Remember when the world shut down and all those folks panic-bought
toilet paper like it was currency? Well, musicians noticed – and
they didn’t miss a beat. (Puns in a humor column, be warned.)
Okay, okay, what
follows isn’t really a chronicle. But the references to the
repeated runs on toilet paper were a source of much musical and
artistic mirth during COVID, with examples between March and June
2020.
First, a historical
reminder of where we were (and also where we weren’t):
March 2020
marked the global realization that COVID-19 was not containable,
leading to lockdowns, panic-buying (hello, toilet paper), and a sharp
halt to public life. Even our local park was shuttered.
April and
May brought a surreal new normal: stay-at-home orders, Zoom
everything (sooooo much Zoom), homemade masks, and a flood of online
creativity as people sought connection and levity amidst uncertainty.
By June
2020, public health messages competed with rising
restlessness, cautious reopenings began in some places, and it became
clear the pandemic wasn’t a sprint, but rather a marathon.
And in response? We
did that very human thing, and drew on humor as a way of coping,
critiquing, and commenting on the world around us.
Some of that humor
was visual…
Next, we have the “ridiculous uses of toilet paper”
category, with freelance cellist
Rylie Corral of Austin,
Texas, participating in
the toilet paper
challenge. I know about
it from the news story, but by March 20, 2020, her facebook video of
the unconventional performance of Saint-Saëns “The Swan” (from
The Carnival of the Animals) had already drawn 700K views and generated its
own hashtag.
If unconventional or extreme uses of toilet paper aren’t quite your
thing, you could go for the whole toilet paper in a comedy sketch
usage, this one dated March 19, 2020. The “queue the toilet rolls”
remark comes in later, after the introduction of the premise –
British conductor/comedian Rainer Hersch running a rehearsal of The
Coronavirus Concerto (“which is due to be canceled in two days
time”) – along with its follow up about the musicians getting
paid (ha ha, no). A chipper upbeat string melody together with a
variety of body noises (coughing, wheezing, spitting, and so on) are
the lighthearted backdrop to our view of Hersch as conductor, pelted
by toilet paper rolls at the 1:16 mark…
There’s the obsessively questioning “Where’s My Toilet
Paper,” the minimalist contribution by Tokyo-based Zombi-Chang (the
composer Meirin’s solo project). This contribution to the “please
stay home!” narrative for Japan was offered up on April 6, 2020,
and – implicitly – reminds the viewer that shopping is not
worth dying for.
There are also laments for the losses, such as the amusingly
named “Ode de Toillette” [sic] subtitled “The Great COVID19 Walmart
Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020- Bagpipe Tribute.” (Happy, this is
not a smell-track, the ode/eau de pun not withstanding). This amazing (see what I did there?) tribute of
“Amazing Grace” performed to the empty shelves by The New
Hampshire Police Association Pipes & Drums had me in stitches
back in the day – the video was posted on March 13, 2020, the date
of the U.S. declaration of a national emergency for COVID.
Irreverent? Yes. Funny? Also yes, both for incongruity, and through
inversion of expectation. We *would* come to need those bagpipe
bands, and too many of them, alas. But a moment of levity in an empty
Walmart aisle doesn’t preclude the subsequent serious mourning of
real and tangible losses in those early days of the pandemic. Both
responses, levity and lament, speak to the human condition.
Sometimes, toilet
paper is just part of the bigger picture, as with rapper Todrick
Hall’s “Mask, Gloves, Soap, Scrubs” (Apr 29, 2020), that
humorous parody of the oh-so-popular “Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels”
of just one year before. In Corona times, the iterations of daily
life are a bit different than they were in more sociable
days-of-yore:
Left,
right, left, right swiping on Tinder / What was life like? I can't
remember / Need my haircut, somebody shave her / Where is all of the
toilet paper?
Then there’s the incorporation of toilet paper as a focus of
social dismay. “We’ve all seen the pictures of people online
who seem to think they’re invincible,” starts the video by the
technical death metal band Cattle Decapitation from April 1, 2020.
“Well you’re not. Enough is enough. Go home and stay home.”
And then the angry guitars start for “Bring Back the Plague.”
Here, toilet paper
isn’t part of the lyrics, but it appears repeatedly as a visual
signal of the “new normal” of extraordinary times –
clutched on shopping sprees, rolling down the staircase, focus of a
tug-of-war, an emptied roll in the bathroom. Bits and bobs of
pandemic life are like the “where’s Waldo” of the COVID first
wave. Tiger King and hand sanitizer, Spring break and lying on your
couch with the TV remote: can you spot these details? Life was hard.
The energy and
frustration at society’s glib and sometimes ridiculous responses –
fighting over toilet paper packages, people, for real??? – brings
the question of a lack of social accountability into juxtaposition
with the unsettling idea that the “bacillus countless” are going
to have their way with us whether we choose to accept that infectious
reality or not.
Bring back the plague / Delete those that threaten a whole new
world
Start today / Dig their graves, they'll find a way
To rid the world of finding new tomorrows
If you aren’t part of the solution, suggests Cattle Decapitation
you ARE the problem.
And perhaps the best
of the best is the use of toilet paper rolls as found instruments.
So I leave you with Netherlandish "designer and maker" Ruben Stelli’s
June 2020 remake of the “Popcorn Song,” originally by Gershon
Kingsley from his Music to Moog By album. You’ve heard it
done by electronic instruments, now hear it performed by … toilet paper and
its cardboard innards, used as found sounds.
Some days I think to myself, I just can’t make this stuff up; I’m
not that creative!
Looking back, I
actually think that these musical moments were more than just goofy
distractions. Rather, these small acts of creativity in the midst of
chaos made a claim to both artist and audience’s very own personal
survivability. If you can laugh, you can cope. Whether through
parody, protest, or bagpipe-laced lament, these songs and memes
reminded us that we weren’t alone – even if the store shelves
were empty.
Hope you got some
joy from these samples from the past – and maybe a reminder for
your next shopping list, just in case?
