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The Radio 3 Boards > The Music Boards > Music Through The Ages > 20th Century > Split from the Riegger Thread: Politics and Music
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Author Topic: Split from the Riegger Thread: Politics and Music  (Read 1794 times)
IgnorantRockFan
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« Reply #90 on: 22:12:48, 14-12-2007 »
So what I'm reading here is that various composers have written music with one "meaning" and later used  it for a different "meaning".

Which suggests to me that music has no inherent meaning. Therefore music can not be inherently political.

A composer might state the meaning of his creation, but his statement is metatextual, not a part of the creation. The composer may be political, the music isn't.

(Specifically talking about instrumental music, not songs.)
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ahinton
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« Reply #91 on: 22:25:26, 14-12-2007 »
Quote from: IgnorantRockFan on 22:12:48, 14-12-2007
So what I'm reading here is that various composers have written music with one "meaning" and later used  it for a different "meaning".

Which suggests to me that music has no inherent meaning. Therefore music can not be inherently political.

A composer might state the meaning of his creation, but his statement is metatextual, not a part of the creation. The composer may be political, the music isn't.

(Specifically talking about instrumental music, not songs.)
That's pretty much the way I've so far seen it (and my thoughts, like yours, are confined here largely to instrumental music), except that I would not say that music has "no inherent meaning" but that its meaning is not easily (if at all) amenable to verbal explanation - in other words, not so much "music is incapable of expressing anything except itself" as "music is capable of expressing everything but naming nothing".

Only my two pennarth...

Best,

Alistair
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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #92 on: 22:30:51, 14-12-2007 »
Quote from: IgnorantRockFan on 22:12:48, 14-12-2007
Which suggests to me that music has no inherent meaning. Therefore music can not be inherently political.


I am not sure you can make a generality out of an extrapolation that may be valid for only a tiny number of cases of the work of a tiny number of composers? Wink

Take the work of Kurt Weill, for example.  Weill was a Socialist of moral conviction, and he abandoned studies with Schoenberg (whom he greatly respected as a man, and as a composer) because he believed that twelve-tone music wasn't accessible to "ordinary people".  He then wrote in a style which was overtly intended to have direct mass appeal - and wrote one of the few C20th opera "smash hits" as a result, "Mack The Knife".  It's music whose entire sound-world is aimed at Socialist-inspired values and goals, and this is really undeniable when you listen to it.  (The apparent "simplicity" of Weill's music conceals some unusual bi-tonal complexities... writing a tonal melody which has an accompaniment in a different key is a Weill trait).

If we go down the road of saying that music is entirely abstract and a piece of music might mean "anything", then you could use the last of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes as background music for a couple holding hands on a beach in the Bahamas?  Clearly you can't - which pulls the rug from the argument.
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
-  Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
ahinton
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« Reply #93 on: 22:51:53, 14-12-2007 »
Quote from: Reiner Torheit on 22:30:51, 14-12-2007
Weill was a Socialist of moral conviction, and he abandoned studies with Schoenberg (whom he greatly respected as a man, and as a composer) because he believed that twelve-tone music wasn't accessible to "ordinary people".  He then wrote in a style which was overtly intended to have direct mass appeal - and wrote one of the few C20th opera "smash hits" as a result, "Mack The Knife".  It's music whose entire sound-world is aimed at Socialist-inspired values and goals, and this is really undeniable when you listen to it.  (The apparent "simplicity" of Weill's music conceals some unusual bi-tonal complexities... writing a tonal melody which has an accompaniment in a different key is a Weill trait).
But there are two issues here. The first is that we listen to Weill's music knowing beforehand some of - or all of - or maybe even more than you write here about him and his beliefs and aims as man and musician, so our listening experience will inevitably be coloured to some extent by such foreknowledge in a way that I suspect would almost certainly not be the case were we to listen to his music without such foreknowledge - and I'm talking about such works as his two symphonies here rather than his stage work; the second is concerned with what you state were the "aims" of his sound-world which, however effectively they may convey themselves through his music to those who might otherwise know nothing about them is, according to your argument, at least indicative of an apparent desire on his part to demonstrate in music his espousal of "Socialist-inspired values and goals". With this notion we are back with Ian's important point about the intent of the composer (when there is such an intent).

