Saturday, February 26, 2005
Music and Politics and Women
A few days ago we were talking about music and politics. One of the ways that music can be political without changing the music itself is in its presentation. The concert series, Women’s Work, presents primarily women composers. Most concert series present primarily men composers. It is a political act to choose music to be performed around a theme such as women composers or French composers or Jewish composers, for several examples. There has been a lot of argument regarding whether or not this is a good idea. I think it is a useful idea to present women composers together and will continue to be useful as long as most concert series present primarily men composers.
When I go to art museums I always look around to see which paintings were painted by women. I am especially pleased when I like a particular picture and discover that it was painted by a woman. One of the great pleasures for me in going to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC is that all the paintings are by women. It is a thrill to see their collection and their special shows. If you haven’t been, you can look around on their site at http://www.nmwa.org/. The NMWA building is pink marble!
In case you are interested in attending the concert series, Women’s Work takes place March 3, 17, and 31 at 8pm, at Greenwich House in The Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow Street in New York City. For information and to see the beautiful poster celebrating this series, call 212.242.4770 and go to www.gharts.org.
Women’s Work 2005 begins on Thursday, March 3 at 8pm with chamber works (string quartets and piano solo music) and songs performed by the Aviva Players, which celebrates its 30th season this year. March 17 is a solo piano concert by Dr. Claudia Knafo. March 31 has the wonderful CASE Saxophone Quartet plus two pianos and cello from Pennsylvania.
posted by Beth Anderson
10:34 AM
Friday, February 25, 2005
two points
I have two seperate comments on this thread, so I'll try to be concise.
1. I don't think it's fair to presume that Brittaney Spears doesn't "think deeply about her art." She's a first-rate performer, whether you enjoy her performances or not, and I don't think you get to be a first-rate performer without a tremendous amount of thought and practice. I am sure that she could perform the "deepest" pop and jazz standards totally convincingly. So she's picked a genre that doesn't get any respect -- so what? Now let's think for a moment about the songs that she performs and the composers who write them. It takes a huge amount of talent and artistry to write a pop song that is as well constructed and appealing as the songs that are written for Brittany. Those songwriters may be applying their talents to a maligned art-form, but their talents are formidable nonetheless. And the production value of her albums is extrordinary -- yes her music designed to appeal to the masses, but it takes talent to appeal to the masses.
2. I think a lot of people take the wrong lesson from the Babbit article. His point was that audiences and compsers need to accept the fact that in many cases they live in different worlds. The audiences need to stop getting angry with the composers for writing music that the audiences don't enjoy, and, more importantly from my perspective, composers need to stop getting angry with the audiences and the culture for not liking their music. David Taub says "Unless composers write music that expresses something, and is not written for other composers at an intellectual level, their music is doomed to be relegated to obscurity." To the extent that any music is capable of "expressing something" (a subject for another day) Babbit _does_ express something -- it's just not something that most people are interested in. And that's okay; Babbit has told us that if we're not interested he doesn't mind if we don't bother listening to his music. But to say that he will be "doomed to be relegated to obscurity" is to imply that the goal of composing is to reach a wide audience. Babbit is interested in reaching a narrow, specialized audience, and at that he is very successful. That neither David nor I find ourselves in that audience is irrelevant.
Where Babbit goes astray, in my opinion, is when he claims that academic specialist composers have a right to public funding in the same way that physics or mathematics specialists do. I'm as big a fan of the NEA and of public funding as anybody, but I see the portion directed to obscure new music as public generosity rather than public responsibility. Math, sicence, and many other disciplines benefit the general public but can't necessarily get the money they need in the market -- obscure new music that nobody wants to hear or ever will hear doesn't. (Although I'd love to be persuaded that I'm wrong about this point.) Classical music isn't "dying" as so many people say it is -- it's moving from mainstream to subculture, and we either need to find a way _in_the_marketplace_ to keep it mainstream, or get over our egotism and accept that we are a subculture and behave accordingly. I enjoy industrial music, and there's some brilliant work out there, but I don't hear industrial bands clamoring for public funding.
posted by Galen H. Brown
8:51 PM
Yehudi Wyner's new concerto for the BSO
Last week the pianist Robert Levin and condutor Rober Spano performed a newly commissioned work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra by the composer Yehudi Wyner. In the interests of full disclosure, I do know the composer personally and I admire the few pieces that I have heard by him. Nevertheless, what I have to say about the new piece is not entirely subjective.
