finding that balance is tough. In a way, that’s the centre of my working life, looking for that balance.

At the risk of seeming entirely obsessed with songwriting, there’s a wonderful Leonard Cohen line—well, first we just need to establish the fact that Cohen was the greatest songwriter of the 20^th century.  

I’m so glad you said that—I completely agree! I say it all the time.

I like Dylan, but Cohen is an infinitely superior songwriter, in my opinion, and now people can shout at me. But the line is, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in’.  That’s one of the most profound couplets that I’m aware of in human writing. And it says something about the creative act as well. Finding that moment of damage can also be a moment of revelation.  

Salman Rushdie once said of the first three lines of Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ that, ‘Put simply, if I could write like that, I would.’ That’s some compliment.

It’s interesting to compare songwriting with other kinds of writing. Songwriting is a more bite-sized medium to work in. I’m sort of terrified by the concept of a novel. The idea of trying to sustain a creative idea over that amount of linguistic output gives me the fear, I’ll be honest with you. But, as that quote sort of outlines, the flipside is that there is a concision to good songwriting. That’s the thing I enjoy sometimes, and I think that’s what sets songwriting apart from poetry. In a song, you’ve got eight lines before you’re back in the chorus, so whatever you’ve got to say needs to be said now. I suppose you could add another 25 stanzas, but then you end up being Genesis, and nobody really wants that. And Cohen is the master of that kind of concision. I actually have a ‘Bird on the Wire’ tattoo in reference to that song. And that line, ‘like a drunk in a midnight choir’, is the most perfectly concise image. And God rest his soul. 

When you mentioned the break-up album, I thought, ‘Was that your Taylor Swift phase?’ And that makes me wonder if, looking back, you see distinct phases in your career?  

Yes, there are definitely phases in my career. If you look at the career arc of many artists—like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Costello, Nick Cave, people like that—there often tends to be a slightly odd middle-aged phase. Whether Dylan being a Christian or, indeed, Cohen producing great songs with Phil Spector in the late 1980s, but with terrible production, or Neil Young being sued for not sounding like Neil Young. There are these creative lull moments for many artists. Actually, one of the reasons I’m terminally obsessed with Nick Cave is that I think that he’s somebody who sidestepped that, and I’m curious how he did so.  

Of course, it’s pretentious of me to compare myself to all the people I’ve just listed, but cut me a break. I feel like I’m in a moment where I’m trying to be raucously middle-aged. I’m 42. That’s definitely middle-aged. The world is full of variously named generations constantly trying to pretend that middle age and old age start later because they’re getting close to it. Fuck off, man, 42 is middle-aged! I’d like to be raucous and ill-mannered in my middle age rather than soft and flabby and reticent. 

Grow old disgracefully.

Exactly.

Incidentally, it’s worth throwing in that Taylor Swift is clearly an excellent songwriter, musician, and performer, and I think that the general disdain within which a certain type of person in the music industry (and it’s usually a guy) holds Taylor Swift is so obviously sexist at this point. Just stop it now. (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the MAGA conspiracy nuts here.) She’s the artist of her generation. That’s the fucking end of that conversation. She’s arguably bigger than Michael Jackson, now. And, like Michael Jackson was the artist of the eighties, and there is no one to compare, so too with Taylor Swift. I think she’s a great songwriter, and I just had to get that off my chest.

She completely screwed my album chart plans, because she’s putting out a record two weeks before mine is released. And do you know what? I’ll let it slide.

‘Undefeated’ is about middle age, as you mentioned. So, what’s it like being middle-aged? To what extent are you the same Frank Turner you were 20 years ago?

Aside from some very basic fundamentals, not much. And that’s how I want it to be. It’s a well-worn quote, but Muhammad Ali said something like, ‘a man who is the same at 40 as he was at 20 has wasted 20 years of his life.’ I don’t want to be the same person. There’s a curious sense of proprietorship that a certain type of music fan has that they want you to stay how you were when they discovered you, and I sympathize because I can see myself having that feeling about some musicians that I like, but also: fuck off, you’re boring! Life is about change, and I want to change and develop as an artist. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Again, this is not an original thought, but my experience of getting older is that there is a quid pro quo. Everything hurts more and hangovers last longer, and I spend more time worrying about sleeping than I used to—all this sort of shit—but I’m more confident in who I am and what I think about the world. That feels hard-won to me to a degree, and I’m grateful for it. And that feels like a direction of travel as well. I’m not sure that that’s a process that has reached its apotheosis for me just yet, and that’s fun. I like that idea. I like the idea of being in my 70s and really not giving a fuck. Good for me!