A pink pig puppet in a black and white striped hat with a bucolic background
News flash: “Swine flu breeds in pigs,” says announcer Anderson Cooper on CNN, and we flash through five flu alerts (including one interview with a masked couple) as we listen to the opening chords of “The Swine Flu Song,” posted to YouTube by PutnamPig in April 2009. Before we even make it to the first verse, we’re aware of the positionality of its creator. News anchors have been modified to judder, their mouths shaking in a visual equivalent of a musical trill, yet their anxious words proceed undoctored – except for the underscoring, of course. The news here is suspect, its narrative in question, the packaging of global media shown to be an artificial manipulation of reality. It is, in other words, an effective intro for a pop song about a problematic world event, written within a few days of the topic becoming international news.And when we do get to the verse, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a satire, mocking the concept of Swine Flu as a whole and, even more, to the public narrative about the threat. The bulk of the text is delivered by a puppet pig wearing a black and white striped hat and an FBI shirt (! standing for “Bald Innocent” !), singing in a whiny and nasal Elmo-like voice, the timbre of which may haunt your dreams. That, coupled with the obsessive melodic repetition – relying on a pentatonic scale (degrees 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, a melodic language which avoids all the musically-directional half-steps) over and over and over again – creates a catchy-but-annoying landscape in which one’s brain knows exactly what to expect – and so slides its attention to the words.
Those words are quite remarkable too. From a textual standpoint, the song purports to be debunking the false claims leveled against the poor pig population. Pigs didn’t cause the swine flu, the song contends. It comes… from a lab. This is particularly funny if you happen to identify the musical inspiration behind the song – Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The claim here is much the same: if we’re culturally are not at fault for everything going wrong in society, well, pigs aren’t at fault for the swine flu either. The parallel is amusing.
PutnamPig’s version of the song has three verse sets, each of which includes four short quatrains linked together in a parallel structure (a1, a2; a1, a3). These, per standard pop-song format, alternate with a chorus. Structurally, after the beginning clips which orient us to the newsworthiness of the song, there are two more intercut news clips with continued harmonic underscore: one between the pairs of quatrains in the first set, and a much shorter one between the two pairs of the second set of verses. The overall structure is:
The first set of verses (1a through 1b) names a whole series of wholesome childrens’-book characters as their images flash on screen; none, points out the song, have any symptoms:
Miss Piggy, Arnold Ziffle, neither has a little sniffle Porky Pig and Pooh's Piglet, No fever yet
Putnam, Gordy, Toot and Puddle, Not contagious safe to snuggle Ask Petunia Babe, Noelle All of them feel well
The patter presentation, mostly presented recitationally, plus the regular rhyming and the attention-grabbing hiatus for Piglet at the cadential drop – “No fever yet” [pause] -- pulls us into children’s song landscape.
But we cut back to the news alert, “The World Health Organization says it appears to be spread from human to human.” That topic seems to inspire a shift of melodic structure, for the second pair of strophes of the first verse (1b) start out parallel to the first pair, but digress as the song starts to blame-storm. Instead of heading downward for the cadence as we did for Piglet, the melody (can we call the recited text a melody?) moves upwards to an anxious clangor: “Now it’s in the USA, No one's safe this day and age!” Hammered out in bad Elmo-esque whine with staccato 8th notes repeating the same pitch 14 times (with some intonation bending), we certainly get the idea of street-shouting, even though there is nominally only the single singer:
How it started I don't know Stay away from Mexico Now it's in the USA No one's safe this day and age
Together, that verse 1 complex makes sense of an unfolding pandemic: everyone’s well, and when they’re not, well, perhaps intensification should be the go-to response:
But there is some relief, at least musically. That pentatonic melody from the beginning, that seemed really repetitive? By now we’re glad to have its multi-pitch variety return in as the music of the chorus. Having established a recitational style during the four quatrains of verse one, the contrast of style comes as a relief and enhances the chorus’s musical allure.
The text context of the chorus, however, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy: “Pigs didn’t start the swine flu / Blame the laboratory / For this awful Story // Pigs didn't start the swine flu / No we've been betrayed /The strain appears man-made… “ With the punchline rhymes of “betrayed” and “manmade,” the song posits a nefarious origin rather than a porcine one.
The second set of verses also starts by shaping the melody to descend at the end of each quatrain, but as we approach the next blame-topic, we again elevate the pitch as we escalate the claims, again with the shouty reciting: “Run a temp and get the chills / Everyone run for the hills.” There’s truth buried in the text – no-one blames dogs, for instance. (That’s actually for good reason, though. For swine flu (H1N1), the transmission chain was human to dog, rather than the reverse, and normal canine influenzas, HDN8 and H3N2, don’t typically infect humans.)
The third set of strophes actually starts at the escalated and elevated pitch as if shouting rejection to its claims; instead of viewing pigs as “clean and pink,” the association of name with virus sticks in the mind. Of course, the same was true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968; there is a reason we have moved from location-based naming of diseases. As it happens, the World Health Organization’s guidance in 2015 – six years after the 2009 Swine Flu – suggested avoiding associative terms for new diseases, in part because they triggered the needless slaughter of food animals. The world is counseled to avoid:
• geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), • people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), • species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), • cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and • terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).
Putnam’s recommendations, it seems, were culturally resonant, and eventually acted upon!
As we move toward the end of the song, the third strophe’s second half follows the more familiar shape. It offers a lower first quatrain first, and then the by-now-familiar escalation, this time for the climax: “This disease it needs a name / Which animals should we defame / Nobody will likely mind / If we named it for an ugly swine.”
The song ends with two full statements of the chorus, and a long instrumental outro. Over the first part of the outro, Putnam speaks his final lines, which are, curiously, non-rhyming, conveying both a sense of intimate conversation (just him as speaker and the solitary listener listening to confidences that just happen to be picked up by microphone), and an authentic perspective after the highly stylized and structured main body:
The pigs are innocent I tell you / We didn't do anything wrong We didn't start this disease / But we're taking all the blame.
With all that, have a listen to the whole song:
PutnamPig, “The Swine Flu Song,” April 30, 2009
ORIGINS AND CONTEXT
PutnamPig (who goes only by that cognomen, even on Facebook and LinkedIn, leaving his/her/their actual identity private) is primarily a Minecraft account, and was set up a year before the swine flu pandemic. Even though coming to health commentary as a sidelight to their normal offerings, their swine flu song is remarkably well-aligned with sentiments of the time, and perhaps even prescient.
