7

‘Music Left and Right’: A Tale of TwoHistories of Progressive Music

ANNE C. SHREFFLER

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Reinhold Brinkmann (1934–2010)

THIS IS, AS FAR AS I KNOW, the first conference to be devoted entirely to musicand communism outside the communist bloc.1 As such, it presents an interestingcounter-narrative to prevailing scholarship, which has tended to emphasizemusic under totalitarian regimes, communist and fascist: that is, situations inwhich the operational relationship between music and politics is more readilyidentifiable, if not necessarily clearer, than it is in Western democracies. Thenotion of practising communism in the West may seem counterintuitive to some,self-indulgent and naive to others. Particularly in the political climate of theearly twenty-first century, in which the fall of state communism has beenfollowed by a widespread dismissal of all views that ever pertained to it (at leastin mainstream politics), the whole enterprise of communist-inspired musiccomposed by citizens of Western democracies seems to have been ratherquixotic.

The topic of this conference focuses on the situations that arise as a resultof left-wing parties and cultural programmes occupying different positions innon-communist countries than they did in communist ones. The ‘communistbloc’ itself was of course hardly monolithic. Eastern bloc countries had differenthistories and different relationships with Moscow, which resulted in vastlydifferent cultural experiences. (We need think only of avant-garde music inPoland.) Western communist parties likewise differed in size, influence, anddegree of participation in the political process, as well as in their degree ofloyalty to Moscow. Whereas after the Second World War, the communist parties

1 I would like to express my thanks to the conference participants for their engaged questionsand insightful remarks on the original presentation, and to Andrea Bohlman for research assistancein the preparation of this text.

Proceedings of the British Academy 185, 67–87. © The British Academy 2013.

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in France and Italy controlled seats in their respective parliaments and numerousother offices at the state and city level, the Communist Party of the US has neverinfluenced mainstream politics. By comparison, the Communist Party of GreatBritain had a much larger (and fanatically loyal) following, although it too wasminuscule in relation to the mass parties on the continent.2

The Western communist parties also differed in their views on the importanceof employing art and culture for political ends. Here the French and Italianparties were again the leaders, devoting their energies – and substantialresources – to the cultural sphere, recognizing that the adroit wielding of ‘softpower’ would win them prestige far beyond the limitations of their actualpolitical impact. Both parties also supported a far wider range of styles andaesthetics than those officially approved in the Soviet Union.

If Western communist parties were freer than their counterparts incommunist-governed countries to theorize about how best to apply Marxistprinciples to music, left-wing musicians in the West were freer still. Somesubscribed strictly to the party line, while others maintained their own, perhapsblended or muddled, personal philosophies and political views. Luigi Nono, forexample, was a member of the Italian Communist Party, while others expressedtheir political beliefs without formal participation in the political process. Itwas relatively unusual for drastic penalties to be attached to party membershipin the West. The most striking exception was the period of ‘Red Scare’ anti-communism in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s. Elsewhere,certain career paths or professorships at certain universities were off limits toparty members. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm recalled that the early1950s ‘was a bad time to be a communist in the intellectual professions. Publicpolicy encouraged discrimination and treated us as potential or actual traitors,and we were deeply suspect to our employers and colleagues.’3 Others feltpressure to migrate to more congenial Western countries, as Konrad Boehmerdid when he left West Germany for Holland, or as Judith Malina did when sherelocated the Living Theater from New York to Italy after being the target of apolitically motivated tax investigation in the United States.4

Others found ways to work within the system. The obvious fact that musi-cians are involved first and foremost with their profession, and often have littletime or training for the sustained study of political theory, means that their

2 For information about the relative size and strength of the European communist parties, see R. Neal Tannahill, The Communist Parties of Western Europe: A Comparative Study (Westport,CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), 6–7 (Italy), 7–8 (France), 18 (Great Britain).3 Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 174.4 Pierre Biner, The Living Theatre (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), 82–83.

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musical approaches to political problems are quite various. Composers mayradically question the concert ritual and other basic frameworks in classicalmusic culture, or they may simply create works to be performed within existinginstitutional settings. Without wanting to soft-pedal the very real persecutionthat many were subjected to for their political beliefs, especially during theMcCarthy period in the United States, I do want to suggest that the penaltiesfor communist affiliation in the West were in general much milder than the harshpunishment and forcible career-ending for those in the reverse situation in theSoviet Union and Eastern bloc.

Although being a communist, or committed socialist, composer in a non-communist country during the Cold War was not usually dangerous, it didrequire a certain contrariness and willingness to work outside of the establishedmainstream. This does not automatically translate into dissident status for the minority position, since dissidence requires a certain level of recognition.An American communist, for example, was more likely to be perceived asextremely marginal rather than as a dissident, assuming that he or she wasnoticed at all. Stefan Wolpe, living in New York City in the early 1950s, forexample, could speak openly of his enthusiasm for North Korea and China asthe Korean War broke out, yet remain unscathed, since he was too small a fishto be recognized by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.5 Eventhough there was an underground twelve-tone scene in the Soviet Union, asPeter Schmelz has revealed, it is fair to say that work like Nono’s totally serialIl Canto Sospeso, which enjoyed great prominence in Western avant-gardecircles in the late 1950s, could not have been produced in any communistcountry at that time.6 Analogously, the technicolor diatonicism of Eisler’s NeueDeutsche Volkslieder, had they been written by a composer in Connecticutinstead of the German Democratic Republic, would have relegated them to thecompositional underworld of school choral music rather than to the status ofcelebrated contemporary work. The issue, then, is not whether certain stylesof music are present in a given society, but rather the degree of recognition,approbation, and even canonic status that they enjoy.