That reminds me of Rushdie again, who is one of my favourite writers—

I strongly agree, by the way. I think he’s absolutely sensational. I’ve just finished [Rushdie’s memoir] Joseph Anton and it was amazing.  

Actually, I think it’s in ‘Joseph Anton’ that he says this: something along the lines of his 40s being a man’s prime.  

That may be more true in the world of novels and fiction writers than it is in the world of musicians. But here’s hoping we can buck that trend.

Further reading on freethinking and secularism in art and music:

Porcus Sapiens, by Emma Park and Paul Fitzgerald

Reading list against nuclear war, by Emma Park

Can art be independent of politics? by Ella Nixon

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

The post ‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner  appeared first on The Freethinker.

I first encountered Eliza Flower (1803-46) in an online search for women composers from Essex during the 2020 lockdowns. My search was part of a ‘Women in Music and Science’ project with Chelmsford Theatre, called ‘Echoes from Essex’. I found only one piece of a capella choral music, ‘Now Pray We for our Country’, but it was exactly what I needed for the project. It was by a composer called Eliza Flower, whom I had never come across before. In the spirit of those strange times, we made a virtual recording of it: the choir consisted of just six members of our Electric Voice Theatre singers, who recorded several parts each in their homes and sent them to us for assembly. The result of this early foray into virtual singing transformed what had been an intriguing score into a moving hymn with qualities quite unlike any I had heard from this era. (Recording by Electric Voice Theatre here.)

Here was something quite remarkable: a piece of sacred English choral music written in the 1820’s which displayed many of the traits of secular European romanticism. The latter movement would not become widespread in the UK for some time – at least not among male composers. Flower called for sharply contrasting dynamics and tempi. The rich and dramatic harmony she deployed, coupled with her use of contrasting chorus and soloist ensembles, suggested that this work was written for no ordinary church choir.

This was just one hymn. However, as I would discover later from a letter written by Eliza herself to Novello, it was a hymn that Felix Mendelssohn was ‘most pleased’ with.

Where had all these ideas, packed into one short piece, come from? Was there more? There had to be more!

The words Flower had set to music, although adapted from those of an American preacher, were patriotic and almost jingoistic in their fervour towards England. They were almost patriotic enough to have deterred this fervent Scot from looking further – but the quality and innovation of the music kept nagging at me. I was impatient to discover more.

We were, however, still locked in: a feeling that was, I suspect, familiar to many women in England during Eliza’s lifetime, who were either hemmed in by societies’ expectations or forced to work, and legally dependent on their male relatives, with no prospect of freedom.

In time, I would discover that Eliza was not constrained in these ways, but was set on a different path. Unlike most women of her time, she was encouraged and educated by her radical parents to think for herself and to seek to fulfil her potential. My initial idea of her, constrained in a drawing room, encased in stays and stiff brocades, would turn out to be far from the truth.

Once normal life resumed in 2022, I investigated further at the British Library in London. There was more music!

The staff handed me a published pot-pourri of Flower’s vocal music, a large manuscript book bound with others from the same period. As I opened it, I was taken aback by the full-page drawing of Eliza. She certainly did not have the look of a starched Victorian lady, but instead of a gentle, bohemian soul, with her hair in soft curls on her shoulders and a face which shone with love. The artist, Eliza Bridell-Fox, had made the portrait in recollection of the composer after her death. Little did I know how important these names would be to Eliza Flower’s story in different ways.

