Can music be voice of freedom and cry for justice?

Say “poetry and human rights” and you can give impassioned talks about bards from ancient Greece to modern Palestine. But music and freedom? Where do you begin? What do you say? Especially if you are not talking to musicians or music buffs, but to students of journalism? Creating an elective course for this heterogeneous bunch made me rethink the old, and discover the new.

Such a course would naturally involve many genres of music from art to folk. But here I have chosen to look at only the most obvious genre, which seems to offer less scope for freedom. Those who compose music for films cannot go on a personal trip. Their imagination is shackled to the director’s intent. Their music has to be tailored to the needs of the situation and the emotional quotient. In mega budget undertakings, the composer can be tyrannised by commercial demands.

Nor is the composer really free even when he works on a film like “The Sound of Music”. He has to remember that the product has to sell. Even films focusing on great composers like “Amadeus” (Mozart) may allow the inclusion of classical fare, but not so much the experimental.

There was probably more freedom in a film like the “The Red Violin”, an awards-winner inspired by the legend of a red Stradivarius. As the film follows the journey of a perfect violin through three generations, and across three continents, it allows the music to take the lead in shaping the changing scenarios. You are not surprised to learn that its Canadian director Francois Girard got composer John Corigliano to create a complete score long before shooting began. Recently, that strange Daniel Day-Lewis starrer “Phantom Thread” had a musical score which intrigued you more than the film!

But what about the classics? Can we imagine “The Godfather” without music composer Nina Rota’s eerie score? Can we feel the poignant horror of Fredo being shot on a boat midstream without the music? Or think of the shower scene in “Psycho”. It seems Hitchcock originally wanted to shoot it without music! But more than the camera, it is the screeching of the violins that evokes fear and suspense, peaking as the music stops and the shower runs on. Such originality can rise only in a mind that recreates its own nightmares as a cathartic experience.

If any film can boast of the camera being king, it is the David Lean’s masterpiece “Lawrence of Arabia”. But mute Maurice Jarre’s music and see how the vast desertscapes lose their dazzling beauty. The majestic sweep and power of that score, interlaced with whispering subtlety, could never have been composed by a mind that was not free. As for “Dr Zhivago”, I would say the film belongs as much to Jarre as to director Lean.

Bollywood composers have a long tradition of finding their creative freedom through that once unique but now commonplace musical strategy we call fusion. From the familiar to the funky, they dared to blend all kinds of musical genres together, to transform desi melodies into rich tapestries of sound and rhythm. If Naushad felt free to use classical raags, OP Nayyar sashayed into perky pop. Salil Chowdhury and SD Burman brought in the full-throated songs of peasant and boatman, Khayyyam the plaintive strains of the hills. Everything was grist to their mill, until every kind of music has now become part of India’s collective unconscious. Somehow the music makers discover that their music is not only their art form, but also a tool for asserting their freedom. Today we see AR Rahman overcoming the monstrous pressures of the box office by ranging across the whole world, to create his brave new world for us to revel in.

I also ask: Was Rahman’s Chaiyya Chaiyya playing for the credit titles of the American crime thriller “Inside Man” a random choice? Or did director Spike Lee find that, by transplanting the song in a different context, he could make it reflect the free-ranging spirit he sought in his story of a heist aimed not for financial gain, but to expose a man who aided holocaustic repression in a brutal regime?

Can music be the voice of freedom and a cry for justice?

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist