Sunday, November 13, 2022

"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.


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.

2 comments:

  1. As a proletarian musician myself, I can only reflect on how much my full-time labor eclipses my opportunities to improve my music skills. I find myself murmuring how much I yearn to retire, so I can put the time into the explorations and practicing and playing I daydream about while working on roofs. My hopes for that leisure are tied to my investments in the stock of publicly-traded corporations, currently too distressingly devalued for me to check on. I'm waiting for the app that I can set so that when TSLA hits $1400 USD, it will automatically sell my stock and notify both me and my boss that I have retired. Meanwhile I practice daily, often not picking up an instrument until 10pm, after a long day of work, shopping and cooking, chopping wood for heat, etc.

    As a patriotic American, I had tried to develop a special enthusiasm for American composers, but as skilled as Copland, Bernstein, etc were, my broadest surveys of music history keep landing me in Monteverdi's orbit. Hardly proletarian music, then or now, but capitalism has raised (virtually) all boats, such that for a half hour's wages per month my Spotify subscription (and the various stereos I've acquired over the years) the technology affords me the ability to study (again, virtually) any music I like.

    I think that in many ways I live better than the kings and elites of the time my music comes from. I have as much sympathy for the poor as I did decades ago in my Trotskyist youth, but now I appreciate the "mndane" yet magnificent institutions that make my life possible, from governments and corporations to schools and civic organizations. It makes me feel pretty conservative at heart, whatever my opinions might be on the fleeting issues of the day, mostly quite liberal by historical standards. That's because the bane of conservatism is the unstoppableness of change. In fact, In Immanuel Wallerstein's tinly little book Utopistics, which I read over 2 decades ago, I read the idea that, given longer views of time, the non-revolutionary societies change every bit as much as the revolutionary ones. No need to rush into things rashly.

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  2. I always treasure your comments, Will, for their deeply reflective observations.

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