Mick Wallis

Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties

The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning 'high art' poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five- day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

A PLAYING-FIELD in South Wales, 1 May The veteran is a real veteran, living proof of 1939. A paying audience on tiered scaffolds struggle brought up to date and into have watched 2,000 other local people enact immediate presence. Locally lived history is a history of the Welsh working class, an seen in its genuine continuity with events episodic account of its strengths and its on a global scale. A narrative gives coher- struggles. Some perform as members of ence and perspective to history. Both the choirs, others have become involved indivi- sturdy might and the protective strength of dually. The Pageant of South Wales now nears a community are imaged - once by that nar- its end. There is a fanfare, and a group of rative, and again by the shape of an event uniformed men march into the arena to the performed by a community to and for itself, music of the Spanish Republican Hymn. and present in mass. One steps forward and speaks: The programme helps the spectator to follow the events in the arena. The simul- I am one of the little band that went out from South Wales to fight in the International Brigade taneous speaking and reading of words, the in Spain. I am going to ask you to rise, all of you, utterance of clearly selected and scripted and swear with me this oath of victory. phrases, producing the sense of a litany, In the name of Wales and its people, in the enhance the felt value of the oath. But the name of our high-wrought past, in the name of programme also importantly acts as a our traditions, in the name of all our battles in the fight for freedom, on this day 1st May 1939, souvenir, a trace to be carried away of that we solemnly swear not to relax until freedom, sensation of special presence, of bearing and the prosperity that can only be brought by witness. The same event was staged simul- the power of the people, bring back the sunshine taneously in three separate locations. It to our land. All those in favour shout 'Aye'. rained, and fewer turned up than expected. You, who are reading this programme, and all around you, shout the answer, and the Bands To many in the mid-1930s, the march of play - THE INTERNATIONAL.1 fascism across Europe looked as if it might be unstoppable. Faced with this crisis and The words are given in the programme, so this perception, Communist policy changed. that all might sing the Communist anthem. The assumption had been that capitalism

132 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 was in final crisis. As the legitimate embodi- received version of the narrative recounts ment of the organized international working how the vigorous, urgent, and defiantly class, the Party should have no truck with working-class politics and aesthetics of the the parties of social democracy or reformist late 'twenties and early 'thirties gave way to trade unions, since these had already demon- class compromise and a retreat to bourgeois strated their complicity with capital. theatrical values and 'amdram' institutions. But by the time of the Spanish Civil War The movement was misled. Stalin's pact in 1936, the old strategy of Class against with Hitler demonstrated the Comintern's Class had given way completely to a new abandonment of international Communism logic: the need for a United or Popular Front in favour of socialism in one country, state against fascism. The Communist Party of capitalist nationalism. The leaderships of the Great Britain and its satellite political, educa- British and other Communist parties obedi- tional, and cultural organizations were now ently sold out their members and their class. seeking both the co-operation of other orga- In such an account, the supposed theat- nizations and the membership of individu- rical retreat either reflects or is a typifying als from a very broad 'progressive' political instance of an overall political retreat. A spectrum. counter argument is that agit-prop merely The advent of the Popular Front in Britain hectored its auditors and typically gave was also marked by changes in Communist them neither practical nor theoretical per- theatrical repertoire and organization. A spectives - that, in short, it failed both as short spate of publications in the 1980s has agitation and as propaganda. And this helped identify this as a shift away from the claimed failure is linked to the failure of mobile agit-prop practice of the Workers' Communism to stem the tide of reaction Theatre Movement to the work of the Unity during its sectarian phase. That tide is seen Theatres in London, Liverpool, Bristol, and as being stemmed at least temporarily by Sheffield. In this and a subsequent article, the united fight against fascism, the transla- I aim to extend the available picture of tion of an imperialist war into a people's war. theatre-related Popular Front cultural acti- Four interrelating questions arise here. vity in Britain by describing and analyzing One is the actual nature of the cultural some of the pageants mounted by the Party practice in concrete terms. A second is the and its workers after 1936. relationship of this to an overall political practice, its role in relation to other organi- zational and rhetorical activities. A third is A Popular or Unpopular Front? the politics of historical interpretation - Popular Front theatrical product was not as what value we place on the choices taken. uniform as some commentators have im- And a fourth is a more general and abstract plied. Chambers (1989), for instance, provides political question of form - how it constructs ample evidence of the variety of forms and a relationship to reality, situates the spec- performance situations employed by the tator in relation to others, and offers or Unity theatres. These were by no means withholds the sense of agency, or of unified confined to naturalism on the 'curtain stage': or decentered subjectivity. performances of the mass declamation On We need to interpret the past to make Guard for Spain at Trafalgar Square or at choices in the present, and those choices public meetings are an obvious case in include attention to forms of cultural pro- point. The pageants, mounted outside the duction and product. These two articles are remit of the political theatre clubs, are intended to contribute towards such choices, further witness to this variety.2 but not to arbitrate them. The material Simplified claims about Popular Front presented here might be mobilized in the theatrical initiatives make the job of criti- making of such choices, but can only use- cizing the general political turn in European fully serve this purpose if the four questions Communism all too easy. For example, one are not collapsed into one another. They

133 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 are importantly related but are not inter- religion, which would both deeply engage changeable.3 the spectator and also deliver a secular, These articles will briefly describe, situate, materialist message. and analyze a number of pageants. How- Yet form and content are not so separ- ever various in its forms, most Popular able. To what extent does the form merely Front cultural product bears the clear marks deliver faith, offer the spectator immersion of the changed political project. Thus, there into a process which promises sublimity is plenty of evidence here of materialist while actually delivering oppression and Marxism having recourse to idealist images, objectification? For some, the narrative from of middle-class artists writing for working- Bolshevism to Stalinism has the shape of an class performers, of women seen as the re- inevitability, the juxtaposition of a Commu- positories of peace and human feeling, of nist rally with one at Nuremberg a shape the construction of heroic narratives. There is something like a mirror. also evidence of the powerful popularization But the totalizing emphatics of an agit- of Marxist theory, of the galvanizing of a prop sketch are not the same as a totalizing community, of a sober self-reflexivity. critique, and neither of these are the same thing as totalitarianism. However integral Dominant or Counter-Discourse and typical a part of a political practice agit- prop sketches or pageants or pantomimes These and the earlier left pageants from may be, the temptation to reflect a rhetorical which they derive can be seen as a special analysis directly into a generalized political form of meeting or demonstration, as highly critique can be a temptation to reductionism.4 articulate means of imaging a community to The turn to the United or Popular Front itself or constructing the illusion of such a against fascism was not simply the result of. community. They are part of a felt tradition the Comintern's edict. The move to a new of protest and celebration. While I do not political perspective also emerged amongst intend to offer the material as one station in rank-and-file working-class Communists. It a heroic narrative of continued struggle and was not just that the sectarian politics of resistance, some may want to see it as such. Third Period' Communism had damaged As will become clear, this very image of recruitment. Fascism threatened the survival democratic effort as a constant thread, a of the very institutions on which working- voice subdued but never silenced, is strong class struggle could base itself. For many, within the performance texts themselves. the nature of the Spanish Civil War was As I shall show, they - like their prede- clear. The probable and indeed eventual cessors - are also appropriations of spectac- world war might well be a fight between ular forms employed by the dominant states on behalf of competing blocks of apparatus of commerce and the state at both capital, hungry for new markets and raw national and local levels. The early century materials: but it also needed to be fought is crowded with pageants of empire, of local and won in order to preserve the possibility 5 history and trade. When and to what extent of a future transition to socialism. is such an appropriation able to operate as If Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy and a 'counter-discourse'? When does it merely Franco's Spain lost the Second World War, it surrender to the dominant? is clear now that capital won it - and that And an immediate context for their fascism still eats at the heart of Europe, both understanding - as well as a demonstrable East and West. Communism has collapsed, cue for their making - is the use of such with few mourners. But there can be no huge events elsewhere in Europe. Mass second-guessing history. We cannot know spectacle was a major propaganda tool in what would have happened had the Third the Soviet Union from the early years. It was International taken a different line in the consciously seen as a pseudo-religious form - mid-thirties, or the Trotskyist Fourth won an outward mimicry of the ritual ecstasies of the initiative.

134 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 Mass participation - and an intimate moment. Top: scene at the Communist Party's Earl's Court rally in July 1939. It was claimed that a thousand actors took part in the pageant - and that seven hundred new members were enrolled. Bottom: time-out from a costumed rehearsal for the Pageant of South Wales in the previous May.

135 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 Calls have been made in the recent past Percy Grainger. Within the context of the for a performance culture geared to a broad- dominant culture, such a starting point left cross-class politics. Yet the relations of might well signal the construction of a sense mass consumption and organizational con- of national heritage. For instance, the dec- ditions on the left are now so different as to lared aim of an almost simultaneous event, prevent these spectacles from being any- the London Music Festival - a 'five-week thing like candidates for emulation in the long family party of musicians and music service of this or any other initiative.6 These lovers' patronized by the royal family and events were opportunities for people to bear overseen by Beecham and Owen Mase - was witness to a belief, a resolution, or member- 'to make apparent, not only to our own ship of a community. Some of them attempt people, but to Europe, what we are doing as to recruit. Most are explicit attempts to a nation'. But as I shall demonstrate, the popularize political theory. They do ideo- Bush festival reclaims this starting point to logical work. inaugurate not a discourse of national tradi- The rhetoric of the Popular Front con- tion, but the theme of 'folk' - the People. tinued directly into the promotion of the In fact, the phrases just quoted are from a idea of a People's War. An examination of full-page advertisement carried in the prog- pageants made after 1945 demonstrates that ramme for the Festival of Music for the People. the discourse, the structure of key categ- Its presence there is a measure perhaps of ories, the 'structure of feeling' of the Popular the sheer need to raise cash, but is also a Front persisted in some residual way in this sign of the redefinition of a political oppo- (by then increasingly marginal) form. And sition into an implied free market of ideas. the main work of the second of these two There is maybe still a notion of 'their music articles will be to contextualize Popular and ours', but the boundary of the unspeak- Front pageantry in relation to similar con- able or intolerable has moved. From the temporary forms within the dominant culture, perspective of the Popular Front event, high- and to map the evolution of each out of ear- brow middle-class flagwaving looks less lier practices.7 sinister than it might have done to other This first article looks at the pageant eyes early in the decade. Music and the People which stands in direct This seemingly casual inclusion of an challenge to dominant cultural product - advertisement for a hostile event might and bears eloquent testimony to the shifts in appear to have the shape of an aristocratic British Marxist rhetoric that the fight against negligence - the attitude that 'all this can be fascism evoked. It is one of the three parts of coped with'. And this may then appear to be the Festival of Music for the People, mounted symptomatic of the class relations of the in London from 1 to 5 April 1939. event. Crudely, the 'folk' festival can be seen as an intended celebration of working-class tradition, imagined and marshalled by an People's Festivals, Mass Markets upper middle-class composer, whose hostility The idea of the festival had occurred to the to nationalist jamborees is real but not urg- Communist composer Alan Bush around ent in a personal sense. June 1938. It was to comprise three events: By 1939 this shape of a class relation had the pageant itself at the Albert Hall on for a long time been the subject of debate Saturday 1 April 1939; a concert of folk and contestation. The question of the relation- songs and popular music at the Conway ship of the working-class movement to the Hall on 3 April; and lastly a concert of a heritage of bourgeois culture is at issue more classical nature at the Queen's Hall on within Marxism from the time of Marx. The 5 April.8 threat of dilution of a class politics that such The Conway Hall concert begins with a cultural engagement may bring has been four numbers from the British folk tradition much discussed. The Festival of Music for the as recovered by Vaughan Williams and People and other large-scale Popular Front

136 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 events were part of a deliberate move to a Williams and Grainger settings, they turned politics of class collaboration. The question to modern versions of Hungarian folk songs: of the class purity of socialist cultural work Kodaly's 'Matra Pictures'. The sequence of is particularly foregrounded.9 But also fore- opening numbers constructs an image of grounded is the question of consumption, of two sorts of extension or connectedness. the conditions of reception. There is the sense of reaching back to This event takes its place within a tradi- recapture a people's culture, a sort of retro- tion of resistance, but it also positions itself spective persistence of a popular voice. And within the marketplace. The event is at one there is the sense of an international, univer- level a ritual affirmation of persistent soli- sal folk: the roots of a common democracy. darity. At the same time, an ideological The next piece maintains the international claim is brought into the public sphere of dimension, but now brought urgently up to relatively highbrow entertainment. This en- date. The reassuring communality of the tails a patent recognition of the power of choir gives way to the isolated figure of forms of mass consumption. While the event soprano Anne Wood, who sings the 'Three as a whole does not have the obvious shape Cantatas for Solo Voice' of Hanns Eisler: of a mass commodity - its repertoire does 'News from Vienna 1938', 'Cantata of Exile', not extend to 'jazz', for instance - it is none and 'Prison House Cantata'. As the dis- the less recognized as a commodity, a thing courses of socialism and anti-fascism are competing in the market. It celebrates the introduced, one woman stands in double People as a subject in history while addres- relation to the body of the choir: as a lonely sing the mass, the object of capitalist figure for alienation and loss, and as the production.10 lyrical voice still able to stand and bear wit- ness. The promise of the People's strength persists, however dark and lonely the times. The Programme for the Music Festival Lastly before the interval, the Fleet Street This rhetorical negotiation is made the more Choir returns to sing Schonberg's 'Peace on apparent by the working assumptions of Earth', embracing even this modernist pageant-making established in the ten or so composer in the people's canon.12 The text, previous years. The need to emulate cine- by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (translated by matic values is a repeated assumption made Nancy Bush, nee Head), presents a narrative by pageant-makers from the late 'twenties. of the universal longing for freedom of the The pageant as a form claims an organicity: oppressed. The first two stanzas tell how the its rhetorical procedures are appropriated Christian promise of salvation had been an from Hollywood. hour in which that hope revived, only to be Excellent standards and immensity of followed by 'deeds of bitter striving'. Then scale were important to the meaning of both the third reflects: festivals: but while the one thought to luxu- riate in national accomplishments, the other Yet the deathless hope still lingers was forthright in its assumption of a That mankind will break its bondage That the rule of might can never forward-looking internationalism. The Fes- Reign on earth eternally. tival of Music for the People was 'designed to pay a tribute to the musicians of Europe Justice lives, however fettered, and in spite who have linked their art to the progressive of death and sorrow. The stanza ends with social forces in which they lived or are the promise that a state will rise tomorrow, living'.11 to install eternal peace. The fourth delivers A look at the concert programmes will the promise: demonstrate how this sense was conceived and constructed. The programme of music Slow it rises from earth's ruins, at the Conway Hall constitutes an argument. Wide its loving sway extending, After the Fleet Street Choir had sung the Man's eternal rights defending.

137 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 Flawless weapons now it forges, precise similarity of two words with con- Flaming swords for Truth's defence. trasting meanings stresses the paradox. This extreme economy of style has two Should anyone be in doubt as to which state linked effects. It communicates a dialectical it is that forges flawless weapons in truth's model with great efficiency, rhetorical defence in 1939, the mystery is solved after strength, and memorability. It also produces the interval. The audience return to hear and depends upon dialectical structure - the Medvedeff and his Balalaika Orchestra per- play of opposites - as an object of pleasure form popular tunes of the day from the in itself. USSR, including 'Chastoushka' from Yuri In the final Recitative and Chorale, to text Tyulin's 'Collective Farm Suite'. by Swingler and Auden, the Tenor Solo sings The concert then ends with two mass that 'at the centre / Of the wheeling conflict songs involving choir and orchestra, Duna- the heart is calmer, / The promise nearer yevski's 'The Young Comrade's Song' and than it ever came before'. 'Secret messages 'Land of Freedom'. The hope for the people's of peace' discovered by the Solo are linked internationalist cause, formulated in the in the Chorus with 'a city where / The will most abstract and lyrical terms, is set firmly of love is done / And brought to its full and uncritically in the Soviet Union. flower / The dignity of man.' These themes - of a quietly persistent essence which will re-emerge in times of Bourgeois Form, Secret Messages of Peace conflict to bring humanity nearer to realiz- The Conway Hall concert constructs a sense ing its true potential - are at the heart of of an international 'people' and places their Swingler's verse script for the pageant, hope for the future in the Soviet Union, which opened the Festival. There, they are using contemporary Soviet musical produc- given a more accessible, deliberately popu- tion as witness to this guarantee. The lar form. In Auden's bitterly jaunty 'Dance of Queen's Hall concert brings the perspective 14 and guarantee home again: it centres on Death', set by Britten as the Scherzo, he British composers who link their art to tells us that now that 'matters are settled progressive social forces. with gas and bomb', After Stratton led the London Symphony The works for two pianos, the brilliant stories Orchestra in the Egmont overture, the first Of reasonable giants and remarkable fairies, performance was given of Benjamin Brit- The pictures, the ointments, the frangible wares, ten's 'Ballad of Heroes for Tenor, Solo, And the branches of olive are stored upstairs. Chorus, and Orchestra'.13 This specially- composed setting of poems by W. H. Auden Among the bric-a-brac of drawing-room and Randall Swingler honours the men of civilization, next to its attractive though the International Brigade who fell in Spain: empty gestures of olive-branch and fairy stories, are 'the works for two pianos'. Men who wished to create and not to destroy, Auden resolutely attempts to turn his back But knew the time must come to destroy the on bourgeois forms and heads for the anger destroyer. and oblique irony of pastiche. But can bour- Swingler, 'Funeral March' geois forms be appropriated? Britten's Bal- lad in itself assumes that they can, and the This condensed, lyrical expression of the work which follows is insistent: 'Friends, we claimed necessary paradox that liberty dep- would speak a little of this performance' is ends on killing works through a tight struc- the opening line of Swingler's text for the ture of opposition and repetition: create/ last section of Bush's 'Concerto for Piano- destroy/destroy/destroyer. The syllabic forte and Orchestra', with Baritone Solo and extension of 'destroy' into 'destroyer' echoes Male Voice Chorus, of which the Lento and the movement from 'wished' to 'knew'. The Finale were given. Alan Bush, who played,

138 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 Two episodes from the earlier Popular Front pageant, Towards Tomorrow (1938). Top: 'Instantly the arena is flooded by a tumbling, laughing crowd.' Episode 1 sets up that 'Merrie England which is partly the invention of storytellers and partly the memory of a little country where eight million women and children lived on a rich wheat- growing soil'. Bottom: Episode 2 displays 'the machines which are going to make a new world - but destroy an old one first.' Here, 'a sinister ceremony' is enacted, whereby the brutalities of capitalist production surround and bewilder 'the people of pastoral England'.

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 has looked back on the piece as 'the penet- If humanity is to be free, then the overthrow ration of socialist realism into the bourgeois of the oppressors' rule is both necessary and concert hall'. An index of its success in inevitable: reappropriating a bourgeois form to the service of the people was its being banned Only in death shall it be fruitful, only its utter by the BBC. Annihilation shall cleanse the world.... The concerto form is used as an oppor- tunity to estrange the musical medium. The Yet while it is without doubt that 'they shall verbal text celebrates the evolution of music fall, fall, fall for ever', the audience must not out of the rhythms of work, out of and in the sit comfortably while a mechanistic history process of men's (sic) living together - mech- proceeds on their behalf: anical skill then developing instruments, There can be no more sides than two: and 'the enriched imagination controlling War and waste for the privilege of the few. the skill into harmony of sound'. Or a share for all in all men make or do. And thus exchanging a wordless currency of thought Socialism and Heroic Inevitability Men are changed, are somehow enriched, Discover within them latent power, Classical Marxism provides a grand nar- Know their own fears and desires better than rative of the movement of history towards before, the universal emancipation which the social- And knowing, can better control. ist revolution will bring by ending class This is seen to parallel the general growth society. Socialized production will be joined of power through knowledge gained from by socialized consumption, the state as meeting human need in history: 'Yet in our instrument of the ruling class will wither day the influence of thought / Is caged and away. That model, which in any case I put bonded, like a bird' and 'Music itself must here in very crude terms, has been much fret like a pent flood'. reworked within Marxism. Much less stress The reason, and its solution, are clear. The is put on the narrative, much more on reins of power are gripped by a few, who Marxism's materialist critique of capitalism. 'fear the liberating impulse and the uniting Yet embedded in that narrative is a spell, / The revealing beams of knowledge question of agency and determination which that all art begets'. What early in the pre- persists, and which Swingler's text faces vious century would have been a Romantic directly. Liberal culture is marked by oscil- schema of the artist's imagination counter- lations between a depressed sense that all ing a corrupt world is here realized as a individual behaviour is determined and so liberationist inflection of historical material- nullified by external forces, and the illusion ism. This resort to Romantic structures helps that choices are freely made. Marxism by redefine the contemporary Marxist perspec- contrast insists on a dialectical model in tive: the struggle of Class against Class has which choices are real, though determined become that of the People against the in the sense that they are delimited by Exploiters. material circumstances. Against the exploitation and alienation of The one who chooses is a product of the present system is set a Utopian vision of history, possesses a consciousness particular a time when to the material circumstances in which it is formed. The choice is therefore made not The unfenced fields and the towns like hearts only within a constraining material land- beating scape of possibilities, but also according to a With regular pulse spread about him in generous constrained perspective. But there are al- peace; ways options, and the choice is real. And love is the law and Man in the pride of his will Swingler adheres to the classic grand nar- Giving his all for all. rative and situates the agency of his auditors

140 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 within it. For Marx (and for Brecht) the each historical juncture. This Popular Front narrative was a possibility: the choice was text reprivileges this discourse.17 The last between human emancipation and a return line is at the centre of the argument: 'Man's to barbarism. For Swingler in this text, the future is to be fought for in our day'. It both narrative appears more as an heroic inevi- marks the analysis that fascism and the tability. Yet motivated human activity is an struggle against it constituted the major con- integral part of that inevitable process. tradiction, supplanting for the time being This particular inflection of the dialectic the class struggle within national bound- between agency and determination takes aries; and it marks the appeal to 'mankind' part in a rhetoric which, with an urgency rather than to the progressive class, con- characteristic of the period, calls for a broad comitant with such a shift.18 front against an increasingly hostile force, as 'Man's future is to be fought for in our day.'15 If the rhetoric of Swingler's text has a The Agency of Art Romantic inflection due to the concerns and Implicit within Swingler's text for the Bush conditions of a Popular Front, it can be concerto is a celebration and reclamation of specified as a humanist inflection common a tradition of struggle on the artistic front. to both. At first sight, the line 'There can be Music figures as a 'wordless currency of no more sides than two' seems to echo thought' that is a help towards the emanci- Lenin's dictum that There is no middle pation of the People. This is made more course'. Yet the two actual propositions are explicit in the pageant Music and the People potentially contradictory. According to and is fully concordant with the new politi- Lenin: cal line. It is also concordant with emergent emphases in left-liberal quarters. All worship of the spontaneity of the labour move- In 1934, for instance, W. H. Auden and ment, all belittling of the role of the party of Social John Garrett edited The Poet's Tongue, Democracy, means strengthening the influence of bourgeois ideology among the workers. . . . The only choice is: either the BOURGEOIS or the SOCIALIST an anthology that claims, not explicitly and so ideology. There is no middle course.16 more weightily, that real English poetry has been shaped by the people in every generation: that folk poetry has a continuous lineage to our own While the Swingler text promotes conscious- day, though sometimes it has an author's name 19 ness of the material origins of culture and its attached and sometimes not. relation to material progress, the history of the material struggle of classes is disprivil- These reclamations are not infrequently eged. This favours an appeal to 'man's made by middle-class artists finding their history' in which the unified subject 'man' own place within working-class struggle. In has progressed. It is 'in our day' that this Fanfrolico and After, the third volume of his progress is said to be challenged. Music, as autobiography, Jack Lindsay tells of his 'the mind-changer, the life-giver', the reposi- conversion to Marxism early in 1936, upon tory of 'the human spirit', will 'release ... a which he threw himself into the political new endeavour' that will 'leave the giant struggle on the artistic front. Already estab- Man / Enormous in freedom, shaking his lished as a poet, historical novelist (with the lightened shoulders, rejoicing once more'. Roman trilogy of 1934-35), translator, fine- The text meets Lenin's demand that the art publisher, and writer on aesthetics, mass be instructed rather than be left to Lindsay now turned his knowledge and spontaneous action, but itself theorizes a skills to serve the new authority for his progressive human spontaneity subject to actions. external aggression and limit. Thus, for instance, he embarked on a new While a humanism is available in (especi- trilogy of historical novels which trace the ally the early) Marx, it is progressively sub- English revolutionary tradition - 2649, Lost ordinated to the specifics of class struggle at Birthright, and Men of Forty-Eight - and at

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 the poet Edgell Rickword's request wrote establishes a popular tradition of struggle England My England, a long essay on the and of artistic production which rehearses same theme. Published in 1939 as the second the Marxist grand narrative. He establishes of Left Review's new 'Key Book' series, 'the this by popular or mobile means - the his- tract sold some 80,000 and had a strong torical novel, the performed lyric. In inter- effect in the factories'.20 view, Lindsay recalled that at this time he A Short History of Culture, published in was continually composing declamations the same year, in a much cut-down version for small and large occasions, often at the that Lindsay came to regret, attempts an request of trades councils and strike com- analysis of cultural history and anthrop- mittees. ology on historical-materialist lines. With Of particular relevance to the present Rickword he published the anthology Hand- narrative, however, is Five Thousand Years of book of Freedom, and he edited poetry broad- Poetry, 'A Declamation in Prose and Verse'. sheets for the Left Book Club. Moving progressively from the earliest A long declamatory poem, 'Who are the recorded poetry to the present, the declam- English?', written in reply to a Times Literary ation reclaims poems and poetry for the Supplement review, was published in Left people, re-establishing a tradition of the Review in 1936, and proved so popular that struggle for liberation carried on in art: 'We it was republished in large numbers as a are here to speak of the reality of poetry.'23 pamphlet. According to Lindsay, it was the Swingler's pageant text for April 1939 staging of this that provided a group at the makes a precisely similar claim for music. recently-formed Unity Theatre, who wanted As I shall demonstrate, this again gives a to develop a form of dance-mime together Romantic inflection to a basically materialist with spoken verse, with the basis of an analysis. In Swingler's treatment, music is English form of mass-declamation.21 at once a material cultural practice able to A similar request from Rickword at the affect lives, and a metaphor for hope and outbreak of the Spanish Civil War gave rise inspiration. to Lindsay's second, more famous mass I want now to turn to the pageant Music declamation, On Guard for Spain. This was a and the People itself. Swingler's text for it major text for Unity in the early years, and adopts a 'popular' style of diction, serves a was much used both at benefits and as a theatrical form enacted by the mass for the piece of agitational propaganda.22 mass, and appropriates the musical tradi- 24 Lindsay's work in this period busily tion to the people.

The Pageant 'Music and the People' (1939)

After a flourish on bass and drums, the of 'tradition' is established. Descent into Speaker comes to the centre of the arena and pastiche is in the main avoided by a delivers a direct address in a roughly regu- softening of the rhyme and the occasional lar trochaic tetrameter, regularly rhymed poetic inversion, as well as a conscious and organized into paragraphs, reminiscent (good) humour: 'No mystic rite we shall in style of the moral interlude: unfold / Initiate to a world remote / Where none but Muses had the vote.' Good people all within this hall, Gallery, circle, pit and stall The 'traditional' presenter-prologue makes Be welcome to our Festival... promises about the ensuing action. This will not argue that Music is 'Nature's select The diction is largely monosyllabic in feel if prerogative/ For certain rare and lofty not in fact, and tends to Saxon-rooted vocab- minds'. Music neither has its origin in the ulary. Thus at the outset, through stylistic ideal, nor is it solely the province of the means as much as argument, the discourse privileged:

142 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 Our world is life. Our theme is man, Two sorts of Utopian thought - 'onto- Whose music since the world began logical' and 'teleological' - surface in but are Like tributaried river runs Through villages and swarming towns also actively negotiated by this text. By And whose original springs arise 'teleological utopianism' I mean the basic Deep down in man's necessities. assumption that history is an already- written narrative with a happy end. By 'onto- As in Swingler's text for the Bush Concerto, logical utopianism' I mean the frequently the argument is materialist. Music arises, as linked idea of there being a now-lost but does knowledge that leads to power, from recoverable natural essence. This latter idea the meeting of human need in history. The finds particular expression in Swingler's metaphor of the tributaried river has its association of 'music' with 'heart'. referent in the social, material, historical. The notion that natural rights have been But the argument shifts as it develops, by lost that once existed historically has its place means of a new metaphor. 'Music' now pro- in the British socialist tradition. Such an idea vides the image rather than featuring as its informed the rhetoric of 'freeborn English- subject. The shift is towards an idealist men', oppressed by the 'Norman yoke', and register. The image is of an uncorrupt world a similar argument can be found persisting which both precedes and will post-date in possibly innocent form in the Pageant of exploitation, a world of natural harmony. Labour (1934). In Swingler's text such a People have always sought 'One rhythm notion is deliberately destabilized. As the and one harmony, / Such as the heart, which Speaker introduces the first episode, in some beats for good'. But while men compete for other texts an occasion for Merrie Eng- private gain, landry, he remarks, 'A merry scene, you say? In this / The fifteenth century / These men Life's tune is broken, drowned its song; are serfs. Their life is harsh / And none of The rhythm that makes the heart beat strong them is free.'25 Is buried deep, though still it keeps But faintly beating while we sleep. If Swingler does construct an ontological Utopian argument, it is not on such a chrono- Like the 'wordless currency of thought' of logical axis, but rather on a synchronic one the 'Concerto' and the 'secret messages of of simultaneous cause-and-effect. In this sort peace' of the 'Ballad of Heroes', music has of model, an already-existing but never- carried the hope for peace and freedom materialized (i.e., ideal) state of perfection is throughout history. All working men and forced from concrete realization by the per- women sistence of an opposing (often 'evil') agency. Mediating between the synchronic and Hold in their hearts and always held chronological models of ontological utopia- This dream of an united world. nism is the idea of a prehistorical state of And music from their hearts has sprung. natural harmony. A version of this formula has had strong persistence in the Marxist grand narrative, where class society figures The Shift to Idealism as a temporary alienation of the natural What adequate sense can we make of this human potential, implicit but as yet to be apparent idealist shift? In one way it can be realized in human relations in the supposed seen as a common lyrical expression of the 'primitive communism' of the earliest human aims of socialism, which none the less societies. remain rooted in material practicalities. But Slippage between notions of potential the problem then remains of a species of and essence (what humanity has the capac- utopianism - a tendency to talk of an ab- ity to become, what it really is) are notorious stract, essential, and natural order that pre- within and at the margins of Marxist dis- cedes corruption and will be regained when course. Swingler's reliance on biologistic meta- corruption is banished. phors ('heart') and idealized ones ('music')

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Music: Norman Demuth And the ring of our dance was the ring of men The Episode opens with Gretry's ballet Le Facing the powers beyond their ken. Fete de la Raison, written in honour of the French Revolution. It shows here the causes and outcome of the Revolution, the I want to note two features here. First is the development of large-scale industry and the appeal to a popularized cultural anthropology changing life of the people. on the left already in existence, with its roots Everybody knows the story of the birth of the in Marx and Engels. Lindsay's A Short His- 'Marseillaise' from the lips of the young tory of Culture, published in the year of the lieutenant Rouget de lisle, as briefly depicted festival, elaborates it. here, and how it inspired the armies of intervention. But the real song of the people in Second, as another specific instance of revolution was the 'Carmagnole', the tune of that discourse, Swingler's text figures man- which was an ancient peasant dance. We see kind (sic) facing the powers beyond its here how the music which had been through understanding. The pageant text maps out centuries the secret bond of unity among the the basic tenets and metaphors of a classical peasant people, flowered into an open expression of their rights and demands at the (though maybe necessarily reductive) Marx- historic moment. ism: it both maintains a sense of 'natural' The Gretry Ballet orchestrated humanity or human potential and also here by Matyas Seiber expresses the basic dialectic of the human Danced by Unity Theatre Dance Group versus the rest of nature, which the develop- Rouget de I'lsle: Parry Jones ment of intellect, knowledge, and power will conquer.28 The Dancers conclude that Dance, which grounds his rhetoric in essentialist territory 'bind(s) men together' with 'new vigour and even as he foregrounds his refusal of other will', ever sets humanity 'a new aim' - 'For idealizing or essentialist options. This could the heart remembers what the mind forgets.' be seen as deep compromise. I think it is a Dance's 'compelling rhythm' joins company very sophisticated piece of declared negotia- with the 'wordless currency of thought', 26 tion for a mass/popular text. 'secret messages of peace', and 'rhythm that makes the heart beat strong'. 'Life's tune' inspires oppressed mankind to liberate itself, Singers, Dancers, and Players and mankind in general to 'master' nature: the aims are coterminous. The negotiation continues as the Speaker is Further modulations of the verse form joined in the arena by three groups who and similar arguments see the Singers and enter from all sides. They represent the the Players complete this expository Intro- Singers, the Dancers, and the Players, and duction. The short, irregular, and highly- each group identifies 'the origin and impor- articulated lines of the Singers tell how they tance of its contribution'.27 bring the word, 'the mould and form / of For the Dancers, Swingler maintains the man's understanding', a seed from which tetrameter but introduces more unstressed his 'secret will / Bursts into action'. The syllables to produce a 'tripping' rhythm. Players (meaning musicians) civilize 'the From the 'Lambeth Walk' to the 'Palais million sounds of nature' and their har- Glide' of the 'thirties, a brief list returns us monies, 'recalling your hidden will', and to 'The Furry, the Maypole and the Hobby- transforming it into 'A power which is real'. Horse': This musical event is an opportunity to Do you remember, as you tread the floor, help construct a broad political alliance How your fathers danced it long before against the specific threat of fascism. It fig- And their fathers' fathers, and what it was for? ures not Class against Class, but the People

144 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 against the Exploiters. Music, in the service of this construction, both acts as a metaphor Episode VI for and is theorized as the material carrier of humanity's persistent urge to realize its true INTRODUCTION: potential in the course of conquering the rest Gretry's Ballet, Le Rosier de la Revolution. 29 At the finish of the ballet a small group of Dan- of nature. cers dance the Carmagnole in its original form. While this introductory section does not typify the whole script stylistically, its rhet- ANNOUNCER 1: orical features do reflect its main concerns. It Now that the towns like spider's webs suck in is an exposition of what will be argued The country's life And under the yoke of the machine through narrative, the articulation of spec- Pass man and wife tacular plentitudes, and formal figures. Has music lost its power To rally the people and their acts inspire? Are all the old bonds broken 'Episode Six' Analyzed And the old culture utterly forsaken?

Reproduced alongside are the two available The tune of the Carmagnole is lightly records of the scenario for a single episode. played by the band. Here, the new song is born from the old as the struggle for liberty progresses through ANNOUNCER 2: Listen - that tune - an age-old dance history. It finds immediate echo in the male The Carmagnole, beloved of peasant France: chorus and a triumphant unity swiftly Not lost now, but sweeping up like a wave develops. Over a people resolved their lives to save, The physical action works at two levels, Resolved to clean the corruption from their land the second more metaphorical than the first. And break the stranglehold of idle hands. Liberty - Equality - Brotherhood - still it sings, At the first, the Carmagnole stands for the And to their hearts a clearer meaning brings. sung tradition as a specific material practice And out of the birth-pangs of revolution torn which gives inspiration to democratic en- The Marseillaise is born. deavour in every generation. The old song has the power to rally, and in the struggle a ACTION: The whole Acting Chorus comes into the new song is born. arena, singing the Carmagnole, verses 1 and 2, At the second level, the Carmagnole simul- dressed as French peasants of 1790. They taneously stands more abstractly for demo- perform a wide circular dance. Then, in the cratic endeavour itself, a constant source of centre, Rouget de Lisle (Parry Jones) gets up progressive energy for the whole of human- on a table, and sings the first verse of the Marseillaise. The second verse is sung by a ity. The socialist tradition, quietly alive male voice choir (off) who enter singing, and beneath the repressive forces, flowers forth the third verse is sung by all in the arena. They at the historic moment to be itself trans- form into a column, singing, and march off. formed into yet clearer meanings, greater potential. Episode 6 of the pageant Music and the People (1939). Some Marxist historians have maintained Opposite page: as printed in the programme. Above: that crucial theoretical and organizational the script-scenario for the same episode in the typescript copy held by Alan Bush. There has just models have arisen outside the revolutionary been an interval of 15 minutes. oppressed class. Swingler, however, both effaces the class argument in favour a narrative in which 'the People' are the sub- In Swingler's treatment, then, the song is ject, and figures a rhythmic energy whch both an image for the socialist tradition, and surges up from within this organic unity. one of the material practices by which that The key ideological work of the episode is tradition is maintained. In the narrative of to insist on the effective as well as the the pageant, however, and in the argument chronological precedence of the 'immemorial' of this episode, the song figures as the Carmagnole over the 'written' Marseillaise.30 material practice by which a democratic

145 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 'energy' is transmitted down the gener- By mastery of labour-process man grasps the ations. This foregrounding, with the liaison universe in knowledge, and in art the very of the literal and metaphorical levels just dynamic of life, the pulse and power of rhythm. That is how it is that out of the masses of toil noted, together produce a very ambivalent all art and all knowledge have arisen. Take away model. that base and there is nothing human left. Swingler insists on a materialist analysis: That is the living relationship which we seek it is not 'ideas' which move history, but to state, which we seek to rediscover with deep- developing material practices ultimately ening clarity. based in labour. Music-making is thus treated literally, in itself, as one instance of ideo- Lindsay's phrase 'masses of toil' figures as a logical production - the making and dissemi- generalized formulation for all productive nation of 'ideas'. As a typical instance, it also classes in history and for humanity before stands in metonymic relation to all progres- the class division of labour. The phrase sive ideological production. It is part of that manages both to name and not to name the whole sphere of organizational-cerebral- modern working class. The gesture of ab- emotional-productive work which constitutes straction both gives significant shape to the both a tradition of and a capacity for demo- material of history and threatens to de- cratic revolutionary struggle. materialize it. What might precisely consti- Yet the foregrounding of music suggests tute 'the masses of toil' either specifically or a high degree of agency for the sung generally recedes from consideration under tradition in relation to other activities (poli- the pressure of an heroic narrative. tical association, party discipline, printed This formulaic anthropolgy constitutes a propaganda, economic association, etc.) - a broadly idealizing pressure within a mater- 'culturalist' pressure in the text which has ialist narrative. Swingler's pageant text is already been noted above. just one instance of the way in which models Furthermore, music is especially available of natural origin, essential human balance, as a model for natural or organic begin- have participated in this construction. nings. 'Music' in the text crosses over from Lindsay on the whole resists this. being the representation of a material cul- But it must be allowed that Swingler's tural discourse to become a metaphor for text is a rhetorical text and not a philosophi- (socialist or originary, teleological or onto- cal treatise. The text recalls, in order to logical) Utopian existence: a world of har- revivify, a tradition in which it itself stands. mony, the natural heartbeat of humanity. It does, nevertheless, have its 'scientific' dimension, as does in a less-diluted sense Lindsay's declamatory passage just quoted.31 A Formulaic Anthropolgy To return to the theatrical text immedi- ately at hand, it is difficult to gauge how The metaphor is itself underpinned by well-known Gretry's ballet might have been Marxist accounts of the origins of artistic to any of the audience through contact with forms, which have sometimes tended to the many dance groups and schools active ideal-essentialist formulations, supporting within the period. And did the Unity group and supported by a theory of natural order. perform in a late eighteenth-century 'classi- Thus, from the beginning of Lindsay's Five cal' manner, or a 'modern' Laban-influenced Thousand Years of Poetry: manner, then gaining currency in progres- sive circles? Rhythm is the concentration of labour-process: men gathering into co-ordinated activity, the con- Certainly the Carmagnole was current, in struction of significant speech, the dance and the The Left Song Book - one of the several song that utter the inner meaning of labour- publications through which the left's cul- process, its uniting of men. tural tradition was being proselytized. But, And by rhythm of labour and art man merges with the universe, the cosmos of energy, the dial- in any case, the audience would have been ectic of matter. able to place either piece after seeing the

