The Civil Act of Listening

Music and Politics have one essential thing in common: they both

permeate and affect our lives every single day. Yet their connection runs

deeper than shared ubiquity. My argument here is that listening itself,

the act that music trains and politics so often abandons, is a fundamental

civic practice. Before one can agree, resist, vote, or dissent, one must first

tune in. In an era defined by noise, reaction, and polarization, the most

radical act available to us may be the simplest one: sustained, genuine

attention.

Music, per se, is not activism, or at least, it is not supposed to be. Music

simply is: it lingers in the background or vibrates directly into our ears,

unapologetic and unconscious. As much as we try to explain it, we do not

really know why that one song became our favourite. How, then, can

music be attributed to politics, or even policy making? Not through

slogans or anthems, but through the forms of attention it cultivates in

those who listen.

Over the past few years, I have noticed a growing effort to highlight the

need for dialogue between different fields of knowledge, and it is

precisely this spirit of interdisciplinarity that underpins the connection

between music, listening, and political life. These domains do not exist in

separate silos; they inform, reflect, and challenge one another. Friends of

mine in their final year of university now have access to courses such as

Law and Art, where they discuss ownership, authorship, and cultural

heritage. In the last decade, Law and Neuroscience was introduced,

questioning whether neurologically and psychologically justified actions

can stand as such in a court of law. These courses begin with

fundamental questions about agency and free will, then move toward

technical instruments, like fMRI scans that attempt to map brain

activity, to examine how those questions play out in legal settings. This

kind of inquiry makes complex concepts inevitably more accessible and

applicable: I do not have to choose to pursue law because it limits me,

but precisely because it allows me to connect it to everything else.

Therefore, I believe that these interactions are necessary for sustaining a

complete and clear perspective of the world. The ultimate agency lies in

evaluation; evaluation requires knowledge; knowledge requires

exchange. And exchange is impossible without cooperation. Precisely

because no one can be an all-knowing vessel, we must support

interdisciplinarity as epistemology.

My distinction here is simple: music should not be patriotic by default.

On the contrary, it should be understood in its purest function, as

mediation. Music has always carried intention and emotion beyond

consent or control; it is not inherently political. Yet history repeatedly

forces it into political meaning, revealing not the politics of music, but

the politics of those who listen to it. Regardless of the contexts we

attempt to impose on it, music will continue to generate different

meanings for different ears.

If music truly functions as mediation rather than instruction, then its

political power does not reside in slogans, flags, or national anthems. It

resides in the act that precedes all political formation: listening. And yet,

in a time where everything demands reaction, urgency, and polarization,

the most radical and neglected civic act has quietly become the simplest

one: attention.

At the same time, music should not be reduced to a political tool. We

have seen what happens when it is forced into rigid ideological frames:

the results are often incoherent, sometimes even unintentionally comic,

and they reveal precisely how political meaning is imposed by listeners

rather than contained in the music itself. In today's polarized climate,

even iconic American anthems illustrate this. The piece traditionally

played on Independence Day, the 1812 Overture, was composed by

Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to commemorate Russia's victory

against Napoleon's France, a country whose military support was

decisive in the American fight for independence. The tradition of pairing

it with July 4th celebrations dates back only to Arthur Fiedler's 1974

Boston Pops concert. Meanwhile, the Star-Spangled Banner is sung to

the melody of To Anacreon in Heaven, the official song of the

Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentlemen's club of amateur

musicians in London, whose original lyrics celebrated drinking and

leisure among British elites, the very cultural world the anthem claims to

resist. These examples do not simply expose patriotic irony; they

demonstrate what happens when listening is replaced by assumption.

The music means whatever its political context demands, until the

context collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Politics has always indulged the illusion of being intangible: distant,

abstract, almost untouchable. This has resulted in a significant portion of

the world's population identifying as apolitical, a stance that has always

been both controversial and ethically fragile. In previous generations,

this detachment could be partially justified by a lack of access to

information; today it is often justified by the opposite: the unreliability of

the information we are constantly being fed. But should either of these conditions truly excuse political disengagement? Or should they, on the

contrary, generate a deeper urgency to become informed, and to become

reliable sources of information ourselves? Critical thinking is not an

isolated virtue; it is shaped, challenged, and fed by friction between

different perspectives. In this sense, being apolitical is not a neutral

virtue but an act of quiet ignorance toward reality, and it is precisely this

ignorance that makes politics feel inaccessible in the first place.

Moreover, for our collective prosperity, being a politician should not feel

like an unreachable ambition reserved for spectacle. Instead, we are left

with oversized public figures, often earning more than their

qualifications justify, endlessly depicted as heroes in some contexts and

villains in others. They become faces before they become functions, and

in that transition, they often turn into vehicles of misinformation rather

than agents of governance.

Within today's exhausted left-right debate, the deeper issue frequently

dissolves. What is at stake is not only ideology, but law, order, and

collective responsibility. And still, my judgement does not end in

disillusionment. This restlessness, born of polarization, political

mistrust, and civic disengagement, made me think of a different way to

understand and talk about politics: a sonic approach. I believe these

fractures can be approached through the most basic and universal ability

we possess: listening. A skill that music, in particular, teaches extremely

well.

In its origins, the idea that music shapes political life is not a

contemporary invention. The recognition of this power has often been

accompanied by attempts to control it. Rousseau, in his Dictionnaire de

musique (1768), recalls how Swiss authorities once prohibited their

troops from playing the ranz des vaches, a traditional herdsmen's

melody without lyrics, because it provoked tears, homesickness, and

ultimately desertion. The song carried no political message, yet it

disrupted military order by reorienting loyalty through affect rather than

instruction.

