According to the teachers who founded the group #DisruptTexts ... They believe that the Bard of Avon should either be removed from school curricula entirely or rebranded in a way that dumps significant criticism on his work as a symbol of white supremacy and colonialism.
Well, sure, if your entire world view is shaped by ideological concepts, allowing no room for consideration of aesthetic quality, then why the heck not toss old Shakespeare in the trash? But if you are that blind to actual literary quality, how the hell did you become an English teacher? Science too hard? The humanities just offer more opportunities for political power trips and general idiocy?
But if it can happen with English teachers then why isn't it happening with Music teachers? Or does the usual requirement that you actually have some skills in music tend to weed out the whackos?
We usually avoid politics quite successfully here at the Music Salon, but occasionally we need to defend music against political inroads. Today is not one of those days, though. Whew! I just wanted to share a piece defending the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC against--what, a mob of barbarians? No, an even more dangerous adversary: its own director, Michael Whitmore. Here is a good discussion piece: Much Ado About Nothing, The Folger Library pledges allegiance to identity politics.
One might have supposed that the world’s largest library devoted to the works and life of Shakespeare would be spared the tsunami of humbug that has overwhelmed so many other institutions and organized activities, from police forces and motor racing to film academies and football. No one would have considered the Folger a racist institution before Floyd’s death or held it responsible for the undoubted injustices in America’s past or present. It was an institution dedicated to pure and disinterested scholarship. Now it is transforming itself into the equivalent of the Marx-Lenin Institute in Moscow, with race instead of class as the master-key to the understanding of history and the world. And just as in Marxist historiography, no one can be a disinterested searcher after truth; in the new racist historiography adopted by the Folger, no one can stand outside his race. He must view everything through its lens.
The Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, issued a statement that proves, if nothing else, that lifetime study of the greatest writer in English does not necessarily conduce to the composition of good prose.
You should read the whole thing, which is not very long. The inescapable conclusion is:
It is clear, then, that the Folger is set fair to become institutionally racist. It intends to hold a series of “critical race conversations,” meaning in all probability uncritical race monologues. “The Folger Institute encourages everyone to engage conscientiously the work of Black and indigenous scholars, and scholars of color, by reading their scholarship, productively incorporating it into syllabi, and using it to frame generative lessons.” In other words, what counts in scholarship is the race of whoever produces it.
Yes, that is the real irony: a previously racially neutral institution is forced by political pressure to become institutionally racist! One wonders why classical music has not had more occurrences like this. Is it just that we are a bit behind, still dealing with the fallout of "metoo"? Are the great classical music schools going to be delivering "critical race conversations" about Beethoven and Chopin? I can't quite see it, but then I would not have expected this kind of drivel from the director of the Folger Library either.
We are dealing with two different pandemics right now: the Covid-19 one and an intellectual one that leading figures in culture, academia and the media seem especially vulnerable to. Signs of infection are mushy thinking entirely devoid of evidence and viewing everything through the lenses of race and sex. We may not have a vaccine for Covid-19 yet, but luckily we have one for the intellectual virus: Thomas Sowell.
One of the topics I assiduously avoid here at the Music Salon is a topic that is particularly frequent in the mainstream media: the funding of the arts. I don't avoid it because it is unimportant--it can be very important. No, I think I avoid it because the public discussion is usually so distorted by hidden agendas, personal interests, pandering to the public, happy thoughts, intentionally misleading information, out and out lies and most particularly, the crucial information being kept secret that it makes my head hurt just to think about trying to sort it all out.
Take for example the simple case of an orchestra going on strike or threatening to go on strike. Obviously each of the sides involved, the management and the union, are trying to spin the facts or semi-facts to their own advantage so media coverage--especially 'unbiased' media coverage--will give equal time to both sides. Sometimes, as in the case of this story, the precipitating event was a press release from one side and countering information from the other side might not be presented.