5 See my ‘Stefan Wolpe: “Excerpts from Dr. Einstein’s Address about Peace in the Atomic Era”’,in Settling New Scores: Music Manuscripts from the Paul Sacher Foundation, ed. Felix Meyer(Mainz and London: Schott, 1998), 177.6 On twelve-tone music in the Soviet Union, see Peter Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical:Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Progressive music for progressive politics: two models

My essay centres around the following question: what kinds of music have beenconsidered to exemplify left-wing thought in non-communist countries atdifferent times and places? I have chosen an intentionally simplistic model oftwo basic categories, which I propose not as exclusive and all-encompassing,but rather as the articulation of two ideal types. The overdrawn clarity of themodel is then filled out and complicated by looking at a series of musicalexamples.

Political expression in music is always mediated by multiple forces: theinfluence of powerful individuals or institutions, the particular history andtexture of political life, the role of certain musical traditions, and even historicalaccident. Audiences, critics, and musical communities, which are seldom unitedbehind a single political platform, are also instrumental in forming and transmit-ting political associations in connection with music. Within this very complexmusical and political landscape, I want to explore two of the primary functionalmodels for the relationship between music and left-wing politics in the twentiethcentury, which one could characterize (simplistically) as the populist and themodernist.

According to the populist model, music should be accessible to the masses,and therefore preferably diatonic, tonal, and vocal, because words aid in theproduction of meaning. It should foster participation and active political engage-ment. Some of its artistic products were codified as Socialist Realism. In 1934,the American left-wing composer Marc Blitzstein characterized this group as‘the Popularists’, writing:

Their [the Popularists’] ideology, displayed in music for the masses, isCommunist Russian; their idol is Erik Satie, the Celtic Frenchman; their social system is Central-European (note their utilitarian Gebrauchsmusik); theyhave found practical uses for the virus of jazz, bred in America and spread theworld over. They are internationalists . . . In particular, the Communist composersare developing the idea with cogency.7

Blitzstein clearly identifies ‘Popularist’ music as international, and notes partic-ularly the significance of Russian and French influences. For this group, Satie’stransparent and intentionally simple music language was both immediatelyaccessible as well as a bulwark against turgid over-complexity. Similar expres-sions of a populist music cognate with progressive politics are found in the

7 Marc Blitzstein, ‘Towards a New Form’, The Musical Quarterly, 20/2 (1934), 216–17.

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music and writings of Aaron Copland and other Americans, especially duringthe ‘red 1930s’.

The second category, the modernist model of progressive music, receivedits most extensive, and extreme, treatment in Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophieder neuen Musik of 1949, although the basic ideas had already been articulatedin the 1920s by Adorno and others. This viewpoint sees musical languageevolving as an inevitable result of historical forces. In using an ‘advanced’ idiom– for example an atonal, twelve-tone, or serial language – music resists beingco-opted into the commercial sphere, or being used as a symbol of state power.Responsible art music embodies all the contradictions and ‘crises’ of societyin its forms and language; in its autonomy, it holds up a mirror to the flawedsociety and serves as a locus for structural critique. Specifically, in the 1930sand 1940s it was held to represent an anti-Fascist stance. Advanced musicallanguages moreover prevent a passive, ‘culinary’, purely emotional receptionof music on the part of the listener; the goal is to get the listener to think, and even to change the listener’s consciousness. This strand of modernistMarxism evolved musically from the Schoenberg school; Luigi Nono andHelmut Lachenmann are among its descendants. It sees neo-classicism, andindeed all contemporary tonal music, as politically and historically regressive.8

The two basic models for representing and fostering socialist thought inmusic – the populist and the modernist – have been expressed in very differentways by different people and have led to a great variety of musical styles, andthere are countless hybrid models as well.9 They are found on both sides of theIron Curtain, although the populist model is more closely associated withMoscow and the United States, and the modernist one with Western Europe.They coexisted throughout most of the century, often in the same country orregion and even within the same creative personality (Hanns Eisler comes to

8 This perception started quite early. Hanns Eisler, in a 1928 review in the communist paper, Dierote Fahne, of a performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, associates neoclassicism with politicalreaction; ‘Die Flucht in die Vorvergangenheit: Oedipus Rex’, in Hanns Eisler: Musik und Politik:Schriften: Addenda, selected and ed. Günter Mayer (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik,1983), 26. The following year, an article by the Italian composer Alfredo Casella extolling thesuitability of musical classicism for Italian fascism ignited a music-political debate: see AlfredoCasella, ‘“Scarlattiana”. Alfredo Casella über sein neues Stück’, Musikblätter des Anbruch 11/1(January 1929), 26–28. Also see the responses by Schoenberg, Krenek, and Malipiero in thenext issue (11/2 (February 1929), 79–81); and by Adorno, ‘Atonales Intermezzo?’, 11/5 (May1929), 187–93. 9 Such as the approaches of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, who were strongly influenced by BertoltBrecht; the anarchic experimentalism represented by the Cage circle; and the participant-basedcomposition of Cornelius Cardew and Christian Wolff. Each of these approaches has its owngenealogy and many descendants.

