By The Landlord
"The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth." – Charles Luckman
"One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.” – Justin Cronin
“The square is a treasure precisely because it doesn't masquerade as an outdoor museum. It's a living place, jammed with people, changeable, democratic, urbane.” – Michael Kimmelman, from City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
"I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free." – Pete Townshend, The Who
Valleys, fields, mountains, town squares, stadiums, huge halls, commons, caves, vast wildernesses. They are the canvas on to which people can pour, painting the place either sparsely or in vast crowds. Open spaces could be a source of heavenly, blissful solitude, or hellish isolation, frightening crushes and battles, or uplifting unisons, entertainment and and mass expressions about things that are just fun, or really matter. And as we’ve seen this week, following the death of George Floyd in the US, demonstrations, many peaceful, and also flashpoints erupting angry violence, stoked further by mindlessly brutal police politically charged teargas attacks. An open space is something where anything can happen.
It is perhaps ironic, and tragically so, that during this inconceivable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of people have died due to a virus that attacks the respiratory system, that a man should die, crying out that “I can’t breathe” not from that, but because another man, a racist cop, supposed to be in a position of authority and trust, was pointlessly and ruthlessly kneeling on his neck. And that demonstrators against such violations are then also unable breathe because teargas is fired on them. Open spaces are exactly the kind of places where we should be able to breathe freely. How quickly things can change.
George Floyd’s family join in a rally to protest his death at police hands in Houston
So week’s topic is wide open too, but its focus is songs set in, or mentioning prominently, any open space, somewhere mostly exposed to the sky or at least with a broad horizontal area and a vast, high ceiling. Open spaces might be left alone to nature, but they can also be where society expresses itself, where habitual life is enjoyed, coffees are drunk on piazzas, to where history is marked and revolutions happen, such as Beijing’s Tiananmen Square where student demonstrations the the spring and summer came to a head by the tank clearance on the anniversary of today, 4 June 1989 Thousands are thought to have died in that time, especially in western Beijing away from the square, but Tiananmen became the focus of this fight for human rights, especially with the iconic photograph of the plastic bag-carrying unknown ‘Tank Man’ who stopped in front of armoured vehicles in the aftermath.
The famous image of ‘Tank Man’ at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, after the massacre on this day, 4 June 1989
Revolutions in squares have been going on for centuries. St Peter’s Square in Manchester, now a place for small festivals, statues, shoppers and Christmas markets, was of course the focus point of worker’s rights demonstrations, where on 16 August 1819, cavalry needlessy charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people, as captured in Mike Leigh’s film:
That tragedy eventually brought about change, and hopefully the current events will too, but they always come at a cost. Another square, Tahrir in Cairo, was occupied for weeks in early 2011 as part of the Arab Spring revolution. That location saw an extraordinary 2 million protestors, many camping out.
Over 2 million protestors at Tahrir Square, Cairo in 2011
But however huge demonstrations may occur in wide, open spaces, all are dwarfed, if temporarily curtailed, by the vast changes brought about by climate change as forest fires rage, land is scorched by endless droughts, and other areas are flooded. Whatever Covid-19 does, it is nothing compared to how all of our spaces will be profoundly affected by climate change. This recent silent demonstration of thousands of pairs of shoes in London’s Trafalgar Square captures two crises in one, but points to a grim warning to our future
Trafalgar Square, London: Thousands of children’s shoes symbolise the threat to our future over Covid-19 and climate change
But your song suggestions need not necessarily be about dramatic events. They could also capture open spaces of happy ordinariness, parks and those pieces of urban or other wilderness where you like to get some quiet time. Though the moment I really feel for the hard-pressed park staff whose jobs involve picking up after thousands of picnics and mass leisure gatherings in city parks, having to clear up after the many who unthinkingly leave their trash behind or think nothing of ruining a resource that is so vital to sanity, exercise, and indeed, space to breathe.
But opening up from the city, vast open spaces are also the inspiration for many songs, especially across American culture, from indigenous populations to the pioneering invaders, with a history of trying to conquer those areas into a form of idealised civilisation. As usual, because the Song Bar itself has a vast, open air beer garden that can fit an infinite number of patrons, we have many new guests in today to talk about this topic.
