Making Marx in the Music: A HyperHistory of New Music and Politics Kyle Gann November 1, 2003 “There is no such thing as Art for Art’s sake, art that stands and instruments he always uses; political classical com- above classes, art that is detached from or independent of posers often feel that the political intention entails a spe- politics.” — Mao Tse-tung cial style and strategy. When Billy Bragg is infuriated by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and I have some- an item in the paper, he can fire off a song that day: thing in common: we’re both ashamed to share our home Voices on the radio state with George W. Bush. But she’s gotten a lot more Tell us that we’re going to war attention for having said so. After she dissed the Presi- Those brave men and women in uniform dent to a concert audience in London, she and the other They want to know what they’re fighting for The generals want to hear the end game Chicks received obscene phone calls, threatening drive- The allies won’t approve the plan bys, bomb threats, and had their songs blacklisted off of But the oil men in the White House hundreds of radio stations, many of them owned by the They just don’t give a damn’ right wing-connected Clear Channel Corporation. Mean- Cause it’s all about the price of oil. while, John Mellencamp revved up an old 1903 protest — “The Price of Oil” by Billy Bragg song called “To Washington,” refitted it with new 2003 The classical and jazz worlds, however, generally have lyrics, and released it provocatively just as the troops a longer turnaround time. were headed for Baghdad: Some composers see themselves playing to such a A new man in the White House small audience that they see no point in writing polit- With a familiar name ical music, and often they compensate with more con- Said he had some fresh ideas ventional types of political activism; Conlon Nancarrow, But it’s worse now since he came for instance, didn’t believe in music’s ability to portray From Texas to Washington He wants to fight with many anything extramusical, let alone political, but was nev- And he says it’s not for oil ertheless a sufficiently committed Communist to fight in He sent out the National Guard the Spanish Civil War. Others feel, more obliquely and To police the world with little opportunity to gather concrete evidence, that From Baghdad to Washington through the nature of their music they can encourage per- For that, hundreds of radio listeners called in and said ceptions that bring about greater awareness in the general things like, “I don’t know who I hate worse, Osama bin population. Laden or John Mellencamp.” Most problematic of all, perhaps, is classical music’s No one can doubt that music has a big role to play traditional relationship to established power and wealth. in the world of political protest. The controversial mu- Rock guitarists and performance artists can challenge sicians we read about in the papers, though, are mostly the status quo without subsidy, but the composer who from the pop and folk genres. It’s not only that those gets performed by orchestra or chamber ensemble usu- musicians are more visible, though that’s certainly true ally does so by the grace of either government grants or as well. Classical music and jazz seem to have a more wealthy patrons or both. You can write a symphony sub- long-term, measured, even sublimated approach to polit- titled “Death to the Corporate Ruling Class” if you want, ical protest, slower to react and more deeply embedded in but think twice about showing up for the orchestra trustee the structure of the music itself. When John Mellencamp board meeting at which the commission is announced. writes a political song, he can use the same old chords Consequently, political controversies involving classi- KYLE GANN 1 Marking Marx in the Music cal music have been few and far between, and not al- of former CEOs like Bush and Cheney has eroded even ways attributable to radical intentions on the part of the the slim, traditional distinction between politicians and composers. The few highly visible cases are easy to enu- the corporate class.) Virtually by definition, “politi- merate. In 1953, Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait cal music” is understood as music that supports the in- — and how can you get any more innocently Ameri- terests of the working classes, and exposes the corpo- can than Copland’s narrated tone poem with Lincoln’s rate/governing class as thieves and oppressors. As Chris- words laced by folk song quotations like “Springfield tian Wolff — one of the central composers in this area Mountain” and “Camptown Races” — was abruptly can- — has pointed out, almost all composers called political celed from performance at President Eisenhower’s in- are leftist: there have been virtually no composers whose augural concert, because an Illinois congressman, Fred music was explicitly associated