146 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 pageant, since the programme synopsis sup- related pageants, and this reflects its having plements the educational concerns of the a thematic concern. The other events are enacted event. (It may be noted that the more directly concerned with establishing a inclusion of Gretry's piece effects a liaison clear line of pedigree for the social or between the 'organic effectivity' of the political institutions they serve. Carmagnole, the 'instrumental effectivity' of The main discourse in Music and the the Marseillaise, and 'classical' music in the People is one of 'inspiration' - the role of cause of the people.) music in promoting the struggle of all opp- This pattern is repeated elsewhere. The ressed peoples against the oppressor. While preceding episode shows 'The country this is argued through commentary, scenic music caught and caged' by the bourgeois action, and images, I suggest below ways in Gay's The Beggar's Opera. But it then relents which spectacle supplements these formal to admit that Handel's Belshazzar - which means. Bush had just himself produced (see below, The dominance of this discourse of p. 151) - 'depicts a dream of an international inspiration/liberation has its corollary in the peace, brotherhood, and extended freedom' relative disprivileging not only of Marxist in its Finale. Episode 7 features Beethoven, class politics but also of the historical- quoting from the 'Conversation Notebooks' materialist cultural anthropology strongly and staging the 'Prisoners' Chorus' from (if simply) set forth in the Introduction. Fidelio. The implication is that bourgeois The pageant was a schematized presen- forms are there to be reclaimed. tation of what is already known or what could readily be developed as knowledge. Thus, as shown above, Episode 6 offers a Rhetorical and Organizational Features 'dialectical' model of the relationship bet- Pageants are station-dramas, whether they ween the cultural tradition and a narrative are processions or have localized physical of human liberation. But its importance is action. Popular Front pageants and those probably as an emblem of 'dialectic' - the from which they derive are arranged by statement of a way of figuring the world. As episodes. What 'passes by' is a series of such, through the aesthetic pleasure of episodes that recounts a tradition - a history recognition, it may serve an affirmatory proper to its audience and makers. A series function. of that tradition's landmarks is visited. In narrative terms, therefore, the texts Spectacle and Scale have a potentially huge content: and so con- densation is essential. The dramatic action in All theatre is spectacle. By means of show- each episode must be as simple as possible, ing, it makes meanings and gives pleasures. to allow the action across the episodes, or The pleasure of looking can be had 'for their repeated argument, to become clear. At itself, as a 'direct' aesthetic stimulus. It is the limit is the tableau. there as such even in the case of the natural- Reproduced on page 149 is the arrange- istic stage, though there it also enables the ment of episodes in Music and the People. If facticity of the pretended objects, persons, the episodes are 'busy', it is not with dram- and events to attain a significance. There is atic action but with a quantity of smaller pleasure in the ostension, and this helps episodic units. Each unit tends towards a construct meaning though a sort of aesthetic tableau, and together the episodes form a validation. broad chronological sweep, with local dis- Looking is never innocent, for we watch continuities and tangents to pursue thematic culturally. Our pleasure-taking is a sorting- issues. through of deep structures of our subjec- The degree of tangent and discontinuity tivity, our historical, psychic, discursive in Music and the People is marked in positioning, the traces of our individuation. comparison with other Popular Front and Hence the scare quotes in the last para-

147 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 graph. This understood, it might be useful Quantity and physical scale plus the idea to think of spectacular pleasure as offered of the superlative each contributes to the by theatre in two senses: heteronomous and achievement of high amplitude, which (to- autonomous. gether with, say, pronounced rhythm) leads By heteronomous spectacle I mean simply to pleasurable excitement. Spectacular theatre those meaningful visual pleasures that can plays directly with plentitude: excitement be translated into other discourses, such as mounts and perhaps satisfaction is glimpsed verbal narrative: 'The soldiers entered, as the arena fills, or the volume and variety clashing their swords and putting fear in of signal suspends decoding and discern- 32 our hearts.' Both the information-content ment. and the more directly emotional meanings The 'ideological' and 'sensory' aspects of of theatrical visual stimuli can, then, be scale of course interpenetrate. The promo- heteronomous. tional material for the left pageants no less But the same modes of expression can - then the civic-commercial ones of the period often simultaneously with a narrative or trades heavily on physical immensity to expository (significatory) function - achieve promote both excitement and prestige. A an autonomous meaning. It thus becomes broadsheet advertising the Lancashire Cotton enough - or necessary - to say: 'It was Pageant (1932) proclaims: spectacular!' The meaning is constituted directly in the pleasurability, the (never MAJESTIC PAGEANTRY. GLORIOUS SPECTACLE. A MIGHTY ACHIEVEMENT FOR LANCASHIRE innocent) act of witness which doubles as a 12,000 performers. 1,500 chorus. fulfilment, an access to plenitude. 500 ballet. 5 bands. If it is useful to think in terms of heteron- 18 months' work. Cost £25,000 omous and autonomous spectacle, it is also useful to think of these as vectors rather and lists each episode, providing a lavish than as separate phenomena. While all descriptive scenario. Edward P. Genn was a theatre is spectacle, we distinguish what we consummate showman. call spectacular theatre. Here, the auton- A venue such as the Royal Albert Hall omous vector is the strongest. Pageants are a may carry prestige, while the 'natural amphi- species of spectacular theatre. theatres' of The Pageant of South Wales (1939) The discourse of 'inspiration' present in may connote an authentic communality. the pageant Music and the People is realized Value of scale may attach to more than size in both the senses sketched out above. of arena or numbers of participants. Copi- Meaning is carried in both a narrative- ousness in terms of number of episodes, expository sense and a directly experiential of choirs or organizations, of professionals sense. The pageant is both expository and (twelve composers for Music and the People) spectacular. The reduction of dramatic action may also add pleasure through value. to a minimum not only facilitates a clarity of Such copiousness also connotes solidarity signification, of encoded meaning. It also and confirms strength. Thus a procession of, produces the condition for a high degree of say, Co-operators representing Co-operators autonomous pleasure/meaning. across the world (Towards Tomorrow, 1938) This autonomy, as in all spectacle, is may serve an expository function while also achieved through scale, and thus more be- providing sensual excitement (scale, move- comes pertinent than the visual register. To ment, presence) and so evidence emotionally this may be added the aural register and a real scale transcending the arena. certain abstract elements. These latter, while Evidence becomes consummate with auth- based in ideological systems, are imported entic presence, and a spectacular value meanings experienced as if sensually ('It was attaches to the real presence of the Inter- sensational!'). They may be generally charac- national Brigade (Pageant of South Wales, terized as superlatives, and include such ideas 1939; Music and the People, 1939) or Party as verisimilitude, originality, and wealth. Leader Harry Pollitt (Heirs to the Charter,

