This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
Me and my siblings are gathering coquinas—tiny, half-inch clams—along the beach at the Far Horizons Resort in Longboat Key, Florida. Spring break, 1968.
We need to collect several hundred in our buckets, then bring them to our cabin where mom and dad promise to make a delicious soup from their broth for dinner. The shells are easy enough to find—they’re all over the beach at low tide. But the key is to pick up only the living ones. The dead ones are no good for the soup. I’m transfixed by their multicolored, jewel-like beauty and keep a separate stash of the dead ones for my collection.
It’s a good way to occupy four kids and give my parents a break, as they chop vegetables and prepare spices in the kitchen while watching the little TV on the counter. They have us in full view—the cabin’s right on the beach, maybe 100 feet from the water. Whenever we get a sufficient haul or just get bored from the process, we run up to the cabin and drop off a load, which my parents then clean, strain, and add to the pot of boiling water.
Every time we pop in through the cabin door, we ask with mock exhaustion, “Is that enough?”
This time my dad just says it before we can ask. “That’s enough.”
Both of them are staring at the TV, even as my dad stirs the pot. My mom sits in a kitchen chair with a look that is a thousand miles away.
She turns to us. “Martin Luther King was just assassinated.”
It’s April 4, my seventh birthday.
* * *
Forget about lyrics, protest songs, or music that is overtly political. Forget about “We Shall Overcome” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” I’m talking about abstract music.
Do political events influence the notes a musician plays—the chords and the way they’re voiced?
Are syncopated rhythms and the prolonged avoidance of the downbeat a kind of musical code for “avoiding the man,” as some have suggested?
Can simple melodies over non-obvious harmonies evoke an attempt to transverse two disparate worlds—one of acceptance, the other of struggle?
Can instrumental music make a political statement?
What I’ve learned is that the notes not only can make a political statement, but they unavoidably do so. Every note played is politically charged, whether intended or not—especially if you don’t want it to be.
* * *
There are fires when we return to Chicago a few days later. Some of the African-American neighborhoods on the West Side have exploded in reaction to the King assassination. There are no fires in our part of town, but we can see the flames, smell the smoke from our apartment.
Mayor Daley orders the police and the 3,000 Illinois National Guard troops called in to back them up “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand . . . to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.”
Along with the odor from the smoke, the sense of rage is palpable, even to a seven-year-old. And there is fear that the rage could find its way to our neighborhood. But after a weekend of rioting (met with brutal suppression by law enforcement), things settle down on Monday.
Years later, the Chicago Tribune reported that “no official death toll was given for the tragedy, although published accounts say nine to 11 people died during the rioting. Three hundred fifty people were arrested for looting, and 162 buildings were destroyed by arson. Bulldozers moved in to clean up after the rioters, leaving behind vacant lots that remained empty three decades later.”
In spite of sniper fire, no police, firemen, or National Guard were killed or seriously injured.
* * *
So a C major chord is a C major chord, right? The basic note material is always the same: C, E, and G. Harmonically speaking, that’s about as basic as it gets. But a C major chord is not just a C major chord. There are infinite ways to play it, infinite contexts, infinite combinations of instruments, rhythm, groove, dynamics, and attitude.
You can play it with bombastic militarism.
You can play it rough, low-down, and dirty.
You can hit it straight on, arpeggiate it, or slide into it from adjacent notes.
You can strum it, strike it, blow it, bow it, and intone it.
Regardless, it’s still called and functions as a C major triad.
But each one of those infinite ways of playing a C major triad means something. They each have a purpose and context, a reason why they’re played the way they are played. They each have the ability to provoke various shades of emotion, various chains of ideas. They describe something in the world, even if the description is vague and chimerical—or even more so because it’s vague and chimerical.
The brilliant, iconoclastic Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich got in trouble with the Soviet cultural police without even having to resort to lyrics. His notes told the story of repression.
As I grew older and more confident in my technique and knowledge, I noticed that, while I could physically play a chord a certain way, I was deeply resistant to playing it certain ways because specific ways meant—not just implied—certain things. More than that, I couldn’t physically play the notes the right way when their meaning was wrong. That is, their wrongness restrained my physical ability to play them correctly.