Quote from: Reiner Torheit on 22:30:51, 14-12-2007
If we go down the road of saying that music is entirely abstract and a piece of music might mean "anything", then you could use the last of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes as background music for a couple holding hands on a beach in the Bahamas? Clearly you can't - which pulls the rug from the argument.
Well, I don't go down any such road and I hope that I've clarified my position on that elsewhere in this and other threads. You could use perhaps use that piece "as background music for a couple holding hands on a beach in the Bahamas" provided that hurricane someone-or-other was devastating the islands at the time, but I know that this is not what you had in mind when you made that reference. That said, you are obviously writing from knowledge of the context of that piece, in that it is the last of four orchestral interludes in an opera where an eastern English sea and those peoples living and working nearby it feature, that its activity is intended to be representative of a storm over those often inhospitable waters, that Britten himself came from that area and was English, etc.; what about the listener who approaches this piece for the first time knowing nothing of Britten's background or of the opera from which it comes or of the sea or the characters, etc. - or, indeed, the title of the piece (i.e. the "innocent ear" type of experience)? Of course the ideas in the piece were set off in Britten's mind by all of those things about which he knew and was concerned and sensitive, but isn't that another matter?

Best,

Alistair
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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #94 on: 23:12:54, 14-12-2007 »
Quote from: ahinton on 22:51:53, 14-12-2007
But there are two issues here. The first is that we listen to Weill's music knowing beforehand some of - or all of - or maybe even more than you write here about him and his beliefs and aims as man and musician, so our listening experience will inevitably be coloured to some extent by such foreknowledge in a way that I suspect would almost certainly not be the case were we to listen to his music without such foreknowledge - and I'm talking about such works as his two symphonies here rather than his stage work; the second is concerned with what you state were the "aims" of his sound-world which, however effectively they may convey themselves through his music to those who might otherwise know nothing about them is, according to your argument, at least indicative of an apparent desire on his part to demonstrate in music his espousal of "Socialist-inspired values and goals". With this notion we are back with Ian's important point about the intent of the composer (when there is such an intent).


Very fair points, AH Smiley  However, we're off into the world of "what-ifs", aren't we?  "What if" Weill had not abandoned twelve-tone writing, and stuck with Schoenberg, Berg and others?   He might easily have done so, because he was attracted to this philosophy...  he had rigorously defended the Berlin premiere of WOZZECK whilst writing (under a pseudonym) as a music critic.  Ian's point about "intent", in Weill's case, was surely that he intended to write more immediately accessible music?  Otherwise he might have been the fourth of the Schoenberg-Webern-Berg trio, and written entirely different music as a result.  For Weill it was absolutely clear - writing accessible music was an act of political conviction,  and he purposely set out to fuse the dance-hall and cabaret styles of Spoliansky and Hollaender into a "classical" format.

Although I entirely see (and agree with) your point that "we already know what an ardent socialist Weill was before we even hear his music",  I am not sure this would hold water outside this forum...  I bet the huge majority of people who know "Mack The Knife" have no clue who composed it, or what piece it's from, or anything about Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble or any of this at all.  Weill knew that "you catch more flies with jam than vinegar", and put his art at the service of his political convictions.  The result is a different kind of music Smiley
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
-  Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
Daniel
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« Reply #95 on: 23:32:28, 14-12-2007 »
Quote from: IgnorantRockFan on 22:12:48, 14-12-2007
So what I'm reading here is that various composers have written music with one "meaning" and later used  it for a different "meaning".

Which suggests to me that music has no inherent meaning. Therefore music can not be inherently political.

A composer might state the meaning of his creation, but his statement is metatextual, not a part of the creation. The composer may be political, the music isn't.

(Specifically talking about instrumental music, not songs.)



I think you put that very well, IRF. A piece may be inspired by strong political feelings, but the music itself cannot have a political hue can it, wouldn't any political slant would need verbal/textual explanation to be certain of its communication?
 
When I listen to the music of Shostakovich for example, part of the reason that the sense of struggle in it moves me is because I know of the terrible conditions that he was battling against when writing it. But if I knew nothing of his life and listened to the music, I would still feel the struggle (and still be moved) but would anything about the music tell me that there was a specifically political dimension to his struggle? Surely not. Music is not political because a composer says (genuinely) that he was inspired to write it to express a political feeling, is it?

Quote from: Reiner Torheit on 22:30:51, 14-12-2007
If we go down the road of saying that music is entirely abstract and a piece of music might mean "anything", then you could use the last of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes as background music for a couple holding hands on a beach in the Bahamas?  Clearly you can't - which pulls the rug from the argument.

IRF will correct me if I have got this wrong I hope, but I don't think he/she is saying music can't be expressive of different moods, I certainly wouldn't, but the interpretation of mood is very flexible according to the listener, so any meaning in it is surely too much in flux to identify itself as explicitly political.