The previous evening I had attended the Boston Modern Orchestra project's concert entitled "Minimalism." So, I was naturally expecting something quite different from the earlier evening's concert. We have all attended concerts with high hopes that we would encounter something new that perhaps would produce a long-lasting and memorable experience. The Boston Symphony concert produced something even more shocking: a first-class masterpiece by a living composer.
What was so good about it? Well, besides the extraordinary, clear dramatic profile, the elegance of design, the sense that the musical material was comensurate with its length and development, the musical narrative was surprising and inevitable. Many of these wonderful qualities (including the novel orchestration) may be attributed to the idiomatic writing for the piano and the overall quality of the counterpoint. In addition, the composer paid the greatest compliment to the audience by rewarding them for paying attention.
posted by Larry Thomas Bell
8:29 PM
hitting a nerve
I suspect I really hit a nerve with the last post, given the number of comments. I think that's a good thing-it's important to have an open, free discussion, which I think is a great benefit of a blog.
There are composers who feel that it's appropriate to write music only other composers are likely to appreciate (the WH Auden model). That's fine.
And there are those who feel music composition is a business; to paraphrase one comment, composers sell "notational music" and should do something to attract consumers. That's also fine.
And apparently there are composers who are content to write music for themselves, with the desire that others listen, but that is not the primary objective. And that's fine too.
While my preference is the third one, that's not to say any one approach is valid for everyone. As a corollary, one can have many people who admire his or her music, and that shouldn't suggest that the music is inferior. In addition, one's music could be liked only by a small crowd of people, if at all, and that doesn't mean the music is bad either. I'm not sure there is a definite relation between one's audience and the quality of one's music. Besides, quality is subjective. I never understood how one "wins" a composition contest. How can any work of art be objectively judged, anyway? Would a Botticelli beat out a Kandinsky because Botticelli is more intricate and detailed? Should Two Pages by Philip Glass be judged inferior to a lavish orchestral work by Wagner because the latter is more complex? Why judge at all, in terms of which works should win contests? Isn't it all subjective anyway?
posted by David Toub
3:54 PM
Thursday, February 24, 2005
meaning vs. obscurity
Not to prolong this thread, but...
With all due respect to WH Auden, he's wrong. Or maybe that is true for poetry, but certainly it should not be true for music. As Steve Reich once indicated to me in the 80's, one would have to be a very strange composer not to want to have people listen to his or her music. I've written my share of complex music; there's nothing wrong with complexity, nor is "melodic" music automatically great---far from it.
It gets back to the issue of "meaning." Unless composers write music that expresses something, and is not written for other composers at an intellectual level, their music is doomed to be relegated to obscurity. Period. Messiaen recognized this, I think. The second of his Quartes Etudes de Rythme (Mode de valeurs et d'intensitis) essentially serializes every element: pitch, attack, duration. It's a great piece, one that I've loved since I was a teenager. But I've always found it interesting that AFAIK, Messiaen never did anything like this again. The piece works because the music is well-suited for this approach, and is relatively short. I think Messiaen realized that to do such a controlled approach again and again would likely produce rigid music devoid of any meaning or emotion (which is not the case for Mode de valeurs). One problem I have with "academic" composers like Boulez and Babbitt is that they did not realize this limitation; they started serializing everything as if serialization for its own sake was a great thing. It's not.
Again, just an opinion, but I'm serious in that if composers merely write for each other (which might imply some level of trying to impress others in the same profession), they will be missing out on producing music that is more than a footnote in a musicology journal. Just as there is a difference between data and information, there is a big difference between writing notes and composing music. My 3-year-old son plays notes. Music implies arranging notes to express something, just as my son can splash paint on a piece of paper but not approach the artistry of Jackson Pollock.
