The Trichordist

By Charles J. Sanders

Recently, a viral video originating from Waxahachie, Texas made the social media rounds featuring the winning bidder of a Taylor Swift guitar immediately, publicly destroying it with the auctioneer’s hammer.  The perpetrator claims the stunt was intended as a light-hearted act of political satire protesting celebrity endorsements of a presidential candidate he does not support.  Most folks of a similar political bent cheered gleefully, while members of the other camp generally eye-rolled and shrugged their way through what appeared to be a somewhat more mean-spirited statement than the disgruntled, new owner was willing to acknowledge.  It’s tough to tell, but hey, free speech is free speech.

I suppose that in a world in which the legendary, guitar-smashing prowess of a Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix has long been celebrated, and in a country where Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy turned the dismantling of upright pianos into an art form, perhaps the nonchalant reactions over the sad end to the icon’s former axe are understandable.  We are surely a country and a music community with bigger issues on our plate.  That reality, combined with the dangers of crying wolf being what they are, would ordinarily render the engagement in a humorless, long-winded diatribe against a gavel wielding, wannabe cowboy defacing a guitar a meaningless exercise. 

But in my role as chair of the National Music Council of the United States, the Congressionally-chartered umbrella organization of American music groups advocating for the advancement of musical culture and education, I feel obliged to at least offer reflections on what some may consider to be the far less-benign overtones of this seemingly trivial event. In simplest terms, the alternative of silence is made unacceptable by the ghastly results that such a non-response has produced in the past, particularly when it comes to the long, grim, global history of political violence against music creators and musical culture.  Shining a light just seems the better course.

Last year, it was NMC’s honor to host a series of discussions with several incredibly brave members of the international music community fighting to keep creators and their works safe from political harm.  One such hero of musical culture is Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, founder of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music currently in exile under the protection of the Government of Portugal.  Dr. Sarmast, who had nearly been beaten to death in previous run-ins with the ultra-rightist Taliban movement over his audacious teaching of young, female Afghani music students how to play musical instruments, was unsurprised that one of the first targets of the resurgent Taliban in 2021 was his world-renown music program. 

The group’s initial act in its renewed crackdown on infidelity was the burning not only the school’s instruments, but also of a large percentage of musical instruments throughout the entire country.  The teacher, his students and their families fled for their lives to Qatar and then Lisbon, where they remain two years later in defiant pursuit of musical creativity and freedom.  This week, meanwhile, the Taliban announced its intention to bar the artistic depiction “of any living thing” throughout Afghanistan pursuant to Sharia law.

The experiences of another international champion of artistic freedom NMC interviewed, Cambodian Living Arts organizational founder Arn Chorn Pond, serve as an even more fraught example of violent, music-related suppression and its horrific results.  Professor Pond, whose parents’ national opera company in Phenom Penh was one of the great gems of Southeast Asian musical culture, was a ten-year old flautist when ultra-leftist Khmer Rouge terrorists seized power in Cambodia during the mid-1970s.  The party’s first acts of cultural cleansing included the summary execution of most musicians and composers (including his parents and family), the destruction of virtually every traditional and modern musical instrument in the country, and the banning of all unapproved music on threat of death. 

The details of young Arn’s enslavement and unspeakable torture, even as he was relied upon as a resource for the creation and performance of new and “acceptable” Khmer musical works, are far too graphic to repeat here.  It has taken him a half-century following the defeat of the Khmer to rekindle the light of traditional Cambodian musical culture throughout his nation, all the while carrying scars that cannot possibly be fully healed even after a lifetime of fighting for greater protections for others.    