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IgnorantRockFan
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« Reply #96 on: 00:27:02, 15-12-2007 »
Quote from: Daniel on 23:32:28, 14-12-2007
IRF will correct me if I have got this wrong I hope, but I don't think he/she is saying music can't be expressive of different moods, I certainly wouldn't, but the interpretation of mood is very flexible according to the listener, so any meaning in it is surely too much in flux to identify itself as explicitly political.

Yes, that's the way my thinking is leaning. I've been grappling with this for quite a while, as I've tried to learn more about various composers and compositions and been baffled in trying to hear the meanings that commentators apparently hear in music. I've always approached instrumental music, in any genre, as an abstract art form -- certainly capably of communicating a mood, but not capable of communicating a concrete idea.

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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #97 on: 10:38:17, 15-12-2007 »
Quote from: Daniel on 23:32:28, 14-12-2007
IRF will correct me if I have got this wrong I hope, but I don't think he/she is saying music can't be expressive of different moods, I certainly wouldn't, but the interpretation of mood is very flexible according to the listener, so any meaning in it is surely too much in flux to identify itself as explicitly political.

My point in saying the above was to establish that it isn't abstract.  As soon as we agree that certain pieces of music are capable of expressing moods, emotions and ideas, then we can no linger cling to the claim that it's "abstract".  And once we establish that music is capable of conveying ideas, emotions and moods, then the question has moved on...  we are no longer discussing whether it can or not, but to what degree it can do so? 

Let's have another Beethovenian example that we'll all know - the Pastoral Symphony. It's programmatic, certainly - the composer has been kind enough to tell us what different sections of it refer to.  But is it successful in achieving what the composer intended?  I'd say that it is 100% successful.  We all hear the storm.  We all hear the calm after the storm.  Once we admit this, we can't then say it's "abstract" when it suits us to do so Smiley

Now move back three symphonies - to the EROICA, where we were about three forum pages ago.  Beethoven wrote it for "now", and what he was feeling at that time.  The huge, lunging nature of the piece hymns the revolutionary spirit of contemporary events perfectly.  It expresses the political ideal of the time, the Zeitgeist.  Any arguments about what it might mean to us are really just so much mashed potato, because Beethoven didn't write it for us - he wrote it for the audience who were to hear it at the time, and for no-one else.  A Europe in which France guillotined its entire ruling class could not mistake what EROICA was about. If we can't hear it, the fault lies with us, and not with Beethoven Wink
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
-  Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
martle
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« Reply #98 on: 12:57:57, 15-12-2007 »
This has become a really interesting discussion.
How about moving forward six Beethoven symphonies, to the 9th. I really don't see how the meaning, spirit, and political implications of Schiller's text in the final movement aren't absolutely inherent in the architecture, not just of that movement but of the entire symphony. The scale of the thing, its proportions, its structural frictions, its self-referencing, the weird recitative mode B employs in the last movement anyway, the choice of variation form (mingled with about three other sonata/rondo-derived forms in that movement) - in other words the 'compositional' conception of the symphony in terms of structure - all surely derive from the implications of the final movement's text. Don't they? I find it really hard to hear it any other way. In fact I remember 'intuiting' such an interpretation the very first time I heard it, as a teenager (unable to grasp at that time the intricacies of its politics, but nonetheless aware that there was a message built into the fabric of the music itself).
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Baz
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« Reply #99 on: 13:49:12, 15-12-2007 »
Quote from: martle on 12:57:57, 15-12-2007
This has become a really interesting discussion.
How about moving forward six Beethoven symphonies, to the 9th. I really don't see how the meaning, spirit, and political implications of Schiller's text in the final movement aren't absolutely inherent in the architecture, not just of that movement but of the entire symphony. The scale of the thing, its proportions, its structural frictions, its self-referencing, the weird recitative mode B employs in the last movement anyway, the choice of variation form (mingled with about three other sonata/rondo-derived forms in that movement) - in other words the 'compositional' conception of the symphony in terms of structure - all surely derive from the implications of the final movement's text. Don't they? I find it really hard to hear it any other way. In fact I remember 'intuiting' such an interpretation the very first time I heard it, as a teenager (unable to grasp at that time the intricacies of its politics, but nonetheless aware that there was a message built into the fabric of the music itself).

A number of times here, martle mentions "political implications" or "politics" with regard to Schiller's text. I should be really grateful if these implications (or actualities even) could be pointed out. Below is an English version, and I hope that not too much of the politics has been lost in translation. Thanks.

Baz
==================

Joy, beautiful spark of Gods,
 Daughter of Elysium,
 We enter, fire-imbibed,
 Heavenly, thy sanctuary.
 Thy magic powers re-unite
 What custom's sword has divided
 Beggars become Princes' brothers
 Where thy gentle wing abides.