Two things strike me as particularly insightful. First, the timeline of events, traced by Paul Shapshak et al. (2011) and Smallman (2015), shows that Putnam’s creator was actually quite forward-looking, writing about the flu before it was considered a global pandemic. The lyrics early on in the song point out that cases were now being found in the United States. This is a remarkably quick capture of the event that had actually justified the change of the disease’s status to stage 5, as the timeline shows. The song was posted just 8 days after the first national alert, and only four after the US declaration of a public health emergency:
March 24-April 24, 2009: influenza infections in Mexico
April 22: the Mexican government issues a national alert
April 23: the US government announces 7 cases across Texas and California
April 25: the Mexican government declares a public health emergency
April 26: The US government declares a public health emergency
April 27: H1N1 found in Europe
April 29: WHO raises pandemic alert level to “phase 5” (with outbreaks at least two countries in one WHO region)
April 30: Egypt announces a cull of pig herds
APRIL 30: PutnamPig’s Swine Flu Song
May 2, 2009 China suspended flights to Mexico
June 12, 2009: WHO announces a full “phase 6” pandemic alert level
August 10, 2010, the WHO declared an end to the 2009 influenza A/H1N1 pandemic
Or maybe that’s easier to see in the calendrical view – here, yellow is outbreak, blue is government action, and pink is the song’s debut:
A little more than a week from first government action to the song's debut
Likewise, the themes of the chorus –
the purported laboratory origins and man-made release of the disease –
align with many of the conspiracy theories Smallman (2015) was able to
trace, including a cluster which called out Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld’s long-term involvement with Gilead Laboratories as a potential
beneficiary of a global pandemic. They were, after all, the ones who
owned TamiFlu. As they say, “Information” doesn’t have to be true to
circulate widely on the internet. Smallman also implicates YouTube as a
news source, finding that more than 15% of the 142 “news” videos
examined from that first few months of the swine flu epidemic “called
the outbreak a man-made conspiracy.”
PutnamPig’s “Swine Flu Song”
stands as both a time capsule and a cultural artifact. Although it
shares the relentlessly upbeat idiom of the Flying Fish Sailor’s
confrontation with the past in “The Flu Pandemic Song” (which I wrote
about last month), it differs in important ways, since
the “Swine Flu Song” captures the anxieties, misinformation, and
conspiratorial currents that swirled around the 2009 pandemic as it was
happening. It is reportage, but reportage with a difference. Its rapid
creation and viral spread underscore the speed with which music, satire,
and digital media can shape public perception, particularly in moments
of crisis. By setting news clips against an intentionally grating yet
catchy melody, the song exposes the performative aspects of media-driven
panic while, ironically, simultaneously participating in the same
ecosystem of viral information.
A decade and a half later, the song’s
themes remain strikingly relevant, reminding us that the ways we frame
disease – whether through news narratives or pop-cultural satire – carry
real consequences for how societies respond to outbreaks, assign blame,
and remember pandemics.
WORKS CITED:
Billy
Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” from the album Storm Front (1989),
with the chorus “We didn't start the fire / It was always burning /
Since the world's been turning / We didn't start the fire / No, we
didn't light it / But we tried to fight it...” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
History of the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) outbreak of 2009:
McCauley, M., Minsky, S. & Viswanath, K. The H1N1 pandemic: media
frames, stigmatization and coping. BMC Public Health 13, 1116 (2013).
https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116; https://rdcu.be/eckME
Phases
of Pandemics explained: “Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and Response: A
WHO Guidance Document,” National Library of Medicine, NIH, from Pandemic Infleunza Preparedness and Response, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143061/
Image from 1919 of three men in hospital beds, two with a head bandages
Music is a multi-purpose tool, and I appreciate its role in public health as a vehicle for advocacy and education. But it also has a sharp edge, one that mocks, satirizes, and even ridicules. Today, I want to explore this opposite side, in which music pokes fun – at public health efforts, at public concern, even at the sufferers of the illness themselves – as a potent human response to pandemics. And the flu in particular has drawn the attention of some deeply creative individuals as a topic for mockery. (So did COVID, but that’s a different discussion).
Why? In part, I think that this kind of “humorous take” is a form of catharsis. People process fear and loss in different ways, and graveyard humor is a useful presence in our lives. Musical humor is also, trenchantly, a tool for criticism, including political and social criticism. Through laughter (or at least inner grins), it gives us a space to contemplate the otherwise unthinkable. That people or policies were in fact horrid. That wisdom is not always the guiding hand on the decision tiller. That casual cruelty is sanctioned, and even rewarded. That suffering has been ignored – or even dismissed. “We sing about what we cannot talk about,” say the AIDS educators (McNeil). The same seems to be true in the context of other major medical disasters as well. We sing when we cannot agree. We also sing when we wish to revisit that which we wish to forget.
These humorous takes can have a strong downside, of course. They can reinforce stigma or ridicule those suffering, trivializing real harm. That they do so with a wink and a nod makes us complicit; as viewers, we give mental real-estate to the position that these songs take. And thus, we join the jeering crowds. Miguel Mera argues that “For an audience to find something funny, they must be complicit in this anticipation; they must expect what you predict them to expect.” As we take pleasure in the subversion – anticipation followed by the twist, the dislocation, the joy of the unexpected – we move beyond our own moral narratives to join in the fun. Until we don’t, or at least, until we wish we hadn’t. The line between satire and insensitivity is always thin, especially when illness is involved. Yet clearly “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe they said that” can go hand in hand with our urge to share. (Waves hand broadly at the internet.)
I offer these observations with direct knowledge aforethought that I am about to partake consciously and deliberately in that ambiguous space of sharing the uncomfortable. I disapprove of the happy message, for instance, of “The Flu Pandemic Song,” a song written and performed by The Flying Fish Sailors from Houston, TX. The repeated cheery refrain, “And they died, died, died” should be nothing to smile at. Yet die they did, those victims of the 1918-19 flu in its various waves. (Old estimates of 20 million dead have been updated since the time that Greg Henkel wrote the song to reflect more geographically diverse parameters; current consensus suggests that the death count was closer to 50 Million dead.)