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mind). Yet the populist and the modernist approaches have just as often beenpitted against each other as arch-enemies; the ‘Expressionism debate’ of thelate 1930s between Georg Lukács on the ‘realist’ side and Ernst Bloch andBertolt Brecht on the ‘modernist’ side, centres around just this dichotomy.10

The current historiography of twentieth-century music, at least in the UnitedStates, is strongly oriented towards the history of populist musical Marxism atthe expense of the modernist strain, which is almost completely unknown. InEuropean historiography it is practically the reverse. So it is useful to outlinethese two perspectives for historiographical reasons alone.

In the two histories of progressive music sketched here, I have chosen someexamples that contrast in different ways; some clearly represent one or the other ‘camp’, others blend the two models, and still others are associated withnon-communist or even anti-communist thought. I’ve made no attempt atinclusiveness; many relevant figures, such as Brecht, Weill, Cardew, and Cage,are left out, and I do not touch on popular music. I would like to use my examplesto explore the two primary categories of left-wing music and ask, what madethem such powerful models? What is at stake, musically and politically, ineach of them? What forces created and sustained the associations betweenmusical idioms and political ideas? Finally, how have these works been treatedin Western historical accounts, and how have these historiographical narrativesshifted since the end of the Cold War?

To the barricades

Hanns Eisler’s ‘Comintern Song’ (on a text by Franz Jahnke and MaximVallentin), and the genre of Kampflied in general, represent the epitome of thepopulist strain of Marxist music. Recorded by the legendary political singerErnst Busch, the song, composed in 1929–30, is meant to be experienced by agroup of people and to inspire them to action (Example 7.1).11

The song’s musical qualities contribute to its effectiveness. The rhythmicidentity across phrases, for example in the first two, which in their halting,emphatic way evoke the text’s call to action, makes the song memorable. Thethird phrase spins out the rhythm of the first two, stopping cleanly with the

10 See Hans-Jürgen Schmitt, Die Expressionismusdebatte: Materialien zu einer marxistischenRealismuskonzeption (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).11 This performance, available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KncK5cZ5Rmk(accessed 25 January 2012), comes from a Soviet recording issued in 1936 (see http://www.russian-records.com/details.php?image_id=13018). I am grateful to Andrea Bohlman for trackingdown the reference to the original recording.

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characteristic ending rhythm of two crotchets on the downbeat. Then the logjambreaks. With ‘Die Fahnen entrollt’ (‘the banners unfurled’) the crotchet/dottedquaver/semiquaver rhythm (a diminution of the minim/dotted crotchet/quaverrhythm from the beginning) sets up a strong forward motion and a seeminglyunstoppable momentum. The return of the opening rhythm, along with thesingular melisma from the highest note, E, to the tonic D, underlines the all-important line, ‘Wir erobern die Welt!’ (‘We’ll conquer the world!’).

There is much more that one could say about the song’s musical featuresalone, as there is about Busch’s performance, particularly the tempo changesthat he employs to masterful effect. Instead I would like to think for a momentabout the function of the song, and how it signifies politically. While a concertperformance or passive listening is possible, the ‘Comintern Song’ is con-structed in such a way that it is almost impossible not to sing along. (In hisrecording, Busch sings the verses solo, and the chorus – the people – join in atthe refrains.) Even though the melody has large leaps, and there is a prominenttritone at the beginning of the second phrase, these are easily negotiated diatonicintervals, and the song is firmly anchored in D minor. The rhythms of the vocal

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Example 7.1. Hanns Eisler, ‘Komintern-Lied’, from Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales,ed. Ernst Busch, 5th edition (Barcelona, 1938). Facsimile reprint with a prologueby Manuel Requena Gallego (Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces/EditorialRenacimiento, 2007), 127.

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line assist the less musically adept; the song could be chanted by a crowd inrhythm without any melody at all, and still be perfectly intelligible and effective.Yet the characteristic minor key and the march rhythms lend the song a grim,almost desperate quality, implying that the world has not yet been ‘erobert’,and the real fight is yet to come.

Therefore, Eisler’s ‘Comintern Song’ operates on several levels: as a catchy,well-composed melody; as an effective vehicle for transmitting the meaningof the words and making them memorable; as an opportunity for people toparticipate in a musical action together; as a means of articulating a politicalgoal and generating positive feelings about the Communist International. Theultimate goal, of course, was to motivate people to political action. This is justas relevant in the specific context of the Spanish Civil War as it was for thesong’s origins in the agitprop group ‘Das rote Sprachrohr’ in 1929, or in massdemonstrations in New York in 1935, or in any number of the song’s othercontexts.12 In the fight against Franco’s fascist army, the creation of a strongcollective identity was especially important, since volunteers had come fromall over the world. The songbook from which Example 7.1 is taken, Cancionesde las Brigadas Internacionales (which was edited by Busch), provides songsand lyrics in sixteen languages. Above the English translation of the ‘CominternSong’ is the note: ‘This song has been translated into more different languagesthan any other revolutionary song excepting the International.’13 Unifying thesedisparate troops (which were also quite disparate politically, as George Orwellunforgettably showed in his Homage to Catalonia) was crucial if the effortwas to be successful – which, as we know, it was not.

