Picking up from some questions raised between Ian and myself in the What are you reading thread.


OK!

For what it's worth, I start by leaning tentatively towards the idea that the binary of West vs East is roughly congruent to astraction/serialism/avant garde/Darmstadt vs socrealism/folklorism. BUT that is only a place to start, and although it may have figured in the minds of some composers, organisers and critics (both East and West) it is a structure that rapidly becomes much more complicated on examination and at best I think only functions for a very short period of music history (roughly 1956-58). The obvious example - and the one I know best - is the Warsaw Autumn festival. For this, the organisers very definitely felt (as documented in Cindy Bylander's PhD on the subject) that the West was modern, and modern was good, and the first two or three WAs were a deliberate and explicit attempt to bring Polish composers 'up-to-speed'; the ideological underpinnings of this are quite transparent.

There remains a broad critical consensus on what the impact of this was on Polish composition. There are a variety of shades, but essentially it boils down to: Polish composers embraced the opportunities of the newly opened paths to the Western avant garde, but in the main remained epigonal in their uneven responses to the challenges of serialism, aleatory, music theatre, etc.

It's this aspect (epigonism) that I would challenge, and in doing so, I would suggest that if we are to consider the Cold War an influence on musical activity we need a more nuanced understanding its dynamics than a straightforward Them-Us polarity. The possibility that Polish composers weren't weakly imitating the West, but were coming up with their own responses to the challenges of the Western avant garde, deliberately and carefully, is rarely addressed. In a binary model composers like Penderecki, Gorecki, Serocki and Baird reject the socrealist East, but don't quite measure up to the modernist West, and so fall by the historical wayside. Whereas I would rather argue that musically they belong to a third, in between category, something liminal, borderline, or central - adjectives that have been used comfortably by historians, authors and theorists of and from the region for years.

And this is just Poland. In the Danielle Fosler-Lussier book, I can see similarly knotty problems with Bartók, who at various times has been viewed as beyond the pale as both an avant gardist and a conservative folklorist, but I've yet to see how or if she is going to address these. Mark Carroll's book on Boulez and the 1952 festival of new music in Paris throws down similar challenges to an either-or interpretation (and does so with appropriate subtlety I think), so this isn't a problem just confined to Eastern Europe.

That's a lot of talk from me - I would love to hear the thoughts of other posters!

Thanks for starting this thread, Tim, that's extremely interesting stuff. I don't know so much about ideologies and processes behind the Iron Curtain, but can chip in with something about the paradigms that have recently emerged to describe the situation in Western Europe, and in particular the West German situation, for those who may not know so much about it.

The issue of abstract modernism in the arts and its possible promotion and/or appropriation as an instrument of Western propaganda has been raised for some decades, including as early as the 1960s (I think?) by John Berger, who claimed that abstract expressionistic art was being funded by the CIA. He was thought to be a crank for saying this, but he was right: whilst some information on this has been available for a while, it is most comprehensively documented in the book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. Whilst this is a highly problematic book (mostly because it gets so bogged down in gossipy stuff about various CIA officials as to lose sight of the huge issues at stake), the research is very comprehensive. The basic argument goes as follows (I simplify a bit out of necessity): in the post-1945 period (and to some extent before) the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc aggressively promoted the superior virtues of socialist realist art for a variety of reasons deriving from a particular Stalinist reading of Marxism. This was expressed most adamantly in the Zhdanov Doctrine (see here for a little more on this), with its trenchant denunciation of 'formalist' tendencies in artistic work. In response to this, various officials at the CIA and other related organisations could see the propaganda value of precisely the type of art that would be condemned as abstract, formalist, or whatever, in the Eastern Bloc, and thus sought to covertly promote it, by diverting money via various front organisations. Various abstract artists' work were given significant support this way (sometimes unbeknown to the artists themselves) under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; whilst Cold War propaganda concerning artistic matters was disseminated through the magazine Encounter, in which the then right-wing cold warrior poet Stephen Spender was deeply involved. The basic point was to create an artistic climate in which artistic possibility in the 'Free World' could be held up as an example of the superior virtues of what was possible under capitalism. Interestingly, some of the types of arguments developed by Clement Greenberg in his 1939 essay 'Avant Garde and Kitsch' were appropriated towards such propaganda.

All of this forces a rethinking of the history of various artistic/literary movements in the Cold War era: numerous movements (not least American Abstract Expressionism) which may have been assumed to have attained prominence simply through their intrinsic artistic merits can be seen to have had an unfair advantage over other developments by virtue of being heavily backed by CIA money (just as various movements in the Eastern Bloc gained backing and significant financial support in a similar manner). This is not to say we should write such things off simply as being 'CIA art', simply that the situation is more complex than previously assumed, and a theory of artistic 'natural selection' will no longer do.

