Classical Music and Political Radicalism

[Ralph]

From The Telegraph:

Political cacophony
(Filed: 11/05/2006)

Classical music still burns with the radical spirit of the 1960s, writes Ivan Hewett

Pop and classical music are often thought to live in separate worlds, but they connect in some surprising ways. I was reminded of that last week, when I read my colleague Neil McCormick's lament on the lack of political fire among young pop musicians.

It seems that, these days, they're all fixated on their private lives, or on their girlfriends'. If you want protest songs, or just an awareness that there's a world beyond the front door, you have to turn to oldsters such as Patti Smith.

I was struck by how similar things are in classical music. Back in the 1960s and '70s, everything seemed charged with political energy, but it wasn't shown in obvious ways, such as protest songs. It was to do with changing our perception. The effort to create new languages of music felt like part of a bigger enterprise for a better world.

Sometimes, the connection became overt. The Italian composer Luigi Nono tried to raise the consciousness of the proletariat with his car-factory concerts in Turin. Another Italian, Luciano Berio, wrote memorial pieces for Martin Luther King. The German composer Hans Werner Henze had a sudden flush of revolutionary fervour when he met student leader Rudi Dutschke, and then went off to Cuba. Even someone as purist as Pierre Boulez was rumoured to have been communist in his youth.

The trouble with this middle-class political music was that it floated far above the world it was meant to change. You can't whistle Nono's electronic tape piece La fabbrica illuminata while manning the barricades.

The British radical Cornelius Cardew realised this, and tried to create a real proletarian revolutionary music, writing simple, pugnaciously optimistic songs with texts by Chairman Mao. But these went too far the other way: the feelings expressed seemed as fake as those heroic statues of Socialist Man and Woman that came tumbling down with the fall of communism.

The experience of the 1960s and '70s seemed to show that political music is caught in a dilemma. If it uses radical language to say radical things, it can't connect with real political and social life. If it says simple things in a simple way, it loses all emotional subtlety and turns into propaganda. If the choice is that stark, then it's a lost cause, and we shouldn't be sad about the disappearance of the ideological strain in new music.

But I am sad, because we seem so much poorer without it. The retreat to the purely aesthetic in the past 30 years has led to a depressing lowering of the emotional and intellectual temperature of new music. We hear so many safe, high-gloss pieces that seem to have no urgent reason for existing.

However, the good news is that the radical spirit hasn't gone. It's just that, as in pop music, you find it in people who might be old in years, but are marvellously young in spirit. One of them is the American composer Frederic Rzewski, who's in London this month for a retrospective of his music.

He declines the title of political composer, saying that, unlike Cardew, he is not a provocateur. But he also says he is not into abstractions: "I am interested in life and the relationship of music to life." He's written pieces about the Iraq war, about union-breaking in American cotton mills, about the Attica prison riot in New York state in 1971. His best-known piece is stirringly entitled The People United Will Never Be Defeated.

That sounds as if it could be a tub-thumping piece of propaganda, but Rzewski never stoops to that. His music keeps the subtlety of art, and all the freedoms gained by Modernism. What it junks is the Modernist obsession with purity.

Rzewski's music is wonderfully impure. His piano pieces ask the player to rap on the wood, blow whistles, stick things in the strings, grunt and hiss rhythmically, even recite poetry. The notes themselves are full of references to folk song, protest song, art music, jazz, you name it. But these things aren't just quoted, they're put in a highly wrought context that gives them an aura of imaginative freedom. This is how he avoids the pitfalls of avant-garde political music. It is simultaneously anchored and free, Utopian and yet with its feet firmly on the ground. Go hear it while you can.

[Werner]

I'm inclined to think there is no rational response to this these and no logical connection between music and political attitudes.

The case of Rzewski is interesting - not that I pretend to be able to analyze the connection between the two tendencies in his case. I'm thinking of an early piece of his, the variations "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." A leftist theme if ever there was one. And yet the work itself - originally recorded by Ursula Oppens - struck me as something in the way of a modern-day "Diabelli Variations."

Among performers, Maurizio Pollini, a notably dignified, cool, intellectual artist, is famously a man of the left. Among our posters here, our own Pizza, of deep musical culture and judgment, occupies a place way on the other side.

As a teenager at school in England - many years ago -I remember visiting a professor of music. All I remember about him is that he had a rare piano with dual keyboards, and that he expressed very leftwing sentments. So the dichotomy between art and politics is nothing new.

[Ralph]

I'm inclined to think there is no rational response to this these and no logical connection between music and political attitudes.

The case of Rzewski is interesting - not that I pretend to be able to analyze the connection between the two tendencies in his case. I'm thinking of an early piece of his, the variations "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." A leftist theme if ever there was one. And yet the work itself - originally recorded by Ursula Oppens - struck me as something in the way of a modern-day "Diabelli Variations."