The idiom of the Kampflied cannot be stretched very far – and surely Eislerstretched it about as far as it could go – without destroying a song’s suitabilityfor mass singing. Although it is possible to admire the song’s craftsmanship,as we have done here, its accessibility and the political goals that this enablesoutweigh any perception of aesthetic autonomy, and intentionally so. It wascrucial, according to Eisler, that the new workers’ songs avoid beauty for itsown sake, which had been the primary goal of bourgeois music as well as ofthe earlier Tendenzlied. He wrote in 1931:

Enjoyment, which had been the main aim of music, was now the means to anend. The [music] does not [primarily] satisfy the aesthetic sense of the [listener],

12 The song was arranged many times, and Eisler also used a version of this tune in his Suite forOrchestra No. 5, Op. 34 (1933).13 Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, ed. Ernst Busch, 5th edition (Barcelona, 1938).Facsimile reprint with a prologue by Manuel Requena Gallego (Seville: Centro de EstudiosAndaluces/Editorial Renacimiento, 2007), 127.

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but rather it uses beauty to educate him, in order to present the working class’smethod of thinking in a clear and tangible way.14

By linking beauty to function, Eisler questioned Western culture’s insistenceon autonomy as a necessary index of superior artistic quality. But the messagedid not get through. In most Western historical accounts, Eisler is given theback-handed compliment of being the master of the mass song. Even RichardTaruskin, who in his influential Oxford History of Western Music otherwiseoffers a strong critique of the ideology of aesthetic autonomy, similarly mar-ginalizes Eisler’s accomplishments.15 The perceived incompatibility betweenpolitical practice and aesthetic autonomy that is so widespread in Westernculture, and which Eisler sought to overturn, is still an unspoken assumptionof mainstream music historiography.

Let us now praise famous men

If, as Eisler said, a good tune can be used to make words and their messageespecially memorable, then melodrama – spoken recitation over music – hasthe power to communicate to an audience in an even more direct way. LincolnPortrait by Aaron Copland (composed in 1942) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Odeto Napoleon Buonaparte (composed in 1943) use the spoken voice to presenttexts with overt political meaning, accompanied by music that underlines andheightens that meaning. While there are many similarities between the twoworks – both share a palpable Hollywood flavour – they were composed in twovery different musical idioms, and their composers come from opposite sidesof the political spectrum as well. I would like to compare these two works, onerepresenting the populist model of left-wing musical thought, and the other ina modernist idiom, and not intending to be left-wing at all. Yet both the LincolnPortrait and the Ode to Napoleon are quite malleable in their politicalassociations, and can be tilted both left and right, as their later reception shows.

Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, commissioned by the conductor AndréKostelanetz to be part of ‘a musical portrait gallery of great Americans’, signalsits populist intentions in several ways.16 First, the musical language is diatonic

14 Eisler (‘Die Kunst als Lehrmeisterin im Klassenkampf’, 1931), in Hanns Eisler: Musik undPolitik: Schriften 1924–48, selected and ed. Günter Mayer (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag fürMusik, 1973), 128–29. Translation mine.15 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: The Early Twentieth Century (Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 654. 16 Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: HenryHolt, 1999), 357.

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and features the transparent textures characteristic of much of Copland’s music. Second, the quotation of popular songs, such as ‘The Camptown Races’and ‘Springfield Mountain’, gives those who know these songs a feeling offamiliarity and pleasurable recognition. Finally, the recitation itself is the mostaccessible feature of all: it is spoken in normal tones and rhythms, and the textis always understandable (there is no musical notation for the reciter’s part,unlike in Schoenberg’s Ode). Just as Eisler’s ‘Comintern Song’ is compre-hensible even without the melody, because its rhythms can be chanted by anuntrained group, Copland’s Lincoln Portrait can be enjoyed even by themusically unsophisticated. The passages with the reciter, who enters halfwaythrough the piece, are the most memorable. The seven-and-a-half minutes oforchestral music that precede the reciter’s entrance are less well known, andare sometimes even omitted in performance (for example, in almost all of theversions available on YouTube).