Chorus

Be embraced, millions!
 This kiss to the entire world!
 Brothers - above the starry canopy
 A loving father must dwell.
 Whoever has had the great fortune,
 To be a friend's friend,
 Whoever has won the love of a devoted wife,
 Add his to our jubilation!
 Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
 His own on this earth!
 And whoever was never able to must creep
0 Tearfully away from this circle.

Chorus

Those who dwell in the great circle,
 Pay homage to sympathy!
 It leads to the stars,
 Where the Unknown reigns.
 Joy all creatures drink
 At nature's bosoms;
 All, Just and Unjust,
 Follow her rose-petalled path.
 Kisses she gave us, and Wine,
 A friend, proven in death,
 Pleasure was given (even) to the worm,
 And the Cherub stands before God.

Chorus

You bough down, millions?
Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy.
Above the stars He must dwell.
Joy is called the strong motivation
In eternal nature.
Joy, joy moves the wheels
In the universal time machine.
Flowers it calls forth from their buds,
Suns from the Firmament,
Spheres it moves far out in Space,
Where our telescopes cannot reach.

Chorus

Joyful, as His suns are flying,
Across the Firmament's splendid design,
Run, brothers, run your race,
Joyful, as a hero going to conquest.
As truth's fiery reflection
It smiles at the scientist.
To virtue's steep hill
It leads the sufferer on.
Atop faith's lofty summit
One sees its flags in the wind,
Through the cracks of burst-open coffins,
One sees it stand in the angels' chorus.

Chorus

Endure courageously, millions!
Endure for the better world!
Above the starry canopy
A great God will reward you.
Gods one cannot ever repay,
It is beautiful, though, to be like them.
Sorrow and Poverty, come forth
And rejoice with the Joyful ones.
Anger and revenge be forgotten,
Our deadly enemy be forgiven,
Not one tear shall he shed anymore,
No feeling of remorse shall pain him.

Chorus

The account of our misdeeds be destroyed!
Reconciled the entire world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
God judges as we judged.
Joy is bubbling in the glasses,
Through the grapes' golden blood
Cannibals drink gentleness,
And despair drinks courage--
Brothers, fly from your seats,
When the full rummer is going around,
Let the foam gush up to heaven*:
This glass to the good spirit.

Chorus

He whom star clusters adore,
He whom the Seraphs' hymn praises,
This glass to him, the good spirit,
Above the starry canopy!
Resolve and courage for great suffering,
Help there, where innocence weeps,
Eternally may last all sworn Oaths,
Truth towards friend and enemy,
Men's pride before Kings' thrones--
Brothers, even it if meant our Life and blood,
Give the crowns to those who earn them,
Defeat to the pack of liars!

Chorus

Close the holy circle tighter,
Swear by this golden wine:
To remain true to the Oath,
Swear it by the Judge above the stars!
Delivery from tyrants' chains,
Generosity also towards the villain,
Hope on the deathbeds,
Mercy from the final judge!
Also the dead shall live!
Brothers, drink and chime in,
All sinners shall be forgiven,
And hell shall be no more.

Chorus

A serene hour of farewell!
Sweet rest in the shroud!
Brothers--a mild sentence
From the mouth of the final judge!
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #100 on: 13:53:54, 15-12-2007 »
Quote from: Baz on 13:49:12, 15-12-2007
Eternally may last
...
Men's pride before Kings' thrones--
Brothers, even it if meant our Life and blood,
Give the crowns to those who earn them,
Defeat to the pack of liars!

...well, that seems reasonably clear in its politics, no?
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Baz
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« Reply #101 on: 13:59:55, 15-12-2007 »
Quote from: oliver sudden on 13:53:54, 15-12-2007
Quote from: Baz on 13:49:12, 15-12-2007
Eternally may last
...
Men's pride before Kings' thrones--
Brothers, even it if meant our Life and blood,
Give the crowns to those who earn them,
Defeat to the pack of liars!

...well, that seems reasonably clear in its politics, no?

I would have expected your last word to read "yes?" Ollie. What is in any way "political" about that short extract as opposed to being "poetic"?

Baz
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #102 on: 14:03:08, 15-12-2007 »
Well, it doesn't seem entirely in favour of undue deference to hereditary monarchy, for one thing.
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Baz
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« Reply #103 on: 14:08:44, 15-12-2007 »
Quote from: oliver sudden on 14:03:08, 15-12-2007
Well, it doesn't seem entirely in favour of undue deference to hereditary monarchy, for one thing.

Neither does Christianity. So where is the politics then?

Baz
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #104 on: 14:10:21, 15-12-2007 »
Who says Christianity isn't political? But, if calling for the defeat of those who have power for purely hereditary reasons isn't political, then what is?
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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