But in either case, one-sided or balanced reporting, what we don't have, nor have a way to determine, is what the actual truth of the situation is. Whose account is accurate? Is either account accurate? How can we tell? A friend of mine who used to play in an opera orchestra had a sobering experience last year when the opera orchestra decided to go on strike to protest the slip-shod and unethical way in which the impresario was treating the musicians. After a couple of days walking the picket line and being cursed at by the public, who just saw greedy musicians preventing them from seeing the opera, she decided never to become involved in this sort of thing again. Neither the politicking nor the opera!
From being more or less on the inside of things I know that the public version and the truth are often far apart. Sometimes the situation is so complex, it is impossible to tell what is really going on. For example, a story just broke concerning the Banff Centre, a fine institution I have attended a couple of times. Here is the story in the Globe and Mail. They picked up the story from coverage a couple of days ago on Norman Lebrecht's blog, where it generated quite a lot of commentary which is well worth reading. Notice how the two headlines put entirely different slants on the story: "Classical music's future at Banff Centre not in danger" and "arts centre dismantles classical residencies". The problem for me is that at least some of the parties involved have zero interest in telling us the truth: they just want to put their spin on it. Perhaps there are no 'objective' witnesses here.
One kind of discourse that is, to my mind, a sure indicator of political spin comes from the President, Jeff Melanson who writes:
I thank all Banff Centre staff for their support during this transition period, as we continue to redefine our collective vision for the future of The Banff Centre. Over the next few months, we will review the needs of our participants, and consider ways to diversify and strengthen our programming. Our ambition remains to design and implement the most compelling and impactful programming possible, and to continue to offer the very best in creative and professional development for artists and leaders from across Canada and around the world.
The buzz words "transition period", "collective vision", "diversify and strengthen", "design and implement", "compelling and impactful" and "creative and professional development" are a sure indicator that we are being shined on, soft-soaped, happy-thoughted and manipulated. These are all abstractions with no content. Maybe the writer is intending to do all these things, but there is no real content so perhaps he is just going to do whatever he feels like, or perhaps this is just an excuse to fire someone so he can hire a friend. Who knows? And anyone with actual inside information is probably afraid to speak out because their own career could be in jeopardy. Yes, I'm afraid that is often how things work.
Here is another story, the kind that doesn't bother me a bit. The Welsh National Opera is going to put on an opera by Gordon Getty after a big donation from the Getty family. As far as I'm concerned, this is perfectly ok. I understand exactly what happened and what the motivation was and there don't seem to be any secret agendas. When the opera is produced, the audience and critics can make up their own minds. Now let's hear a little music. Here is the overture to La Gazza Ladra by Rossini. In English, The Thieving Magpie:
Norman Lebrecht put up a clip from the tv series The Newsroom on his blog the other day, quoting a description of it as "the most honest three and a half minutes of television, ever." Go have a look.
I put up a comment saying this had no place in a music blog and got both agreement and disagreement. But I've been thinking and I realize that the issue I have here is that this is simply an appeal for unreflective acceptance of a political view: propaganda, in other words. THAT'S the problem I really have. If you are going to talk about music and politics,for example, then it needs to be aware discussion. There are lots of good examples in Taruskin's Oxford History volumes. Take, for example, his discussion of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and why it was so successful. Musically, it was the right combination of Italian and German musical techniques, but it also conformed to the nationalistic needs of the day: Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationhood. Describing how these elements were both integrated into the opera and how they were received by audiences is good musicology--aware musicology.
So what I always try to do here, is have aware discussion. I'm not asking anyone to simply accept my views on what is good or bad music or whatever. I try to present my reasons, my argument for the position. And, sure, I do take up positions. I'm not neutral. But my 'political' position is let's talk about it, not, just take my views as gospel.
Politics is interesting and music is interesting and their intersection is interesting. But only if we are aware of these things. Otherwise, it's just propaganda.