The simple, diatonic musical language and the reciter’s role place the LincolnPortrait firmly in the populist camp. In the United States at that time, populistmusic was firmly associated with left-wing thought, as my earlier quotationfrom Marc Blitzstein also indicates. Stylistically, the Lincoln Portrait is a pureexample of American Socialist Realism. But what else would have made theLincoln Portrait seem left-wing to its original audiences? First, the figure ofLincoln himself, who had freed the slaves and died a martyr’s death, was oftenappropriated by Socialist causes and those who fought for racial equality. Inthe Spanish Civil War, we recall, the American anti-fascist fighters were knownas the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. Moreover, the text, assembled by Coplandfrom Lincoln’s writings, responds clearly to the wartime context, speaking ofthe ‘fiery trial through which we pass’ and the ‘stormy present’. But the countryfaces not only the challenge of war, but also that of social inequality. Oppressioncan take many forms, Lincoln says, and here his plea for social justice is clearlyarticulated:

It is the eternal struggle between two principles – right and wrong – throughoutthe world. It is the same spirit that says: ‘You toil and work and earn bread – andI’ll eat it’ . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of aking who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit oftheir labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, itis the same tyrannical principle.17

17 Aaron Copland, Lincoln Portrait for Speaker and Orchestra (New York: Boosey & Hawkes,1943), 36.

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Finally, the Lincoln Portrait would have been understood as left-wing becauseCopland himself was known to have been strongly sympathetic to Socialistcauses; he was active in the communist-led Composers Collective in the 1930s,and even composed a mass song, ‘Into the Streets May First’. This involvementraised a red flag, so to speak, with the House Committee on Un-AmericanActivities, and Copland was to go through a gruelling interrogation and highlypublic humiliation at the peak of McCarthyism.18 The Lincoln Portrait, whichhad been programmed for the inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower in1954, was abruptly taken off the programme as soon as objections were raisedby conservative Congress members.

The Lincoln Portrait survived this right-wing attack, however, and remainsa staple in the repertory, at least in the United States. Many famous personageshave recited the text, and in fact, the choice of narrator has a great impact onthe political message. For example, on September 11, 2005 (the fourth anniver-sary of the 9/11 attacks), there was a performance with the Chicago SymphonyOrchestra; the narrator was the then Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.19

We need to keep this history of the ‘red Copland’ in mind, because it’s easyfor our more politically cynical age to hear the Lincoln Portrait’s glowingportrait of an American hero as jingoistic American nationalism. The politicaleffect of the piece depends to a large extent on who is performing the narration.A favourite of actors, the piece has been recited by Gregory Peck, James EarlJones, Katherine Hepburn, Tom Hanks, and many others, in (presumably)politically neutral performances. As we have seen with the Obama performance,Lincoln Portrait is also used as a vehicle for politicians, who are happy toassociate themselves with Lincoln. Yet Margaret Thatcher reciting the text isapt to make a different political impression than Obama.20 Another exampleof a ‘right-wing’ performance was narrated (in English) by the Italian busi-nesswoman and politician Letizia Moratti, who was mayor of Milan and amember of Berlusconi’s party, Il Popolo della Libertà. As education minister,Moratti undertook unpopular reforms. In the YouTube video of the performance,shouting and jeering protesters are seen interrupting the performance.21 While

18 See Pollack, Aaron Copland, 275–76 (‘Into the Streets May First’), 451–60 (on McCarthy,Copland, and Lincoln Portrait), and Jennifer L. DeLapp, ‘Copland in the Fifties: Music and Ideol-ogy in the McCarthy Era’, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1997), 123–34.19 An excerpt from this performance is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTNv53j7fSo (accessed 25 January 2012).20 This performance was released on Salute to Democracy, Wyn Morris, conductor, LondonSymphony Orchestra, Margaret Thatcher, reciter (CD, EMI Classics, CDC 7 54539 2, 1992). 21 This excerpt is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DFjunYx66A(accessed 25 January 2012).

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Copland composed the work in the spirit of left-wing populism, given the rightcontext and speaker, even this clearly defined political message can ‘flip’ to adifferent one entirely.

Whereas Copland’s Lincoln Portrait is intended to honour a hero,Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, for string quartet (or string orchestra), piano,and reciter, based on Byron’s epic satire, cruelly mocks the figure of the defeatedand exiled emperor. It was apparent to the first audiences, as it is to us today,that here Napoleon represents Hitler.22 After some 162 lines of angry verseexcoriating the tyrant Napoleon/Hitler, a true hero is invoked in the last stanza:George Washington.23 A review of the premiere in December 1944 in Newsweekmagazine carried the approving headline: ‘Arnold Schoenberg scores offtyrants’.24 Of course, Hitler was still in power when the piece was composedwhile the exiled composer was living in Los Angeles, so for the original audi-ences, the text painted a vivid imaginative picture of what could and shouldhappen; it was, in effect, propaganda, even though Schoenberg came up withthe idea for the piece himself and the government had nothing to do with itscommissioning. As Schoenberg later explained, ‘It deals with Napoleon likewe would have dealt with Hitler if we had caught him alive.’25

The compositional challenge for Schoenberg was capturing Byron’s scornfuland ironic tone while creating enough variety to sustain such a long text.Whereas the Lincoln Portrait is completely devoid of irony, Schoenberg claimed(in a letter to Orson Welles, who Schoenberg hoped would recite the text) thatthe music of the Ode to Napoleon suggests 170 different shades of irony. Forthese purposes Schoenberg employed a twelve-tone row with strong tonalassociations: each of the three adjacent notes form diatonic triads. Indeed thesound of triads permeates the texture from the beginning (Example 7.2).