This song partakes fully in the Flying Fish Sailors’ motto "Happy Music For Happy People," unless, of course, one actually attends to the lyrics. Why am I smiling about millions of deaths? Ugh, but ugh with a guilty sense of pleasure. Warning: it’s an earworm...
That jaunty chorus may well haunt me forever. The major key and simple harmonic structures, the plain and singable melody with its high sense of motivic unity, all combine to make for a kiddy-song feel far removed from the actual meaning of the chorus:
It was the flu pandemic
And it swept the whole world wide
It caught soldiers and civilians
And they died, died, died!
Whether they’re lying in the trenches
Or lying in their beds
Twenty million of them got it
And they’re dead, dead, dead!
Once you’ve heard it, you’re stuck with it, complicit in its knowledge, and complicit in enjoying the receipt of this knowledge. (“The Flu Pandemic Song” is “Infuriatingly catchy,” as Mera once said of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers). Here we are together, grinning about the horrors of the past. And here I am, laughing along. Why?
I think that the very moment of discomfort that we experience in such songs is asking us to ask an important question. Why is it that we haven’t thought so much about the nature of this historical crisis? I mean, whether it was 20 million or 50 million dead, it isn’t the sort of thing we should go around forgetting, right? So the song serves yet another function beyond critique or catharsis: it reminds us that we need to be witness to the full scope of human experience, including the deaths – in the hospitals, the trenches, and the far reaches of the globe.
Perhaps that’s the ultimate function of songs like this: not just critique, not just catharsis, but confrontation with the past. These songs refuse to let us look away. To me, the persistence of musical mockery in times of sickness suggests that humor, even in its most irreverent forms, is a deeply human response to the chaos of disease. Whether it’s a medieval plague song, a 20th-century blues lament, or a 21st-century viral TikTok, music helps us laugh—even when (especially when?) we probably shouldn’t.
WORKS CITED:
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York : Viking, 2004.
Marrin, Albert. Very, very, very dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
McNeill, Fraser. AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Mera, Miguel. “Is Funny Music Funny? Contexts and Case Studies of Film Music Humor.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14 (2002): 91–113.
The Flying Fish Sailors [Website.] https://www.flyingfishsailors.com/, consulted 2/26/25.
Image of Fader Moviz playing the viol with text bubble, "Movitz, your Consumption, it pulls you into the grave..."
While
those of you in New York City might be lucky enough to attend the
book-launch for John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis
(Mar 18, 2025), the
rest of us are hanging around with “old TB” – its readings, its
meanings, and its character.
Musically
speaking, there’s a lot of literature on tubercular heroines
(Violetta in La Traviata; Mimi in La Boheme; Antonia in Tales of
Hoffmann)
Hutcheon,
Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Famous last breaths: The tubercular
heroine in Opera.” Parallax, 2:1 (1996): 1-22, DOI:
10.1080/13534649609362002
Morens,
David M. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging
Infectious Diseases
8:11 (Nov. 2002):1353-8.
If
we follow artistic assertions, to be consumptive is evidently to be a
soprano, since so many of the roles are in the Leading Lady idiom.
And, of course, these narratives blend into those of the cautionary
tale, where the fallen woman and the consumptive prove to be one and
the same. That latter theme remains common, with an added whiff of
poverty – just think of Fantine from Les Mis, or Satine from
Moulin Rouge, not to mention
Violetta herself.
TB / Consumption accounted for up to one in six deaths in France
by the early twentieth century.
The
prevalence of the disease made the it and its social consequences
quite topical, of course. Though weirdly, not for men, at least not
as artistic representation. There are hosts of deaths of artistic men
from consumption – Boccherini, Chopin, Keats, George Orwell… But
women feature in much of the music, both before and after the
baccilus’s discovery in 1882.
Take,
for example, this abbreviated list of tubercular characters.
Lots of women, and our passionate consumptive Chopin.
Fader
Movitz (Freman’s
Epistles by Carl
Michael Bellman, 1790)
Chopin
dies of consumption, 1849
Violetta
Valery (La Traviata,
Giuseppe Verdi, 1853)
1865
Jean-Antoine Villemin: proved TB was contagious (not heritable)
Antonia
(Les Contes
d'Hoffmann, Jacques
Offenbach, 1881)
1882:
Robert Koch announces discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Mimi
(La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini,1896)
Lady
Madeline (La Chute
de la Maison Usher,
Claude Debussy, [incomplete] 1918)
Sister
Benedict (Bells of
St Mary's, 1945)
Fantine
(Les Misérables,
1980)
Satine
(Moulin Rouge, 2001)
“In
the 18th century in Western Europe, TB had become epidemic with a
mortality rate as high as 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per
year, more elevated among young people. For this reason, TB was also
called ‘the robber of youth.’”
-- Barberis et al (2017)
On the list, the odd man out –
the odd MAN – is that 18th century character, Fader
Movitz. He, and his illness, features in Epistle no.
30: “Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi” [To
Father
Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy].
Fader Movitz might not be young, but he is definitely
characterized as one of the 900 consumptives per year; we learn
various of his symptoms, and know from early on inn stanza 1 that he
is terminally ill, though in TB’s typical slow motion fashion.
Unlike the ethereal soprano heroines of later operatic tradition,
however, Fader Movitz is neither young nor transfiguring; instead,
his illness is woven into a bawdy, bittersweet world of drinking
songs and resignation.
The composer of the work, Carl
Michael Bellman (1740-1795), was a Swedish composer, musician,
and lyricist. His song collection, Fredman’s Epistles,
contains 82 songs. “To Father Movitz” is relatively typical of
the song types; they mix themes of drinking with character sketches
and scenes ranging from the pastoral to the poignant to the saucy.
Movitz appears in 28 of the settings, so this isn’t his only
appearance! He is a composer with a famous Concerto, we learn from
the book’s character list.