with conservative causes, E. Busbey, had protested Copland’s Communist connec- notwithstanding a number of patriotic symphonies and tions of the 1930s. Copland had never actually been a tone poems penned during World War II. In Marxist Party member, but had written a prize-winning song for terms, composers who write for the delectation of the the Communist Composers’ Collective, given musical rich and for their fellow professionals are giving aid and lectures for Communist organizations, and appeared at comfort to the bourgeoisie, and are by definition counter- the 1949 World Peace Conference to meet Shostakovich. revolutionary, no matter what their conscious personal Within months, Senator Joseph McCarthy called Cop- politics. Most non-pop music of the past century that land to appear before the House Committee on Un- we think of as political has come from a Marxist, com- American Activities, a fate that also eventually befell fel- munist, or socialist viewpoint — the composers who low composers Elie Siegmeister, Wallingford Riegger, come to mind are Hanns Eisler, Marc Blitzstein, Fred- David Diamond, and the German emigr´ e´ Hanns Eisler, eric Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Luigi who was subsequently deported. Nono. Even for composers who write from a feminist or A similar situation recurred in 1973, when Vincent gay or pro-Native American or Save the Whales view- Persichetti’s A Lincoln Address, also based on words of point, Marxist conditions for political music tend to be the Great Emancipator, was to be premiered as part of assumed: simplicity, relation to some musical vernacu- Richard Nixon’s inauguration. Lincoln, however, had de- lar, non-elitist performance situations. nounced “the mighty scourge of war,” which threatened For many people, music can only be political when it to look like a reflection on Nixon’s pet venture, the Viet- has a text, and for certain composers, the style is imma- nam War. Persichetti was asked to make changes. He de- terial as long as the text makes its point. The latter group, clined. The performance did not take place. Apparently however, seem to be a minority; most political composers the words of Abraham Lincoln are too inflammatory for feel that music should be understandable not only by mu- today’s politicians. More recently, John Adams and Al- sical connoisseurs, but by the working classes whose in- ice Goodman had the choruses of their opera The Death terest it represents, whereas writing music for new-music of Klinghoffer canceled by the Boston Symphony in the specialists and the upper class is regarded as being of lit- wake of 9-11 for their arguably pro-Arab (or in Adams’ tle value or point. Therefore, political music tends to view, even-handed) stance. The words of that opera, such be widely accessible, non-abstract, familiar in its basic as— idiom, tending towards simplicity rather than complex- “My father’s house was razed ity. There are exceptions; Nono wrote political music in In nineteen forty-eight a serialist and rather forbidding idiom, and Wallingford When the Israelis Riegger was a curiously complacent 12-tone Commu- Passed over our street” nist. Leftist composers of the Depression Era believed — were to some listeners, it has been charged, “not a in using folk tunes to represent, and reach out to, “The simple statement of fact, but rather provocation.” Never- People.” Analogously, some more recent composers have theless, despite these isolated headline-grabbers, by and believed in starting from a pop or rock idiom, as being large — aside from the perennial attacks on Wagner’s the “folk” music to which today’s mass audiences are at- anti-Semitism that constitute a cottage industry — the tuned. world rarely takes classical music seriously enough to However, as Wolff has written, the conditions through protest it. which popular music develops are themselves corrupt As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Man- and exploitative. Those who take pop music as a stylis- ifesto, the bourgeois epoch has simplified the structure tic basis may already be, by implication, playing into the of the world’s class antagonisms into two camps: bour- hands of the corporate world — unless, somehow, they geoisie and proletariat. (In recent years, the selection engage to subvert it. Swerve toward popular music and KYLE GANN 2 Marking Marx in the Music you may be letting corporations dictate your personal ex- ever, will they be, as they so often are, pessimistically pression; swerve too far away, even in the direction of dismissed. For some, answers will forever depend on simplicity and accessibility, and you run the danger, as the consciences of individual composers; others may be Wolff says, of seeming merely “eccentric.” As he further clarified as time goes by and our experience of music in spells out the paradox, parsing German social thinker differing contexts accumulates.