POLITICS AND MUSIC
Recently I wrote about how social and technological factors structure our experience of music. It has to be admitted I am no expert in this area, but I thought the resulting discussion was interesting and informative.
What I want to turn my attention to now is how Twentieth Century politics has intervened in the development of music. Because music talks to the emotions fairly directly, unmediated by language, and because of the collective pleasure in both listening and performing music, then it has often had a directly political dimension; for example the partial banning and popular disapproval of guitar based popular music by the former East German DDR led to the Leipzig riots of 1966. The rather culturally and socially staid government of Walter Ulbricht regarded such Western influence as symptomatic of political oppositionism, which of course bore with it the danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is necessary to understand that although governments have intervened in Art and music, there is no necessary and obvious correlation between certain styles of cultural production and left or right wing politics. For example, modernism and futurism were banned in Nazi Germany, while they were positively encouraged in Fascist Italy. Mussolini’s government was relatively successful at encouraging an environment where great art flourished, for example Mascagni’s opera “Il Piccolo Marat” about the French revolution breaks from his earlier work of the pre-fascist period by being more dissonant and more militaristic and iconoclastic. The ideologically committed fascist Goffredo Petrassi produced a particularly muscular sound in his early works.
Petrassi is arguably an archetypical fascist composer, the assertive use of brass and the deliberately ungracious shifts in mood reflect the pomp and arrogance of Mussolini himself. Fascism was experienced as a renaissance for the creative arts by many Italian intellectuals, as Mussolini’s government provided significant state support and subsidies; and Mussolini exercised personal patronage and interest in new music. As a result there was almost no anti-fascist opposition from Italian musicians: not until 1938 did Luigi Dallapiccola break from Mussolini, because he had a Jewish wife, when Mussolini half-heartedly introduced new nationality laws to cement his alliance with Hitler.
Nazi German was much less successful in harnessing art music. The two major composers working in Germany at that time were Richard Strauss and Carl Orff; neither of whom were Nazis, but both of whom were compromised by their collusion with the Nazi authorities (in the same way that P G Wodehouse and the Belgian cartoonist Herge were). The particular problem for the Nazis was to remove the record of Jewish influence from German music; where for example Schumman’s Dichterliebe used the text from the Jewish poet Heine, and Mozart’s operas used librettos written by the baptised Jew, da Ponte. Banning public performance of the music of Mendelssohn, Mahler, Meyerbeer and Offenbach inevitably made them look philistine and anti-intellectual, and banning Mendelssohn’s wedding march from a Midsummer Night’s Dream affected every family and community in Germany, so it was not a scandal limited to the intellectual classes.
The Nazis had developed theories about both music and the visual arts; Orff and Richard Strauss were highly valued by them because they wrote music that was popular and emotionally accessible, but also monumental and imposing. (This is in itself an illustration that very similar political projects can have different artistic expressions: in Spain, Franco’s regime had suffered from a huge flight of intellectuals and artists, and so it was not imposing monumental music, but the the folkloric intimacy of Rodgrigo’s music that was used by Franco to sanitise the international reputation of the regime)
However, what is clear is that all the fascist regimes encouraged art music that was accessible . The same is of course true of the socialist movement. It is worth referring to the discussion in Berthold Hinz’s extraordinary book “Art in the Third Reich ” where he explodes the myth that because there is superficial stylistic similarity between some Nazi genre painting and socialist realism that this means they were related phenomena. Seeing the achievement of a mass audience as a criteria of success is a politically neutral stance; and indeed American composers Samuel Barber and Aaron Copeland are popular without being particularly associated with politics (though Copeland was briefly blacklisted under McCarthy)
Nevertheless, to understand the context of modern Western music, we need to appreciate the degree to which there was a definite reaction against popular accessibility following the war; in particular associated with the Darmstadt school of composers, where music became excessively intellectualised; for example Pierre Boulez describes how it was necessary to read maybe four pages of explanation before reading a bar of music; and Stockhausen sought a condensed musical notation that required analysis before it could be played. A critique of this position (which I have sadly never read, though I doubt I would agree with it) was the marvellously entitled book “ Stockhausen Serves Imperialism ” by the British composer and Maoist activist, Cornelius Cardew.