148 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 Music and the People 7. Prisoners. 'Ludwig van Beethoven descends from rostrum'; 'But who are these / In modern clothes appearing / Their haggard eyes / The Introduction brand of torture like a web of scorpions wearing?'; 1. Feudal England. A canon from 1350; songs 'that prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps enter have lived in the peasant tradition for centuries, and sing the Peat-Bog Soldiers' Song. only lately collected because they were beginning 8. Slaves. 'Following this train of thought', John to be forgotten'; a primitive fertility ritual dance; a Payne and his Negro Choir enter as slaves, sing- Hebridean spinning song. (No dramatic action.) ing a chain-gang song, a cotton-picking song, and 2. The Massacre of the Innocents. Parts of some 'songs of freedom, led by one of the fore- two pageant-plays are performed, as if to the most champions of freedom', Paul Robeson'. villagers: after the famous complaint from the 9. The People Advance. As Robeson's Kneelin' Second Shepherds' Play, Herod and the Inno- Low ends, the Mass Chorus sings the Chartist cents - 'no doubt much of its popularity owed We're Low and the Speaker takes up a prose much to the memory of the massacres of their own narrative to take us forward to trade unionism - people after the rising of 1381'; the song King 'To every trade its club, to every club its song' - Herod and the Cock in which 'the invincible spirit' and 'the Trades Unionists sit round a table and wins against the oppressor; a choir of early sing their song' (unspecified), 'the verse sung Christians, following an introductory verse by Paul solo'; 'the tide rose apace', and in a few sentences Robeson; and, since 'the play's not finished yet' taking in the Co-operative Movement, the Speaker (i.e., of history) the Basque Lullaby. takes us to the late 1880s - a crowd headed by 3. Peasants in Revolt. A return to 1381: John Ball William Morris enters, singing People of England; addresses the crowd; a signal arrives from him; the the Speaker relates the killing by the police of the march on London, singing The Cutty Wren; Tyler's demonstrator in Trafalgar Square in 1880, and meeting with Richard II, and murder ('All words William Morris gives his famous 'Not one, not one, spoken in this scene, except for the commentary of nor thousands must they slay'; the Chorus the Speaker, are taken from authentic records'); all marches off to the Russian 1905 Funeral March, the men of the Mass Chorus (nine choirs) sing The 'that now commemorates all those who have fallen German Peasants' Song. in the fight for freedom'. Interlude. 'The ancient ritual carried on / And the Finale: For Peace and Liberty. The Speaker makes forbidden message spoke': members of the a summation in verse of the Pageant, and reflects Woodcraft Folk 'come on in small numbers, like on its meanings for us now: conspirators, and perform the Stag-Dance', part of And having present struggles and despairs the cult which was 'the bond of unity between the Sharp in our minds, remember too harassed peasants'. The past whose urgent influence prepares 4. Soldiers of Freedom. Two Announcers briefly The issues of today, and know that you set the scene for 1649 (the episode is not con- By today's action map the future's road.... cerned with celebrating Cromwell). 'One king may Never so needed was that single will be dead, but who still owns the land?1 Six Levellers That unity of the people, to fulfil and the actor-singer Parry Jones sit at tavern The claim for freedom, and to ensure our peace... tables and sing; an Announcer recounts their talk It is time we answered, as they answer now as they remain in tableau; a group of dancers; In Spain, in China, in every tortured land.... some Diggers brought on in ropes by soldiers; an Let our song rise whose simple power Announcer hails them in verse while the soldiers Can flood the boundaries that divide us still order drinks; the Diggers sing Stand up Now. And make our common hope, our single will. 5. Village Green to Concert Hall. Announcer's Then a procession of groups: Christian Hymn; verse reports the break-up of rural communities Levellers' Song; Marseillaise; People of England; and the appropriation of their culture by bourgeois 'Bandera Rossa1; German Solidarity Song; institutions; 'A group of dancers enters and Chinese Student Song; Spanish National Anthem; performs to the tunes from which The Beggar's (and now not representations but actual) veterans Opera was concocted. At the end of their dance, a of the International Brigade led by Fred Copeman; proscenium arch appears over the platform, and a the Negro Choir. Paul Robeson sings The Land of scene from the play is performed to the dancers as Freedom, 'the great song of liberated Soviet audience. humanity1, with the Acting Chorus (twelve choirs); Tom Mann, the Dean of Canterbury, and Fred Interval Copeman speak briefly on the theme 'Music and the People1. Finally, all (audience included) sing 6. Changing Europe. 1792 (see pages 144-5). the American Men Awake! the Day is Dawning.

149 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 1939). The effect is similar to the presence of and the subjects of the drama ('We danced a 'star' though is not reducible to it. A star the seasons', 'You too like them'); and as a presence operates in these circumstances left event opposed to the dominant culture, through an imported prestige. Paul Robe- it is the special property of its audience, the son's presence in Music and the People is community of makers: the enacted history is especially full, combining the heroic, presti- theirs, they are its guardians. gious, and evidential.33 Writing songs for the movement and pro- moting musical activity within it was a major part of Alan Bush's activity at this Issues of Authenticity and Involvement time. His engagement was close. He was Voice-over narration and the use of speakers himself conductor of the Tooting Co-op and commentators achieves an epic scale Choir. Having joined the London Labour with value-laden connotations of authen- Choral Union in 1924, the year of its ticity, presence, and truth. Thus also, the formation, he became its Musical Adviser in scientific function of a speech quoted from 1929. The LLCU, Workers' Theatre Move- real history may be attended by a spec- ment Music League, and some independent tacular function deriving from the presence choirs merged in 1936 to form the Workers' of the authentic (a special fetishization rel- Music Association. Moves towards federa- ated to the effects I noted above in relation tion date from about the turn of the century. Repertoires were dominated by 'community' to naturalism). In the case of the pageant- 34 plays re-enacted in Episode 2 of Music and and 'hymn' numbers until the mid-thirties. the People (see page 149), the sensation of reflexivity (a pageant of pageants, the Logistics of Mass Participation tradition of popular playing in which we stand), may join with that of authentic pres- Bush chaired the Festival Committee and his ence to achieve a feeling of plenitude. friend Edward Clark acted as Organizing Costume may achieve spectacular effect Secretary. Clark regularly promoted working- by sensory means and through copiousness, class music-making at the BBC Music Dep- this itself being part of the argument of the artment, from which he later resigned over Lancashire Cotton Pageant (1932). There may a matter of political principle. The active also be connotations of wealth: the Co-op participation of the twelve composers was News of 8 July 1944, reporting on the progress sought, even though their work was limited of L. du Garde Peach's pageant at Dewsbury, to harmonizations and arrangements of the proclaims 'Players' Costumes Worth £3000'. pre-selected music, and the writing of link Connotations of both wealth and auth- material.35 enticity may attach to the antique. Thus, a The entire arena of the hall plus stage was 120-year-old gown used for the Manchester used by the 500 singers and 100 dancers, production of Co-operative Century was ex- plus principals. The Acting and Mass ploited (Co-op News, 8 July and 29 July 1944). Choruses comprised a total of 22 Labour, The fact of its being an heirloom in a Co- Co-operative, and other left choirs, of which operative family of several generations will at least one found it necessary to call for have enhanced the sensations of tradition new members - especially men - to make up and authentic presence. full strength for the event. The Woodcraft The dominance of the 'inspirational' dis- Folk, directed by Margaret Leona, and the course in Music and the People has a rhet- Unity Dance Group performed the dances. orical function: the pageant is itself designed Music was provided by the specially-formed to inspire. This is achieved through a com- People's Festival Wind Band.36 Choirs re- bination of example, spectacle, and involve- hearsed as local units, combining once for ment. Many in the audience would have rehearsals of the two entire individual been there to see 'their' choirs; the text choruses in late February, and all together argues for a community between audience one week before the performance. Dress

150 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 'The actuality of the present struggle is brought into the arena by the entry of the International Brigade veterans.'

151 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 rehearsals took place at the Albert Hall on community of effort that surrounded them - the day before and the afternoon of the fund-raising benefits, the Basque children's performance. homes, Spanish Medical Aid, and relief for These choirs constituted a major organi- widows. zational basis for Popular Front pageantry. The present struggle is given heroic rep- By corollary, the pageants extend their dual resentation in an arena now filled with pro- cultural work: as fashioned communities cession and sound. Past and present inform and as carriers of the socialist tradition one another urgently and at the point of expressed in song. Thus, Bush had composed closest involvement for the spectator.38 and conducted the music for the pageant And, before the entire gathering joins to- Towards Tomorrow mounted at Wembley by gether to sing, there are addresses from three of the London Co-operative Societies three leaders. The inclusion of the Dean of in July 1938. In the same year John Allen Canterbury indicates the 'broad church' to had directed an operatic version of Handel's which this event is addressed. A voice in oratorio Belshazzar made by Bush and his solidarity from inside a dominant institution wife Nancy, and performed by Co-operative is made manifestly welcome: the Front choirs.37 declares itself to be broad. (A contrasting About 1,000 people took an active part in apotheosis is engineered by the specifically the Festival, which was watched by a total Communist Party Heirs to the Charter of July of about 10,000. It had been planned to 1939. This pageant was in effect a lead-up to donate any financial surplus to the Basque a major address by Pollitt, the event as a Children's Home. But in the event the dona- whole being a major station in a national tions and guarantees which had been sought 'Crusade' of mass recruitment meetings.) and secured could not offset costs that While the pageant Music and the People climbed well beyond budget. This was an was neither a political meeting in the strict expensive enterprise, which ended with a sense, nor part of a recruitment drive, nor deficit of £600. geared to a specific party, it shares in the As has been noted, some episodes in rhetorical strategies of affirmation, heroism and interpellation of each of these to some Music and the People develop tangentially 39 from the main chronology. In particular, degree. Episodes 2 and 7 bring the history of the struggle for liberty up to the present, with Splits in the Front songs evoking the suffering of the children in Spain and of the victims of nazism in Clark's promotion of this event, as of others, Germany. The spoken text stresses the links could make itself felt in the ruling-class between past and present: 'The massacre of press. Ernest Newman of The Sunday Times innocents is here again', 'For their humanity took the opportunity to try to wean his old is a crime / Even in our time'. friend off of such a naive habit. Responding These references to the suffering might publicly in his column to Clark's request for evoke pity, anger, or even resolve in the an assessment of the festival, he opined that abstract: but they are unlikely to inspire. The he didn't really know who 'the people' was. actuality of the present struggle is brought 'Why this rather painful class conscious- into the arena by the entry of the Inter- ness?' The working class had played little national Brigade veterans. Despite the close part in the growth of music: the pageant memory of defeat, and despite the bitter presented a specious history. The festival struggles within the anti-fascist forces, the had been an expensive piece of junketing veterans march on as the embodiment of an undertaken by modern equivalents of von heroic inspiration. They represent the con- Biilow, who 'found, as many of his class do crete struggle at its sharpest local resolution. today, that sympathy with "the people", Their presence signifies not only their own about whom he knew very little, was an sacrifice and struggle, but also that immense excellent safety valve for his hatred of