Coming
in the middle of the pack, “To Father Movitz” is clearly a song
about his consumption (“Lungsot”). Death is coming, but there may
be some time (line 4) – after all, TB is a slow-moving disease.
Nevertheless, it is an active disease, one that “pulls you into the
grave” (line 5). In fact, it’s so effective at drawing you toward
death that the first part of the next line belongs not to the singer
but solely to the instrumentalists. There’s a bit of a musical pun
on the striking of the octave, and then we move upwards (finally) to
sing about the fond memories one had.
Drink from your glass, see Death waiting for you, Sharpen his sword, and stand at your doorstep. Do not be alarmed, he only glares at the grave door, Beats it again, maybe even in a year. Movitz, your Consumption*, it pulls you into the grave. - - - Strike now the Octave; Tune your strings, sing about the Spring of life. : |||
(stanza 3): Heavens! you die, your cough scares me; Emptiness and sound, the entrails make a sound; The tongue is white, the saving heart hatches; Soft as a fungus are late marrow and skin. Breathe. - Fie a thousand times! what fumes are your ashes. - - - Lend me your bottle. Movitz, Gutår! Bowl! Sing about the God of wine. : |||
The
song is strophic, but sets its mood effectively; all those descending
lines, the minor mood, the simple harmonic language, the largely
syllabic setting – we aren’t singing of triumph but instead of
the inevitable outcome in the local cemetery. And the active agency
of consumption is signaled musically by the shift from the
predominantly step-wise treatment to the more dramatic leaping, as
the illness personified pulls poor Movitz toward the grave.
The
third strophe gets into even more graphic details: the cough, the
disruption to the guts, the gradual falling apart of health into
pallid skin and grotesque forms of mucus-coated tongue. Ick. But,
think back on happier times, and toast the God of wine. The
inevitable is, well, inevitable.
“About
10 million people around the world do fall ill with the disease. And
even though it is preventable and curable, about 1.5 million people
die. So it is known as the world's top infectious killer according to
the WHO.” -- AMA report, 2/5/25
In
this current moment, TB has taken on special poignancy. We know that
TB is still “the world’s top infectious killer” under normal
circumstances. It doesn’t need to be; there are treatment courses
that take 4 to 12 months, depending on drug and dosage. If it isn’t
one of those (scary) resistant strains, it’s treatable. And yet
people continue to die.
With the Kansas City
outbreak doing its best to set records, we should remember that an
illness like TB is both PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE.
Don’t be “that”
character in song or story; redemptive endings and transfigured souls
are all very well in fiction. But in real life, we’d rather spend
our time like Fader Movitz, focused on wine and happy memories.
Leprosy (now more properly designated Hansen’s Disease) is a
disease of almost overwhelming stigma. It can cause disfigurement and
is associated with poverty, all the more so now that treatment is
readily available. It is a disease that also causes us to attend to
our social response, highlighting the tension between charity and
revulsion, inclusion and fear.
The work that goes
on around the globe on World Leprosy Day seeks to create social
change – to reduce stigma, emphasize treatment and inclusion in
community, and break the inter-generational cycle in which leprosy
leads to isolation leads to reduced education and livelihood
opportunities leads to poverty which leads again to leprosy.
While it’s early yet to see what will be issued for THIS year’s
world leprosy day, I’d like to take up three examples of the
campaign from previous years which provide a glimpse into the
power that music has in these socio-medical campaigns. It is, in
other words, an example of music as public health, and one that I
like to talk about with students in my Music, Pandemics, and History
class.
EXAMPLE 1: A Leprosy Awareness song
“Gandhi’s dream: India should be Leprosy Free”
The
song conveys straightforward yet impactful messages.
One theme is that of
awareness. “It does not spread by touching”; treat early;
it’s eradicable. Also, finish your course of treatment, “medicine
has to be given till the end.”
A second is working toward a
more inclusive society: “We should get a little more, we
should get all the rights, we should get a sense of belonging in the
heart, the society should accept us from the heart, leprosy has to be
eradicated from the body, mind and thought also.” Likewise,
eliminate discrimination and avoid stigma by adopting a
caring attitude -- “Avoid grudges or bad mouthing”; “Keep the
patient happy with a loving face.”
A
final message is the fact that we are all implicated in this
work: “Through a joint effort we can all make India free from
leprosy.”
The music reinforces this
vision in several ways. It adopts traditional Indian idioms and
instrumentation. The musical style is approachable, trending toward
pop. The presence of a lilting, danceable percussive backbeat, for
instance, gives the performance energy. There’s a good deal of
musical and verbal repetition, and sections are marked with dramatic
gestures such as a rising swoop in the strings. There is a chorus
that comes in to add richness to the texture. Put together, these
choices are signaling that theme of collective effort together; just
as this is “our music,” so is its challenge “our problem.”
EXAMPLE 2: Sparsh Awareness Campaign (A governmental educational program)
Theme: United for dignity
This initiative was a government-sponsored campaign to use a festival model to facilitate education and awareness of the disease. The performances include skits, dance, and song, in between giving speeches about the disease. The (edited) example here comes from Vellore district, and condenses the cultural offerings to focus in on the speeches that convey this 2022 message:
“The disease will not spread through treated persons. Hence all cured leprosy persons should not be neglected or disliked. The WHO Theme for SPARSH Leprosy Awareness Campaign 2022 is "UNITED FOR DIGNITY". Therefore, let us strive to uphold the honour and dignity of leprosy cured persons.” (Excerpt of the YouTube description)
At the beginning of the clip, we again get singing, this time by a woman singing in the traditional Indian style, celebrating the local region, Tamil Nadu. The song depicts the importance of local culture and the importance of state initiatives. This is followed by a traditional circle dance to sung accompaniment which visibly expands to include the community gathered in an outdoor venue.
This
initial set-up emphasizing music and dance creates
a bridge between cultural pride and public health awareness
messaging that follows. There is the familiar sound of local musical
practice. The performances, though polished, are not unduly
professional; they seem to stem from within the community. This is
reinforced in the dance, where the circle of women visually segues
into the circle of the listening audience, many of whom bob and sway
to the sounds they are hearing. We have been brought from the joys of
cultural expression into community, “United for Dignity,” which
shares its appreciation for such beauty. The implication is that they
will share as well in the understanding from the day’s educational
program.
