Boogie Woogie Forever
Drama at the public piano and the superpower of music
It was January 19, 2024. Boogie woogie pianist Brendan Kavanagh—known to his YouTube following as Dr. K.—had just begun livestreaming his latest session at the public piano in Central London’s St. Pancras railway station.
“Somebody’s put some purple balloons on the piano, so all is well,” he greeted those tuning in. Pedestrians with suitcases hurried past as the YouTube audience gathered, conveying thanks and good wishes on the live chat from assorted locations worldwide.
Dr. K. started in with a warm-up number and was soon joined by his colleague Jim, who delivered a soulful rendering of “Trouble in Mind.”
The party in St. Pancras station had just begun when a member of the red-clad TV crew approached the piano at 9:14. They were there for Chinese television, she said, so their images were “not disclosable.” Unfortunately, Dr. K. would not be able to publish his video online.
The musician was confused. Would he get in trouble with the Chinese government? A male member of the Chinese crew stepped in. “Just don’t do it, please. I would really appreciate that.” “But we love your music,” he assured the pianist, “we want to stay here for a lot longer.”
Dr. K. continued the livestream, still pressing to know the reason. The young man grew insistent. “We will put a legal action into it.” “I’m sorry, this is the end of the conversation. This is our right we’re protecting, and that’s it.”
Dr. K. didn’t accept his claim. If they didn’t want to be filmed in a public space, they could walk away: “We’re in a free country, mate. We’re not in Communist China now, you know.” The young man objected that the comment was racist, then things went south fast.
The pianist touched a female crew member’s red flag. Why was she was waving a Chinese Communist flag? The young man exploded: “Stop touching her! Don’t touch her, please! Do not touch her— You are not the same age, please do not touch her.”
So it continued for several minutes: an impromptu demonstration of bullying and conflicting communication styles. To the pianist’s chagrin, at least one London police member showed a weak grasp of British law, enjoining him to turn off his camera.
Several times, though, the young Chinese man assured Kavanagh that his crew appreciated the music: “We love your art,” he said, “we love your music, but we are trying—”
“No you don’t,” Dr. K. retorted at 13:44, “you just shouted at me.” “You’re getting a bit aggressive, you are.”
“Can someone who’s heard this music—I mean, really heard it—still be a bad person?”
The question lies at the centre of the 2006 film The Lives of Others. It is also germane to the dust-up at St. Pancras station.
Playwright Georg Dreyman has just learned that a fellow East German artist committed suicide, in despair over being unable to work in his home country. He poses the question to his actress girlfriend as he plays the piece, Sonata for a Good Man, in his Berlin flat.
The film is set in the German Democratic Republic in 1984, at the stultifying late-stage nadir of real existing socialism. Spying is ubiquitous. Communist ideology has long since become a veneer for moral rot. Dreyman and his girlfriend, a feted leading lady, inhabit a precarious world of state-controlled art—where one word from a high-placed Socialist Unity Party official could cancel a career.
Dreyman’s apartment is bugged because a powerful East German cabinet member desires his girlfriend and has enlisted the Stasi to help eliminate his rival.
Captain Gerd Wiesler, a middle official in East Germany’s secret police, is personally surveilling the couple. This stiff, isolated man known mainly for his skills at breaking dissidents in the interrogation room has no social existence beyond his work and the occasional prostitute. As voyeur, he is drawn into these artists’ lives:
Art brings Wiesler to tears. His exposure to the lives of these others shakes him loose from striving to be a good Communist and Party servant; ultimately, it impels him to be a good man by betraying his regime.
That’s the film’s theory of the power of great music: that one who truly hears it must respond.
The theory is simple, but not simplistic. It does not imply that music enthusiasts—including those who create or interpret it—cannot be bad people, or even that they cannot commit atrocities. Dreyman himself alludes to the famous statement of Lenin on Beethoven’s Appassionata, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor:
“I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and would listen to it every day. It is astonishing, superhuman music. I always think with pride—perhaps naively—on what marvelous things human can do.”