There's also the other extreme-writing to please the audience. That doesn't work, and is no better than writing just for the appreciation of other composers. Composers should write for themselves---if it's genuine, and expresses something, then listeners will at least have respect for it. When composers write for the audience and not themselves, once the fad is over what's left? There is a good analogy from business: if you ignore profit margins and try to do right by the customer, the profit margins will take care of themselves and the business will succeed (at least that was Dell's approach). Similarly, if you write music for yourself and are honest in that pursuit, ultimately people will listen, and other composers will at least have some regard for your music beyond just analyzing the notes to death.
posted by David Toub
12:53 PM
writing for each other
I can't resist at this point mentioning the following quote from W. H. Auden:
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow poets. The poet's audience consists of myopic school teachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow poets. So a poet writes for his fellow poets.
(I couldn't find it where I thought it was, so I kind of got if off the web, so it may not be completely accurate, but it's close enough.)
posted by Rodney Lister
12:22 PM
American Music and American Politics
A central thread of this discussion of Politics and Music seems to be focused on the generation that came of age in the 1950s, so I appreciate Cary's attempt to bring things up to date. I’d like to throw in a statistic that relates to generations coming of age today and in the near future: Agenda Inc. of San Francisco reports that 40% of the songs that made Billboard Top 20 in 2004 included mentions of at least one specific brand name, and 50% name at least one form of weaponry.
Gives W a lot to be proud of, doesn’t it?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
11:25 AM
Music and the Market
Just so we're clear, I don't think all academics are bad, nor do I think all pop stars are good.
But music is, more often than not, written for a market, either cultural or commercial. (These are not mutually exclusive, by the way). And this generates a great deal of questionable art, both on the university stage as well as on pop radio. That’s okay too. Though we are not always successful, perhaps the nobility is in the attempt.
Composers in the academy usually write for each other. This provides entry into their particular market segment, and we all hope to find acceptance there. Fast travel and communications, as well as the leveling effects of the market, have resulted in some composers in California that sound just like some composers in New York. Occasionally, the original voice pops up, but it's unpredictable just when, how, and where this occurs. If we hear about a trend or a composer, it's often because, beyond the musical craft itself, marketing forces align to make something happen.
Britney Spears, for example, is an entertainer, and a marketing construct of remarkable proportions. (I mean commercially, not physically....) Her appeal is carefully researched, segmented, and targeted with as much craft and knowledge as can be brought to bear--though the discipline is different, and less musically than economically driven. What she sings, what she wears, how she walks, are carefully crafted, and reactions and sales are carefully charted in search of (please pardon the expression) a great bottom line.
And though Britney may lack the depth of Igor, in terms of her popular market and commercial power, she's wildly successful in terms of how our society rewards its most prized citizens: $$$.
It's dangerous to make judgments about what people actually think, but I doubt Ms. Spears thinks deeply about her art--her marketers to do that. I wonder if art music composers consider "depth and meaning" too. The American trend seems to be a quest for new sounds, new methods, and a show of facility in developing and exploring musical material that might result in big prizes--and that's all wonderful. We need these explorations and acknowledgements. But to paraphrase Corigliano, if composers speak in secret languages and join secret clubs, then we shouldn't be surprised if no one understands or cares if we exist.
For many "outsider" artists, their target is only themselves, so they are less invested in what an outside market can do for them. This may result in some of the most interesting work, if we ever actually hear of it. But if it has merit or at least interest, such work might then be co-opted by the mainstream. Minimalism, atonality, impressionism all started on the edges as a reaction to something.
Okay, gotta go finish a commission and write a grant, or I don't get paid.
I'll try to infuse them with some meaning along the way.
Meaning is hot right now.
posted by Cary Boyce
11:12 AM
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
academic
Well, part of my point was: Mr. Toub doesn't like Babbitt and finds Carter vapid and forgettable. I happen to think they're both great composers and their music seems to me full of substance and meaning and, for that matter, great beauty, not to mention drama, etc. I'm happy to agree to disagree about this, there being no accounting for taste and it being a big world, and all of that, but I'm not happy about not giving them the benefit of the doubt in regard to their intention to write what seems to them to be meaningful and satisfying.