This turning away from mass accesibility did not happen in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most successful composer at combining socialist politics with music, Hans Eisler, both built on the traditions of German art music following his teacher Schoenberg, and also reached for a mass audience. Eisler’s applied music is rarely obvious, and keeps the listener alert, often with a rather unresolved ambiguity. What is interesting is those politically committed left wing composers in the West, like Luigo Nono and Hans Werner Henze who were influenced by Eisler, adjusted their creative writing to a much less populist audience, as that was the requirement for funding in Western Europe. Hans Werner Henze argued that the main task of left wing composers was not to write music for workers, but to fight for working people to have enough leisure time and self assurance to appreciate that music belongs to them as well as the rich.
I suppose it is impossible to leave this subject without mentioning the serial difficulties that Shostakovich experienced in Stalin’s USSR. Stalin’s regime in the 1930s had developed a sense of acute paranoia, a paranoia that extended throughout the ranks of the Communist Party; and which had developed an internal culture of rationalising all forms of non-conformity into categories of external threat, whether “fascist”, “kulak” or “Trotskyist”; this was a particularly dangerous environment for individual genius. Socially, Shostakovich wrote for the quite wide class of Russians who self-identified as being the intelligentsia. His was not elite music, but neither was it designed to be populist. This would immediately raise suspicion, but Shostakovich was also an extremely playful writer who constantly alludes to various cultural references that his highly educated audience would pick up on. In a period of state paranoia, it was sadly inevitable that this would raise suspicions that he was trying to communicate some subversive sub-text.
However, it is also worth noting that Shostakovich was a subject of attention precisely because he was a very important figure in the USSR, as the government did prioritise the wide dissemination of culture (though the USSR did not go as far as Hungary, where each school child had one hour of music tuition every day). The difficulties of Shostakovich have become a commonplace to criticise the USSR, and while his persecution is indefensible, such probems were not confined to the USSR. The USA persecuted many artists, particularly of course Paul Robson.
In my earlier article I argued that the structure of funding for music makes the composing and production of new art music an essentially elitist affair. To a certain extent this situation has been informed by an over-reaction to the political use of music in the Twentieth century to stir emotions and encourage awe in a sense of historical purpose. It is a marvellous irony that the favourite music of the Nazis, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, because its monumental symbolism makes the listener feel impotent in face of greater power is also used by Simon Cowell on the X Factor to announce the arrival of the judges.
Some good stuff there Andy. A few points:
Worth noting that (in my opinion) Strauss’ music became less interesting and, basically, worse after the Nazis came to power. Not sure how much of a causal link there is, mind. And nothing on Wagner?
As an aside, there seems to be some evidence that some Nazis quite liked Bartok’s music, for purely musical reasons to do with rhythm and quasi-folk elements. This despite him being implacably anti-Nazi of course.
To put the post-war reaction against populism in some context. The Darmstadt generation were too young to have been properly involved in the great disasters of European politics in the 30s and 40s, but were strongly affected by them, and there was a quite conscious decision to reject ‘mass art’ largely as a reaction to what it had come to mean (politically and musically). Intellectually, by the way, Stockhausen was miles ahead of Boulez, Nono or Henze, but that doesn’t make him any more listenable.
Cardew’s angry little rant at Stockhausen is quite entertaining for what it is, but have you ever listened to anything he wrote after his break with modernism? Absolute tosh.
Worth mentioning the American experimental composers? Compared with the Darmstadt circle, they - Cage at first then the others - really did represent a radical break with the past in questions of authorial identity, relations between composer, performer, audience, etc. Cage was some sort of pseudo-Buddhist IIRC.
It has to be said that Uncle Joe was right about Shostakovich’s 4th but Lady Macbeth is a bit more worthwhile. Are you familiar with the Volkov controversy? Recommend Taruskin on the subject (and on Russian music in general of course).
Not so big on Eisler myself though…
Comment by Rory — 16 December, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
Thanks Rory, very interesting points
I didn’t discuss Wagner because I was already tackling a huge topic in discussing composers alive and working in the twentieth century, but the general problems with the historical repertire for the nazis were more with what they had to exclude than what they liked.
Comment by Andy Newman — 16 December, 2009 @ 2:12 pm
Wagner’s interesting for many reasons but worth mentioning his anti-capitalist and pacifist tendencies as well as anti-semitism. (Not to excuse the latter, obviously, just an interesting starting point for discussions of composers and politics.)
