EIF 26: Global Ideas Stage - Music

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh - 12/08/26

Wynton Marsalis (trumpet), Beth Taylor (soprano and accordion), Hamish Taylor (piano), Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, Nicola Benedetti (violin).

How can music particularly, and the arts more generally, spark the human moral imagination in confront the dark realities of a world in turmoil? That was both the implicit and (at times) explicit question that weaved its way within and between the EIF Global Ideas Stage at the King’s Theatre on a sweltering afternoon.

The core of the events itself was a series of one-to-one dialogues, followed by a panel discussion, featuring filmmaker Ken Burns, lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and truth-to-power journalist Amy Goodman, alongside Harvard University professor and author Sarah Lewis. However, it was the practice of music that both framed and punctuated the conversation, rooting it in both local cultures and the power of creativity.

Before the opening interview with Burns, whose own documentary film on The American Revolution features the sounds of both the deep South and Black emancipation, Wynton Marsalis walked through the audience to the stage, trumpet to lips. His hauntingly improvisational evocation of “Amazing Grace” was combined hope, elegy and longing.

Soprano Beth Taylor and pianist Hamish Brown also caught the mood well with a delicate, accordion-accompanied rendition of Burns’ iconic “A Man's a Man for a’ that” which seemed to pose its message as a question rather than a simple exclamation.

Following a discussion on the Scottish Enlightenment in a global context (between Gordon Brown and Professor Adam Dixon from Panmure House, the last home of Adam Smith), the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers took to the stage for a third time in the 2026 EIF.

This time is was for an exquisite performance of the traditional spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”. The twist, lyrically and semantically, was how that ‘nobody’ became an undeniable ‘somebody’.

After all the words, including the powerful drumbeat of social justice from Bryan Stevenson and a stirring rebuttal of media complacency from Amy Goodman, the last statement was from Nicola Benedetti’s violin. Her performance of the band Fiddle Fever’s “Ashokan Farewell” seemed knowingly adjacent to the spectre of climate change. The tune takes its name from a former village in the Catskill region that is now mostly covered by the Ashokan Reservoir.

But literally the last word was a note of dissonance from a heckler the gallery. Why not a hint of Gaza or genocide amidst all this talk, he asked? Silence was the deafening answer.