Anyhow, various musicologists (including myself) have been somewhat preoccupied in recent times with the question of just why certain varieties of modernist abstraction attained a degree of prominence in the early post-1945/Cold War era. A common paradigm, that one will find rather blithely asserted without any evidence in various histories of post-1945 music, is that of the Stunde Null (zero hour), whereby after 1945 all tradition, all past culture was somehow seen as tainted by association with the calamitous events that had decimated a whole continent. Especially in Germany, for obvious reasons. Almost no-one who has looked into this in any detail believes it any longer (nor do many historians accept it as a paradigm for the history of post-1945 West Germany); there is far too much evidence of a high degree of continuity in artistic and other matters, whilst that music which best fits such a model (the short-lived ventures into total serialism, relatively few in number) constitute a minority of what was going on. But more recently, the Cold War paradigm has emerged and to some extent taken the place of the Stunde Null. Basically, this attempts to map the processes described by Stonor Saunders onto contemporary classical music, believing it to have been artificially supported and funded in such a manner. You can find this argument very aggressively asserted in the final volume of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, but only on the flimsiest of grounds. So far, none of the scholars working on the area have found any substantive evidence that, say, the CIA were directly behind the Darmstädter Fereinkurse; it was set up by the American occupying authorities, but so would have been just about anything that emerged in the American zone in the 1945-1949 period. That said, there is still more research to be done on this period and how and why avant-garde music developed in a certain way.

Anyhow, to summarise the Taruskin et al argument: abstraction and serialism had meaning during the Cold War for purely propagandistic reasons, and was artificially supported and sustained in such a manner. Today, with the Cold War over, this music has no relevance. This all ties in with the relentless attacks on some construction of modernism that are a prevalent feature not just of the New Musicology but often more widely in Anglo-American musicological circles. Abstraction is supposed to be de-historicised, de-politicised, de-personalised, and so on and so forth, and the arguments against it frequently come from musicologists associated with feminist, gay, ethnicity, etc. studies (for one of the most blatant expositions of this argument, for those of you with an academic server, see Susan McClary's review of Taruskin here). Taruskin himself has a fanatical hatred of all things German, and plays up whatever went on in Eastern Europe, before, during and after the Cold War, essentially as a stick to beat German music with. So he ends up espousing 'realism' in music (which does not exclude socialist realism) against both romanticism and modernism (seen as part of a continuum - in the sense of that construction only I would agree with him), despite at the same time being fervently opposed to any form of socialist politics.

OK, that's enough for now! Just wanted to inform other posters of some of the paradigms that have emerged.

Well, that is sort of what both Greenberg and Adorno (and later Metzger and others) did with respect to abstract music/art - and in fairness, Taruskin does (in his awful article 'Speed Bumps', I think) draw attention to that fact, though unsurprisingly arguing that such a view is outdated. He isn't really so much saying the works are meaningless, in the way McClary et al would do, just that their historical meaning is no longer meaningful in the contemporary era. But to accept that, you have to accept his diagnosis of their meaning being exclusively framed in terms of the Cold War, which I don't. Furthermore, has he or have many others heard Structures 1b, 1c, or Book 2, let alone all the other music from that period?

Just dropping in quickly on this thread to mention that Rachel Beckles Willson's book is, indeed, an excellent read. I shan't say too much as I'm currently reviewing it (alongside the Fosler-Lussier already mentioned), but suffice to say that its readership deserves to extend beyond Cold War specialists, Hungarian specialists, or Ligeti/Kurtág enthusiasts. Masterful stuff.

Blimey! that's more expensive than Douglas Lilburn's complete electronic works! Looks like it might be an interesting read though. I have the feeling that while, only a few years ago, most people who knew anything about modern music would have regarded Ligeti as a "major contemporary composer" and Kurtag's work as a rather more parochial phenomenon, that situation has almost reversed itself in the meantime. Do you think that's fair, Tim? Maybe it's to do with the fact that Ligeti's late work doesn't really measure up to the stuff he made his name with, while with Kurtág (whose work I actually still feel somewhat "left out" of, though I would very much like not to be) it's quite the opposite.

Sorry, yes (silly slip)! There's undoubtedly a new wave of studies on Darmstadt and post-war music in general, and from a much wider perspective that was true in earlier, mostly formalistically-inclined, work, at least that in English. Perhaps there's a stronger feeling than ever before that this period constitutes something 'historical' rather than 'contemporary', and that is what has provoked more people to look at it with a degree of objective distance? It's interesting to me that much of the more obviously 'politically' inclined work concentrates on Eastern rather than Western music, where the politics of the situation under which music operated were more explicit, though not necessarily any more 'political'. For all that Taruskin makes the case so dogmatically for post-war serialism being little more than a product of cold war ideology (and without much in the way of really hard evidence - many people have been looking for such a thing, but little of any consequence has been uncovered), would you agree with me that in the aftermath of his book, it's unlikely that the period will be able to be looked at so innocently again?

Has Kurtág's reputation really eclipsed that of Ligeti? The latter seems just as big a name as he ever was nowadays, though that in part surely has something to do with the popularity of various of the later works.

You could perhaps say that Kurtág's music is "made of notes" in a sense that Feldman's isn't. Some comments on Kurtág from you would be very welcome anyway. I think I find it difficult to get myself into the kind of listening mode which would allow me to appreciate what's going on there. "In theory" I find his music attractive, but not so much somehow when listening to it.

As for the Ligeti/Kurtág thing, my comment was just based on the feeling that I seem to come across more people showing enthusiasm for K than for L these days, though I'm sure that in the wider world L is still one of those few composers of the "avant-garde generation" (you're forgetting Boulez maybe) whom people have heard of. One of his études was on the radio the other morning, actually. I find those works very boring indeed.

Maybe Cage has even more 'name recognition' than any of them (admittedly mostly on the basis of 4'33")? But I wonder about people having heard Stockhausen (or Xenakis) - still very few of his works are played outside of contemporary music concerts, whereas Ligeti has made more inroads in that respect?