MASARYK UNIVERSITY Faculty of Social Studies Department Of
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MASARYK UNIVERSITY Faculty of Social Studies Department of Sociology Coding Jazz Performing Music Criticism in Stalinist Czechoslovakia Bachelor thesis Author: Dominik Ţelinský UČO: 397500 Supervisor: Dominik Bartmanski, M.A., Ph.D. 1 I would like to thank my advisor, Dominik Bartmanski for his personal effort, priceless comments and general help with the development of this thesis. My gratitude goes to Zuzana Ţelinská who corrected the language of the text and Lucie Kučerová who reviewed it and criticized it, as well. 2 I hereby declare that I wrote this thesis independently, using only the sources cited. In Brno, date: …………………………………… Dominik Ţelinský: ……………………………… 3 Content 1. A Brief Introduction 5 2. After the Victorious February of 1948 5 3. Performing Criticism 8 3.1. Dancing the critique. Is the act of criticism a performance? 8 3.2. Elements of performance 9 3.2.1. Background symbols and foreground scripts 10 3.2.2. Actor & Audience 11 3.2.3. Means of symbolic production 12 3.2.4. Mise-en-scène 12 3.2.5. Social power 13 3.3. Fusing the elements to mediate meaning 13 3.4. Criticism under Totalitarian Rule 14 4. Targeting Jazz 17 4.1.1. Briefly about Jazz in the Soviet Union 17 4.1.2. What about Czechoslovakia? 18 4.1.3. In the USSR 20 4.2. The East, the West and the Meaning of the Jazz 21 4.2.1. Construction of the Eastern and the Western 21 4.2.2. Authentic & Inauthentic Jazz 22 4.2.3. The Tool of Oppression 23 4.3 Space, Subculture and Form 24 4.3.1. Spaces of Jazz 24 4.3.2. Jazz Subculture 26 4.3.3. Jazz as a Formal Genre 28 5. Conclusion 30 6. A Note at the End 33 Bibliography 34 Name Index 40 Annotation 43 Anotácia 43 4 1. A Brief Introduction This bachelor thesis provides an analysis of tense relationship between Czechoslovak communist party and jazz music during the Stalinist era (roughly 1948-1956). The first, introductory part acquaints the reader with basic historical and social events and signalizes the cultural sociological approach I am utilizing throughout the whole thesis. The second part is then devoted to analysis of contemporary music and art criticism through the scope of relatively recent theory of Cultural Pragmatics (Alexander 2006) and the theory of social performance. The third part offers a description of the contemporary interpretation of jazz music and its sociological analysis, as well as attempt to identify the reasons (subculture, space, and formal specificity) why jazz was rendered problematic by contemporary ideologues. The thesis ends with a conclusion and a note on the limitations of my work. To understand the problem and to develop the following thesis I have used, apart from theoretical conceptions, empiric material such as memoires of important figures of Czechoslovak jazz scene (Dorůţka 1997; Traxler 1980), coeval music criticism (e.g. Zhdanov 1949a; Gorodinsky 1952, etc.), contemporary press (Hudební rozhledy; Kulturní politika), and present-day articles in music periodicals (e.g. Dorůţka 2011a; Matzner 2014, etc.). 2. What Happened after the Victorious February? Political turmoil that escalated between the 17th and the 25th February 1948 and climaxed in communist coup d‟état is widely considered to be a source of collective trauma in Czechoslovakia, for it, in the end, resulted in forty one years of pro-Soviet socialist regime. Close connection with the Soviet Union, the outbreak of the Cold War, closure of borders and anti-Western paranoia led at the time to establishment of totalitarian rule which aimed to uniformity (Macura 1992: 46) and absolute control of every particle within the system (Arendt 1996: 551). To sustain its position, totalitarian movement had to maintain its dynamics by constant search for and fight with an “objective” enemy (Arendt 1996: 585) – in this case the bourgeoisie, America, the capitalism. Communists began to occupy key positions in many spheres of the system yet before the Victorious February of 1948 (Traxler 1980: 265) and after the takeover they swiftly gained control over the entire public sphere, bureaucracy and politics. In order to do so, communist 5 members and employees of virtually every organization or enterprise (radio stations, publishing houses, hotels, unions, syndicates, etc.) concentrated themselves into “action committees” that investigated background and ideological affiliation of other participants in these organizations and purged administrative structures of non-communist elements that could endanger the smooth flow of takeover or defy the application of communist policy in the future. Such pattern applied to collectivization of private property of “kulaks” (wealthy peasants) and private enterprises as well. This radical and swift change influenced directly everyday life of Czechoslovak population and caused vast transformation of social reality. To uphold stability after such drastic intrusion into social life, communist authorities had to develop, or apply ready-made strategies for re-integration of Czechoslovak society. While manifestly fighting the Christianity, they