As to "Who Cares If You Listen?": I've been thinking about that lately since I've been reading Babbitt's Collected Essays to review them. It's pretty well known that Babbit's original title for that article was "The Composer as Specialist." The Editor decided the title under which it was published in High Fidelity was better. It certainly was eye-grabbing. One could say the editor was really only encapulating what the article was saying, anyway, and I suppose one might see it that way. It seems to me, though, that Babbitt didn't intend that message. (And, for whatever it matters, he's on record as strenuously denying that he intended anything like the message of that title.) The article does say basically that since the layman wouldn't question the authority of the expert doing advanced work in science and mathematics (even though nowadays they do), why should the musical layman feel entitled to question people doing advanced work in music. The obvious answer to that is that a composer is not supposed to be doing advanced work in music, he or she is supposed to be writing music, which by definition is supposed to be communication of some sort. I think there is different problem which is pointed the article, though: a composer spends an enormous chunk of his or her life listening to music, and an awful lot of it, of all different kinds, and thinking, and thinking seriously, about music (not just his own) in a very technical kind of way, to an extent and in ways which a non-composer almost certainly doesn't. (I was trying to avoid a word like technical, but I couldn't think of a less loaded one). Even though what, presumably, first drew him or her to music was, presumably, what also draws the "layman," it would seem to be inescapable that he or she would end up with at least a slightly different, insider, sense of things. One would hope that this "insider's" view wouldn't be an obstacle to his music communicating to someone who wasn't a composer. But, also presumably, a composer tries to write the music that seems most satisfying to him, and it would seem that some times this might leave the composer writing music which is meaningful and satisfying to him which somehow alludes others. (Among works which I think can be said to be intended for insiders (written for other composers?) and concerned with highly technical matters in a very specific way (academic exercises?) The Art of the Fugue, the Von Himmel Hoch Variations, and The Musical Offering of Bach, the Mozart Haydn Quartets, The Diabelli Variations, and bunch of Brahms pieces fall alot more into that category than the Schoenberg 4th Quartet or the Carter Variations for Orchestra, to name two randomly chosen pieces). I can't see, though, that there's a virtue in a composer writing music which doesn't seem to him or her to be as satisfying as he or she can make it just because he or she is afraid that somebody else won't like it. In fact, what can a composer possible go by except his or her own instincts about what's meaningful or beautiful, and how can he or she do anything other than try to frame a piece as carefully and soundly and elegantly as possible?
I don't think anybody would claim to think that academic exercises were musically satisfying. The rub comes with determining what might or might not be merely an academic exercise. It's all too easy, though, and glib, to throw that accusation around.
posted by Rodney Lister
10:57 PM
give them a choice
Jult52 quotes a friend as saying "if pop music were to disappear, what would people dance to?"
And (coincidentally) today a dancer friend of mine told of appearing as a guest teacher at a high school in Massachusetts. He asked the students to bring in some music. They brought in Britney Spears. So he showed them how to improvise a dance with the recording. The next day he brought in Le sacre du printemps, and showed them that the same improvisatory techniques they were using with Spears could be applied to Stravinsky. Within minutes, the energy in the room was exploding.
On the third day, he said, "Okay, which one today? Britney or Igor?" The vote was unanimous, and the soon a gaggle of teenagers was happily stomping about to The Rite of Spring.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
7:34 PM
re: More
[This was entered as a comment on the preceding post, but was truncated so here is the complete entry FWIW]
I don't think your question is particularly offensive, so I figure I might as well up the ante. In my opinion, there are those who compose without meaning or substance. I recognize that this is entirely subjective, and one man's meaning is another man's mindless dribble. However, there have been many works I've sat through with the most open of minds, studied the scores, etc. listened over and over again trying to see what someone might have seen in them, only to come up empty handed.
When I was a teenager in the 70's, it was very inexpensive to attend concerts of "new music" at what was then Carnegie Recital Hall. Usually, these were concerts of the ISCM type, in which there was a small crowd, most of whom appeared to be the friends and students of the composers represented, and the applause was polite. But 5 minutes after each piece, I couldn't remember anything about the works in question, nor did it make me feel anything one way or the other. Not even anger, just nothing.