152 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 human beings of his own sort, of whom he are on the one hand securing the best possible knew too much.'40 conditions of performance, and on the other hand they are enabling the professional musicians to A more serious dissension came from link their art directly with the progressive social 'within'. John Goss, a Marxist outside the forces of today.44 CPGB and conductor of the Unity Male Voice Choir, wished to dissociate himself entirely from the planned event. Refusing to be tempted by Clark's insistence that he was Notes and References the very person to introduce material on 1. Programme, Pageant of South Wales (1939). Biblio- early trade-union bands into the pageant, he graphical details of this and all other pageants men- tioned in the text will be found in a later article in New wrote that 'the proposed festival is just Theatre Quarterly. musical "Leftism" and therefore quite repre- 2. For Unity, see Colin Chambers, The Story of Unity hensible in view of the need for a broad Theatre (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989); Jerry 41 Dawson, Left Theatre: Merseyside Unity Theatre, a popular appeal in all our political activities'. Documentary Record (Liverpool: Merseyside Writers, Goss's opposition to the event marks a 1985); Angela Tuckett, The People's Theatre in Bristol, rupture from within the general position of 1930-45, 'Our History' Pamphlet No. 72 (London: History Group of the Communist Party, 1979). The the need for a Popular Front. He did not strongest recent claim for the political effectiveness of find agreeable 'the idea of being a steadying agit-prop is made in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, weight on the tail of Mr Bush's kite',42 and and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left, 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America argued strongly that: (London: Routledge, 1985). For a range of Popular Front theatrical activity, including pageants, see Bernadette at this juncture to give our struggling leftish Kirwan, 'Aspects of Radical Theatre in England in the 1930s' (doctoral thesis, Loughborough University, 1989). efforts such a grandiose title is a deception. It Popular Front pageantry appears to consolidate from tries to give the false impression that we have 1937, typified at first by relatively small events such as tremendous forces at our disposal and that the the ones held at Manchester and banned in Dundee, Labour Movement is seething with musical acti- cited in my next article. Larger in scale is the Pageant of vities that are of such high standing that we have Scottish History (1938). The major examples are Towards a right to ask the public to pay good money to Tomorrow (1938), Music and the People (1939), The Pageant hear them. of South Wales (1939), and Heirs to the Charter (1939). The performance standard of our Choirs and 3. The relationship is vital and cannot be ignored. Bands is deplorably low, and until this can be For a good mediation between more abstractable ques- tions of form and political priorities, see Stourac and altered and until we can raise the standard of the McCreery, Theatre as a Weapon: Workers' Theatre in the smaller musical units, get together a large body Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-1934 (London: of music for their performance, and then make Routledge, 1986). Pragmatic accounts from the left the whole movement music-conscious, we are based on the (ultimately proper) assumption that only building up an ostentatious lath and plaster theatre should enlighten have tended both to efface the facade, behind which there is next to nothing, by operation of desire in the performance contract, and to presenting festivals such as the one proposed.43 suppress either or both the specificity of performance and its partiality as one of a set of political practices. It would be good to see a non-Hegelian version of Goss expresses a contemporary concern over Frederic Jameson's 'political unconscious' applied to the 'illusionism' perhaps necessarily atten- these materials, something to unlock the structures of feeling inhabiting scenarios at the levels both of dant upon the reclamation, through inven- 'theatre' and of 'performance'. For a definition of these tion, of a tradition. And the personal charge levels see Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1988). For a counter-narrative to of self-importance is less significant than the that given by Samuel, in Samuel et al., op. cit., see vigilance over 'dilution' of the working-class Leonard Jones, 'The Workers' Theatre Movement in the movement by intellectuals in the period in Twenties', Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, XIV (1966), p. 259-81, and 'The Workers' Theatre in the which it is situated. Goss throws light on the Thirties', Marxism Today, XVIII (1974), p. 300-10. class contradictions attendant upon a situa- 4. Agit-prop depends much on the phatic tropes of tion where repetition, binary opposition, and the construction of crescendi by augmented repetition (Murder, m-u-r-d-e-r, MURDER!). These syntactical tropes typically reflect into In presenting this music to the general public, the simple linear and/or symmetrically-organized dramatic musical forces of the British working-class move- shapes. Both support the localized delivery of schema- ment are enlisting the services of the most highly- tized versions of Marxist critique as part of the exhor- skilled professional musicians. In doing so they tation. They might then at a superficial level seem good

153 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 game for both 'post-Marxist' and 'postmodern' appro- and Robert Buckland's Where's That Bomb? for London priations of Derridean deconstruction. Unity (1937) skits its working-class writer-hero for in- 5. For hostile accounts of the political turn, see dulgence in the easy expressivity of agit-prop rhetoric. Hugo Dewar, Communist Politics in Britain: the CPGB The play's humour contains a strong vein of self-efface- from its Origins to the Second World War (London: Pluto, ment. Articles tracing tropes of rhetorical negotiation/ 1976); Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, Two Steps embarrassment from British agit-prop into Popular Back: Communists and the Wider Labour Movement, 1935-Front product are in preparation. 1945. A Study in the Relations Between Vanguard and Class 10. The London Music Festival effaces the fact that (Ilford, Essex: Socialist Platform). For benign accounts the condition of its own existence is as a commodity, of the turn's cultural manifestations, see John Clark, with cosy talk of family parties. Margot Heinemann, David Margolies, and Carole Snee, 11. Circular letter, n. d. eds., Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties (London: 12. Eisler wrote in 1935 that he admired his ex-tutor Lawrence and Wishart, 1979); Jim Fyrth, ed., Britain, Schonberg, though for the reason that the decadence of Fascism and the Popular Front (London: Lawrence and his music was perfectly expressive of the chaos atten- Wishart, 1985). Trotsky made clear that the main threat ding capitalism's death-throes (see Eisler, 'Schonberg', in of fascism was its determination to extinguish the his A Rebel in Music, ed. Manfred Grabs (Berlin: Seven organizational and institutional bases of socialism. The Seas, 1978). By 1939 two things had happened: Schon- CPGB for its part, under Harry Pollitt, for a short time berg had left expressionism behind to return to natural proposed a struggle on 'two fronts': with the British harmonics; and he had been exiled by the Nazi threat state against fascism, and against it as the instrument of from Austria to the USA, where Eisler also arrived in the capitalist class. But Comintern imperatives prevailed. 1938. For accounts of Eisler's Popular Front cantatas, 6. See, for example, David Edgar, 'Festivals of the see Albrecht Betz, Hanns Eisler, Political Musician Oppressed', New Formations, 3 (Winter 1987), p. 19-32. (Cambridge University Press, 1982). The mass die-in was a regular feature of CND activity 13. Op. 14, dedicated to Montagu and Enid Slater. in the 1980s, a theatricalized demonstration in which The Sunday Times of 12 March 39 gives the title as parade turns to tableau-image, often accompanied by 'Anthem for Englishmen'. The eventual title is notably short agit-prop sketches and sometimes supporting a both more secular and more internationalist. spoken address. Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s 14. From the play of that name written for the Group came near to an 'organic' politics based in popular Theatre. Montagu Slater situates the Group aesthetic- culture and self-organization. In the dominant appar- ally in The Turning Point', Left Review (1935), p. 15-23 atus, the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games 15. This account leaves the Queen's Hall concert here, have produced an ersatz notion of international com- still only at the Interval. The audience returned to John munity by means of televised pageant since 1985; Jean- Ireland's setting of John Addington Symond's poem Michel Jarre in the late 1980s provided a distant echo of 'These Things Shall Be'. Dennis Noble sang baritone Leger's plan to turn Paris into a lightshow for the Front throughout. Populaire, Jarre manufacturing pseudo-religious pleni- 16. V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? tudes for punters in Houston or London with himself 17. This reprivileging is concomitant with a shift in as hero-priest; and by celebrating the history of their the understanding of how 'our epoch .. . has simplified region's resistance to Paris, including the Revolution of the class antagonisms' (Marx and Engels, The Commun- 1789, through a sentimental and reactionary pageant ist Manifesto) and favours a generalized understanding enacted by locals, the inhabitants of the Puy de Fou in of 'oppressor and oppressed' (ibid.) over specifics. In France have created a tourist industry to revive the the British context this reprivileging occurs on the flagging local economy. My disclaimers about my own ground of the 'William Morris' tradition. relationship to the material signal neither an adherence 18. This has a precise echo in Montagu Slater's to the outmoded and reactionary attitudes of literary 'Women's Chorus' for Towards Tomorrow, the Co- New Criticism - a sort of agnostic close reading - nor to operative Pageant of 1938. the banal cataloguing procedures now largely aban- 19. Montagu Slater, 'The Turning Point', Left Review doned in the writing of theatre history. But such a false (1935), p. 15-23. More is of concern here than the signal may be a necessary risk. The intention here is to immediate question of a tradition. There are important open this material up, not close it down. 'formal' questions relating both to the historical analy- 7.1 suggest but make little theoretical progress with sis of poetic discourse and much more immediately to a development of Raymond Williams's coinage 'struc- the contemporary poet's finding a 'popular' voice. See ture of feeling' into 'structure of desire' in Mick Wallis, the Slater article, and Margot Heinemann, 'Three Left- 'Present Consciousness of a Practical Kind: Structure of Wing Poets', in Clark et al., op. cit. Feeling and Higher Education Drama', in W. John Mor- 20. Jack Lindsay, Fanfrolico and After (London: Bodley gan and Peter Preston, eds., Raymond Williams: Politics, Head, 1962), p. 274. England my England (London: Fore Education and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1993). Publications, 1939) describes itself as 'a Pageant of the 8. Otherwise unascribed facts and opinions relating English People' and declares that 'Communism is to Bush derive from a number of conversations I held English'. It opposes the Second World War, a position with him in 1984-85. See also Ian Watson, 'Alan Bush that Lindsay was to reverse before the Communist and Left Music in the Thirties: an Introduction and an Party did. He joined both the Army and the CPGB in Interview', Gulliver, XXIX, German-English Yearbook 1941: call-up came on the day before Hitler launched (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1978); Alan Bush, In My the attack on the Soviet Union. Unquoted opinions Eighth Decade, and Other Essays (Kahn and Averill, 1980).ascribed here to Lindsay are derived from an interview, 9. See, for example, Samuel, in Samuel et al., op. cit., December 1985. p. 58 ff.. The WTM sketch 'Their Theatre and Ours' 21. Lindsay, op. cit., p. 263 places agit-prop culture in direct opposition to opiate 22. There are many versions of the declamation, bourgeois product. The working-class Herbert Hodge which was cut to make it performable in different

