Reflecting on the Power of Music and History

April 1, 2025

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

The power of music cannot be underestimated. And we musicians, of all the people on this continent, hold that power in our hands. One such example of that power is embodied in Aaron Copeland’s composition, Lincoln Portrait.

The Lincoln Portrait is a very moving piece, designed to frame with music particularly powerful excerpts from speeches of US President Abraham Lincoln. As the orchestra performs the music, a narrator—usually a well-known actor, performer or politician—gives life to Lincoln’s words.

In 1957, Copland traveled to the Venezuelan capital of Caracas to conduct the first Venezuelan performance of the Lincoln Portrait. As Copland later recalled, President Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the country’s reviled and ruthless dictator, who rarely dared to be seen in public, arrived just at the last possible moment to hear the concert.

For that evening’s performance, Juana Sujo, an Argentine actress then living in Venezuela, and an opponent of the Pérez’ repressive regime, took the stage with the orchestra, offering up a fiery narration of the spoken words of the piece. When she uttered the final phrase, “… that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,” the audience rose and began cheering and shouting so loudly that, as Copland said later, he could not hear the rest of the music.

The energy manifested in the audience by that one performance quickly rippled through the country, and within months Pérez was toppled from power in a coup d’état and forced him to flee the country.

Music. Power.

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President Gagliardi and I recently traveled to Montréal to discuss matters of mutual importance with the officers of Local 406 (Montréal PQ). I’ve traveled to Canada many times in my life, and I have many friends and relatives on the north side of the 49th Parallel. This trip, however, was unlike any other. Virtually every Canadian I met, upon learning that I was an American, offered some sort of expression of sympathy and pity. I began to feel that I was being seen as someone from a third-world country.

The constitution of a country, as with the currency of a country, only has validity because society chooses to accept that it has validity. That acceptance is the living blueprint for how all of us can live together. When the constitution and the laws that underpin it are cast to one side for political or economic expediency, that validity is nullified, and anarchy follows. Haiti, our neighbor to the south, gives us a vivid illustration of what follows when a country’s foundational norms are displaced by unprincipled autocracies.

When I think about the 44 other men that have held the office of the US Presidency—whether liberal or conservative, straight-forward or Machiavellian, comfortable in their skin or fatefully insecure, narcissistic or empathetic, visionary or bureaucratic—they all shared two common traits that I find devastatingly lacking in the present US administration: A sense of history (of the past and for the future), and a respect for the laws and norms of society.

I therefore reflect upon Lincoln Portrait and words of Lincoln captured in that composition:

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.

We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.

It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says ‘you toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’

No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of people as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

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