When I was a music student a few years back, the main problem for historians was addressing the C20th polarisation between a caricatured ’socialist’ position which was so concerned with historical and economic factors that it rarely had anything interesting to say about the music itself, and an extreme ‘ars gratia artis’ individualism which sees the composer or the work as an isolated entity and is unconcerned with its context. Not sure how that stands now. Worth reading Adorno and Dahlhaus though, if you’re interested and haven’t done already. Jazz was about the only subject on which Adorno concurred with Hitler…
Anyway, wittering now. Cheers for the article.
Comment by Rory — 16 December, 2009 @ 2:21 pm
#3 “Anyway, wittering now. Cheers for the article.”
I think wittering is allowed on a blog!
Wagner is a very important figure I think, and you are right that his politics are not simple, and open to more than one reading, For example Parsifal could be read as being about racial purity, or it could be read as about the triumph of love over secular power (AMOR triumphs over ROMA); IIRC Parsifal was picked up as a theme in one of Philp K Dick’s later novels, which played with the theme that only an idiot can acheive redemption.
but also Wagner is important to understand the difference between art music and popular music.
Only someone deeply educated in the history and theory of music could do anything as experimental as Wagner acheived in Tristan; and once the rules have been changed like that, then that novel shift in consciousness can never be uninvented, and so enters popular culture. But popular culture is unlikely to ever make the same sort of leap on its own.
Comment by Andy Newman — 16 December, 2009 @ 2:44 pm
Parsifal can also be read as an endorsement of Schopenhauer (like Tristan), or straightforwardly Christian (Nietsche). Or anything else you like really!
Comment by Rory — 16 December, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, Bay city Rollers- all had a bad sense of dress so me and Andy can’t take them seriously.
Comment by jj — 16 December, 2009 @ 2:52 pm
‘Jazz was about the only subject on which Adorno concurred with Hitler…’
As a jazz fan I’d appreciate some elucidation on this, from both perspectives as I am unaware of either and can only suspect Hitler’s objections to the modern American culture of any note, but not Adorno’s.
Cheers
Comment by Alf G — 16 December, 2009 @ 5:04 pm
“…Because music talks to the emotions fairly directly, unmediated by language…” who writes this shit? Music not a language- what the f… is it then? just a series of sounds unrestrained by rules,conventions,syntax and culture?
After reading such a philistine comment to begin with I gave up reading the rest although I can guess that the conclusion is that either the DDR, USSR or modern china were/are actually brilliant.
Comment by Paul Ross — 16 December, 2009 @ 5:21 pm
#7
Both anti-jazz (a bit of a catch-all term at the time).
Hitler because it was black music.
Adorno because it was a manifestation of commodified artistic production or something. Though it’s a while back and I can’t remember much detail. Google says read the Zeitschrift so I will try and dig it out!
Comment by Rory — 16 December, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
If you will forgive a bit of pushy advertising (especially # 7) we at Five Leaves mansions are finally bringing out Mike Gerber’s Jazz Jews on January 6th. Though not a political book as such, Mike does detail the role of Jews in breaking the colour bar in music in America, the role of jazz as an oppositional instrument to Apartheid in South Africa, to Soviet oppression etc. Jazz was identified as Black and Jewish by the Nazis. Commercial over.
Comment by ross bradshaw — 16 December, 2009 @ 6:01 pm
“there is no necessary and obvious correlation between certain styles of cultural production and left or right wing politics”
what means ‘necessary’ at this point? Although there are no simple, unequivocal correlations, there are clearly, eg., deep affinities between fascist and Stalinist aesthetics. both tend toward the, ahem, ‘muscular’, popular and ‘realist’, though for most practical purposes you could translate this to mean ‘popular mythologising and outright bloody lies’.
“However, what is clear is that all the fascist regimes encouraged art music that was accessible . The same is of course true of the socialist movement”
Not necessarily. For instance, only recently a collection was released of poetry and music from the period of the Russian revolution, much of which is very much avant garde (whether you consider it accessible or not is up to you.) The rise of Stalin naturally saw the dispersal of the avant garde. As Brecht said, bureaucracies and bureaucrats hate production (artistic production) because they can’t control it. Hence the preference for simple, naturalistic images which confirm their lying domination and absurd, anti-socialist mythologies.
“he explodes the myth that because there is superficial stylistic similarity between some Nazi genre painting and socialist realism that this means they were related phenomena”
It is not a ‘myth’. Indeed, it is precisely Stalinist and fascist art that are mythological.
