ART BEYOND BORDERS: When Nationality Becomes a Verdict

Nikolai Lugansky, a Russian pianist of extraordinary depth and versatility

Music and art should surely be placed beyond isms, national divisions and political disputes.

A musician is not a government. A composer is not a foreign policy. A pianist standing on a concert platform is not responsible for the decisions of the country written beside their name in a programme.

Banning musicians simply because of their nationality seems to me as stupid and narrow-minded as refusing someone entry to a restaurant because of the colour of their skin. The histories and circumstances are different, of course, but the underlying mistake is disturbingly similar: we stop seeing the individual and begin judging the category to which we have assigned them.

I was reminded of this recently during a conversation with a colleague. I was speaking with admiration about the Russian piano tradition when he remarked:

“Yes, they are talented, but also cruel.”

I asked him a very simple question.

“How do you know? Have you met any?”

He had not.

And that, to me, was far more interesting than the remark itself.

Where do such ideas come from?

How does a Russian pianist become Russians, and how do Russians acquire a collective personality trait such as cruelty? At what point do political events involving governments, armies and institutions become evidence about the character of a piano teacher, a violinist, a writer, or simply somebody born on the other side of a border?

I was trained in the Russian piano tradition. I attended masterclasses with Russian pianists and encountered Russian musicians as teachers, colleagues and artists. I do not remember cruelty. I remember discipline, enormous attention to sound, seriousness towards the score, technical rigour and a profound respect for the musical tradition.

For musicians, this kind of division seems particularly absurd. Our entire artistic tradition is built upon crossing borders. We perform music written in different countries and centuries, study with teachers of different nationalities, absorb different schools and traditions, and carry all of them into our own artistic identities. Music has never respected borders particularly well — and it is richer because of it.

Of course, I have met difficult musicians.

I have met difficult people of many nationalities.

So has everybody else.

But we do not normally take the unpleasant behaviour of one Frenchman and construct a theory of the French character. We do not hear an insensitive remark from an Italian pianist and conclude that Italian musicians are insensitive. Yet once political conflict enters the picture, extraordinary generalisations suddenly become acceptable.

This is precisely when we should become more careful.

Nationality tells us where somebody was born, or which country they belong to. It does not tell us whether they are kind or cruel, generous or selfish, courageous or cowardly. A passport is not a psychological profile.

When I play Rachmaninoff, I do not hear a government.

When I listen to Tchaikovsky, I do not hear a political system.

I hear longing, tenderness, anguish, beauty, vulnerability, passion — experiences that belong to human beings everywhere.

The same is true when I listen to Bach, Chopin, Debussy, Bartók or Shostakovich. Their music may have emerged from particular cultures, histories and political circumstances, but what allows it to survive those circumstances is precisely its ability to cross them.

That is one of the extraordinary powers of art.

Politics divides the world into countries, alliances, ideologies and opposing sides. Art continually slips through those boundaries. A melody written centuries ago by someone whose language we do not speak can reach something in us before we have had time to ask where it came from.

This does not mean that artists exist outside morality. Artists are individuals, and individuals can make choices for which they may rightly be criticised. Nor does it mean that art exists outside history or that political circumstances should never be discussed.

But responsibility must remain individual.

If a musician has done something reprehensible, discuss what that musician has done. If an artist openly advocates something we find morally unacceptable, we can debate it. But nationality alone cannot be evidence of guilt.

The moment we begin assigning moral qualities to entire peoples, we have stopped thinking about human beings and started thinking in categories.

And history has given us more than enough evidence of where that can lead.

Perhaps this is one of the things art can still teach us.

Before the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Israeli, the Palestinian, the American, the Chinese, the Serbian, the Greek — there is a human being.

Before the passport, there is a person.

And when that person sits at a piano and begins to play, perhaps the most intelligent thing we can do is listen.

And art, of all things, should remind us of this.

© Alternative Approach to Music: Inspiring - Healing - Empowering, Xenia Elizabeth Zilli