There’s a bit of slippage
here: enjoyment of song, and enjoyment of message are portrayed as
somehow equivalent. This is an important public health messaging
strategy that we see on a variety of fronts (see AIDS awareness in
Uganda, for instance). Music, dance, and other cultural expression
draws in the crowd, garnering attention and preparing them for the
harder-hitting messaging about disease safety, treatment, and the
need for change.
Here in the Vellore
video,
that stratey is made
explicit. After
these initial song and dance excerpts, we cut
to a series of speakers each
of whom speaks from a seat in
front of a poster about leprosy awareness. The
poster behind the series
of speakers is busy
delivering text. It mentions symptoms (“loss of feeling”) but
also seeks to normalize the disease; we should “treat it like TB.”
Lastly, it makes the point that clinics will provide evidence-based
care, there is “no experimentation” (!) in delivering treatment
for the disease. As a
backdrop, the poster is a bit overwhelming; the amount of text and
the array of type-faces and colors seem to function more like a flag
backdrop than a conveyance of information. Tired eyes might prefer
instead to focus on the speaker, and maybe that’s part of its
purpose. It is “official” without being “interesting.”
Reading is work; listening is easier.
Indeed, what IS interesting,
in contrast to the poster, are the series testimonials
from individuals who have had the disease. These
testimonials make up the
central portion of this “Leprosy awareness day.” The first [in a
google translation based on a notta.ai transcript], reads:
My
name is Shafuddin. I am speaking from Vellore. My body has been
damaged since 2001, so I went to the hospital. They said it is
leprosy. In the hospital they said it will be cured by treating it. I
took similar medicine for two years. The body recovered to some
extent. Hands and feet are very nerve affected, there is a lot of
pain, so they said that by doing an operation the hands will be
cured. After doing the operation it got cured. I do my work myself. I
can eat. I do all the work myself. There is no problem. Feeling good.
Leprosy is not a bad disease. If you take the right medicine you will
be cured.
This shared personal
experience helps the audience understand the multiple treatment
options. There were the meds, and then afterwards a surgical
intervention. The success of his treatment and his subsequent
independence would be important to anyone who fears that they
themselves might be suffering. Moreover,
his story demonstrates personal resilience and also the societal
support needed to uphold dignity for those affected by leprosy.
Shafuddin’s journey from diagnosis to recovery directly embodies
the campaign’s call to honor the dignity of those affected by
leprosy. Likewise, his ability to regain independence challenges
stigmatizing narratives. His message, as I see it, reinforces the
hope embedded in the festival's music and dance.
Later in the video (1.59)
there is a masked and
costumed dancer and supporting chamber ensemble; the elaborate
costume and intricate steps contrast with the packed-earth dance
circle and the backdrop of cow and crops. A second and then third
character come in to enliven the skit. This cultural
offering too is followed
by impassioned speakers.
Alternation of entertainment
and education keeps the audience engaged. Such alternations also
subtly suggests that there is a “whole-life” experience in
illness treatment. Just as we (here the we of the community audience
and its internet echo) enjoy the singing and dramatic action, we –
the united “we” of community – should enjoy our support for
these companions who have suffered with the disease, and for their
invisible compadres.
The
video ends with a medical overview of symptoms and treatments, and an
emphasis that treatment is free. The government is working to support
eradication, and anyone who has the disease should be treated.
Here,
we see music as an attention-getter,
valuable for its entertainment value, and providing a forum in which
other socially-critical messages can be sent. We
also see music as a community-building
element, identifying the “united we” of the messaging campaign.
The visual placement –
an outdoor festival setting, with birds and other nature sounds –
create an ironically “homey” atmosphere, in which you are hearing
from neighbors and compatriots about what is possible. And
throughout, the upbeat
music goes along with the upbeat message: Leprosy can be cured. That
message is worth celebrating.
In short, I think this
approach – blending
traditional cultural expressions with modern health messaging
– creates
a shared space for education, empathy, and celebration of civic
progress in a
significant public
health initiative. Like
“Gandhi’s Dream,” the message here is simple: just as we
collectively respond to the music, we should collectively respond to
the disease itself. Through its blend of traditional cultural forms
and modern health education, the Sparsh Awareness Campaign
demonstrates the potential of music and other performative arts to
transform public health initiatives into inclusive, community-driven
movements.
EXAMPLE 3 An Award-winning leprosy awareness short (from 2003)
Dungarpur Films' 2003 award-winning short, recipient of the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA) Gold for the best public service film for leprosy awareness, delivers a powerful yet simple message:
One intervention can make a difference.
The film follows a woman and her son as they navigate the stigma surrounding leprosy and move toward the hopefulness of seeking treatment. It begins with the village headman’s stark declaration: “There’s no place in the village for leprosy patients.” This sets the stage for conflict, as the family’s diagnosis has sparked fear among the villagers, who seek to exile him and his mother so that the disease stigma doesn’t pass to the broader community.
Yet,
one woman raises her hand and calls to the mother and son. She speaks
out against exclusion, commanding them not to leave the village, but
rather to go straight to the health center. She reinforces this
message by publicly inviting the mother’s touch, hand to head. Her
intervention shifts the focus from judgment to action and the
narrative from vague crowd mutterings to crucial public health
information: “A disease-free body… Leprosy is completely cured
with MDT [Multi-Drug Therapy]. And this MDT is available completely
free at every government health center.”
The film ends with a
resolution—the mother and son are welcomed at the clinic, where
they receive treatment. The final frame features the National Leprosy
Eradication Programme (NLEP) symbol: four connected stick-figure
hands alongside the message, “Join hands: eradicate leprosy.”
This visual reinforces the short’s central theme of connection and
collective responsibility.