From the ever-useful website of Norman Lebrecht comes this interesting story. Here is a link directly to the website for the recording. If you click on the samples, there are brief extracts from each piece. The one for Stress Position consists of a low register pedal in irregularly accented quick notes. A "stress position" is a kind of interrogation technique involving putting someone in various positions for extended periods of time. Simply forcing someone to stand for a long period of time can be very painful. So, depending on the variety and length of time, stress positions have been determined to be a form of torture or at least"inhuman and degrading treatment". Despite this, they have been used by the British against the Irish Republican Army, by various police forces and by the US. Here is what the composer, Drew Baker, says about his composition:
Pianists spend lifetimes alone in small rooms with antique instruments. This intimate scenario is defined by an atmosphere of confinement as well as an overt physicality. The piano receives the weight of the body and disperses sound.
These simple and rather obvious facts regarding intimacy, physicality and space are essential to my piano works. Whether addressing extra-musical and political topics or simply existing as "absolute music," every piece on this recording attempts to lay bare the visceral intensity that directly results from the act of playing.
He is making a connection here between the self-imposed stress positions that pianists live with (and all other musicians, for that matter) and, apparently, the interrogation technique, I suppose, because he doesn't say that explicitly. On his website there is this further comment on the piece:
Throughout the duration of Stress Position, the pianist must play an unrelenting series of repeated notes at opposite ends of the instrument. This causes the arms to remain extended for the duration of the work. In addition, each hand is stretched to further extremes as pitches are slowly added.
It seems, therefore, that he is subjecting the pianist to the same sort of, well, torture, that the US armed forces use on terrorists. Interesting idea. Again, I am assuming that the purpose of this is twofold: as he says, to involve the pianist and the listener in the "visceral intensity" of playing, and, by having us experience an analogue to the stress position torture, to developing empathy for those subjected to this kind of interrogation. There are other similar piano pieces out there that might have a similar effect. The piano part to Terry Riley's In C, for example:
Which goes on for a very long time, indeed. Or Vexations by Erik Satie:
This is just a brief extract. The whole piece, repeated 840 times, goes on for hours and hours and hours...
My question is, would someone use the same sort of aesthetic technique to create empathy for the victims of 9/11? I.e. will we be seeing a piece soon where the performers and perhaps the audience will be engulfed in flaming jet fuel?
Looking back at my piece on aesthetic virtues and sins, I wonder how many sins this piece exemplifies? Number 1 probably, perhaps numbers 2 and 3 as well.
Much of what is written about the ethical or political dimensions of music is rather superficial. But here is one article that is not. It takes on forthrightly the questions surrounding the use of music during the Third Reich and how musicians dealt with their exploitation--or rejection--according to the needs of the Nazi state.
...by the end of the war it was impossible to claim that art-music was intrinsically improving or ennobling. Although it might have soothed a mass-murderer's savage breast, it had also steadied his gun. And if this realization encouraged a more mechanistic, less spiritual appraisal of music's power, it also raised the possibility that music itself had betrayed society. Given the country's rich intellectual history, its sophistication and cultural pre-eminence, the question of how Hitler had managed to win over the German people and enact Nazi policy became a leitmotif of post-war discussion.
The essay is rich in details:
It is not entirely surprising that most German musicians, faced with opportunity on the one hand and the risk of reprisal on the other, chose something between compromise and complete capitulation. True altruism and heroism are rarities, particularly during times of economic hardship, unbridled fascism and civic paranoia, when neighbors and family members are encouraged to spy on one another, and a network of secret police probes life at its most quotidian. The gifted young pianist Karlrobert Kreiten, whose German tours had provoked comparison with Walter Gieseking, was hanged for listening to a BBC news broadcast. In addition to this capital offense, Kreiten had idly shared his criticism of Hitler with his landlady, who promptly informed the Gestapo.
I encourage you to read the whole thing as the amount of collaboration with an inherently evil regime and the amount of rationalizing and back-pedaling after the war was remarkable. A cautionary tale, indeed.
Another instance of the collision of music and politics is seen in the career of Shostakovich who, living his whole life under the Soviet regime and much of it while Stalin was in charge, lived in fear every day. His response was to attempt to write music--at least the more public symphonies--in such a way as to appeal to the general audience while following, or not breaking too obviously, the precepts of 'socialist realism'. While certainly not a dissident--that would have been a death-sentence under Stalin--Shostakovich did manage to capture the torment and desolation of life in the Soviet Union.
