Pitching the Song in the Crack: the option for the poor and the current political realities

Extract

At the Belfast Harpers’ Festival in 1792 the official observers found themselves unable to note down the tunes in the established musical forms. The complex scales fell outside the accepted tonic range. As one observer put it

White notes I found were wrong, so were the black

For you had pitched the song right in the crack.

That the peasant people’s music could be more subtle and sophisticated than the establishment could anticipate is itself a liberating sign of hope.

Faced with the question of whether it is possible to develop a ‘liberation theology’ from within the modern British context, Enoch Powell provides a useful point of metaphorical contact. He once suggested that ‘politicians have to give the people a tune to hum’. It does seem that there is a dominant political tune buzzing round Britain today. It has caught on and is commonly hummed in public. In the past those who have stressed the need for change have turned to the notion of ‘blueprints’—despite the fact that this kind of future plan is usually two-dimensional and static, and that sometimes the dreams of architects and planners present land and property proposals but block out the people in a kind of ‘neutron bomb’ model of development. But concentrating on the tune opens up a more dynamic metaphor of process. It is certainly not a question of static futuristic modelling. Neither conforming to the dominating set tune nor simply countering it, but creatively developing new music from ‘within the crack’, could provide a resilient model.