Is music really ‘our reply to violence’?

The pianist Boris Giltburg thought long and hard about the hackneyed Leonard Bernstein platitude that gets trotted out by music leaders and on mass media every time civilisation comes under mortal attack.

Boris’s conclusion: ‘Music, and any art, by the very fact of creating, of bringing something new into the world, is in opposition to any force which comes to kill, destroy and terrorise.’ Read his reasoned argument here, far more cogent than the blethering of the general commentariat.

Boris’s response, as a pianist, was to play a chaconne, ‘a funeral dance of Spanish origin, which several classical composers have turned to in order to express their thoughts on death.’ But not necessarily the obvious ones.

Listen here.

And here.