Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced.
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors,
And acclaim the bully as hero, and aims to rule the world by force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own, and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money, and sleeps the sleep of the too well-fed.
Pity the nation, oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
And their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
And the great owners, who must lose their land in upheaval,
The great owners with access to history, and eyes to read history,
And to know the great fact:
When property accumulates in too few hands, it is taken away.
And that companion fact:
When a majority of the people are hungry and cold, they will take by force what they need.
And the little screaming fact, that resounds through all history:
Repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
The great owners ignored the three cries of history.
The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased,
And every effort of the great owners was directed at repression.
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
Half sunk, stand in the desert.
Near them on the sand, a shattered visage lies,
Whose frown and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive,
Stamp’d on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that led.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains; round the decay of that colossal wreck,
Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
PDF: Reflections_on_Tyranny-sample.pdf
The forces seeking to shift the United States from democracy into autocracy and tyranny have been at work for a long time, but they have come into sharper focus in recent years and achieved power as of the 2024 elections. Many books, articles and speeches have warned of of this trend. Time will tell how much damage is inflicted.
As a composer I feel a responsibility for expressing such sentiments in music, perhaps reaching people in a way that the written and spoken word might not.
Thus I chose my texts: Ferlinghetti’s echo of Kahlil Gibran’s poem, written in 2007 and eerily prescient about events a decade later; Steinbeck’s prophecy, set forth in 1939, late in the Great Depression but timeless; and Shelley’s testament to the ignominious fate of tyrants. Let us hope.
“Pity the Nation” starts out in 9/8 meter, with the basses introducing the angular theme in C minor. The tenors take the theme up to F minor for the second line of the poem, with the basses providing harmony. The altos get their turn; all four voices declaim the third line, with the sopranos taking the theme to G minor. The meter changes to 6/8, then 2/4 to fit the text.
The altos begin the second section in D minor and the sopranos carry the theme in F♯ minor (how did I get there?). The tonality wanders, cadencing on a B♭ chord with no third to set up the sarcastic “My country, tears of thee” coda in E♭, then jumping the track into C major.
More often than not, when I compose to an English prose text I find that the best-fitting meters are 5/8 or 7/8. Such is the case with both “The Great Owners” and “Ozymandias.”
The 5/8 time signature fits “The Great Owners” well. The text is ominous and the phrases are short. The three facts of history are delivered in a slower tempo, with the upper three voices declaiming the text while the basses sing a rising/falling five-note motif on the syllable “dm” as if they were timpani, ascending by whole tones from A♭ all the way up to D♭. The basses will have a great time with this. The piece ends somehow on the same G minor chord on which it began.
There are many ways to interpret Shelley’s well-known poem. I take it at face value, believing that ignominy awaits all tyrants, sooner or later. The 7/8 time signature matched the text. The movement begins on a stark C-G-C chord, and the basses introduce the poem using material from the first two movements with the other parts providing spiky harmony. There are a lot of chromatic passages, perhaps evocative of the desert winds. The king, doomed to obscurity, loudly declaims his sneering boast in G Major, but it fades away, and the basses and tenors sing the epilogue using the same theme that began “Pity the Nation.” The movement ends as it began, on the “empty” C-G-C chord.