Music and Resistance

In this presentation I will contextualize and analyze Ethel Voynich's cantata _Epitaph in Ballad Form_ as a musical response to the 1916 Irish Easter Rising and the execution of Roger Casement. As a successful author, Voynich expressed her revolutionary ideology and keen sense of justice through art. Today Voynich is remembered primarily as a novelist while her musical compositions have largely been ignored. Voynich's unpublished cantata, _Epitaph in Ballad Form_, however, stands alongside her novels as a work filled with revolutionary themes. Roger Casement, the cantata's dedicatee, was executed in 1916 for his involvement with the Easter Rising. Unlike the other rebellion leaders, Casement was subjected to an extremely public trial, during which the British Cabinet leaked pages from his diaries (thereby revealing his sexual relationships with other men) in an effort to turn public support against him. The majority of early artistic responses to Casement's execution fixated on forgery theories regarding the diaries, but Voynich's cantata probed for a deeper meaning behind the events. Rather than focusing on Casement's guilt or innocence, Voynich's unique and visceral musical response contemplated the dignity of the dead and the brotherhood of the deceased with the living.

William Billings's _An Anthem, for Fast Day_ ("Mourn, mourn") was published in _The Continental Harmony_ (1794) and became one of his most iconic works, especially through its use in William Schuman's _New England Triptych_ (1956) and later in Robert Russell Bennett's bicentennial tribute, _The Fun & Faith of William Billings, American_ (1975). The original publication, however, presents a number of problems and the edition in Billings's _Complete Works_ introduces substantial editorial changes. No previous analysis or discussion has taken into account Billing's text, with its alterations of and additions to the biblical texts. Following earlier research by Barbour, McKay and Crawford, Kroger, Schrader, and Brewer, a closer reading indicates that the anthem was composed somewhere in the period between the Boston Port Act of 1774 and the revolutionary events of 1775 during a very difficult period for the then British colonies.


The new dating raises essential questions about the criteria for the alterations made in the _Complete Works_ edition. Billings's preface to _The Continental Harmony_ suggests his dissatisfaction with an earlier minor-key anthem's setting of the word "Hallelujah" (_Hear My Prayer_) but this reflects a stylistic viewpoint more evident in his later compositions. The evidence indicates that Billings did not have much editorial involvement in typesetting or proofing the music published in _The Continental Harmony_, perhaps due to illness, and it appears that his original manuscript was being followed unaltered. When the anthem is compared with his earlier anthems, following Billings's changing musical styles as delineated by Kroger, the unaltered version in the 1794 edition is not anomalous. A more detailed analysis demonstrates that it has clear musical parallels in _The New-England Psalm-Singer_ (1770) and _The Singing Master's Assistant_ (1778) and in anthems by William Tan'sur that would have served as Billings's models. The new dating and restoration of the music as printed in _The Continental Harmony_ demonstrates how Billings composed this anthem as a direct response to the events that affected Boston following the Boston Tea Party which would soon lead to open rebellion.

In a letter from Warsaw dated 1982, electroacoustic composer Bohdan Mazurek requested that Françoise Barrière forward tapes of his new _Polnische lieder ohne worte – dedicated to Anka Kowalska_ (1982) to experimental music centers and radio studios in Stockholm, Italy, and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Mazurek worked at Polish Radio Experimental Studios (PRES), a hotbed of electronic music innovation in postwar Poland under the direction of Józef Patkowski. In the letter, Mazurek alluded to the dangers of publicizing this music, writing that Patkowski could not know about this distribution of such music realized at PRES. Despite PRES's stature as a leading center of uncensored music in the 1960s-70s, the 1981 declaration of martial law in an attempt to squelch democratic groups precluded PRES artists from composing freely and circulating their music at a time when political messages were needed most. Certainly, Mazurek's work in dedication to Anka Kowalska, imprisoned poet and leader of the anti-communist Workers' Defense Committee, would have been problematic in martial law Poland. Barrière, a Parisian electroacoustic composer and founding member of the International Federation of Electroacoustic Music often involved in distributing new electroacoustic works across channels, ensured that Mazurek's tape – and more crucially his message in opposition to the government –  reached supportive colleagues at the Experimental Music Studio at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 
In light of scholarship revealing the importance of PRES in postwar Poland (Crowley, ed. 2019) and Polish composers' navigation of political environments in the 1970s-80s (Bylander 2010, 2012), I suggest that Barrière's dissemination of _Polnische lieder_ enabled Mazurek's message to resonate outside of Poland, despite the government's silencing of political art, as an element of what James Scott calls a "hidden transcript" created within oppressed groups (Scott 1990). These materials, part of a larger collection of artifacts shared between PRES and the Illinois Experimental Music Studio during the Cold War, demonstrate a moment of solidarity among electroacoustic centers. This calculated operation helped propagate a space for the circulation of controversial cultural products, one of many strategies of resistance that Polish composers used to shirk oppressive government policies.