At its core, the film frames stigma as a more pervasive and
damaging issue than the disease itself. We initially sit with the
discomfort of an unhappy village; we are grounded in the reality that
the ill one might be ostracized. The disease is contagious, but
attitudes are even more contagious. The woman’s intervention not
only counters this stigma but also demonstrates the courage and
compassion needed to enact change. By touching and interacting with
the family, she visibly defies the rumor and shunning which had
seemed increasingly normative. Her actions embody the film’s call
for inclusion and understanding.
This act of bravery is pivotal. It transforms a moment of
potential exclusion and banishment into one of connection and hope.
The journey to the clinic becomes a metaphor for the broader societal
journey—from ignorance and fear to knowledge and action. The
message is clear: intervention, grounded in education and empathy,
can dismantle stigma and pave the way for healing.
Her intervention is successful; we follow these characters as they
move toward the clinic, receiving crucial public health information.
Leprosy is completely curable. Treatment is free at all government
health centers. There is a solution. We end with an arm around the
shoulder in support – connection, not stigma, will solve the
disease.
The film’s music underscores this narrative journey, amplifying
the emotional stakes and reinforcing the thematic arc. At the start,
the suspenseful score reflects the villagers’ tension and
hostility. There’s a traditional voice, and threatening
intermittent and unpredictable drum. We hear discussion and crowd
noise. This is the acoustical chaos of bad things happening.
Yet, after a woman intervenes, we move toward acceptance and a
resultant shift of musical idiom. A more hopeful lyrical voice
emerges, as well as more instruments playing in a coordinated and
more predictable way. We have a reiterated drone pitch to provide a
harmonic reference point, making the point that stability comes from
seeking treatment. So does optimism, for a series of arched phrases
accompany images of the journey to the clinic – the boat, a bike
and walk into the clinic. The highest of these vocal phrases is
delivered as our patient receives her packet of medicine, not only a
climax, but a happy one. Throughout this section, there is also more
complexity in the drum rhythms, accompanied with the tinkle of high
bells – a brighter timbre, with more interesting patterns. This is
music that we want to listen to. It is music as “accompaniment to
action.”
The music of this 90-second
short, in other words, tells us that inclusion and intervention are
the right choices, the ones that will lead to a positive, major-key
kind of place. We have, in the final frame, the joy of treatment with
the final high arched phrase. Layered over that is the visual cut-in
– the NLEP symbol, and four connected stick-type figures, with the
words of the final message: “join hands: eradicate leprosy.”
Dungarpur Films’ offering blends narrative, music, and
public health messaging together in order to inspire change. By addressing stigma
through a compelling story of intervention – by illustrating the
transformative power of knowledge and empathy – the film leaves
viewers with a clear and actionable message: inclusion and education
can eradicate both the disease and its associated stigma.
The
music, serving as both a narrative driver and an emotional guide,
amplifies the film’s impact. From the acoustical chaos of exclusion
to the lyrical harmony of hope, the soundtrack underscores the
journey from fear to acceptance. Storytelling and music here foster understanding and community-building. The film's call to “join
hands” remains as resonant today as it was in 2003: just as we
collectively respond to music, we must collectively respond to
disease and its societal implications.
TAKE-AWAYS
As we have seen in these
three examples of leprosy intervention, music plays a vital role in
public health. It bridges the gap between complex medical messaging
and community engagement. Its ability to evoke emotion, foster
community, and reflect local cultural values makes it a powerful tool
for reducing stigma, promoting awareness, and encouraging positive
collective action.
Whether through traditional
idioms, modern compositions, or community-driven performances, music
transforms abstract health messages into relatable, memorable
experiences. By integrating music into campaigns, public health
initiatives transcend mere information dissemination; they build
empathy, solidarity, and hope, empowering communities to confront
challenges together. Music, in essence, resonates not just in sound,
but in its capacity to inspire societal change.
I would like to thank Avagail Hulbert, whose seminar contributions
on India’s leprosy eradication programs introduced me to these
and other compelling examples of music in public health. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend Gregory
Barz, whose work on medical ethnomusicology was my first introduction
to the topic. Lastly, I’d like to thank all those many people –
musicians, film-makers, dancers, educators – whose capacity for
empathy and commitment to optimistic service is the active force for
good that makes real change happen in the world.
Image includes the 6-box screen of characters and their fictional names
Today’s contribution is a review of a pandemic opera – one
that I’ve just taught in my Music, Pandemics, and History class. Since not a
lot has been written about the opera yet, I thought this overview might be
helpful to the interested reader.
In the middle of the pandemic, the creative team of David
Shenton and Christine Steyer took on the lived experience of COVID-19 directly.
They focused their three-scene / one-hour opera on the voices of healthcare
workers. Their information was, as they explain, well-researched, “drawn from
200 articles about health care workers facing the pandemic.” While news as
opera may seem surprising, questions of moral codes and strong emotion –
especially tension, fear, and hope – emerge from the script as part of its operatic landscape. By the end, we care for
the characters, as one should, and have traveled their story arc – from angst
to connectedness and from outrage to hope. It is, as critics note, an “operatic
love letter to global front-line healthcare workers.” The opera was also deemed
successful by judges, for the first production was the winner of the National
Opera Association Production Award and garnered 3rd place in the 2022 American
Prize for Opera Production.
Set as a zoom call, the operatic performance cleverly begins
with that moment of recognition: “Please wait. The host will let you in soon.”
Yes, we all came to know that phrase all too well during the early stages of
the pandemic. Likewise, as we move into the first scene, the mood of melancholy
set by the Overture gives way to a frenetically repeated piano, underscoring
the urgency in which the characters have been immersed. We meet the various
characters, especially Sandra, the RN who has convened the group out of near-overwhelming
frustration and a need for connection.
In this first aria, Sandra describes the nominal perks
accorded the frontline workers, including fancy hotels and invitations to jump
the queue (!), but points out “it all comes down to nothing” because she’s not
able to see her own family. She snapped, she tells us, when the hospital
started talking about pay cuts because of the lack of elective procedures. Pay
cuts? In the middle of a pandemic? So her frustration boiled over into the need
for this call/this opera.