The article by Simon Wynberg is a fine one, but he makes the assertion that music essentially has no moral content:
Of course music can express a variety of emotions and conjure up all manner of associations, which are generated not only by the music itself but also by the circumstances of its performance. But whatever these qualities may be, they are disconnected from concepts of innate good or evil.
But while this is true of most music, I wonder if it is true of all music? Isn't there some music that seems to possess a kind of moral authority? In this category I want to place some of the music of Shostakovich, particularly the Fifth Symphony. I again want to mention an extraordinary essay by Richard Taruskin that captures the complexity of the issue: Richard Taruskin: "Public lies and unspeakable truth: interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony", David Fanning (ed.): Shostakovich Studies, 1995, pp. 17-56.
Try as I might, I cannot quite imagine what Stalin and Molotov might have thought if they were at the first performance. We do know from the testimony of Rostropovich that the ovation from the audience lasted over half an hour...
I have been accused of (complimented on?) being a classicist. Guilty! So I think I look at the intersection of music and politics in a rather old-fashioned way. I'm reading Alex Ross this morning and one item is on the cancellation of Huang Ruo's opera Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Beijing. He links us to this article that gives a full account. Ross' view is the conventional one about "a Chinese arts bureaucracy that is inclined to place limits on creative freedom." I think that all arts bureaucracies place limits on creative freedom. As a matter of fact, I think that the person that is the first to place the most severe limits on creative freedom is ... the composer! Have a look at this post. Some of the finest pieces I know are written with the most severe creative limits. Take The Art of Fugue for an example.
Politics, patronage and parsimony (aesthetic parsimony, that is) always limit composition. Let's take the last two first. In the Renaissance, which has produced an astonishing amount of great artworks, the patrons, whether they be sacred or secular, were very precise and demanding of the artists. We have accounts of commissions where the exact weight of gold leaf to be incorporated in the painting was specified. Music was commissioned on specific texts for specific occasions for an exact fee. Sometimes composers were compensated in indirect ways as well, such as when Guillaume Dufay was given a sinecure post in a cathedral he was never expected to even visit, but there was never any doubt about who was calling the shots and what they expected in return. Modern patronage is more subtle, perhaps, but no less demanding. If you are writing exactly the kind of music expected, for the right artists in the right venues, then you can expect funding from the arts bureaucrats. The irony nowadays is that the arts bureaucracy tends to expect that you write music that genuflects in the correct directions. This may be as true in New York as it is in China. Whereas in China, digging into unsavory aspects of the life of Sun Yat-sen seems to be anathema, in New York, as we see in this other item from Alex Ross which begins with a clip from a performance of Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together by Mos Def and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, it is welcomed that composers take up the causes of the day--in that case the Attica riots of 1971. Annoying the bourgeoisie seems to be required nowadays if you want the arts bureaucracy to consider you a 'serious' artist. The bottom line, now as ever, is that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Aesthetic parsimony, and I wonder if I am the first to use those two words together, is just the fundamental aesthetic principle that you use minimal resources for maximal effect. It is an aesthetic principle that is discovered early on, as soon as you start analyzing music by Bach or Beethoven and are astonished to discover that Bach can turn out any number of preludes, each one based on one simple theme. Beethoven can generate a whole symphony using little more than one interval--a falling third--and a simple rhythm. Not only CAN, but the power of the resulting work derives from the economy of means. Then this lesson is heavily underlined by student composers' first attempts when they discover that the more different ideas they throw into the piece, the more diffuse and confusing it becomes. So limits on creative freedom are important. We must be careful to notice, however, that these kinds of limits are self-imposed.