In spite of the explicit ‘anti-hero to hero’ narrative of the piece, the politicalimplications of Schoenberg’s Ode are less clear-cut than those of the LincolnPortrait. Yet the US State Department’s Office of War Information found thework sufficiently convincing politically to be interested in broadcasting it inwartime Germany over the Voice of America radio, as Reinhold Brinkmann

22 See for example the review by Olin Downes of the premiere, ‘Rodzinski Offers “Ode toNapoleon”’, New York Times, 24 November 1944, 18.23 According to Leonard Stein, Schoenberg was very impressed with Winston Churchill and wasthinking of his voice as a model for how he wanted the text recited; perhaps the Napoleon/Hitlerequation could be extended to Washington/Churchill? See Gerold W. Gruber, ed., ArnoldSchönberg: Interpretationen seiner Werke, vol. 2 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2002), 89. 24 Quoted in Gruber, Arnold Schönberg, 81.25 Quoted in Gruber, Arnold Schönberg, 88.

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Example 7.2. Arnold Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon, op. 41; entrance of reciter (used bypermission of Belmont Music Publishers).

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and Judith Ryan have shown.26 It was therefore deemed suitable for anti-fascistpropaganda, and the State Department asked Schoenberg for a German versionof the piece. It is not clear whether it was actually broadcast.27

On the personal level, Schoenberg could in no sense have been construedas left-wing. His anti-communist convictions verged on the paranoiac, as hislater correspondence with Hermann Scherchen reveals.28 So we can safely saythat Schoenberg’s intentions did not include any kind of left-wing message,however the piece might have been perceived. While the political resonancesof a work should never be limited to the composer’s intentions, there are otherfactors besides Schoenberg’s own anti-communism that would have preventedan American audience of that time from hearing the piece as left-wing. Themain one is the twelve-tone musical language, which remained antithetical tothe common American perception that Marxist culture had to be populist intone.29 However full of triads this particular twelve-tone row may have been,the Ode was still heard as ‘advanced and devilishly difficult’, as a reviewer ofthe premiere wrote.30

Another clue to the words’ political resonances is Schoenberg’s treatmentof the end of the piece, when the poem invokes George Washington. To my ears,not one of the 170 forms of irony can be found in this passage; Schoenbergseems to be completely sincere in his praise of the first American president.Not only the piece’s notorious E-flat major close, but also the rising chromaticline and vast crescendo that lead to it underline a ‘heroic’ reading of this passage.This interpretation is even stronger in the German text, which Schoenbergprepared; here, instead of Byron’s ‘To make man blush there was but one!’,Washington has brought freedom to the human race: ‘vermacht/ der Menschheit,

26 See Abteilung VI: Kammermusik: Melodramen und Lieder mit Instrumenten, series B, vol. 24:2,Arnold Schönberg: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann (Mainz and Vienna: Schott andUniversal, 1997), 132, and Judith Ryan, ‘Schoenberg’s Byron: The Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,the Antinomies of Modernism, and the Problem of German Imperialism’, in Music and theAesthetics of Modernity (Festschrift Reinhold Brinkmann), ed. Karol Berger and AnthonyNewcomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Music, 2005), 201–16.27 Sabine Feisst notes that the Office of War Information made a recording of the work, butperformances did not materialize; see her book, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 149.28 Schoenberg’s 1950 correspondence with Scherchen was published in Hermann ScherchenMusiker 1891–1966, ed. Hansjörg Pauli and Dagmar Wünsche (Berlin: Akademie der KünsteEdition Hentrich, 1986), 62–66.29 Taruskin speaks, for example, of Wolpe’s ‘modified twelve-tone technique, formerly the bêtenoir of all socially committed musicians’; see Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music:The Early Twentieth Century, 13.30 H. T., ‘Full House Hears Schoenberg Music’, New York Times, 24 November 1949, 46.

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Example 7.3. Arnold Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon, op. 41; conclusion (used by permission ofBelmont Music Publishers).

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der er Freiheit bracht’ (see Example 7.3). The use of the word ‘freedom’ hereeerily anticipates the Western, individualistic interpretation of the word thatbecame a Cold War trope.31

Whereas the Lincoln Portrait harks back to the 1930s, a time in which left-wing thought reigned supreme in American intellectual and artistic circles,the Ode to Napoleon, composed only a year later, looks ahead to a Cold Waraesthetic landscape in which advanced musical languages were used to sym-bolize Western values, particularly that of individual freedom. At the same time,the two works have a lot in common. Both spring from a musical environmentsaturated with Hollywood films. Both reflect an age that embraced both hero-worship and respect for the common man, like those portrayed in the popularbook, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, with photographs byWalker Evans.32 And both, in spite of the enduring popularity of the LincolnPortrait, sound dated today, perhaps because the melodrama genre, so remi-niscent of 1940s newsreels, and the texts themselves seem clichéd to today’smore cynical ears.33

Suspended elegies

With Luigi Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso, premiered in 1956 at the apex of Cold Wartensions, we finally arrive at the post-war timeframe of the Red Strainsconference. The work is composed in an unabashedly modernist idiom – integralserialism – but still articulates a strong political message. Nono drew the textsof Il Canto Sospeso from letters of resistance fighters who were to be executed.In an extended work for chorus and orchestra, whose vocal polyphony and scaleis meant to recall Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mozart’s Requiem, and Italian madri-gals, Nono commemorates those who gave their lives fighting fascism andoppression.34

At the time of its first performance in 1956, much was made of the fact thatthe highly emotional text of Il Canto Sospeso had been set in such a way as to

31 See Anne C. Shreffler, ‘Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress forCultural Freedom’, in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Berger and Newcomb, 217–45. 32 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1944).33 Yet the young Luigi Nono admired Schoenberg’s Ode enough to adopt its row in his Variazionicanoniche of 1950, his first Darmstadt breakthrough.34 Luigi Nono, ‘Text – Musik – Gesang’ (1960), in Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zur seiner Musik,selected and ed. Jürg Stenzl (Zürich: Atlantis, 1975), 50–58.

