Music and protest

Music and actions

The MSO drama is not about music at all. It is about music being engaged as a vehicle for something else. Music itself is only about music.

Most of the music the MSO performs does not contain words, and most of the titles have no non-musical relevance at all eg Symphony no 3, Concerto no 2, Music for Strings etc.

Further, the same music which is said to reference journalists killed in Gaza could also be said to reference the innocents of October7 – simply because we can say so. Just as the same piece by Bach can grace both a wedding or funeral with equal success.

Music itself is not specific about these things, it is the non-musical part of us that makes such connections and associations.

So the MSO drama is about how much of the non-musical should be allowed to enter the domain of music.

Given the difficulty and complexity of this eternal question, the rush to pronounce heroes and villains is unfortunate, while the discussion itself is a vital one.

William Hennessy, Clifton Hill

Silencing protest

Why is anti-war protest now forbidden in Australia? I do not understand the MSO’s action in cancelling a pianist because of his expressed sympathy for journalists killed in the war in Gaza.

This is very un-Australian.

Australian history is replete with the stories of anti-war protest from the Boer War to World War I through the anti-Vietnam marches to the protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a proud tradition of anti-war mobilisation.

Anti-war protests were of course met by pro-war forces. There was political conflict.

I do not understand why the present-day pro-war forces do not, as then, argue the case for the justification of the war in Gaza rather than seek to silence the voices of anti-war protesters.

Let the pro-war forces in our society openly argue the case for the Israeli war on Gaza just as the pro-war forces did in World War I, during the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

Professor Marilyn Lake, History University of Melbourne

A father’s grief

We have seen and heard so many tragedies and human suffering in Gaza (‘‘As Gaza toll passes 40,000, the city is now a cemetery’’, 17/8) but sometimes there is a moment that can strike one with utter disbelief and profound sadness. That was the death of a mother and her three-day-old twins in a building in Deir Al-Balah. They had been displaced from northern Gaza. The shattering grief of the father was so palpable; his first children and he could only bury them.

Judith Morrison, Nunawading