Other historical examples are legion.  In 1973, one of the first acts of the Pinochet military junta following its coup in Chile was the arrest of progressive singer-songwriter and nationally celebrated guitarist Victor Jara.  Rather than merely destroying his confiscated guitars, the regime mutilated both his hands prior to executing him at the National Soccer Stadium as a warning to others who might be contemplating musical protest.  Days later, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was dead, as well.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin terrorized the towering composer Dimitri Shostakovich into an emotional wreck through political manipulation and death threats starting in the 1930s. Nazi Fuhrer Adolph Hitler launched an immediate program of terror against “degenerate art and artists” upon rising to power in 1933, culminating in the forced expatriation and eventually the execution of Germany’s greatest composers, conductors and performers (many of them Jewish victims of the Holocaust).  One such target, the poet and songwriter Ilse Weber, actually composed the famous lullaby “Wiegala” while imprisoned at Prague’s Terezin concentration to comfort the children in her care.  She later volunteered to accompany her physician-husband and those children to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in 1944 just as she expected they would be.  Only her music miraculously survived, attributable to the panic of the fleeing killers at war’s end.

And finally, in our own country the great jazz singer Billie Holiday was one among many American creators and artists with more than just a passing acquaintance with the travails of brutal, sometimes fatal repression.  Intimidation of music creators knows no geographical or political boundaries. 

As desperately uncomfortable as these past and continuing events may be to contemplate, the crucial reason to educate ourselves about them is their value as examples of exactly what must be avoided at all costs in the future.  Clearly throughout history, music creators and performers have not only been frequently subject to pressure to conform, or to participate in propaganda efforts by governments and extremist groups, but also victimized by repressive actions up to and including murder to enforce their silence. 

This depraved strategy often eliminates the most persuasive voices of protest, while at the same time setting an example of what happens to those less-visible citizens who choose dissent.  The threatening or carrying out of violent repression against outspoken music creators, performers and educators is simply one of the preferred means of warning everyday people in the bluntest possible terms, “if this is what we’ll do to them, imagine what we’ll do to you.” 

Nevertheless, even armed with such knowledge one might still legitimately ask in the current instance, “what has any of this really got to do with a laughing man in a cowboy hat destroying a celebrity’s former musical instrument?”  Well, probably nothing.  But potentially everything.

Visitors today to Berlin often wander over to the enormous square fronting the library at Humboldt University, a revered institution of learning whose alumnae include some of the greatest thinkers and artists in western history, from Mendelssohn and Heine to Planck and Einstein.  The empty cobblestoned plaza, restored after repeated wartime bombings some 80 years ago, remains completely devoid of any structures whatsoever.  There is only a barely discernable, rectangular glass plate embedded into the pavement in front of the library, allowing viewers to gaze downward into a room of empty bookshelves two stories below, and an equally flat plaque sunk into the ground next to it.  That view, gazing through the glass darkly into history, is why most visitors come. 

This is the very spot on which Joseph Goebbels lit the bonfire of books written by many of Humboldt’s most illustrious graduates, and where the people laughed and cheered as those works burned in 1933.  The empty shelves are self-explanatory, and the plaque has only one simple quote, written by Heinrich Heine fully one hundred years prior to the day that the Nazis struck their match. “Where they burn books,” it reads in German with extraordinary prescience, “they will eventually burn human beings.” 

As our own Mr. Twain was fond of reminding us, while history doesn’t actually repeat, it surely does rhyme.  Is a private citizen smacking a recently acquired guitar with a hammer for political effect the same as a government or terrorist group burning a book, banning a musical work for its content, or assaulting a creator?  No, probably not.  Was the destruction of the Waxahachie guitar a symbolic, political warning issued by an individual or group seeking power through intimidation, intended to be interpreted as a threat of actual violence to any one or all of us in the music community? 

That’s a harder question to answer.  We simply do not and cannot know the intent, effect, or seriousness of the action at this time, nor do we possess Heine’s cursed gift of farsighted genius. 

As a result, on the advice of the American bard of Hannibal, Missouri, we less-gifted prognosticators are left with just one inquiry that absolutely must be asked under this circumstance –and in every other instance like it– for the safety, security and freedom of everyone in our music community and in this country:

“Does the Waxahachie event, or any subsequent one, rhyme?” 

Whether it does or not, now or in the future, will in large part depend on us– not just on the folks with the hammers and the matches.

About the author: Attorney, historian and author Charles J. Sanders is outside counsel to the Songwriters Guild of America, chair of the National Music Council of the United States, and an adjunct professor of music business and its history at New York University.  For more information, visit https://www.musiccouncil.org/. All opinions are his own.