So, Hear Me Out: Can classical music provide hope to the imprisoned?
Can classical music provide hope when freedom has been taken away?
Gillian Moore and Linton Stephens explore classical music compositions that testify to the resilience of creativity in this latest episode of our classical music podcast So Hear Me Out.
The pieces that Moore and Stephens cast their eye, and ear, over include Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women, which rang out as a rallying cry for imprisoned suffragettes with its defiant and unifying rhythms .
They also give time to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – a piece which was composed and first performed in a Nazi Prisoner of War camp in 1941 and fused faith, birdsong, and dazzling visions of colour into music that offered hope and transcendence to prisoners and guards alike.
Moore also recalls her own personal encounters with music behind bars, where moments of song broke down walls both physical and emotional.
‘The conductor Thomas Beecham visited Ethel Smyth at Holloway Prison and found the women activists marching round the courtyard lustily singing their war chant while Smyth hung out of a window, conducting between the bars with a toothbrush’
Linton Stephens
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