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be mostly unintelligible.35 Syllables are separated from one another, syntax isfractured and spread among different voices, and words are uttered simulta-neously and in extreme vocal ranges. It was widely known at the time that thistreatment of the text was a result of the work’s serial structure. Yet the texts havea strong impact when read, and their anti-fascist political message is clear. Whywould a composer want to disguise these texts? Is it Nono’s aim to use themsimply as an excuse for creating an autonomous musical structure?

The answer with respect to Nono’s aesthetic is complex, and many haveexamined this question in detail.36 First, there is the perhaps banal but importantpoint that many of the words in Il Canto Sospeso are indeed audible, if onemakes the effort. Close listening reveals single words and even phrases thatstick out from the texture. In No. 7, the solo soprano’s ‘normal’ singing sets itclearly apart from the women’s chorus, which sings ‘bocca chiusa’ throughoutthe movement (Example 7.4). The orchestration of strings, flute, glockenspiel,celesta, harp, vibraphone, and marimba creates a delicate, transparent soundthat allows the voices to be easily heard. The solo soprano’s words, ‘Addiomamma’, delicately and indistinctly come to the fore, to great emotional effect.Part of the movement’s dramaturgy is that the solo soprano begins and ends‘bocca chiusa’ as well, only opening her mouth to utter the words ‘addio,mamma’ etc., providing a musical and sonic analogue to the difficulty ofspeaking under such circumstances, or of portraying such a situation at all.

Whereas in Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, anyone can sit back and take in therecitation by the famous actor or politician, it is exactly this kind of passiveconsumption and enjoyment that Nono wanted to prevent in Il Canto Sospeso.Since the text is not easy to perceive semantically, one cannot simply be carriedalong by the poignant words. Listeners are forced to attend carefully to themusic, or else not to listen at all. (The recording by Claudio Abbado and theBerlin Philharmonic, which is based on live performances, includes recitationsof the texts, in German, by well-known actors. This practice creates a kind of‘Lincoln Portrait’ immediacy, which I assume would be contrary to Nono’sintentions.)37

35 The earliest and most influential critic was the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (‘Musik undSprache II’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 1 (1958), 65–74. Reprinted in Stockhausen,Texte, vol. 2: Aufsätze 1952–62 zur musikalischen Praxis (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMontSchauberg, 1964), 157–66).36 Recent analyses of the work include Wolfgang Motz, Konstruktion und Ausdruck: AnalytischeBetrachtungen zu Il Canto Sospeso (1955/56) von Luigi Nono (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 1996) andLaurent Feneyrou, Il Canto Sospeso de Luigi Nono: Musique & Analyse (Paris: M. de Maule, 2002).37 Luigi Nono, Il Canto Sospeso, Claudio Abbado, conductor, Berlin Philharmonic (CD, SonyClassical, SK 53360, 1993).

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Example 7.4. Luigi Nono, Il Canto Sospeso, No. 7 (excerpt).

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The question of the relationship between the meaning of the text in Il CantoSospeso and its deployment in the piece brings up two concepts that I believeare crucial to the modernist model of progressive music: (1) breaking throughfalse consciousness; and (2) modelling a future, still unattained, utopia inmusical structure. The first relates to the notion that art should not lull itsrecipients into a sense of false security or complacency, but rather shouldcommunicate the truth about society’s historical position. The ultimate goal ofmusic, according to this understanding, would be to break down the audience’sfalse consciousness: to pull away the curtain, revealing the sense of satisfactionand well-being that the bourgeois concert ritual aims to provide as illusory andartificial. Music should not be a diversion or a merely sensual enjoyment, as ifit were analogous to good cooking or interior decoration. Instead, music, likeall the higher arts, has an ethical obligation to speak the truth. Most establishedartistic institutions, however, have a vested interest in making sure that this doesnot happen, since their survival depends on deluding audiences into a beliefthat the concerts and operas that they attend, whose repertories draw mainlyfrom the past, represent a vital musical culture. According to a modernistMarxist understanding, any attempts to restore imagined traditions simply paperover the deep fissures in our social organization and in our individual psyches.Authentic art should reveal the contradictions of its time and place, rather thanrendering them in pleasant and harmless disguises.

In addition to destroying the passivity and complacency that false con-sciousness brings, music could also play a positive role by modelling a future,still unattained, utopia. Encountering new sounds and new ways of organizingthem could not – indeed, in this view, should not – stop at musical perception,but should lead to changes in the listener’s way of thinking. Simply by recog-nizing the new creation as a legitimate example of ‘music’, the listener wouldbe acknowledging that music can progress far beyond the familiar. A deeperknowledge of the complex details of this new sonic landscape could lead tothoughts about what else in society could also be changed to the same degree.