Among performers, Maurizio Pollini, a notably dignified, cool, intellectual artist, is famously a man of the left. Among our posters here, our own Pizza, of deep musical culture and judgment, occupies a place way on the other side.

As a teenager at school in England - many years ago -I remember visiting a professor of music. All I remember about him is that he had a rare piano with dual keyboards, and that he expressed very leftwing sentments. So the dichotomy between art and politics is nothing new.

*****

Of ccourse Beethoven had strong political views which he expressed in music but absent knowledge of his ideas and the times the pieces are inherently and immutably apolitical.

Opera and theatre express political and social values in ways absolute, even programmatic, music can't.

[BWV 1080]

The political composers gravitate toward the Left because it provides a quasi-religous, all encompassing worldview. The Marxist rhetoric of political liberation in composers like Nono is an easy substitute for the religous salvation of earlier generations. Conservatives tend to have a much more mundane view of politics, and unlike the left, do not tend to politicize every aspect of life.

[Modernistfan]

This is a fascinating topic and it is very difficult to draw consistent conclusions. In some other artistic areas, notably literature, there seems to be a strong connection between modernism and the political Right. Two outstanding examples were T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The American novelist John Dos Passos, almost forgotten today, started out as a socialist but eventually veered to the extreme right.

As for music, the connections are all over the board. Edvard Grieg, a relatively conservative musician in his music, was liberal in his politics to the extent that he got into a lot of hot water for comments he had made in France during the Dreyfus Case that Dreyfus was innocent and was being railroaded. He was virtually booed off the stage at one concert, after which he refused to play in France. During the same period, Vincent d'Indy was vociferously anti-Dreyfus, while Alberic Magnard was strongly pro-Dreyfus, dedicating his "Hymne a la Justice" to the pro-Dreyfus cause.

Perhaps the most perplexing example is Anton Webern. He was a student and supporter of Arnold Schoenberg and his own music was banned during the Nazi regime in Germany, and after 1938 in Austria, as "entartete" (degenerate). Before the Anschluss, he had worked for the Vienna Workers' Chorus (probably affiliated with the Socialists) and the Jewish Cultural Institute for the Blind. Despite that, he later expressed a great deal of sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis. It is very difficult to understand what he might have been thinking or what motivated him. The Webern case has mystified supporters of New Music ever since.

[Ralph]

The political composers gravitate toward the Left because it provides a quasi-religous, all encompassing worldview. The Marxist rhetoric of political liberation in composers like Nono is an easy substitute for the religous salvation of earlier generations. Conservatives tend to have a much more mundane view of politics, and unlike the left, do not tend to politicize every aspect of life.

*****

Right. That's why conservatives, some not all, care so much about what goes on in the bedroom.

[Corlyss_D]

I'm inclined to think there is no rational response to this these and no logical connection between music and political attitudes.

Me too.

[Barry]

While reading the Swafford Brahms biography, I was a little amused to read that Brahms reacted with something along the lines of "Serves them right.....let the oppressors get what they've got coming to them for once" (that's a very loose quote) when he read about Custer's last stand.

[Corlyss_D]

While reading the Swafford Brahms biography, I was a little amused to read that Brahms reacted with something along the lines of "Serves them right.....let the oppressors get what they've got coming to them for once" (that's a very loose quote) when he read about Custer's last stand.

Barry gets the Post of the Day Award.

Herr Brahms must have been reading too many accounts of the noble savage.

[srappoport]

Opera and theatre express political and social values in ways absolute, even programmatic, music can't.

This can be true. Think of Don Carlo or the Va pensiero chorus.

[BWV 1080]

The political composers gravitate toward the Left because it provides a quasi-religous, all encompassing worldview. The Marxist rhetoric of political liberation in composers like Nono is an easy substitute for the religous salvation of earlier generations. Conservatives tend to have a much more mundane view of politics, and unlike the left, do not tend to politicize every aspect of life.

*****

Right. That's why conservatives, some not all, care so much about what goes on in the bedroom.

Right, as opposed to liberals who would mandate that everyone publicly celebrate what some people do in theirs.

[Corlyss_D]

That's why conservatives, some not all, care so much about what goes on in the bedroom.

I don't think any conservative worthy of the name cares about what happens in other peoples bedrooms so long as it involves only consenting adults.

[Ralph]

That's why conservatives, some not all, care so much about what goes on in the bedroom.

I don't think any conservative worthy of the name cares about what happens in other peoples bedrooms so long as it involves only consenting adults.

*****

"worthy of the name." That lets out a lot of folks.