Politics has become more and more a factor in the arts. It didn't arise in earlier times because art was commissioned largely by individuals and artists were expected to flatter their patrons and not do the opposite. No mystery there. But since the French Revolution music has often been handed a truly political role. One thinks of the festivals of the revolution and the anthems and marches that accompanied them. Music can have a powerful effect in uniting large groups of people, something that totalitarian regimes, whether in France under the Terror, or in the Soviet Union or modern China, have not failed to notice. Shostakovich was required to write patriotic works of socialist realism such as his Second, Third, Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies. When he went outside the boundaries, as with his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, he risked not only his career, but his life. My suspicion is that composers like Shostakovich really didn't have a single political conviction worth mentioning. He was nearly kicked out of the conservatory for satirizing the questions on a test having to do with Marxism. If he was required to write something political he did it. Pieces like the Fifth Symphony, written to rescue his career after a political ban, are immensely complex pieces of music and to interpret them as either Stalinist or anti-Stalinist is absurd. For a brilliant discussion of this whole question please see Richard Taruskin, "Public lies and unspeakable truth: Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony," in Shostakovich Studies ed. David Fanning.
The problem of politics and music becomes acute when music adopts a progressive ideology as it did in the 20th century. Composers who write music in the correct 'language' are acceptable, those who do not are not. I suspect that some composers did, idealistically, adopt the progressive ideology (for the official theorist, see Theodor Adorno), others, like Shostakovich, did what they had to, to survive, while others just held their finger to the wind and realized that if they did such and such, nice grants and commissions would come their way.
My view can be summarized succinctly: music and politics are quite different things and if you try and mix them together both of them suffer.
I see the controversy that I discussed previously here in this post is still going on. Let me underline what I was saying there and elaborate a bit. I am repelled by the intrusions of politics into music--especially guerrilla war tactics such as disrupting concerts and trying to get musicians banned from playing. One of the commentors on Norman Lebrecht's blog had this to say:
"music making is by its very nature a political act" and "any claim that music is apolitical should be contested, since such a claim is itself ideological through and through, a typical ploy by those in positions of power to repress those who are not."
I haven't read such blatant Marxism for years! Yes, it is certainly possible to use music for political ends, though this may result in an unfortunate distortion of the original intention of the songwriter as we see in the controversy over the Bruce Springsteen song "Born in the USA" during the 1984 US presidential campaign. But most instrumental music, despite claims to the contrary, simply does not have the capacity to instill particular political views. Thank god! Music making is only "by its very nature a political act" if you fail to understand the nature of both politics and music! Or only if you see every single human act as being political, in which case I really don't want to talk to you. Ah yes, Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier as well as Shostakovich's preludes and fugues are typical ploys to repress, or perhaps escape repression?
We have an international ban on the use of chemical weapons in war: can't we also have a ban on the intrusion of politics into music? Can't we make all musical concerts a politics-free zone? I have no interest in the political views of performing musicians or composers and I heartily wish they would shut up about them. Let them have complete freedom to express their political views as often and as loudly as they wish, but please don't mix that up with music!
I post this with extreme trepidation as it sometimes seems as if the under the surface politics in music already threatens it to such an extent that discussing it overtly could only make matters worse! As you know if you read this blog, I am very focused on the music itself to the exclusion of everything else. But Norman Lebrecht recently posted this story about the suspension of four symphony players for writing a letter. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians seems to be taking place in London as well, as there were two recent incidents where concerts by Israeli musicians were disrupted by protests. As Norman Lebrecht points out in an earlier post:
A small group of musicians has sent a letter to the Independent newspaper calling on the BBC to cancel this week’s Prom by the Israel Philharmonic.
By "small group" it seems there were twenty-some signatories. The fallout from this, as recounted in the link above, is that four of the musicians signing the letter are members of the London Philharmonic and have been suspended for up to nine months by the board. The London Philharmonic is a player-owned organization and the board is a mixed group of players, executives and supporters. It seems as if the crux of the offence was in including their orchestral affiliation in the signature to the letter, making it appear that the orchestra itself supported the contents of the letter.
I really think we need a Geneva Convention to outlaw tactics like this from the world of music. Music has its own set of ethics and conventions that include everything from how to handle the resolution of a suspended fourth to proper attire for concerts (yes, I'm thinking of you, Yuja Wang). It would seem to me that the ethics of the musical universe should forbid trying to prevent the performance of fellow musicians for non-musical political reasons.
On the other hand, you might be able to make an argument for the banning of certain performances for good musical reasons...
