Music Tag

I’ve been tagged for music now. What track has been running through my mind lately? Easy answer. Prokofiev’s sublime Symphony No. 5. When I brought it up in my book tag, a reader e-mailed me to tell me that he’s played orchestral piano for it at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, where the symphony first premiered.

What is so remarkable about the Soviet composers of that era is that they managed to testify vividly about the grimness, the bleakness, the inhumanity of that time . . . and also their hope that eventually the misery would end and humanity would be restored. They managed to do this without incriminating themselves in spite of suffocating creative repression by apparatchiks who (thankfully) didn’t really understand the music.

Lyrics? My head is always grabbing onto great lyrics and rolling them over to reexamine them, but just not lately. The closest thing might be this monologue from Team America, spoken by the Alec Baldwin puppet to a world peace conference in Pyongyang, sketching out how the Film Actors’ Guild (F.A.G.) will bring peace to the world:

We are here to usher in a new era without violence.

By following the rules of the Film Actors’ Guild, the world can become a better place–that handles dangerous people with talk . . . and reasoning.

That is the F.A.G. way.

One day, you’ll all look at the world us actors created and say, ‘Wow. Good going, F.A.G.’ ‘You really made the world a better place, didn’t ya, F.A.G.?‘

[Kim Jong Il:] Yes, Awec Bawdwin. Too bad there won’t be a wowld reft!

Team America might one day go alongside The Great Dictator as a classic of political satire.