The aftereffects of violent deeds – abuse, genocide, sexual assault, extractions of labour, property, and resources – travel through time and space. Neuroepigenetics researcher Isabelle Mansuy suggests, “adverse extreme experiences in childhood can modify the body so much that it can have imprints or traces even in reproductive cells.”¹ These acts burrow inside human DNA strands, and our descendants may never escape their echoes. When it comes to music, chord progressions, notes, and melodies linger as well, finding their way back into the current moment, as if to confirm Carlo Rovelli’s observation of Newton’s laws: “there is no distinction between past and future.”² The notion of history as a single linear progression, where post-Enlightenment thinking liberates the modern human from dull, bloody violence and “savagery,” is a grim joke, and one thing modern art does is serve as a counter-argument to this subtle, unacceptable tyranny. 

First Action: It is 1691. Baroque composer Henry Purcell writes the music for the semi-opera King Arthur, with a libretto by John Dryden. Instead of adapting the more romantic legends, Arthur focuses on the battles between the Britons and the Saxons, and the king’s recovery of his fiancé, Princess Emmeline, from King Oswald of Kent. Dryden originally wrote the play during the reign of “Player King” Charles II. He is forced to adapt the script after England’s Glorious Revolution, which replaced the Catholic James II with the Protestant William of Orange, “not to offend the present Times, nor a Government which has hitherto protected me….”³

In the Act 3 aria, “What power art thou who from below,” Oswald’s Saxon magician attempts to seduce Emmeline with a masque acted out by spirits. Cupid awakens the “Cold Genius,” the spirit of Winter, who sings under a bed of slow, icy, Sul ponticello strings: “What power art thou, who from below/Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow/From beds of everlasting snow?” Timothy Judd of The Listener’s Club notes how “contemporary” Purcell’s dissonant composition feels. Later musicians take notice as well, including Klaus Nomi, who adapts it into “The Cold Song” on his first album, and composer Michael Nyman.

Second Action: It is May 29, 1985, at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, “the match of a lifetime.”⁴ The European Cup is yet to start, but already there have been multiple, aggressive incidents between Juventus fans and resentful, prejudiced Liverpool supporters. Eventually, when these fans, most of them Italian, try to escape what eyewitness Ed Vulliamy described 30 years later as “the English, waddling and bellowing, drunk on lager and the xenophobia of the day,”⁵ the spectators get pressed into a wall. It collapses under the pressure – six hundred people get injured while thirty-nine die. The game goes on regardless. Vulliamy later writes bitterly of England’s entrenched reaction to the crowd disaster: “an orgy of denial, excuses, and a search for rotten apples in an otherwise healthy sport and proud nation.”⁶

Third Action: It is April 15, 1989. To ease the crowding inside Hillsborough Stadium, then hosting the FA Cup semi-final, a police match commander orders the opening of exit gate C.⁷ The ensuing crush of Liverpool supporters results in ninety-seven deaths and seven hundred and sixty-six injuries. The South Yorkshire Police publicly blames “football hooligans” and drunken misbehavior. However, an independent panel concludes years later that “lack of police control” was a major factor in the tragedy, and the SYP even altered evidence supporting this conclusion.⁸

Fourth Action: It is 1985. A Liverpool fan in mourning, Michael Nyman is inspired by the chilly, arrogant power of “What power art thou who from below” to write a new piece of music.⁹ Nyman “kind of observed it, reedited it, and rewrote it as a memorial to the victims of the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985.”¹⁰ The result, Memorial, is performed once in its entirety at a Yainville electricity generating station “in an event that could never be reproduced,” according to Nyman’s programme notes. A twelve-minute section of the fifth movement is, however, released for mass consumption. A driving, insistent composition, Memorial increases the pace of Purcell’s strings until the progression becomes a stately march for the dead. The fifth movement patiently introduces horns, clarinet, alto sax, flutes, and piano, all the while gaining in speed and emotional intensity. By the time Sarah Leonard’s keening soprano vocals appear in the mix, the music reaches a frenzied, delirious crescendo, a sonic death wail.

Four years later, Nyman feels guilty when he hears of the Hillsborough disaster: “I had the thought I had brought it on, because the first time I took that music I had written for the Heysel disaster out of the box, another Liverpool tragedy happened. On the two occasions when I started playing with this particular set of material, there were not only football tragedies, but Liverpool-associated football tragedies.”¹¹ It’s as if the composer believes his art has conjured up this violence, or that his art is the violent act in and of itself. 

Fifth Action: It is 2011. Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist, psychologist, and scholar, releases the best-selling book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker’s argument is that, overall, “violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”¹² He notably credits liberal humanism and technocratic thinking, including what he calls “The Leviathan” – the nation-state and judiciary’s “monopoly on the legitimate use of force.”¹³ 

The book garners powerful fans in billionaires Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps overeager to find supporting arguments for a hyperrational, tech-savvy world where they hold enormous political and financial power. Pinker’s thesis has supporting evidence, including the plummeting number in populations who die violent, war-related deaths, and how the historical decline of this violence seemingly correlates with the rise of the modern state. Still, psychologist Robert Epstein believes confirmation bias is at play: “Pinker wants peace, and he also believes in his hypothesis; it is no surprise that he focuses more on facts that support his views than on those that do not.”¹⁴ 

One October 2017 study published in Current Anthropology finds that Pinker’s citations of mean ratios of war deaths are “blind to actual population sizes.”¹⁵ The study concludes that smaller populations aren’t proportionally more violent when compared to larger groups, but more vulnerable, and “humans from non-states are neither more nor less violent than those from states.”¹⁶ 