This episode reveals the limits of instrumentalization: music exceeds

control. It does not dictate emotions, but it exposes what already matters

to those who listen. For this reason, classical political thought treated

music with equal seriousness. For Plato and Aristotle, music was

understood as character-forming, capable of cultivating particular

dispositions in citizens; aesthetics, ethics, and civil order were

inseparable. Listening, therefore, was not private taste, but a civic skill,

one that demanded political attention rather than neglect.

If listening is the first political act, then jazz may be its clearest and most

developed sonic manifestation, and it is for this reason that it serves as

the primary case study here. Jazz does not operate through fixed

instruction, nor through rigid hierarchy. Its rhythm is felt rather than

imposed, constantly negotiated rather than dictated. Even when a pulse

exists, it is elastic: stretched, delayed, rearticulated; never simply

obeyed. This openness does not abolish form; it relocates authority from

command to relation.

Improvisation is not an ornamental feature of jazz, it is its core principle,

and the very force that distributes sound democratically. In big bands

and small ensembles alike, musicians are granted space to speak through

solos, yet that space only exists because of collective attention. A solo is

never autonomous; it is shaped by what comes before it and by what

surrounds it. To play, one must first listen. In large ensembles, where

dozens of musicians share the same temporal space, this becomes ever

more evident. Each voice enters not to dominate but to respond; sound

becomes dialogue, unfolding in real time, sustained by mutual

awareness. No single instrument carries the total meaning of the piece;

meaning emerges only through interaction.

In this sense, jazz does not aim for consensus, it teaches coexistence on a

stage and beyond, inherently critiquing polarization. Order is not

enforced through command but maintained through attentiveness.

Authority circulates. Structure exists, but remains open, flexible, and

contingent. What holds the music together is not obedience to a beat, but

commitment to one another. Improvisation does not entail a lack of

discipline; it is precisely the mastery of it.

Today, lyrical content tends to be treated as the primary carrier of

political meaning in music, or at least, as its most legible one. Lyrics are

often what transforms songs into what we label protest music, precisely

because they can be quoted, archived, and translated into political

narratives. And yet, political meaning in music does not reside

exclusively in words. It exists in intention, in form, and in interpretation.

While jazz listens to negotiate, punk depends on refusal. In both cases,

listening remains central, in punk, not to reach agreement, but to make

space for dissent.

Punk offers a clear example of the tension between lyrics and sound. Its

political force was never dependent on textual preservation; you will not

find punk lyrics canonized in history books. And yet, from its emergence

in the 1970s through its culmination in the 1990s, punk provided one of

the most immediate and unfiltered representations of society at the time.

It documented social reality not through institutional vocabulary, but

through sound, posture, and refusal.

Pop, by contrast, operates through the immediacy of context. By

definition, it reflects what is popular within a society at a specific

moment in time. Its function is not to negotiate differences or endure

discomfort, but to circulate recognition. Pop absorbs the emotional

climate from which it emerges and makes it legible, repeatable, and

widely accessible. In so doing, it rarely demands sustained attention: it

accompanies rather than interrupts. Listening here becomes continuous

and frictionless, often remaining in the background of everyday life.

This does not make pop politically empty, but politically revealing: it

mirrors dominant moods, desires, and anxieties without necessarily

questioning them. In this sense, pop trains a mode of listening based on

simultaneity rather than exchange, on exposure rather than engagement,

a mode that closely resembles the way contemporary political realities

are often consumed rather than confronted.

Jazz, punk, and pop do not offer the same solutions, nor do they share

the same aesthetics. What they share is a structural relationship to

listening. Jazz teaches listening as coexistence: the ability to sustain

difference without erasing it. Punk teaches listening as confrontation: a

willingness to remain present in discomfort, noise, and dissent. Pop

promotes listening as revelation: a mirror of collective mood and desire.

If music holds political power, it is not because it delivers messages more

efficiently than speeches or slogans, it is because it trains forms of

attention that precede ideology. Long before opinions are formed,

alliances chosen, or ballots cast, listening shapes how difference is

perceived: as threat, as dialogue, or as something to be endured. In this

sense, music does not instruct politics; it conditions it.

Contemporary politics, however, often abandons listening altogether,

mistaking volume for clarity and reaction for engagement. Consider the

political landscape of several Western democracies in recent years: cities

governed by social-democratic administrations while national leadership

moves in a radically opposite ideological direction, not as a corrective

tension, but as a symptom of fragmentation. These configurations are

not anomalies. They reflect a society listening in parallel rather than

together; one in which political identities are formed in separate sonic

and informational chambers, rarely encountering genuine friction or

exchange.

This condition becomes particularly visible at a time when listening is

increasingly mediated, filtered, and anticipated on our behalf. Sound

today often reaches us already selected, already contextualized, already

aligned with what we are presumed to prefer. Exposure replaces

encounter, continuity replaces friction, and listening becomes a mode of

consumption rather than participation. The ear is trained to move on

rather than remain, to recognize rather than to question. In such an

environment, difference does not disappear; it is simply organized

elsewhere, heard in parallel rather than together.

Listening, then, is not a passive act. It is a civic posture that resists

acceleration and prediction. It requires patience, exposure, and the

acceptance that meaning is not fixed but negotiated in real time. In an

era that rewards immediacy and polarization as the only forms of

progress, listening becomes increasingly rare, and increasingly radical.

Perhaps the political question is no longer what we believe in, or which

side we are on, but how, and whether, we are still capable of listening at

all.