“Stockhausen Serves Imperialism ” by the British composer and Maoist activist, Cornelius Cardew”
Although Cardew was interesting at various points in his musical career (with the group AMM and in the Scratch Orchestra, perhaps), his position in the piece you mention is overblown (albeit that the title is quite catchy.) He ended up writing ‘popular folk tunes with political themes’: sadly but entirely predictably the tunes were rubbish, were patently unpopular, and his politics absolutely sucked. Such a position is far more elitist than making an honest to goodness avant garde racket. He passed from singing Mao’s praises during the cultural revolution to following Enver Hoxha. His erstwhile comrades now present North Korea as a model of socialism. His early avant garde pieces are often interesting. AMM were certainly a provocative and thoughtful bunch who made some wonderful records (mostly after his departure) - check out, eg., ‘Live at The Crypt’. But everything he did after abandoning the avant garde is risible. There are many problems with Stockhausen, but Cardew didn’t solve any of them. I have a soft spot for Cardew despite all this - the recent biography by John Tilbury is very good.
Comment by Andy Wilson — 16 December, 2009 @ 6:21 pm
The link above should have pointed to Baku, Symphony of Sirens: Sound Experiments in the Soviet Avant Garde
Comment by Andy Wilson — 16 December, 2009 @ 6:26 pm
Not forgetting the Bonzos classic ‘Jollity (Collective) Farm’ and ‘Monster Mash’, about a meeting organised by Jim Denham and Eddie Truman.
Comment by Doug — 16 December, 2009 @ 7:45 pm
#8
There is a complex debate to be held over the degree to which music is a language, for example Adorno descibes musc as only being analogous to language - he describes it as language without intentionality , but i think it is better to say that as it lacks semantics then music is not per se language. It is intersting to even consider to what degree syntactic strcture is inherent to music. can you have music without syntax? perhaps, but you certainly can’t have human language without semantics.
So it is not “shit” to be simply dismissed to say that music reaches emotions without the mediation of language, if we mean language in both its common sense meaning, and also as understood by lingusitic theory and psychology.
Comment by Andy Newman — 16 December, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
#14, last para. Don’t hold back Andy, tell us what you really mean.
Comment by ross bradshaw — 16 December, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
Excellent stuff Andy.
Apolgies for just lifting this gobbet from wiki, but Arthur Schopenhauer is very interesting about the universal language of music and the reasons why us humans find it so appealing - why time and space seem suspended when we listen to it, why it makes us forget our mundane woes, and lots of other stuff besides -
Art & Aesthetics
For Schopenhauer, human desiring, “willing,” and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe’s “Sublimation”). This is the next best way, short of not willing at all, which is the best way. Total absorption in the world as representation prevents a person from suffering the world as will. Art diverts the spectator’s attention from the grave everyday world and lifts him or her into a world that consists of mere play of images. With music, the auditor becomes engrossed with a playful form of the will, which is normally deadly serious. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of phenomenal representation. Music artistically presents the will itself, not the way that the will appears to an individual observer. According to Daniel Albright, “Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
wikipedia
Comment by joe90 kane — 16 December, 2009 @ 8:55 pm
Music to the listener is in similarity to that of the book reader, it speaks to you and takes you on a minds journey.Although some in composition is without word does not detract from the understanding that the rhythm and flow does speak to the listner.
Comment by jim mc donald — 16 December, 2009 @ 9:42 pm
Incidently, when the nazis banned mendelssohn’s wedding march, the obvious alternative would be the equally famous wedding march by Richard Wagner from Lohengrin.
BUt I beleive that Carl Orff also wrote a wedding march, that was in common use in the Nazi period, any one know whether that is true?
Comment by Andy Newman — 16 December, 2009 @ 10:42 pm
#18
Sorry I can’t help you with that query Andy.
As far as weddings in The Third Reich goes, I think it was compulsary for the happy couple to receive a free copy of ‘Mein Kampf’!
Comment by joe90 kane — 17 December, 2009 @ 1:34 am
I thought at Reicht weddings is was mandatory to do the Reicht version of the hoky koky with mandatory 15 second right vertical arm raising.
Comment by jim mc donald — 17 December, 2009 @ 3:39 am
“I would be delighted if you can now change your comment so that it is at least factually correct. I can live with the random, tedious, unprovoked, playground insults.”
And the bad spelling?
Comment by tyresome points — 17 December, 2009 @ 9:43 am
#10
thanks for that. I will read that one, but only when it either comes out in paperback or ordered through the library.
#9
“Adorno because it was a manifestation of commodified artistic production or something.’
