A long time ago, I had as a signature for personal emails a quote: “Reform is born aloft on the wings of song.”

That quote came from Mark Noll’s book God and Race in American History:

As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.

That comes to mind because I just started reading Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler 📚

From the intro:

Typically history is written without much regard for music, and music is often heard as residing outside history. This book instead asks what might happen when we peer at each through the prism of the other—that is, when sounds are entwined with stories and we listen to the past through music’s ears. I have taken this approach not for the sake of “filling in some gaps” but in the hope of illuminating and activating the possibilities that open when we attempt to hear music as culture’s memory. And because these goals are fundamentally generative, because they relate to how we live today and how we experience art in the here and now, I do not consider this book primarily a work of elegy. Instead, among many other things, it becomes an experiment in the reciprocal enchantment of music and history. That experiment will have succeeded only if each one becomes fuller, and more luminous, in the presence of the other.