Over the years, I’ve written this column about a myriad of genres of music, many that would call themselves radical, and others that might be surprised to find themselves included here. But there are so many different and beautiful ways in which people use music to agitate for social change, to energise activists and to support communities of oppressed and marginalised people.
For some musicians, simply singing in your native language can be a radical act.
For others, posting a…
Radical music is so often about the core message. We think so carefully about the words we choose to communicate something we feel is important.
We find musically-wrapped words that help us as a community of humans to process many painful injustices in the world around us. But there is a bigger thing that music, and singing together in particular, can bring us and that is somewhere we can hold and experience emotions that are simply too big for words.
Even as a campaigner and…
There are songs that beat the drums of war and songs that wave the flag of peace, and in different ways these are all love songs, songs of grief and songs of hope. It’s all a propaganda of sorts, even songs written from the deepest place in our hearts.
Yemeni singer Bilal al-Aghbari became well-known in his home country in 2007 when he came third in Sharjah Star, an international talent competition hosted in the UAE. When the Arab Spring reached Yemen, he says: ‘I participated in the…
I remember Charlotte Church’s rise to fame as a very young classical singer, and I was vaguely aware of the diversity of musical voyages she embarked upon as she grew into an adult.
Years later, I re-encountered her in a new light when Welsh friends began talking about her as a grounded and committed activist voice. I heard about her support for local community, wellbeing and environmental campaigns, and for the Palestinian people.
Côr Cochion Caerdydd (Cardiff Reds)…
Some years ago, I recorded my best friend’s grandad, Stuart Gilbert, talking about his experiences as a conscientious objector and of doing voluntary work at home and overseas with Service Civil International (SCI).*
I asked Stuart why he refused to participate in national service in 1948. The most common reasons for conscientious objection to military service were either religious or connected with a specific political ideology.
For Stuart, it was something different. ‘You…
Sometimes the song is silence.
In the context of radical singing, I’ve only felt this once before, during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020. At that time I felt that sharing my voice in song wasn’t the right element to bring to some of these protests and gatherings; that as a white person my job in that moment was to shut up and listen, and then to amplify the voices of black people at home and internationally, alongside participating in conversations within…
Last month, I sang Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time as part of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. It is a large choral and orchestral work that was sparked by Tippett’s reaction to the Nazi pogrom of 1938 called Kristallnacht, and which he described ‘as an impassioned protest against the conditions that make persecution possible’. It was informed by Tippett’s complex personal history, exploring deeply at different times Communism, Socialism and pacifism.
One of…
Reem Kelani's online concert For the People By the Sea was hosted by the Palestinian Museum, in Birzeit, just a few miles north of Jerusalem. And while the physical museum is important, they are equally dedicated to curating online resources that shine a light on Palestinian experience and cultural life.
Reem is a Palestinian singer based in London, from where this concert was live-streamed, and is available to watch for free all over the world. Because of the Nakba (…
‘Oh, bonny Portmore, I am sorry to see such a woeful destruction of your ornament tree.…’
These words begin an Irish lament from Country Antrim, sung for an aged oak that fell in a great storm in 1760.
It is the oldest ‘environmental justice’ song (as we might call it today) sung in the English language that I’ve been able to source. (Please do let me know if you know of other early songs with this theme!)
As with all issues of environmental justice, the critique in this…
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba: 75 years since hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes; 75 years since over 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed, since ‘home’ was taken away. Palestinians call this ‘the Nakba’, which translates as ‘the Catastrophe’.
We mark the Nakba on 15 May every year, which is also International Conscientious Objectors Day.
There is a poetic beauty in this, as increasing numbers of…
I first heard the song ‘Bread and Roses’ sung by Edinburgh folksinger Eileen Penman. In 2009, we were collating a booklet of songs as part of the ‘Gude Cause’ project celebrating 100 years since the first women’s suffrage march in Edinburgh. ‘Bread and Roses’ was one of the songs she brought to the table, a song that strongly connects women’s movements with labour movements.
James Oppenheim wrote the poem ‘Bread and Roses’ in December 1911, possibly after reading a speech by Chicago…
In my work as a community musician and singing teacher, I am a member of the Natural Voice Network (NVN).
As a community of teachers, we believe that everybody has the right to use their voice, that sound and movement are innate expressions of the human animal, and that it is the constrictive societal structures and attitudes surrounding us that prevent many people from feeling able to exercise this right.
We teach songs from all over the world, sharing in the oral tradition of…
In Iran since the 1979 revolution, women have been banned from singing solo in front of men who are unrelated to them. This is just one of many restrictions forced upon Iranian women during this time.
In September, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in custody after being arrested by the ‘morality police’ because her clothes were judged to be ‘revealing’. Just a few threads of her hair were visible outside the edge of her hijab.
At Mahsa’s funeral, thousands…
In 1923, my granny went to study at the Royal College of Music to be a piano teacher. She loved to play the piano more than almost anything, and when she married my grandfather she had to give up working. She carried on playing, but there was always a thread of sadness that she wasn’t allowed to teach. My mum was also a beautiful pianist, though for pleasure rather than profession, and she trained first as a librarian and later as a person-centred counsellor.
Before she died, I…
Just as the election of Trump caused ripples of increased racism and misogyny the whole world over, so the overturning of Roe v Wade by the US supreme court on 24 June has empowered those who seek to restrict women’s access to reproductive healthcare far beyond the borders of the USA.
In Scotland, there has been a sharp and necessary increase in campaigning to introduce buffer zones around reproductive health centres so that women do not have to face harassment when accessing…