* * *
A few days after the riots died down, all six of us are in the family station wagon heading south on Lakeshore Drive toward an event at the Field Museum. As we drive past Grant Park, Amy, who is almost ten, asks my parents what will happen as a result of the assassination. We all chime in, “Yeah, what’s going to happen?”
My mom considers this for a minute. “It’s a disaster . . . not just for the black community, but for America.” She ponders for another few seconds. “But we can’t lose hope.”
And then Bobby Kennedy, my mom’s passionate choice for president, is shot on June 5, two months after the King assassination. He dies the next day.
As a result, we’re assisting her in early August with the grunt work for Hubert Humphrey’s campaign, just prior to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
With Bobby gone, it’s between Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy—and to a lesser extent, George McGovern. Most of my mom’s friends are now firmly behind McCarthy for his firm antiwar stance, but mom neither likes nor trusts him. She says he’s a fraud. I agree because that’s generally what little kids do, agree with their parents’ political views, good or bad.
Humphrey has entered the fray late in the game, only after President Johnson decides not to run. In fact, he’s too late to enter any primaries, but as sitting VP, and with Kennedy gone, he’s in a good position to win the nomination at the convention.
So we’re sitting on the floor of his Oak Street campaign office—dubbed the Pharmacy because Humphrey began his career as a pharmacist—to do our part to help. My fingers are sticky and waterlogged from sealing envelopes with an overly-soaked sponge. I have paper cuts from the first phase of the job, stuffing multiple inserts into those same envelopes.
We’re surrounded by boxes. Boxes with various inserts for the mailer. Boxes with empty envelopes. Boxes with stuffed envelopes. And the biggest of all, boxes with the finished stuffed-and-sealed mailers. The odor of freshly printed campaign materials mixed with envelope glue is nauseating. We eye those complete boxes like the finish line of a marathon.
Just a few weeks later Chicago is the hotbed of antiwar, anti-establishment activity during the convention at the International Amphitheatre on the South Side. The whole world is watching—and so are we as antiwar demonstrations unfold in Grant Park downtown, and then, in Lincoln Park, not far from our apartment.
My mom doesn’t directly participate in the demonstrations, though some of her friends do. Having four young children probably dissuades her from confronting the heavily armed and violent Chicago police force that is again augmented—per orders from Mayor Richard J. Daley—with the National Guard for a total force of 25,000 (facing 10,000 protesters).
Or maybe she doesn’t participate because she’s a bit too old to be a yippee. She is no radical, perfectly willing to draw a line between generally progressive values and the political realities.
Our man Humphrey, in any case, is nominated. A short-lived victory.
* * *
Perhaps the way I play a C major triad today is rooted in the events of 1968. Assassinations, riots, and officially sanctioned violence against protesters. The facade Mayor Daley had erected was breaking down, baring the blatant racism of our city. Of course, many subsequent events and experiences would influence the way I play a C major chord. But the roots of my worldview, and the way I write and play music, were formed in those months.
And yet, the way I play a C major triad will forever be a compromise between two worlds: a political compromise, just like my mom’s. Our world—one of white, liberal privilege—and that other world, the one exposed during the riots, particularly those taking place after the King assassination. The truth is, like my mom, I’m not inclined to give up the comforts or privileges of my world. I’m not inclined to risk it all by facing physical violence.
I’m also not inclined to give up, like some in the various avant-garde movements, the comforts of tonality and C major itself for the unyielding dissonance of anarchic atonality—or the dreary and noncommittal new world order of serialism. Instead, I float between acceptance of the received order (tonality) and the desire to break it down for something new. I settle somewhere in the middle, with a free-floating tonality that challenges, then yields—forever on the verge of, but never quite breaking away from, the established order.
Peter, I'm sorry to be so late coming to this. Your memory of April 4 1968 of our are stay in Longboat Key are so clear. What started out as a birthday party for you turned very sad, with the assassination of MLK.