Made me smile. The only things that I’ve encountered by Adorno have been more mysterious waffle. But based on you precise there I suspect that he was to jazz as Popper was to Marx , Hegel and Plato. That is, uniformed from first hand knowledge.
Comment by Alf G — 17 December, 2009 @ 10:43 am
“I can live with the random, tedious, unprovoked, playground insults”
I imagine you can. After all, you are part of an organisation whose leading members include Sean Matgamna and Jim Denham.
Comment by lone nut — 17 December, 2009 @ 11:06 am
Its ok,isin!t that what socialism is striving for, a better world without segragation of intelect and snobery.Now its time to go to the back of the class,no.23.
Comment by jim mc donald — 17 December, 2009 @ 11:30 am
#24: “But based on you precise there I suspect that he was to jazz as Popper was to Marx , Hegel and Plato”
and you couldn’t be more wrong. ‘based on your precise’ is the kind of thing that would have made Adorno snarl, if he had gone in for that sort of thing.
Comment by Andy Wilson — 17 December, 2009 @ 12:30 pm
ps. people talk nonsense about Adorno. Hardly anyone has read him, but everyone seems to have a clear idea of what he stood for. Like Marx himself, he’s more talked about than read.
Comment by Andy Wilson — 17 December, 2009 @ 12:30 pm
#11
Andy Wilson
I am not sure that the socialist movement qua socialist movement were responsible for, nor entirely supportive of the artistic ferment that thrived on the social context that the revolution created.
Lenin for example was highly critical of Mayakovsky.
Nor is it necessarily true that avant guardism is inaccessible, especially compared to the traditions of salon painting and very formal poetic conventions that early twnetieth century art was rebelling against. In particular you can think of Wyndham lewis and the English vortacists who took their work into working class music halls, and found a better response than in the salon society that Wyndham lewis hated with almost pathological obsession.
(incidently, in Britain at least the vigorous and exciting avant guarde scene rotated around these proto-fascists, rather than the left)
Comment by Andy Newman — 17 December, 2009 @ 1:14 pm
Adorno is that a mirror image or a being,if so please inform, im of the prolarariat class that karl and his mate fred was talking about.
Comment by jim mc donald — 17 December, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
“Lenin for example was highly critical of Mayakovsky”
Apparently Cliff wasn’t too keen on Stockhausen either. I couldn’t care less in either case. Perhaps they were just wrong-headed and a bit out of their sphere of competence or expertise. I don’t see why anyone should take their lead from Lenin on the matter.
Though I was surprised once at The Klinker Club a few years ago (a London club that’s home to extremely far out sound poetry and wild improv) to see Chanie Rosenberg in the audience and seeming to enjoy it (true story)
“Nor is it necessarily true that avant guardism is inaccessible”
I thought I made this point myself. But some stuff is rather inaccessible. On the bright side, we aren’t babies and it’s often worth the effort to get to grips with ‘difficult’ stuff. It won’t kill anyone to try.
Adorno is that a mirror image or a being
(guessing here somewhat as to your meaning, jim) Adorno is as cool as f**k. I hate all this mopey, lardy-arsed proletarian whining about how the working class like their fare plain and easy to digest. When I moaned that few people read him, I definitely include the most of posh kids who write about him. He’s not an easy read, for sure, but that’s true whatever class you come from. D’you know, I’ve heard people say that Marx himself wasn’t always that easy to follow. Who cares?
Comment by Andy Wilson — 17 December, 2009 @ 3:09 pm
#29
“Apparently Cliff wasn’t too keen on Stockhausen either. I couldn’t care less in either case. Perhaps they were just wrong-headed and a bit out of their sphere of competence or expertise. I don’t see why anyone should take their lead from Lenin on the matter.”
I don’t care who you tak e your lead from, ir what your cultural preferences are.
I am just pointing out that my original statement that the socialist movement has traditionally encouraged accessibility in art is not wrong, and is not disproved by there being avant garde and perhaps inaccesible cultural production in the context of socialist governments.