On the opposite page was the index, which pointed to 182 pages of music. This page was full of clues to Flower’s character and outlook on life, but at this point I just wanted to read the music and listen to it in my head – since singing out loud in the British Library Reading Rooms is unfortunately not permitted. I could not take it all away with me, but I copied as much as I could and, when I returned home, began to sing and play the music, and to share it with my colleagues in Electric Voice Theatre. This was the beginning of an adventure that would lead us to Conway Hall in London, and to a performance based on that index page and the variety of work that it represented.

As I explored the music, I found unexpected harmony and structures; wonderful melodies, hymns, songs and ballads; and a strong and clear voice for the rights of men and women at all levels of society.

But who was this woman, creating music at one minute for Christian services, at another for the salon, and at the next for workers protesting in the street?

Thanks to the Conway Hall Ethical Society, at the invitation of Dr Jim Walsh, and to the efforts of researcher Carl Harrison and librarian Olwen Terris, my understanding of Flower’s music and ideas began to grow. When Holly Elson, Conway Hall’s Head of Programmes, introduced me to Oskar Jensen, a music historian, a new world opened up.

Oskar’s wide knowledge of Flower and of the musical and political history of the nineteenth century began to fill in some of the many gaps in her story. As we brought our own pieces of this fascinating jigsaw puzzle together, a fuller picture of Eliza Flower began to emerge as a highly regarded, prolific composer and radical feminist. Alongside her sister, the poet Sarah Flower Adams, she had exerted a profound influence on the move from Unitarianism at South Place Chapel in Finsbury towards humanism and the creation of the Conway Hall Ethical Society. The sisters’ contributions to the cultural and political life of the period were so important that when the chapel closed down, their portraits and archive were moved to Conway Hall, where they still hang in pride of place in the library, flanking a much bigger painting of the man usually credited with this move, William Johnson Fox. It seems this was, like so many other important historic events, a team effort. Yet gender bias eventually erased Eliza, and to some extent Sarah, from their shared history.

The beautiful drawing of Eliza discussed above holds the key to her story. When Eliza Fox, who became Mrs. Bridell-Fox and an artist, was only 11 years old, she was taken away from her mother by her father, William J. Fox, to live with him and Eliza Flower. They set up house together in the face of deep societal disapproval.

The courage this must have taken for Eliza to take up such a precarious position, totally reliant on Fox’s continued regard for her, can scarce be imagined.

Little Eliza Fox (the artist-to-be) went willingly to this new household. She loved and admired Eliza Flower, who, along with Flower’s sister, Sarah, had been part of the Fox household since their father’s death, with the then Reverend Fox as their guardian (after the break from his wife in 1834, he would eventually be removed from the Unitarian ministry). Reverend Fox, at the time minister of the congregation at the South Place Chapel, worked closely with Eliza Flower on his speeches, sermons and publications, and on the chapel’s political, spiritual, and musical direction. They grew closer, both spiritually and, apparently, in other ways, until in 1834 the break was made with Mrs Fox, who lost not only her husband, but her children too.

Not all of Fox’s congregation were happy about this arrangement, nor were some of the couple’s friends. For Eliza Flower, who by this time was a published and well-known composer, there was also the prospect that her music might be rejected by an outraged public. As a composer, her music fell into three distinct categories, each connected by her profound belief in equality and justice. I will now look at each of these categories in turn.

1. Sacred Choral Music

The hymn of Eliza’s that I first discovered turned out to be part of a book of ‘150 Hymns and Anthems’, published by Reverend Fox in 1841. Unusually, most are settings of poetry by the many freethinkers in Flower’s circle of friends – people like her sister Sarah (author of ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ with exquisite music by Eliza) and Harriet Martineau. These free thinkers expressed their ideas about morality with less emphasis on God than you might have imagined. 

Take Hymn 139, ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter’. Its lyrics are a poem by the Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliott (1781 – 1849), containing a moral that is still relevant today (recording here):

But Babylon and Memphis

Are letters traced in dust:

Read them, earth’s tyrants! Ponder well

The might in which ye trust!

…

They fell, because on fraud and force

Their corner-stones were founded.