154 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 performance conditions, and updated by hands other 27. Programme scenario. This identifies by name the than Lindsay's with the progress of the Civil War: see, actors of Two Players' and 'Two Singers', and it may for instance, the three versions dating from 1937 to 1939 be that they spoke some or all the text for their groups. at 1937/23 in the Lord Chamberlain's Collection at the The Dancers may, by implication, have moved to a British Library. To stress the variety of situations: voice-over or spoken ensemble. On Guard was licensed for a first performance by Unity 28. '[Man] opposes himself to Nature as one of her at Shoreditch Town Hall in April 1937 (though see own forces.' 'By thus acting on the external world and Chambers, op. cit., p. 84, n. 23); shared the programme changing it, he at the same time changes his own with Wliere's That Bomb? and Odets's Waiting for Lefty at nature' (Marx, Capital). a benefit for the Spanish Relief Fund at the Phoenix 29. For Marx, humanity's productive articulation of Theatre on Sunday 2 May; and was given at an IB rally the rest of nature gives rise to an 'objective force' (the at Trafalgar Square that July. The poem as printed in organized means of production) to which humanity is Valentine Cunningham, The Penguin Book of Spanish bound in its own ultimate interest: '[Man] not only Civil War Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), is effects a change of form in the material on which he neither the original nor a performed version. A brief works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that formal appreciation is given in Don Watson, 'Poetry gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he and Politics: Mass Declamation and the 1930s', Artery, must subordinate his will' (Marx, Capital). The con- V, 3 [No. 19], p. 25-7. dition of class society is that one group controls that 23. Jack Lindsay, Five Thousand Years of Poetry objective force for its own benefit. While the notorious (London: Left Book Club, n. d.) base/superstructure metaphor might seem on the basis 24. The account which follows derives from two of this to consign cultural realities to a secondary level textual sources: the synopsis printed in the programme of materiality, that of 'effects', poststructuralist currents to the festival and a lacunose script-scenario in dupli- within Marxism have recovered or at least constructed a cated typescript in the possesion of Alan Bush. The sense of a structural totality in which the historical effec- latter is probably a near-final version. tivity of 'culture' is recognized. Swingler's text empha- 25. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English sizes its insistence on the materiality and effectivity of Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), Chapter IV, cultural production by recounting music's 'own' grand and my next article. Swingler's immediate target is narrative. This produces a 'culturalisf inflection to the almost certainly the Merrie Englandry of dominant argument: a sort of inverted base/superstructure meta- cultural accounts of history, which looked back to a phor in which a true human potential calls, through the constructed era before (left-wing) class-consciousness. agency of art-based-in-material-production - as intui- While his insistence on the class nature of feudalism tive theory, an organic understanding - for progress to- could still logically allow a notion of a natural social wards the emancipation of humanity from class society. contract or even 'Saxon precedent', his swipe at a 30. See, for instance, George Rud6, Ideology and sentimentalized history of innocent beginnings is plain Popular Protest (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980). enough. But the assault on dominant ideology has Marx, in the Introduction to Contribution to the Critique reverberations in his own narrative. of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, writes that 'Theory . . . 26. For an assault on attempts to 'save' Marx from his becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the assumption that there is such a thing as 'human nature' masses'. And see Rosa Luxemburg for a negotiation of see Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation the idea of 'spontaneity'. of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983). For a Popular Front 31. A comparison of this with Lindsay's own theor- account, see Emile Burns, What Is Marxism? (London: etical work demonstrates the conceptual shifts atten- Lawrence and Wishart, 1939). The presence of a species dant on finding negotiable metaphors. It can be said, of ontological utopianism in Marx may be accounted following Macherey, that as a dramatic transformation for by his debt to the idealist Hegel. Althusser, in Essays of historical substrate (the culture and politics of on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984) remarks that as Revolutionary France) this portion of Swingler's text, as Marx developed his thought, the term 'alienation' pro- all other rhetorical texts, is situated between 'science' gressively disappeared from his writings. Its persis- and 'ideology'. As a piece of Marxist analysis, it stands tence in Marxism may be accounted for in general nearer to 'science'. As a piece of Marxist pragmatics or terms by the necessary dialectic between science and faith, it stands nearer to 'ideology'. It is not necessary to ideology (as defined for a time by Althusser) within the be a naive empiricist to find the distinction useful. historical struggle. In times of political expediency and British Marxist literary theory of the period, to which physical as well as ideological onslaught it may be Swingler's text is closely allied, is largely considered to expected that these earlier formulations will gain be impoverished compared with continental examples. greater currency. The worst result in this case is an See Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (London: analysis of the historical juncture in Manichean rather Macmillan, 1937); Alick West, Crisis and Criticism than more complex dialectical terms. But this may suit (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1937). the political situation. Though for an insistence that the 32. This is necessarily a sketch. A full discussion 'worst in this case' is nothing less than a betrayal of the would need to mobilize not only Lacanian psycho- working class and socialism, see Dewar, op. cit., p. 129 analysis (especially as mediated by film theory, while and 141. I have suggested that any teleological not inattentive to somatic realities) but also anthropo- utopianism in Swingler's text has its legitimation as an logical models, and the sort of specificities engaged expression of the living tradition of socialist aspiration, with by Wolfgang Fritz Haug in Critique of Commodity underwritten by his albeit modest 'deconstructive' Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capi- gestures. In the swim of history the dialectic between talist Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). See idealist and materialist formulations (because of and Schechner, op. cit. (especially Chapter 8, 'Magnitudes of within consciousness) will remain - until we reach Performance'), for a mediation between somatic and Utopia, that is. semiotic dimensions.

155 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 33. Authentic presence need not be real, but construc- 37. One of their aims in adapting the Charles ted diegetically, and still achieve spectacular effect. I Jennings libretto had been to restore the 'revolutionary' shall argue this for the closing sections of Heirs to the chorus excised by earlier editors and producers. The Charter (1939). institutional nature of Towards Tomorrow typifies 34. This is only briefly to situate Bush in relation Popular Front cultural production. Mounted by Co- to the choirs: see Note 8. In his practical involvement operators, its artistic principals were all Communist with popular music-making, Bush was following in Party members. This seems genuinely not to have been the footsteps of his mentor Rutland Boughton: see regarded as entrism, rather as an obvious thing to be Michael Hurd, The Life and Time of Rutland Boughton doing in the circumstances. It is unlikely that the Party (London: Routledge, 1962). Boughton moved from re- at an official level valued these activities as a political forming the Edwardian choir festivals to founding the end. Bush, who joined in 1935, remarked in conversa- (utopian) Glastonbury Festival with Reginald Buckley, tion that the Party 'rather discouraged us from wasting and both wrote about the project. See Rutland time on matters of such unimportance'. Heirs to the Boughton, The Reality of Music (London: Kegan Paul, Charter (1939) as a rally was a different matter. Trench, Trubner, 1934) for a resolutely biological- 38. See Jim Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain: The British Aid materialist account of the origins and history of music. to Spain Movement (London: St Martin's Press, 1986). Stalin's 'proletarianized' academy was busily produ- The Minutes of the Festival Committee Meeting for cing such narratives, typically fetishizing a mechanical 1 March 1939 indicate that 20 of the young Basque notion of the concrete. refugees then at the Barnet Children's Home were to be 35. The Committee comprised: Bush, Clark, John invited to come and sing in the pageant. Many benefit Allen, Parry Jones, Alan Rawsthorne, Randall Swingler, and memorial meetings for the Brigade continued to be representatives of the LLCU, WMA, Labour Stage and held at this time. As was seen above, The Pageant of LCS Education Committe, Barbara Allen (theatre South Wales ends in similar fashion. designer), Michael Ross (painter), a chartered accoun- 39. Notwithstanding the religiosity of procession, tant, and a concerts manager. Composers: Frederic spectacular plenitude, and fetishized text, most Popular Austin, Alan Bush, Erik Chisholm, Arnold Cooke, Chris- Front pageants remain resolutely secular in normal tian Danton, Norman Demuth, Elizabeth Lutyens, Eliza- ideological terms. An exception is the Pageant of South beth Maconchy, Alan Rawsthorne, Edmund Rubbra, Wales, designed for a community in which the tradi- Victor Yates, R. Vaughan Williams. This section is tions of nonconformity and socialism were and remain based on papers in the possession of Alan Bush, too closely interwoven. For 'interpellation' see Louis Alt- numerous to cite individually. husser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). Ideology 36. Acting Chorus: Ashford, Bromley, Clapham, 'hails' (interpellates) the individual as subject: the sub- Eltham, and Epsom and Elwell Labour Choirs, Green- ject is constituted in ideology. A pageant may hail spec- ford Co-op Choir, Hendon Left Singers, Lasindon tator or participant as subject of a community or Ladies' Co-op Choral Society, New Progress Choir, interest. See for example my discussion of the Sher- Rhondda Unity Male Voice Choir, Unity Male Voice borne Pageant (1905). Choir, West London Co-op Choir. Mass Chorus: Bexley 40. The Sunday Times, 12 March 1939. Heath, Enfield Highway, Kentish Town, Redhill and 41. Goss to Clark, 20 January 1939. His name appears Reigate, Surbiton, Tooting, and Tottenham and Edmon- in the programme, which may simply have been ton Co-operative Choirs, East Ham Co-operative Choral wishful thinking. But Bush recalled that he was there. Society, Edgware Co-operative Musical Society. A 'name' 42.Ibid. was sought for the role of Announcer. In the event the 43. Goss to Clark, 11 December 1938. role was split between Wilfrid Walter and Ronald Kelly. 44. Circular letter, n. d. (op. cit., Note 11).

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