Music and politics are uncomfortable bedfellows no matter what your political or aesthetic theories are. But here is one writer that takes the bull by the horns: Strings attached: How politics corrupts classical music. The author is Austrian composer Rina Furano. Here is an excerpt:
For most conventionally successful classical artists, ensembles and concert halls, scrambling for subsidies is a daily reality. But before any youngsters start dreaming about state-funded stipends, let it be said that there is a major pitfall to this practice, which everyone in the industry knows, but nobody likes to talk about in public: Musicians who rely on politics for their daily bread effectively sign up for serfdom to the politicians controlling the grants — both artistically and personally. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
In my native Vienna, classical music’s supposed capital, this is euphemistically known as Freunderlwirtschaft — roughly: murky business with friends, or less charmingly: cronyism. To see local and national politicians invited to, and courted at, events and fairs for composers is the norm, not the exception. The director of Vienna’s largest music university, MDW, even went so far as to open the Austrian Composers Association’s annual meetup a few years ago with the words: “It is our first and foremost duty as creators of music to spread a political message.” I was struck with disbelief; truculently, I had always thought the first and foremost duty as a creator of music was — to create music. The director, meanwhile, proceeded to go into detail about what the current political message was supposed to be, much to the contentment of the politicians dappling the audience. Vienna is not an isolated case by any means; indeed one would struggle to find any territory in Central or Western Europe where things are different.
I have just been reading some essays by Richard Taruskin bemoaning the aesthetic pitfall that high art classical music fell into of the myth of aesthetic autonomy, so reading this is a bit jarring. It is as if everyone read Taruskin and decided, no, we are going to be very socially engaged and as a reward, we will get lots of government stipends. I don't think that this is what he intended.
Read the whole essay for the author's solution, basically, cultivate private donors and try to do something musically worthwhile. Ah, ok!
About the only thing I am comfortable with these days is music as an entirely private pursuit. At least there are no aesthetic, economic or ideological problems.
The Symphony no, 15 by Shostakovich would seem as good an envoi as any. Bernard Haitink conducting.
Those were the days, when the worst thing Shostakovich had to worry about was Stalin.
2 comments:
The solution is obviously not a solution so much as a recapitulation of Ecclesiastes 9:11. The race is not to the swift or victory to the strong nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the clever but time and chance happen to them all. Arts education can foist a delusion on students by suggesting that prosperity came to the canonized and in that sense I find that critics of canonist decrees about Art have more than a valid point, they have history on their side.
I take the point about Vienna with a grain of salt. This WAS the city that had a bunch of secret police monitoring musical activities in the Biedermeier era, right? I finished a fun little book on the subject a few years back.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/music/nineteenth-century-music/musical-life-biedermeier-vienna?format=PB&isbn=9780521104845
Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (Cambridge Studies in Music
Alice M. Hanson
The Bachs wrote plenty of solid music in the service of both the church and the prince(s) for generations. I suspect people can misread Taruskin's comments about the malaise of aesthetic autonomy at the price of any social utility. It's possible for music to transcend its initial social utility (Charles Rosen tersely noted much of the canonized keyboard literature was, strictly speaking, pedagogical and didactic literature). Music that aspires to political relevance tends to aspire to such relevance at the outset with no other actual value thrown in for good measure. Music that has NO social use has no reason to be heard but music can have more than one social use. Dance music can eventually be listened to as something besides dance music and any number of jazzbros felt that jazz lost its soul when it stopped being music to dance to. Well if that "is" true then it's about the dance and not the music, unless people want to go mainline Gerardus van der Leeuw on the former fusion of all the arts. ;)
Erasmus vented spleen about a flip side to the fusion of politics and aesthetics, saying that if you dared to complain about the shrieking boys singing English polyphonic music within England itself you'd likely get reported as a possible Lollard heretic to the authorities, which was why he waited until he was safely back on the continent to rant about English church music, Bob Wegman documented and translated that rant in his book on the crisis of music in the early modern period in Europe, which I've alluded to a few times in the past.
So, sure, music has always had an "uneasy" relationship with throne and altar but Taruskin's polemical point that the liberation of music from both eventually brought a crisis of social utility wasn't even Taruskin's point, it was Adorno's. The difference between Taruskin and Adorno was in saying that maybe music SHOULD have "some" kind of social usefulness to merit patronage.
Paul Hindemith (whose music Taruskin hated) was fairly blunt in suggesting much American music education erred in teaching students they WOULD make a living as musicians when they would be better taught to love and practice music as a hobby. Music that is most free from serving anyone's "interest" is music done by the amateur (a la Barzun's quippy little essay about the role amateurs have played in arts that "professionals" don't sufficiently appreciate).
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