The instigator of the Bolshevik revolution and murder of millions continued:
I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days one can’t pat anyone on the head, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people’s little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hmmm . . . what a devilishly difficult job!”
Lenin’s words attest to his need to resist the humanizing influence of the music. Surrendering to it would cause him to abandon his ideological program.
A second example arises from same country where The Lives of Others was set. In a 2022 article on musicians in the Third Reich, French music historian Philippe Olivier recalls both the brilliance and the National Socialist beliefs of some of the regime’s great musicians. Pianist Wilhelm Kempff, for example, is still acknowledged as one of the subtlest interpreters of Beethoven’s sonatas. Yet he was also “ambassador-pianist” for the National Socialist government in the 1930s—and gave concerts throughout its conquered territories in the 1940s.
For music was too important for the regime to leave alone. The chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels took pains to curate and export an image of “purified” German music—one that banned works by celebrated Jewish composers and purged Jewish performers. Jazz, much enjoyed in the 1920s Weimar Republic, became known as “degenerate music.”
Yet “degenerate music” took its subtle revenge. An ORT article, “Music in the Third Reich” describes the fate of the Entartete Musik exhibit, which the National Socialists staged in 1938 to educate the German public:
“Under the organisation of Hans Severus Ziegler, this ambitious production took place in Duesseldorf, and was intended to identify to the German public what music was ‘degenerate,’ to demonstrate its dangers, and celebrate its purging from German society. Ziegler quickly realized, however, that ‘Degenerate music’ was remarkably difficult to define. Many of the pieces played at the exhibition as examples of degeneracy were in fact popular among listeners, and some feared that the display was attended by fans eager to hear them.”
Music—real music, as opposed to propaganda—evades capture by ideology. It is pre-ideological, pre-political, more elemental even than language.
A 2017 article by neurologist Michael Trimble and epidemiologist Dale Hesdorffer reminds that our ancestors had limited language skills, relying on voice, rhythm, and gestures to communicate. Neuroscientists have documented physiological responses that music triggers when we hear it. It reaches deeper than ideas, deeper even than the conscious mind. Hearing music increases blood flow to our brains and limbic systems, activates memories and emotions, alters moods—even dispositions.
“The ear is always open and, unlike vision and the eyes or the gaze, sound cannot readily be averted,” Trimble and Hesdorffer remind. We are at the mercy of music—which is why we need to take care what we hear. Plato’s Socrates took pains to purge any music that did not express a “courageous and harmonious life” as he built his just city in the Republic. Soldiers use specific playlists in preparing for combat.
Music can separate us, whip us into a frenzy. But it can also soothe, create fellow-feeling in ways language cannot.
Which returns us to the public piano.
“You’re coming to the live drama at the piano,” Brendan Kavanagh said after police left with the red-clad crew. “This is Dr. K. versus the Communist Party.”
He called the livestream “Pianogate.” He might have called it the Triumph of Boogie Woogie. Within a few days, the livestream went viral. Kavanagh had acted well, many said, despite the admonishments of the British Transport Police officer. From legal experts to an expat Chinese etiquette consultant, several came forward to affirm the rectitude of his insistence on continuing recording.
Of special interest here is the live chat. Dr. K.’s listeners sided with him, but several expressed impatience. They had come for the boogie woogie—not for politics. Some wanted the pianist simply to get on with it.
Which he did at 26:55. Embattled yet energized, Dr. K. returned to the public piano.
It’s the Good Resist at its elemental best. An artform created by black musicians in Texas, played by an Irish musician, again filled the Central London train station.
Boogie Woogie Forever.
Coda:
Is it possible that one of Europe’s great composers stumbled on that same swinging rhythm over two centuries before? Purists will insist that Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 in C minor shares nothing in common with boogie woogie, that this piece from late in Beethoven’s life issued from a different emotional place entirely.
Did it? Readers are invited to hear and judge for themselves.
Fascinating piece on music and propaganda, Jodi. Maybe that's why oral forms of propaganda are so powerful. The oral medium is not only about the delivery of content/ideas but also about the musicality of voice and that's what draws us in and holds us: the rhythms of language and the tonal qualities and range of voice.