Since 2011, dozens of studies and articles defend - or debunk - Steven Pinker’s conclusions. Yet the most damning argument against Better Angels, and its narrow-minded definitions of violence and exploitation, comes from the man’s own personal life. In 2006, the entrepreneur and con artist Jeffrey Epstein is indicted for sex crimes. Fellow Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz asks Pinker to help with his defence. According to Buzzfeed News, “Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts.” He tells Buzzfeed that he was unaware of the details of the case at the time, and regrets his involvement, but Pinker is in photographs sitting next to Epstein as late as 2014. The scholar appears on the infamous 2002 “Lolita Express” flight records as well.¹⁷ 

What exactly is Steven Pinker’s definition of violence? Is it only a bloody, coercive action, like burying a knife in someone’s chest? How is individual, one-on-one murder inherently worse than the monopoly of the state or a capitalist’s ownership of the property and people around them? Why exactly would a public intellectual who crows about our enlightened age feel so comfortable sitting on a plane that held sex-trafficked, underage girls? Pinker is a clever man, but one whose grasp of structural and institutional violence is laughable. He is, at best, a comfortable, privileged scholar, writing in an age of extraordinary self-commodification, settler-colonial genocide, totalitarianism, and literal ecocide, often as an indirect result of modern political thought, while placating himself and other dazed liberals with platitudes about how enlightened we have all become. 

Sixth Action: Michael Nyman and filmmaker Peter Greenaway meet in 1961 while Nyman is a student at the Royal Academy of Music. When Greenaway decides he wants an original soundtrack for the 1976 short Goole by Numbers, Nyman writes the score, kicking off an extended collaboration over fifteen years and five films. Later, as Greenaway prepares his 1990 movie The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover, he tells Nyman he wants a “slow” piece of music with “a very professional, funereal pace.”¹⁸ This is just what Nyman had written in Memorial, and he ultimately gives the director the cassette to use in the movie as he likes. 

The composition’s insistent violins, cellos, and violas appear all over this allegorical, formalist revenge film, first drawing the audience into the opening footage of dogs fighting over table scraps, gangster Albert Spica’s procession of absurd, sinister, Gaultier-costumed hoods, and, later the steady cooking and cleaning of the workers in Albert’s restaurant, where his wife Georgina and her lover, Michael, make hurried, desperate love. Memorial only appears in its “complete” form during the movie’s operatic, Jacobean climax.

A satire of the free-market capitalism overtaking England at the time, as well as (literal) consumerism, The Cook avoids becoming a stilted parable thanks to the humanity of characters like Georgina, chef Richard, and the poor kitchen boy Pip. Even Albert’s inability to introspect, and his resentment of Michael’s literacy, would be pitiful if he weren’t so loathsome. Over the course of the film, Albert’s henchmen abandon him one by one, disgusted by the degradation and abuse offered to anyone in his vicinity. However, Albert is also a crime boss, and the characters put up with his cruelty until each one reaches a breaking point. The obnoxious thief speechifies about his taste – though he hates most of the food in the restaurant – but where Albert believes his capital liquidity inherently makes him a man of class, knowledge, and refinement, what he really possesses is access. He owns the restaurant, and he pays his henchmen to intimidate and murder. Therefore he can throw diners out, mispronounce every word on the menu, and careen into the back of the place whenever he likes. His crucial mistake is assuming he also owns people, including Georgina. 

Michael, the lover, errs too in thinking Georgina and he will be safe in his book depository. He’s a kind man, and his death is heartbreaking, but like Steven Pinker, Michael believes the life of the mind can liberate oneself from violence, that he can be untouched. His fate then - suffocated by ripped book pages - is all too poetic. You think you are governed by intellect? You think you are safe? Chew on the written word then. Georgina accepts, finally, that her emancipation and vengeance will come through literalizing  Albert’s greed and cruelty, his appetite for everything and everyone. She, accompanied by those Albert has injured and abused, serves Michael’s fully cooked, roasted corpse to the horrified gangster. “You vowed you would eat him,” Georgina tells him serenely, “now eat him.”  

Seventh Action: It is 2014. The Liverpool Bicentennial commissions Michael Nyman to write and perform Symphony No. 11: Hillsborough Memorial with the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra. Mezzo Kathryn Rudge accompanies and sings the names of the Liverpool supporters who lost their lives during the tragedy.¹⁹ 

In later interviews, Nyman is candid about his discomfort over how The Cook uses Memorial. “I thought it was very tasteless and fatuous. I actually felt embarrassed to have taken this particular piece of music out of a genuine memorial situation and to have given it to a situation of gruesome playfulness.”²⁰ It’s easy to sympathize with Nyman’s perspective, especially given the original intent of Memorial, yet it’s impossible to imagine the operatic power of Greenaway’s film without it. The Cook recontextualizes this solemn composition for a grotesquerie, turning the piece’s climax into a note of horrific triumph over a cannibalistic predator. 

Both the film and Memorial focus on violent behaviour, and the grief and loss which transpire in its wake. They defy the technological rationalists who insist things have changed, that this is what Pinker calls the “most peaceable era.” The vivid photography, the red and black costumes of the film, and the insistent, pummelling score suggest otherwise, as if to speak to us directly: “Witness how men can buy and own whatever they like and believe everyone is either property or an animal. Witness the cruelty which seems invisible if we aren’t the victims, or actively seeking it out. Witness how nearly a hundred people can die in an instant thanks to bigotry and panic. Look at it. Look at it. Feel it. Do not turn away.”