Why the Music We Love Feels Different Now

There's a scene in the 2002 movie The Pianist in which Adrien Brody's character, the Polish-Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, is hiding in the ruins of a Warsaw villa.

- BY ROGIER VAN BAKEL

The Nazi officer who discovers him asks what he did before the war. “I was a pianist,” Szpilman stammers. The German points to a battered grand piano and orders him to play something. Szpilman hesitates, sits, lifts his trembling hands, and begins Chopin's Ballade No.1 in G minor.

He plays because it's what's left; not to beg, not to resist, but to hold onto the one thing that still makes him himself. It isn't protest music or even defiance in the traditional sense. It's something deeper: an assertion of worth, humanity, beauty, all still alive in the rubble.

That scene wouldn't leave me alone this past year. The machinery of American democracy sputtered, and in the midst of it, the music I love—most of it nonpolitical—started to sound charged, alive, subversive, even when the lyrics aren't. It isn't just Kurt Weill or Gil Scott-Heron. Billie Eilish and Philip Glass now crackle with a sharper edge too.

I have also found new solace in world music. The devotional chants of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the polyrhythms of Manu Katché move nimbly past the parochial, claustrophobic limits now being imposed on the Kennedy Center, public radio, and other institutions that ought to celebrate the breadth of human expression. When the culture contracts and once-open doors start closing, it feels good to listen to sounds that reject the small vision taking hold.