Nono explicitly claimed this kind of artistic modelling of reality in his music,writing that ‘it has always been clear [to me] that a human being can realizehimself only in his relations with other people and society’. In Il Canto Sospesoin particular, these connections are modelled, made audible by, in Nono’s words,‘a horizontal melodic construction encompassing all registers; floating fromsound to sound, from syllable to syllable . . . These relationships . . . affect alllevels of the composition, like a net which extends in all directions.’38

38 From ‘Conversation with Hansjörg Pauli’, in Hansjörg Pauli, Für wen komponieren Sie

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Although Il Canto Sospeso expresses political sentiments, it avoids makingthese explicit, in contrast to the Lincoln Portrait or the Ode to Napoleon. Nono’smodernist aesthetic is characterized by a pull towards aesthetic autonomy, and(equally important) by a complete rejection of the popular and especially thecommercial spheres. This attitude is consonant with the modernist anxietiesabout anything that can detract from a work’s freedom to express musical, asopposed to extra-musical, content. Nono also took care to avoid clichés of wordpainting, as well as the imposition of overt and specific musical meaning, soas to preserve the work’s aesthetic power.

While many of Nono’s works have become an integral part of the New Musiccanon in Europe, they are seldom played in the United States. This is partly for practical reasons (for example, the lack of experienced performers whoknow how to realize Nono’s complex scores). But the main reason is that Nono’smusic and his politics seem to most Americans to be a contradiction in terms.In his passage on Nono in the Oxford History, for example, Richard Taruskinexpresses his frustration with the ‘contradiction between [Nono’s] musicalidiom, which appealed only to an elite coterie, and his commitment to egalitarianpolitics’.39 Taruskin’s views are shared by many and have the weight of a longinterpretive tradition behind them. Yet a misunderstanding occurs here becauseNono’s modernist model of progressive music is mistaken for a failed ormistaken populist one. Nono’s vision of a future utopia, aimed at all of humanity,was literally embodied in the otherworldly sounds produced by the serialprocesses he used. The highly structured relations between pitches, registers,and rhythms mirrors the interconnectedness that people might experience in abetter world. Nono’s aim is not to entertain or to please, but to express a powerfulvision. His political goals would be undermined if he allowed his audiencespassively to take in pleasant sounds – this would reinforce their false con-sciousness of the current state of affairs, rather than awakening their criticalsense and their desire for change.

I have tried to sketch here two histories of left-wing music, the populist andthe modernist, each of which may seem utterly self-evident to those familiarwith that music and completely illogical to others. Yet both were presentthroughout the twentieth century, and indeed the tensions between the populistand the modernist tendencies in progressive music reflect those within Marxismitself. David Priestland, for example, distinguishes between ‘Radical’ and

eigentlich? (1971), quoted in Christoph Flamm, ‘Preface’, in Luigi Nono, Il Canto Sospeso, newedition, translated by Angela Davies (London and New York: Eulenburg, 1995), ix.39 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: The Late Twentieth Century, 88.

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‘Modernist’ Marxism. The former ‘was a Marxism of the mobilized masses,. . . of revolutionary enthusiasm, mass-meeting “democracy” and a rough-and-ready equality.’ Our populist musical Marxism clearly belongs to this strain.‘Modernist Marxism’, Priestland describes, ‘was an ideology of technocraticeconomic development – of the educated expert, the central plan and disci-pline.’40 While leftist musical modernism did not necessarily see itself as‘technocratic’, it was based on the idea of progress realized in every sphere oflife simultaneously. Left-wing musical modernism drew further sustenancefrom the writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who criticized Marxism’salmost exclusive focus on the masses. In order to influence the educated classes,a new, advanced art that would be powerful enough to compete with the classicaltradition was needed.41

For most of the twentieth century, musical language became a battlegroundover societies’ modernization processes in general. Social debates about themodern and the traditional, the conservative and the progressive, the accessibleand the elite were projected into the musical sphere, with very real consequencesfor how people composed, performed, organized, and received music. Politicalthought figured into these debates, often becoming a driving force in musicalproduction and reception.

Here ideology can only take us so far. Sometimes a musical direction isinitiated and sustained by a powerful individual (such as Virgil Thomson, towhom my title quotation alludes)42 or by institutional forces more than by apolitical philosophy. More interesting than the simple identification of howmusical style has been mapped onto politics are the controversies that arise inthe process: music, as a powerful symbolic force, is contested territory for manytypes of political and personal identification. Examining the political resonancesof music, or the musical resonances of politics, allows a better understandingof some of the most fundamental ideas that have framed aesthetic discourse inthe twentieth century, encouraging us to view them not as abstract concepts,but as weapons in highly charged political debates.

40 David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009),xxiv.41 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Marxism and Modern Culture’, in Marxism and Art: Essays Classic andContemporary, ed. Maynard Solomon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 268–69.42 Virgil Thomson, Music, Right and Left (New York: Holt, 1951).

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