"An art national in form and socialist in content"

We usually think of Russia and its predecessor the Soviet Union as being on the opposite side from the USA of not only international power politics but also economic and social questions, but that was not always the case. For a period in the 1930s and early 40s, there was considerable harmony of aesthetic ideology between the two nations--at least in some circles. The quote standing as title for this post comes from Joseph Stalin and it expressed the new approach in the Soviet Union in 1932 when the RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), the politically radical side, and the Association for Contemporary Music, the more professional association, were replaced by the Union of Soviet Composers. The idea was a compromise: "a professional contemporary art music that would remain accessible to workers and peasants because it would draw on familiar folk and popular idioms." [Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, p. 656]

In the US, leftist politics were having a significant influence on compositional practice. One figure was Marc Blitzstein who studied in Europe and heard the Three Penny Opera of Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht.

Encouraged by the exiled Brecht, whom he met in New York in 1935, Blitzstein composed The Cradle Will Rock, a "play in music" (to his own libretto) in ten scenes embodying what the composer called "an allegory about people I hate" that would through a combination of entertainment and political harangue persuade its intended middle-class audience to join the class struggle on the side of the proletariat... [Taruskin, op. cit. p 649]

I think we have heard something like that before! After the premiere in New York in 1937, itself surrounded by scandal, the cast party was at the Downtown Music School administered by the Workers Music League, an adjunct of the American Communist Party, itself under the discipline of Third International of the Soviet Union. The League also sponsored the Composers Collective of New York, loosely based on the Russian Union of Soviet Composers. The membership included Charles Seeger and Elie Siegmeister as well as Blitzstein. One concert in March 1934 sponsored by the organization was devoted to the music of Aaron Copland and was reviewed by Seeger in the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. An excerpt:

For one of the finest definitions of revolutionary musical content yet made, we hail Aaron Copland's "Up Against!" And with vigor, too -- that is the essence of the Piano Variations. Their chief shortcomings seem to be that they are almost too much "against" -- against pretty nearly everything. So some day Aaron, write us something "for." You know what for! [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p.653]

Let's have a listen to those Piano Variations.

Of course that is more in the aggressively avant-garde mode, but through the 1930s in works like the ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! and the mass song "Into the Streets, May First" Copland began to move towards a style more appropriate to a proletarian art. One good example is Prairie Journal, originally commissioned in 1936 under the title Saga of the Prairie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEm6bVD2Wxw

Copland, like other composers of the day, including Virgil Thomson, was searching for a new musical style that would be comprehensible to ordinary people, the proletariat. In the words of Charles Seeger, a music that was "national in form, proletarian in content."

I was planning to look at how Dmitri Shostakovich responded to similar ideological requirements in the Soviet Union, but that will have to wait for a follow-up post.