utilized almost religious approach to unify the symbolic universe of the population. Since, as Émile Durkheim wrote, “moral remaking can be achieved only through meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments” (Durkheim [1912] 1995: 430), primary for this process of re-integration and unification became secular rituals such as 1st May marches and later (after 1955) Spartakiads, mass athletic demonstrations (Macura 1992: 65-73). It is a ritual that manifests new political and social situation through semantic and spatial organization of symbols, for they are the “repeated episode of simplified cultural communication” (Alexander 2006: 29) that makes social reality intelligible for particular agents. Such rituals were not only massive; they permeated everyday life of people in form of constant ideological trainings and work sessions or conferences. It goes without saying that such rituals may have, for the same purpose, been utilized constantly in Western society as well. The structuring principle of symbolic system of Czechoslovak communism was the narrative of class struggle, based on theory of Karl Marx and further interpreted by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and other theorists and ideologues of Communism. After the Second World War and Victorious February, this narrative quickly took on geographical form – Western hemisphere of the globe became interpreted as colonized by imperialist and capitalist power, while the East was a land of free proletariat under the rule of Joseph Stalin. To this basic narrative, or myth (Barthes [1957] 1972), a bundle of other, specifying myths – such as the myth of the leader as the father of the working class (Macura 1992: 46-53) – was attached. One must not forget that this narrative of clash between proletariat and bourgeoisie or East and West had 6 strong moral dimension, understanding it as a war between Good and Evil (Alexander 2003: 3). To ensure their position, communists, similarly to Hitler‟s National Socialists‟ racial policy (Arendt 1996: 527), utilized trope of undeniable science of dialectical materialism that enables one to understand the objective course of history. It was hoped that through spreading of this mythology and practicing rituals, as well as introduction of new symbols and recodification of the old ones, it would be possible to unify symbolic consciousness of population and create symbolic boundaries between citizens mutually and between citizens and state apparatus. Rituals and myths played cognitive role: specified what is of special significance and orientated people‟s attentions toward specific objects (Lukes 1975: 301). To establish new boundaries, old ones had to be disrupted – this was to be attained via constant paranoid search for inner enemy, again, inherent to totalitarian system (Arendt 1996: 583). Paranoia of regime induced feeling of distrust and fear, enhanced by tragic massive rituals of purification – the show trials that manifestly proved existence of “reactionary” powers inside of People‟s democratic state of Czechoslovakia and shown exemplary treatment of such excesses (such trials took place in most countries of Eastern bloc, e.g. Hodos 1987). To certain extent, this experiment was, thanks to absolute monopoly on symbolic and physical power, successful – as Egon Bondy says, “It was impossible to resist this attack and most people were unable to at least start to defend themselves, for it was absolutely unexpected and its massiveness was, even after the experience with Nazi propaganda, unprecedented. It did not take much time to see the effect. Enthusiasm for Stalinism was, mostly among the youth, massive.” (Bondy 2008: 63) Since the sphere of culture and cultural production was considered to be an important source of information and hence a potential threat to homogeneity of freshly established Czechoslovak people‟s democracy‟s ideological structure, it had to be purified of non- communist elements as well. On the other hand, culture – art, literature, press, radio, and later television, was the medium that enabled the regime to transmit, through individual performance, the abovementioned unified symbolic system to whole population. Relative ideological coherence of cultural sphere was achieved through exclusion of openly non- communist authors from artistic unions, or authors with history of collaboration with Nazi regime, from artistic unions (Knapík 2006). Authors who did not belong to such official structures were denied the access to material means of production of art, music and literature and had to satisfy themselves with clandestine 7 samizdat editions and with minimal audience, consisting, at best, of their friends and relatives (Knapík 2006; Janoušek 2007). These authors, or whole genres of art, had to be chosen and their work interpreted as an attack against communist rule. It must be remembered that the exclusion and stigmatization of producers of cultural good might have had numerous reasons: as Vrba (1998: 282) argues, those were not only ideological – it could have been result of personal conflict or backwards revision of literary canon.