Comment by Andy Newman — 17 December, 2009 @ 3:14 pm
#24/25: Jim, just to clarify - Adorno didn’t like Jazz, to be sure, but his idea of what ‘jazz’ meant might be very different to ours: when he talked of ‘jazz’ he could be seen to be talking about popular music (where this would mean ‘the popular music of the time’, and not necessarily what you or I think of as popular music today). When he was at Oxford he was known to defend jazz against genuinely elitist criticism. And then factor in that to some extent he might just have been plain wrong or ‘bending the stick’ (ahem). One way or another, that hardly makes him “the Popper to Jazz’s Plato, Hegel and Marx”. I only mention it because Adorno is so often taken to be a symbol of a certain kind of elitist dismissal of the popular without anyone bothering to get to grips with what he was really trying to say, which is far more interesting than his reputation suggests. Me, I think he is far and away the best Marxist critic of culture.
Comment by Andy Wilson — 17 December, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
#30: “the socialist movement has traditionally encouraged accessibility”
I have read Socialist Review. I agree with you
All I am saying is that this is a bit of a dumbass move on the part of ‘the socialist movement’
Comment by Andy Wilson — 17 December, 2009 @ 3:28 pm
Well we agree then Andy.
My argument here was to describe what infleunce politics has had on music, not on what shoud have happened.
Similarly, to say that hans Eisler is in my judgement the most successful exemplar of trying to combine socialism with music does not mean that he is the best socialist, nor the best composer, nor even that the project was necessarily a worthwile one. He was just the most successful - in my opinion - of those who tried.
Comment by Andy Newman — 17 December, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
#18
Andy,
Richard j. Evans in his The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939 (2005)uses as a source
Erik Levi Music in the Third Reich (New York, 1994).
#27
(incidently, in Britain at least the vigorous and exciting avant guarde scene rotated around these proto-fascists, rather than the left)
- I was just going to say something along the same lines.
You can see these influences in WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Hugh McDiarmid, for instance, in their dislike and disgust, almost, of the rest of oridnary humanity.
Take TS Eliot’s title to his poem ‘The Waste Land’ is practically proto-fascist in its disgust at the base uneducated masses.
WB Yeats talks in not very flattering terms about ordinary people. Same with McDairmid who hated popular sports for instance
Many of the 1920s creative types were very elitist and high-brow.
Comment by joe90 kane — 17 December, 2009 @ 7:09 pm
“When one breaks a hand or a leg, the bones, the tendons, the muscles, the arteries, the nerves and the skin do not break and tear in one line, nor afterwards do they grow together and heal at the same time. So, in a revolutionary break in the life of society, there is no simultaneousness and no symmetry of processes either in the ideology of society, or in its economic structure. The ideologic premises which are needed for the revolution are formed before the revolution, and the most important ideologic deductions from the revolution appear only much later. It would be extremely flippant to establish by analogies and comparisons the identity of Futurism and Communism, and so form the deduction that Futurism is the art of the proletariat. Such pretensions must be rejected. But this does not signify a contemptuous attitude towards the work of the Futurists. In our opinion they are the necessary links in the forming of a new and great literature. But they will prove to be only a significant episode in its evolution. To prove this, one has to approach the question more concretely and historically. The Futurists in their way are right when, in answer to the reproach that their works are above the heads of the masses, they say that Marx’s Capital is also above their heads. Of course the masses are culturally and aestheticsally unprepared, and will rise only slowly. But this is only one of the causes of it being above their heads. There is another cause. In its methods and in its forms, Futurism carries within itself clear traces of that world, or rather, of that little world in which it was born, and which – psychologically and not logically – it has not left to this very day. It is just as difficult to strip Futurism of the robe of the intelligentsia as it is to separate form from content. And when this happens, Futurism will undergo such a profound qualitative change that it will cease to be Futurism. This is going to happen, but not tomorrow. But even today one can say with certainty that much in Futurism will be useful and will serve to elevate and to revive art, if Futurism will learn to stand on its own legs, without any attempt to have itself decreed official by the government, as happened in the beginning of the Revolution. The new forms must find for themselves, and independently, an access into the consciousness of the advanced elements of the working-class as the latter develop culturally. Art cannot live and cannot develop without a flexible atmosphere of sympathy around it. On this road, and on no other, does the process of complex interrelation lie ahead. The cultural growth of the working-class will help and influence those innovators who really hold something in their bosom. The mannerisms which inevitably crop out in all small groups will fall away, and from the vital sprouts will come fresh forms for the solution of new artistic tasks. This process implies, first of all, an accumulation of material culture, a growth of prosperity and a development of technique. There is no other road. It is impossible to think seriously that history will simply conserve the works of the Futurists, and will serve them up to the masses after many years, when the masses will have become ripe for them. This, of course, would be passaeism of the purest kind. When that time, which is not immediate, will come, and the cultural and aesthetics education of the working masses will destroy the wide chasm between the creative intelligentsia and the people, art will have a different aspect from what it has today. In the evolution of that art, Futurism will prove to have been a necessary link. And is this so very little?”