In my opinion, music needs to express something. Perhaps we're talking about acquired tastes, but even some of the most "difficult" music of composers like Feldman, Riley, Webern, etc. clearly express something. One might not like the music, and that's ok, but you should feel something. You should feel that the composer is trying to express something or other.
In contrast, (and here's where I really up the ante!), "academic" works do absolutely nothing for me. I'm not trying to generalize or categorize. However, I think people like Carter, Babbitt, Wuorinen and other "uptown" composers write for each other on an academic plane. Maybe this is what gives musicologists pleasure, but it does nothing for me whatsoever. Remember, it was Babbitt who wrote a now infamous essay "Who Cares if You Listen?" and I really do think he was serious.
I used to spend hours studying the scores of Carter, listening to records of his works, etc. really hoping to find something of interest. I really, really wanted to like his music. But with the possible exception of a few measures of his earlier work for harpsichord, flute and cello (or whatever it is), I have yet to find anything to engage me. The scores are pretty to look at, and appeal to my intellect in terms of their complexity. But the music is vapid and forgettable, in my opinion.
Now, I have nothing major against most music that I don't like. There are works of Adams, Nancarrow, Schoenberg and others that I really don't like (I love Schoenberg, but his opus 26 is really dull and strikes me as an academic exercise on the order of "Look, I can write a 12-tone work for something other than the piano!"). However, I can still respect the music as expressing something, just something I may not like to hear. Writing music as an academic exercise is anathema, in my opinion. I'm fine with music I think is garbage, because at least it makes me feel something. Not everyone will like my own music (my wife can't stand the string quartet I wrote for her many years ago, for example) and that's fine. Maybe no one will like it. And that's ok, so long as it makes them feel something.
True story: I had sent my former department chair, a wonderful older ob/gyn, a CD of my music courtesy of my iBook, and he sent me a nice e-mail telling me that it gave him a headache. But at least it made him feel something...
posted by David Toub
7:06 PM
more
Well, just to ask the question in the most offensive way possible, who the hell doesn't think he or she is writing music with meaning and substance? I don't think I know of anybody who sets out to write insubstantial music without meaning, (even those bad old academics) do you? For that matter I don't think I know anybody who's not trying to make sure that his or her music is concerned with drama and narrative. Easy enough to try to do, obviously not so easy to accomplish.
posted by Rodney Lister
2:26 PM
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Music, Politics, and the Search for Meaning
As a politically active composer (I'm sure the FBI has a hefty letter file by now), I'm proud to be among the ranks of concerned composer/citizens who voice opinions about the often laudable, sometimes reprehensible actions of governments--both ours and others. And while I don't focus much on political issues in my music, it's bound to crop up occasionally. Artists, as well as politicians, have a rhetoric, and most feel at least some obligation to use it. (Now, if only we could only use our powers for good...)
But it does make me wonder--Many art music composers, myself included, have complained of art music being marginalized, that we're losing ground with an audience. There is reason for this, but it's not entirely the dumbing down of arts and educational programs. Hell, Plato and Socrates complained of that. The number of people seeking meaning (whatever "meaning" means) in their arts and their lives is actually greater than ever before.
So with so many kinds of interesting music and arts in this country, isn't it weird that NPR and others who bankrolled the research were surprised that people actually have more than a single taste in music? And is it any surprise, that so much "new" music in academia, say between 1945 and 1980 or so, with it's abstraction and sentimentality of despair to the exclusion of so much else, became marginalized?
But even with a diveristy of tastes and styles, I would suggest that there are common factors in keeping an audience: Meaning. Substance. Something new to say. Something worth hearing twice. Something that touches the human condition.
if "meaning" is absent, then no matter how beautifully crafted, simple or complex, powerful or beautiful on the surface a work may be, if an original voice and a sense of communication is absent, then the audience drops away. If there is nothing new being said, no element of the human experience touched, the audience drops away. If it's all about color or craft, then the audience drops away. It's not to say a new or radical piece may not have a rocky beginning. But over decades and eras, if there is no audience, then to ask a famous question the other way, "Who cares if we compose?"
