No Martle that is not Richard's elephant, but I am enjoying and learning from this thread a great deal! Keep it up!

I too would like to know how the 48 are political, in & of themselves, or whether that's merely an issue of their consistent reception in certain circles. Of course a work cannot be separated from its reception, but I think Baz believes that it can. And I'm not sure hwæt to say either on the matter.

Blimey! Why on earth do you assume I think that?

But wouldn't it need to mean something rather specific in order to be intrinsically political? Aren't the politics of many works implicit in listeners' responses rather than explicit in the composers' intentions?

And to put another question related to Richard's earlier post, can a piece written by a composer who is not particularly aware of - or inspired by - the political implications of making art be interpreted by later listeners as 'critical'?

Baz, I don't wish for you or anyone else to get the impression that I think I'm an expert in such matters as this, but, since you ask... recall my assertion that:


Note: political dimension, not message. So what we might look for is how the aforementioned conditioning functions in the case of the work you mention.

For one thing, I think one can view the history of tonality in terms of political/historical processes. In Bach's time the divine right of hereditary rulers to rule was basically not questioned, and this is reflected not just in obvious ways like the prologues to Lully's operas but also, I think, in the idea of harmonically closed and expressively consistent forms whose every element would preferably be in something recognisable as its ordained place, and the construction of the 48 could be seen as a particularly intricate example of the belief in a mundane order which reflected a divine one. I think it's uncontroversial that Bach's view of himself and his music was very much the product of his social/political circumstances (viz. the Lutheran community of Thuringia) and this is bound to be reflected not just in the musical forms and contexts he worked in but also, more subtly, in the details of those forms. Many aspects of Bach's music, as you'll know far better than I, express the fact that he was working in a time and place where (the political phenomenon of) "enlightened absolutism" held sway. This is one way of characterising the "political dimension" of Bach's music. Of course the music can be and is appreciated in total ignorance of such things (as can the music of many later, more explicitly "politicised" composers like Wagner or Nono), but knowledge of them certainly aids one's understanding of the whys and wherefores of music from a time and society different from ours.

Contrary to another member of this thread, you are talking in simple language that I can understand. In fact it is almost persuasive!

But I say "almost" only because, unlike you, I do not yet equate "culture", "heritage", "history" or "religious belief" with something as low down as "politics". We may, after all, be arguing over semantics; but the term "politics" implies to me only a theory of society rather than Society itself. It may be, of course, that some societies subscribe to a theory so strongly that they enact it into actual practice. But I should argue that at that point it ceases to be "politics" and is transformed into actual Society (for good or ill).

I suppose, therefore, that I am viewing "politics" as being only a theory - albeit an ongoing and ever-developing one - as opposed to "society" which is the actual living framework of our social reality.

In all the foregoing messages therefore, if the word "politics" could be understood as (in my terminology) "society", I should have no problem, and should basically agree with most of what has been said.

But one really big, oppressive, and insurmountable difficulty remains...

  ...when member Pace talks of "politics" HE always mentions things like "Social reductionism","leftist neglect", "issues of gender", "...of race", "...of class","...of social hierarchies", "Marxist models"  etc. Now these do not seem to me to be attributes of Society itself, but rather descriptive terms that arise from a theory of society.

I remain, therefore, very unclear about the dividing lines between actuality and theory. It is, indeed, my view that member Pace - when using the term "politics" (and inflicting it upon his discussion of music) - still upholds that these theoretical concepts are one and the same as the actuality of "society" as it is, was, and ever shall be.

So, therefore, when Bach's '48 was devised, created, and performed, it is impossible for me to conceive that that activity was in any way abstracted from the social context within which it took place. It is just that I reject the notion that the context was anything other than "social".

Baz

This is almost certainly related to the fact that the wholly undialectical model of Bach thus presented, as a relatively passive product of the norms of his time, is in reality very close to your own highly conservative view. I had thought that this view of Bach had mostly died out after the 1950s, amongst those German musicologists who had moved from exhorting how Bach expressed the spirit of the German race in the 1930s and 40s, to propagating Bach's music as a representation of divine order in the 1950s. But only a highly superficial analysis could manage to override all the many ambiguities, complex emotions, visionary explorations and much more in Bach (which can be analysed in detail through his harmonic and contrapuntal writing, if one is prepared to jettison an approach that imposes overriding hierarchies upon the music from without). Why does this still exist? Just thinking about this right now has clarified something I'm going to be exploring in a paper I'm giving in Manchester this weekend. The very fear of those ambiguities, the fear of emotion when it cannot be 'contained', the need to find some semblance of order in the face of an uncertain world, aspects of the authoritatian personality that are all quintessential characteristics of the British male (and some from former British colonies), are what lead to a particular appropriation of Bach especially by various British HIPsters (the particular use of historical evidence manages to force the music into such a mould in performance). But so much is lost in this quasi-militaristic process, and it really is true to say that 'They say Bach and mean Telemann'. I hadn't realised before now the ways in which gender in particular informed this conception.

It is a shame to see Bach's music marred by such a low-down variety of politics.