In the case of Il Canto Sospeso I don't see its being 'beautiful' as a problem, but in other pieces (La Fabbrica, Riccorda, and to a lesser extent both La floresta and Como una Ola) I do maintain my original conclusion. They don't strike me as having a utopian quality, quite the contrary, there's a tendency to make a type of modernist pathos out of the situation, which is arguably somewhat exploitative. Turning tragedy and oppression into expressive catharsis, which may serve a merely conscience-alleviating role (which is another form of 'patting on the back'). That's not all there is, even to the pieces I mention, but I'd argue that their political meaning would be stronger if they weren't so explicitly linked to concrete events or situations. Finding a utopian possibility from such situations is something I believe best served by rational political analysis, rather than simple offering up of what sometimes become manneristic forms of expressive lament.

In some sense the group is frequently malevolent in the ways you describe, but a socialist believes in trying to find as equitable a mode of group existence as possible - with as inclusive a group as there can be.

Well, I would say (as would most Marxists, I think, though I don't particularly care for that label) that capitalism has been equally if not more wrong, and responsible for just as much poverty, starvation, mass murder, in the course of my lifetime. But the victims have been global.

Well, 'capitalism' is just a political model for a particular state of affairs in which power rests amongst the owners of capital. For everything else, it is a distinct improvement upon feudal modes of society. But it is not, by any means, the 'best of all possible worlds'. Personally I break with some on the far left in believing that whilst ultimately capitalism is an unjust and unsustainable model of social organisation, there is still a big difference between regulated, social democratic, capitalist society, and its market-fundamentalist American-style counterpart. And also that the far left are far too complacent about the former being replaced by the latter.

That certainly exists, but it is not intrinsic to the whole ideological project, I believe. Genuine socialism is a rational alternative to what I read recently called 'romantic anti-capitalism', which leads some disaffected people towards dangerous mysticisms and the occult, idealisation of the higher classes (who can to some extent remain independent of the production process), snobbish aestheticism, and other such far-right ideologies. But socialism is not just an intellectual cult, it is a programme for action as well - theory without practice, and practice without theory, are both equally bunk. And any genuine socialist movement needs to be led not by a bunch of estranged middle-class intellectuals (they are the last ones I would trust in such a respect) but by working-class people themselves. There are, at the same time, complex issues of culture and consciousness which are related to why this situation doesn't currently exist on a large scale, but I won't go into those now.

As far as dispute is concerned, there are of course Stalinist and Maoist traditions that have little time for anything other than dogma (unfortunately both are quite prevalent on the far left in Britain, for reasons little more complicated than commonplace anti-intellectualism, also the macho culture that does permeate the movements), but what some might call 'dispute' I would prefer to call 'dialectics'. Dialectical thinking entails attempting to find some sort of unity between seemingly antagonistic, or at least antinomic, viewpoints. Personally, I think that's the only real way to proceed.

(the Freudian and Marxist senses of 'fetish' are not actually so far apart! ). The argument isn't about 'reducing' a piece of music to a dogma (in a dogmatic hermeneutical sense), but rather about asking what composers, or artists of any type, can do in order to find any alternative to simply producing something else which impresses primarily in terms of its amenability to the status of a commodity. And of course there are a variety of opinions on how that might be possible (if at all).

Music has been of equally questionable political and moral use to the purveyors of capital and their ideological adherents in governments and the like. That is one thing that recent musicology has been investigating in quite some detail.

I haven't read Bateson, so can't comment on that.

I would put it more simply that music exists in a world dominated by capitalist economics, but that music produced under the auspices of democratically accountable forms of subsidy has some degree of independence from that. Without that, there'll be nothing other than commodity music.

That last clause is a major claim which I would have to ask you to justify (I don't necessarily disagree in all senses, but would frame the issue in rather different terms; I won't go into that right now, it is perhaps reasonably clear from various of my earlier posts to other threads?)

I'm not sure I really follow what you're saying in this passage (which is maybe simply my problem) - could you elaborate?

So it may do, but the current issue is not yet showing when I visit that URL...

Best,

Alistair

Thanks for your help on this: I hadn't seen the .pdf. I've now read the two letters and the article. My brief pondering on the sheer amount of space devoted to musical matters in this periodical of late might have led me to wonder if there were yet more of it in the front cover reference to Chávez but I soon discovered otherwise.

Apart from its occasional nods in the direction of sociomusicological discourse, Mr Hoban's article contains a great deal of good sense, it seems to me. I'll refrain from further comment beause the entire notions of politicisation and/or belief in the inherent political content of music do not impress me with credibility, therefore I cannot usefully enter into that arena; I stress, however, that just because discussion of them tends mainly to arise from those with leftish leanings that I do not happen to share, my distrust of these concepts has no bearing on my political beliefs (if any), so I would find such claims for them equally unconvincing were they to emanate from what Ian calls the right of liberal and right wing fraternity.

Best,

Alistair

There nevertheless remains a vast difference between the contexts in which music is performed and the funding sources for such performance on the one hand and the actual music itself on the other hand, except perhaps in cases where (a) a composer is given orders by his/her funders to some extent as to how to fulfil a commission for a new work and (b) funders and promoters devote undue and unwelcome attentions to deciding what audiences will want to hear. "One's actions" in any of those areas of music making that you mention may indeed fit, to greater or lesser degree, into some kind of political spectrum, but that is not the same thing as saying that the music itself - or even listeners' response to it - must therefore always do likewise.

Whilst the particular gender issues that you mention here are indeed of importance (unlike some others that are so often drageed kicking and screaming into the area by certain types of "new musicologist" - of such importance, indeed, that it needs to be elevated above the area of specific "ideologies" in order properly to address it - the problem appears to remain that, even if one accepts the grossly simplistic notion that would have us believe that those of left leanings feel that women are treated inequitably in the music profession as a whole whereas those of other political persuasions do not, this is an issue separate from those of the nature of the music itself and the reactions of its listeners.

In summary, then, one might say that the profession of music - in all its forms as outlined by your above - has inevitably from time to time to rub shoulders with that of politics but that the music itself does not.

You also write of music "existing in society" which, whilst obviously very true, is not the whole truth; it is the case only when that music making, distribution, etc. is public. As a performer, you will surely know as well as anyone how much of his/her time an active professional musician also has to spend working at music in private. Time to demonstrate your agreement with at least that bit by going and doing some practice, Ian?!...

Best,

Alistair

Only fortuitously or shall we say incidentally. The society in which it exists is not part of the essence of music.

The composer's proper and native environment is the ivory tower. His intercourse with any form of society must be merely incidental.

Or, as that composer whom Ian persists in not naming would have put it, not an ivory tower but a tower of granite. Now whilst I am obviously not "advocating" - still less "uncritically" - Ian's likely position on this, I cannot accept your view here as something that is entire of itself. A composer has indeed to spend much time working away in private, just as a performer does, but just because the customary intercourse with his/her listeners is by definition at a remove (in a sense that does not apply to the performer) it does not follow that the composer at all times shuns all public or private feedback about his/her work as though he/she couldn't and shouldn't ever care less about what listeners get out of it. It's a matter of balance. Your suggestion here would seem to be especially impractical in application to those composers who also perform and/or conduct their own work in public.

Best,

Alistair

I was referring to both, but in the case of composition referring to that which is, or at least seeks to be, performed. If a composer's work is performed at all, then that brings about some form of intercourse with some (possibly small) sub-section of society, unless there is absolutely no-one there to hear it.