The opera is divided into three scenes set several months
apart: “Of the Heart”; “Just when things couldn’t get Worse” and “Tell Me
Something Good.” Within each scene, several of the six healthcare working
characters will share some part of their COVID-related experiences; Paolo,
in “Fratelli” (I.3 – 17:25) explains the Italian penchant for balcony singing
and its historical grounding, Gordon uses a refrain aria to articulate
the frustration with a lack of progress in “One step forward” (II.2); Jane
questions what we are all inheriting as a society, and whether it’s actually the
good place that she was raised to see (“I’ve always been taught to respect my
elders,” II.4).
Elements of the contextual news for the pandemic also peak
through – for instance, Gordon’s experience (II.2) with the Beirut
explosions, and Rolanda’swith deforestation in the Amazon, and
the spaces it left for graves (II.3). A concatenation of negatives layers up in
the closing part of scene 2, where five of the six characters pile on with
their anger and worries about the way in which the pandemic has unfolded, until
Sandra calls a halt to it all.
CLIMAX AND RESOLUTION (AN EXCERPT)
In fact, if you only have ten minutes to sample the opera,
this climax and its resolution across the boundary of the entr’acte into scene
3 is the part of the opera that I think is perhaps the most worth viewing. This
section follows Jane’s aria, previously mentioned, where she balances respect
for her elders and dismay at behaviors that have led us to the current moment
with its multitudinous ills (39:24). Ultimately, she tells us (40:07), she
finds herself “unable to remain silent.” The Ensemble joins in for a group
layering up of concerns: (41:00) “the World leaders protected from
accountability… (42:29) deny responsibility and find a scapegoat…” The libretto
goes on to distinguish problems from dilemmas: “problems have solutions; dilemmas
don’t.” And the pandemic for many countries is a dilemma. This leads into the
climax, which is where we pick up:
The excerpt itself features several returning lines. At the start
of the excerpt (45:00), we hear how the virus “brought planet to its knees.”
And that in turn raises the repeated question, “…how did we come to this?” The
layers of concern, each character adding thoughts and observations into a
cacophony of stress, reaches a climax, prompting Sandra to intervene (45:41),
saying “Stop, please, please, enough!” These calls began, she reminds everyone,
as “a space for me to share,” and after making a claim for the usefulness of connections,
asks the other characters to “promise me you will tell me something good” when
they return.
As the excerpt continues, we segue (46:56) into a keyboard
entr'acte, designed to shifts our mood for the upcoming arrival of the new
year. It’s “Hard to believe” (47:33) that it’s been almost a year, the
characters observe at the start of Scene three. After toasting the new year
with wine and water, the characters share positive updates. Sandra has
just gotten a second dose of the vaccine so is able to return home to her
family; Mario speaks to the legacy of learning that he has from his
grandmother, whose advice helped get him through a difficult delivery (50:06).
It is a different sound-world than the echo-chamber scapegoating at the end of
the previous scene.
THE REST OF THE OPERA
I’ve ended the excerpt there with Mario and his grandma, but
further positive news then continues to unfold across the third scene – the
availability of vaccines, the recognized wisdom as a legacy of a beloved
grandparent, volunteers helping with ventilators. Sandra perhaps sums it
up best: “it all comes down to nothing if there’s no one to share.” The opera ends
with an ensemble number from our main characters: “Microbes older than us” and
its second part, “We are healers.” The close is provided in memoriam
with a virtual choir.
OPERA OVERVIEW
A viewer-based (rather than score-based) summary of the
opera’s structure looks something like this:
Overture
Scene 1: Of the Heart (early April, 2020)
1.Sandra’s aria
2.Mario: “We called her Lily”
3.Paolo: Fratelli
4.Jane: O what an awful blight
5.[Gordon and Rolanda passim]
Scene
2: Just When Things Couldn’t Get Worse (early September, 2020)
1.[Action: report on Beirut, Paulo]
2.Gordon: “refrain aria” “One step forward…”
3.Rolanda “Amazonia from above”
4.Jane: I’ve always been taught to respect my
elders
5.ENSEMBLE: Scapegoat
6.[Stop, enough.] >>>
Scene
3: Tell Me Something Good (New Year’s Eve, 2020)
1.Sandra: 2nd vaccination
2.Mario: Hard delivery; grandma Lily
3.Jane: Family & pictures of the hospital
4.Paolo: sung to high A
5.Rolanda: volunteers help with ventilator
6.Gordon: y’all
7.Sandra: it all comes down to nothing if there’s no
one to share
8.ENSEMBLE: Microbes older than us
9.ENSEMBLE: We are healers
10.In
memoriam (choral)
THE OPERA'S CONTEXT
As A.A. Cristi noted in their initial review, the opera not
only told a significant story, but also provided a “meaningful project” for the
singers “who have been hard-pressed to find work during the pandemic.” To
record the opera, composer and pianist David Shenton laid down the piano
tracks, which the singers used as they recorded their own parts – safely, and
at home. Those samples were then merged as a single soundtrack, at which point
production turned to the video portion. The singers were asked to lip sync, pretending
to sing on Zoom, as Schering captures in his news coverage of the premiere.
In fact, the executive producer situates this performance
for us in the playbill: “We have yet to meet in person.” This counts as a “remote
ensemble” production. The relatively small forces – the orchestra is a piano
and sometimes violin, and six singers in gender-flexible casting – reflect the
challenges inherent in all our various “safer at home” quarantines impacted
music-making world-wide.
Overall, this one-act is a remarkably approachable 21st
century opera, and has proven an effective entre to the genre for the non-music
majors I’ve taught. The musical structure with its occasional use of refrains
and its clear accompanimental markers to distinguish one section from another
is relatively easy to follow. There’s perhaps more arioso than aria writing,
but this keeps the action and events of the story line at its center. The singing
of this performance is wonderfully done; my students voted for Paolo as the
singer they’d most like to hear again. (It also helps that we’d just finished a
unit on balcony music, and here it was, brought to life!)
Overall, the operatic takeaway is pretty simple: “kindness
and compassion can be as powerful a tool as a vaccine and a ventilator.” Not a
bad message for troubled times.
RESOURCES:
Complete first performance of Shenton/Steyer’s On Call: COVID-19 (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDb70FfOSMc. This video can also be accessed through the Bellissima Opera website.