It's an interdisciplinary age, both in politics and arts, as well as between artistic disciplines. We must learn to understand "those people" who are not like us. And I suspect art music composers had best learn to think outside of our narrow world of harmony and rhythm and into the world of context, drama, narrative, language, politics, meaning, substance, and so on if we want to get new, young listeners in the door, and sell more than ten CDs a year.
(Hmmmmm, makes me wonder....)
posted by Cary Boyce
10:19 PM
Music Critics and Re-viewing the Reviewers
In preparation for the March 20th panel discussion Re-viewing the Reviewers
(with Kyle Gann, Iris Brooks, Pauline Oliveros, Dr. Melanie Mitrano, and Al Margolis at The Gallery at Deep Listening Space in Kingston, New York. Information: http://www.pofinc.org/index2.html) I’ve been reading “Maestros Of The Pen: A History of Musical Criticism In America” by Mark N. Grant. It is a very interesting book partially because it looks at music history through the eyes of music critics. It is also well written, engaging, and tells a story never mentioned in music school.
posted by Beth Anderson
3:03 PM
Re: More Music and Politics
Congratulations to my colleague Rodney Lister for such an eloquent post on music and politics. I have very little to add to what he has said here and I have no quick fix about our current situation. Nevertheless, Rodney's post did persuade me to re-read some of Roger Sessions's essays on music and reflect on how our time is not entirely unlike the period of the thirties.
In an essay written in 1933 called "Music and Nationalism" Sessions writes: "This is of course the reason why modern political men of the type of the Nazi leaders whose power must ultimately rest on their ability artificially to stimulate and direct or even to manufacture popular passions, concern themselves inevitably with art and with culture in general. In its essence art reveals the inner nature of life and of men, and thus must be eternally opposed to those who are trying to force human impulses into purely interested channels. That art may sometimes be inspired by enthusiasm for a cause may be readily admitted, just as it may be inspired by any really profound feeling whatever. But when it remains on the level of an organ or reflection of popular prejudice, the artist has 'made the great refusal' and abrogated his responsibility as a man and therefore as an artist as well."
posted by Larry Thomas Bell
8:51 AM
Monday, February 21, 2005
Seventy-five years later
Rodney Lister’s post (below) is fascinating for many reasons, but there’s one way of summarizing it that I find particularly haunting:
- 1930: no one knew there was any such thing as American Folk music.
- 2005: no one knows there is any such thing as American Art music.
Of course, these are broad generalizations, but they speak to a common blind spot in our cultural self-awareness. Why can’t the most pluralistic society on the planet imagine itself creating great music of every kind?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
8:54 PM
re: Music and Politics
Art and Politics have always existed in a sort of dysfunctional symbiosis. Artists use art to justify or promote political ideologies, and politicians use art for the same purposes. But Artists and the public and politicians also condemn works of art, or aesthetic practices, for exhibiting ideologies that they disapprove of. Shakespeare wrote plays expressly designed to curry favor with royalty, the entire system of artistic patronage by royalty and religions imposed political restrictions on artistic expression, Hitler co-opted Wagner, and the Soviets exerted creative control over the state's artists while in the US the communist artists used art to promote their Socialist viewpoints. And just in the last few years, John Adams got cancelled for being to sympathetic to the terrorists in Klinghoffer, and then Pullitzered and Grammied for writing a tribute to the September 11 victims. It's never going to stop, but even if we think the relationship is dysfunctional and unhealthy, to demand that artists withdraw from the political arena is itself an act of political oppression.
So what do we do about it? We encourage audiences to do their best to separate Aesthetics from Morality. We ask the audience to defuse the problem. Stupid art has been made about great ideas, and great art has been made about terrible ideas; if we can separate the two, we are better equipped to appreciate all art and less vulnerable to manipulation by politicians and artists alike. We can make our political decisions on the practical merits, and our artistic choices on the aesthetic merits.
Now none of this is going to stop me from writing music that advocates a political viewpoint -- but if you ignore my opinion and only listen to the music I promise not to be offended.
posted by Galen H. Brown
4:27 PM
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
which comes first?
I agree with David. Politics (inevitably) inform art, but shouldn't (ideally) inform art criticism.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
9:08 AM
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