Eliza’s setting has more in common with the drama of a Bach Passion or Handelian cantata than a hymn fit for congregational singing. As reported by South Place Magazine in September 1897,

‘South Place was at this time (1833) like other Unitarian chapels, until Miss Flower… commenced a reformation in the musical part of the services, which rivalled the attraction to the chapel of its excellent Minister. Miss Flower’s musical genius, knowledge, and feeling enabled her to exercise a kindly influence over the choir… which would not even have come into existence without her.’

Eliza was one of the first people to champion the move away from the use of music as part of a religious service in the Unitarian denomination towards secular chamber music, as she began to include art songs in her repertoire (see below). This legacy continues to this day in the Sunday Concerts at Conway Hall.

2. Art Songs

These beautiful songs often brush on the themes of love and nature, but some present a quite different approach.

Over 17 days in 1845, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden held their extraordinary Bazaar. A musical score entitled ‘Free Trade Songs of the Seasons’, with music by Flower, was published by Novello to support the Anti-Corn-Law League at this event. The texts, by Flower’s sister Sarah, combine the familiar art song trope with the struggles of poverty-stricken labourers.

These songs were also intended for the drawing room, a place where ladies could pass on their clear message to their menfolk, who had the political power to change things. The Free Trade Songs were a very particular form of protest song, full of trills and turns, recitative, melismatic passages, harmonic surprises and strong melodic lines. The final Winter song moves in a choral march towards the last category of Flower’s work: the protest songs.

3. Protest Songs

Flower wrote many of these with Harriet Martineau, a feminist author and influential campaigner against slavery. Together, Martineau and Flower formed what Oskar Jensen has described as probably the most powerful protest-song partnership of the nineteenth century in the UK. Many of their songs became popular anthems, sung by thousands of protesting workers in the streets – most of whom would have had no idea that their voices were carrying the words and music of two young ladies.

William Fox, too, provided some of the texts, my favourite being ‘The Barons Bold, On Runnymede’, which, written in 1832, has the feel of a jolly Gilbert and Sullivan patter song avant la lettre. The words encourage us to ‘join hand in hand’ and stand up against the power of kings and state, so that ‘our wrongs shall soon be righted’.

Fox continued their work after Flower’s early death in 1846, but distanced himself from her memory. It is not clear why he did this, but it may have been partly in order to avoid scandal: he was intermittently a Member of Parliament between 1847-62. He stopped promoting Flower’s music, compounding the deeply ingrained bias faced by all female composers. This is demonstrated by research recently published by Donne, an organisation promoting women in music, which shows that 88 per cent of music played worldwide in major orchestral seasons is by dead white men. In the Victorian era, composition was seen as an abstract intellectual activity, more suitable for men than women. Eliza Flower was considered an exception during her lifetime. Unlike her contemporaries, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, she was not required to subvert her talent in favour of a musical husband or brother, but was free to express herself as a progressive composer, determined to leave her own musical mark. Yet this same memory was deliberately ignored after her death by the man to whom she had devoted her life. As John Stuart Mill wrote in a review of Flower’s music in 1831,

‘There are not only indications of genius as indisputable as could have been displayed in the highest works of art, but there is also a new ascent gained, a new prospect opened, in the art itself, which we welcome as a pledge of its keeping pace with the progress of society.’

As Robert Browning wrote to Eliza about her music, ‘I put it apart from all other English music I know, and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.’

Yet like many women today, impostor syndrome loomed over Flower’s life. In a letter to Vincent Novello, she tells of her meeting with ‘Mendelssohn the grand, great as his music, as great an artist, (but not so good a man)’.  Mr. Novello had encouraged her ‘to send those sacred songs to him, but I shrunk… They were however shewn to him – (not with my consent). His praise was worse than censure. I did not want opinion, but help. He said I had genius…’ However, Mendelssohn also implied that her musical ideas were irregular and would not be popular. Despite Mendelssohn, Flower was popular in her lifetime. With our project to revive her music, we hope she will be again.

Frances Lynch and the Electric Voice Theatre, together with Oskar Jensen, will be performing in Conway Hall’s historic library, Red Lion Square, London, at 19.00 on 27 October 2023. For more information and to book tickets, click here.

Enjoying the Freethinker? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman appeared first on The Freethinker.