Here’s the writer Sara Paretsky, capturing a peculiarity about human behaviour between the city and the country: “People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more."
Fellow writer Camille Paglia expands her ideas on this subject rather grandly: "America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism."
While that wilderness might encourage violence, many are also are worried about how these vast landscape might be destroyed. Trump continues to threaten to ruin Alaska, as well as national parks with oil drilling. And ecological concerns have been going on for years. “Many of the green places and open spaces that need protecting most today are in our own neighbourhoods. In too many places, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development,” says former vice-president and eco campaigner Al Gore.
"Unless action is taken soon - unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period - we will lose the treasure of California's open space and environmental beauty,” says Adam Schiff.
Monument Valley - iconic inspirational space for the history of pioneering white America
Open space is vital to us. Many in the Bar are keen to emphasise this. “People need open space. People need to bring their children into an area where they can play without restriction. People need fresh air. They can do without buildings. They can do without concrete. But they cannot do without fresh air,” says Wangari Maathai, Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize.
In contrast though, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas sees open space in a different way: "Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky."
"As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development. Says writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams.
But American writer and Anglophile Bill Bryson is also here, and is worried more about Britain in a way that is against open space: "An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space."
John Constable’s Stour Valley and Dedham Church (c. 1815)
Now though, taking a more ethereal view on the topic, "If you create any open space within yourself, love will fill it,” says writer Deepak Chopra.
But let’s have a songwriter’s view on it. "Two things I'm obsessed with are the countryside and fields and being in the open space and body parts, so you'll hear me mentioning body parts and human anatomy. I've listened to my songs and I think I am quite visual and I talk about bones and flesh a lot,” says Ellie Goulding.
We like to stretch the timespan of our guests to as wide an open space as possible here at the Bar, and let’s have a word now from Seneca the Younger: "If ever you come upon a grove of ancient trees which have grown to an exceptional height, shutting out a view of sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity."
Monument Valley is the iconic view of the American cowboy film and is also a fascination for artists and actors of all kinds. "I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West,” says painter David Hockney, while actor Anthony Hopkins tells us: “I love traveling. I like to keep moving. I love the big open spaces in America."
But not all wide spaces attract conventional taste. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley spotted a different open space to fire the imagination: “The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
And lastly, there’s the biggest open space of all – space. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield reckons the response to that can be a mixed blessing: “You can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia - a fear of wide, open spaces - simultaneously on a spacewalk.”
On that note and moving lastly into film’s depiction of wide open spaces, while Monument Valley is ever present in the cowboy genre of John Huston and many others, surely among the greatest portrayers of open space in film is Stanley Kubrick, not only in 2001:A Space Odyssey, but also in another masterpiece, 1975’s Barry Lyndon, in which he captures the English landscape in a manner that visually echoes many great paintings by Constable and others, as shown in this comparison:
But from that tranquility to two there examples from history where opens spaces attract a variety of human activity. The 1994 French film La Reine Margot, directed by Patrice Chéreau from the book by Alexandre Dumas. captures a period in that country’s history of political upheaval and unrest, conflict between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots , all centred around King Charles IX, and his mother, Catherine de' Medici, a scheming power player who offers her daughter Margot in marriage to Henri de Bourbon, a prominent Huguenot and King of Navarre, but also bringing about schemes the notorious St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Huguenots in 1572. The film perfectly captures how open spaces are used as a place of courtship, dance, but also extreme violence.
And finally, and not for the first time, who could resist the fictional film based on the novel Perfume, Patrick Süskind’s Paris-based story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille genius collector of odours, but also a murderer, but who seduces a huge crowd in the square were he is supposed to face execution, but the perfume confuses the crowd into a state of rapturous bewilderment, causing them to have a mass orgy due to a big whiff of his greatest creation.
Over then to the vast open space our your music knowledge and imagination for song nominations on this topic. I’m delighted to say that conducting the orchestra in this space, is the mighty guest playlist Maki! Please put your song suggestions in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlists published on Wednesday. Explore the space!
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