Sunday, February 20, 2005
More Music and Politics
Every once in a while I've done a course, sometimes accompanied by a concert, both of which are called Rocking the Cradle, about music and radical politics in New York in the 1930's. Should anybody not know, most of the unions and, in fact, the communist party in New York had various performing organizations, choruses, orchestras, etc. All of the musical activities of the communist party were under the auspices of the Pierre Degeyter Club (Degeyter was the composer of the Internationale), including the Composers' Collective, which was founded by Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell. Among the composers who were involved in the Composers' Collective were Marc Blitzstein, Eli Seigmeister, Aaron Copland, Earl Robinson, and Jerome Moross. The Composers' Collective published two volumes of the Workers Songbook. They also sponsored a competition for the best setting of a poem by Alfred Hayes called Into the Streets May First. A number of people, including Seeger and Blitzstein submitted settings, but the winner was Copland. His setting was published in the second volume of the Workers' Songbook, and, apparently, on the front page of The Daily Worker.
The members of the Composers' Collective had more or less struggle sessions in which they criticized each other's music on the ground both of the quality and the political correctness. Their great model was Hans Eisler. Seeger thought that the most successful product of the Collective was The Cradle Will Rock, Blitzstein's union opera. I think that actually the work that comes closest to meeting the aims of the whole project was Robinson's Joe Hill.
I admire the people in the collective as composers--most of the things they wrote were really terriffic--but also as idealists. I'm also charmed and attracted by their rather naive thinking that if they were interested in radical (for the time) music and radical politics, then everybody else who was interested in radical politics must be equally interested in radical music. Most of the masses, of course, really just wanted to hear Rudi Vallee. Seeger was apparently the first one to point out that if they were writing songs to be sung on picket lines, piano accompaniment might not be the best idea, since it would be hard to bring a piano to the picket lines. It was later that he and Ruth and Pete discovered American folk music--in the 30's the received wisdom was that there wasn't really any indigenous American folk music.
I envy those composers their illusions about the general interest in what they were doing and their ability to shape the popular consciousness with their music. These days "classical" music is so marginalized--even in what one might consider intellectual circles, and "modern" music gets such a very small piece of that particular pie. That situation itself is at least partially the result of a political idea--that the market should determine the worth of anything and everything in every situation, leading to the complete disappearance of practically every kind of general music education, and the resulting shrinking of a general understanding of/interest in Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, let alone Reich and Adams, not to mention Carter and Babbitt, or what influence any of them might have on politics, or even on general intellectual life.
Of course I deeply regret the possibility for me or any of the rest of us to influence the current political situation, I am much more distressed by the insidious calculated effort to rob all of us of our cultural heritage. Of course people with money will, for various reasons, a lot of them venal, continue some interest in various kinds of arts. But so much of what is in fact our common cultural heritage (I'll say it again) is more and more out of the reach--or even out of the ken--of people without means. I spend a lot of my time teaching at the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory. On a number of occasions my colleagues with children have remarked on the fact that they couldn't afford for their children to study there. I wouldn't be able now to get the kind of education which I was able to get several decades ago. I find this situation very distressing, especially since it isn't getting better and I don't see how it's ever going to change.
On a brighter, maybe, more hopeful and inspirational, maybe, note, I'm reminded of an excerpt from Randall Jarell's The Obscurity of the Poet, which seems to me to be about the most profound statement about the importance of art in a democracy, and which I'm continually surprised to find that few people know, since it seems to me that everybody should:
'Art matters not merely bacause it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of out lives, but because it is life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone--for which of us could have learned for himself what Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke, Shakespeare and Homer learned for us? and in what other way could they have made us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and contradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind which contains them, in some sense a single truth? And all these things, by their very nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can. If while most of our people (the descendants of those who, ordinarily, listened to Grimm's Tales and the ballads and the Bible; who, exceptionally, listened to Aeschylus and Shakespeare) listen not to simple or naive art, but to an elaborate and sophisticated substitute for art, an immediate and infallible synthetic as effective and terrifying as advertisements of the speeches of Hitler--if knowing all this, we say: Art has always been a matter of a few, we are using a truism to hide a disaster. One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared: that in a democracy bread and justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody. [bolding is mine] If a democracy should offer its citizens a show of education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous than their old illiteracy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all, but one more variant of those 'People's Democracies' which share with any true democracy little more than the name. Goethe said: The only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love. But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destory it and ourselves.'
posted by Rodney Lister
9:58 PM
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