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
Comment by Andy Wilson — 18 December, 2009 @ 10:41 am
#34
I think that the contempt of that circle was not so much anti-plebian, as informed by a disgust at the frivolity of civilian and artistic salon life after the carnage of the trenches. There was a feelng that the experiencee of war had exposed something more fundamental and existential about human life that was raw and elemental.
Whereas the ettiquete and gossipy conventions of the literary and artistic elite were rather repulsive in contrast. This also explains their preferece for masculinity, and in a bizare way the anti-Semitism of, for example, Ezra Pound was because to a certain extent he saw the judaic intellectual tradition as effete and not martial.
I think that the proto-facsist intellectuals were so much elitist as contemptuous of humanity itself. And while I agree that the vortecists were in a way elitist, it was a funny elitism that preferred the music hall to the salon. And Henry Williamson, who was certainly part of this fascist set, was a genuinely popular author, and while his Dandelion Years books are little read now, Tarka the Otter is still regarded as a classic.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 December, 2009 @ 11:10 am
#35
Thanks Andy.
Sorry for my ineloquence.
By ‘ordinary humanity’ I meant society was seen as failing its members and that the ‘culture’ it was satisfied with passing on was a degraded ‘mass’ culture of a base and lowest common denominator variety. Whereas Pound, Eliot and McDairmid, for instance, sought to encompass all of the creativity and learning of history. Making their work impenetrable if the reader didn’t know Latin, or Greek or even Chinese Mandarin!
Yes, a funny kind of elitism is a nice way of putting it. They did care about humanity and its future, as you say - and were anti-establishment in the sense they wanted to change it for the better, rather destroy it altogether.
This proto-fascism after World War I is a strand of influence on artists that doesn’t get much air-time these days unless the artist didn’t eventually grow out of it, such as Ezra Pound.
I am always quite struck by how pervasive and fashionable proto-fascism, and even fascism, was in the post-WWI period.
I don’t suppose you have any good books you could recommend on this subject - while I’m at, as I’m always impressed by your knowledge of the subject, could you recommend any good history books on the Russian Revolution- Soviet Union era. I read you meantion EH Carr’s 3 volume history once.
Comment by joe90 kane — 18 December, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
Arse -
sorry, I was replying to #36 not #35
Comment by joe90 kane — 18 December, 2009 @ 1:48 pm
Good points Joe90
I can’t recommend any books on that period in the arts, my own patchy knowledge has been pickked up by snippets from general reading, or individual biograohies that don’t make the link that there were part of a general phenomenon.
On the early years of the USSR, then a comprehensive source is EH Carr’s multi-volume work ( you can pick them up second hand on amazon for about 1p each if you are patient; MIchael Reiman’s “The birth of Stalinism” and on the later period the various works by J Arch Getty. There are of course tons of books about Stalin; but one work that gives some interesting insight from a fresh angle is Jhores Medvedev’s book about Lysenko.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 December, 2009 @ 1:58 pm
Thanks again Andy.
If your knowledge is patchy with regards to some aspects of inter-war western creative influences and politics, then it doesn’t come across that way.
I don’t want to continue these comments beyond their natural span, so don’t feel obliged to reply or anything.
I had a wry smile when you mentioned the treatment Shostakovich-Stalin receives when compared to the the likes of Paul Robeson-America. I remember us exchanging comments about this. This observation could easily be extended to the oppression of all Black American artists of all disciplines. Yet BBC Radio 3 is happy to chunter on about Stalin oppression of this one single composer and rarely, if ever, points out the widespread censorship of Black artists in the US until only just recently - c.1960s and the civil rights movement really.
Like yourself, I’m sick to the back teeth with the BBC’s obsession with Stalin. Rarely do they give Prokofiev the same prominence for the simple reason he’s not as useful for official BBC propaganda purposes. His wife, after the composers death, denounced biographies written which were no more than anti-Stalinist cold war propaganda.
It’s ironic that the unique artistic forms which America has given to the rest of the world are all Black - Jazz, Blues, etc. Not a whitey in sight.
It’s a subject I very much enjoy - politics and culture.
all the best
Comment by joe90 kane — 18 December, 2009 @ 5:51 pm