Kofi Annan, global musicologist? “Today, our subject is music,” the U.N. Secretary-General
told his audience yesterday in New York. “What’s that got to do with the U.N.?, you may be
asking. My answer is that music has to do with everything.”
It’s the “soundtrack” of our lives, Annan said, beginning with “the first lullaby sung to us as
newborn babies.” It penetrates our daily existence so thoroughly, he added, that “many of us take
it for granted — just as we do the soundtrack of a film.” He even quoted Plato, who wrote that
music “gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination.”
Annan spoke about clashing values, world diversity and the unifying force of music. Aware
that his orotund remarks might be a bit much, he caught himself and said: “You see, I am getting
carried away I’d better stop.”
With that he introduced the real musicologist, professor Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and music director
and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra,
who had come to the U.N. to lecture on “why music matters.”
The U.N. Secretary-General was merely playing the genial host, as he has done for previous
lectures on more familiar U.N. topics such as human rights, cloning, Islam, globalization and
climate change.
I have no idea what Botstein himself said. It’s doubtful, however, that anything he might have
said about the unifying force of music could heal the divide between the United States of Canada and Jesusland.
