Music and Politics in 20th c Europe (HIST 311)

Brown briefly mentions Adorno and the influence of the Frankfurt School on young student revolutionaries. He notes that in a televised interview, Adorno admitted he found the protest songs of American folksinger Joan Baez “unbearable.” While it is evident that this evocation was not shared by all proponents of Adorno’s philosophy, Brown notes that many middle-class German students “retained high-cultural tastes in music, even if they embraced pop music as well.” That is to say, although they did not hold the same “draconian” views as Adorno, they valued popular music predominantly as an ideological tool to be deployed on working class youth. This leads me to three different questions, which I hope we can address in class.

First, is the student intelligentsia’s desire to cultivate the political message of pop music and employ it as an ideological tool an inherently different project than the Soviet Union’s desire to produce music that promoted socialist values? When thinking about this question, one might consider the instance when the Scherben were “called out for throwing glitter across the stage” at a musical performance.

Second, I would like to discuss the reasons why Adorno might imagine the music of protest musicians such as Joan Baez to be a “mass distraction” (Adorno, 408) rather than “communal music” (Adorno, 397). Is this due to his own cultural elitism, or is there something more here we might discuss?

Finally, what do we make of the tendency of student intelligentsia to prefer “high-cultural” music to popular music? I’m curious how revolutionaries who viewed rock music as a tool to convert working class youth understood their own “bourgeois” musical preferences. Did they think political songs has inherent musical value, or were they simply ideological instruments?

Mark Edele makes the remark that stiliagi were “decidedly apolitical” (58), echoing the KGB report he quotes earlier in the text that states the stiliagi held an “unpoliticalness” (40). I was taken by the idea that a subversive youth culture could be “apolitical”. It is explained that their apolitical nature was a product of their elite status (lack of financial/ labor concerns, lesser surveillance). However while stiliagi were apparently able to formulate “self-understandings which had little to do with politics” (61) they also politicized color and fashion (choices of grey vs. colorfulness / western vs. outlandish) and built a sexual identity based on the exclusion of women (and thus worked within politicized notions of gender and sex). And are the embracing of “hedonistic lifestyles”, engaging in a black market, and fondness for (banned) American jazz and rock n roll musics not political acts? Would it not be more apolitical to be a conforming, unquestioning party member? Did stiliagi consider themselves as apolitical?

In “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953,” Mark Edele describes the alternative masculinity articulated and embodied by the image-conscious, musically engaged, and socioeconomically well-placed stiliagi of the immediate post-war period as a “struggle to find a positive sense of gendered self in the absence of the defining trait of postwar masculinity – wartime heroism.” (Edele, 39) Edele credits the lack of inclusion of women as both an inevitability due to both the lack of female gender contestation necessitating a new female identity post-war, and to the stiliagi’s identity strictly as Man, and therefore concerning a male audience. As a result, the stiliagi Alternative Man is a wealthy, educated, socially protected being who builds his identity in collaboration with other well placed men, fundamentally in opposition to both women and “normals” (both wartime heroes i.e. the epitome of mainstream postwar masculinity, and those less socially and socioeconomically well placed). Implicitly, Edele is thus making the statement that the stiliagi identity was built off the exclusion of women, with the exception of parties (with the expectation of sex), for the good of their collective masculine identities. How can we place women in this context? Or rather, can we say that to an extent, the stiliagi identity would not be possible without acknowledging women explicitly as both objects of desire and objects of disdain? Is it possible or productive to understand the stiliagi’s articulation of their gender through a Western feminist lens? Additionally, I’m interested in the class-based exclusions of the original stiliagi. Given the sheild their socioeconomic positions afforded them from official retaliation in the Stalinist period, could the ultimate growth of stiliagi masculinity in different socioeconomic groups be attributed at least partially to the mild post-Stalinist easing of State discipline against subversive groups?

As I was reading Heller’s article, I found myself understanding t.A.T.u.’s Eurovision performance as a means of flaunting post-Soviet musical freedom: making up for lost time, perhaps, or sending a message to the rest of Europe about what it means to be musically uninhibited. Nicolas Nabokov, in a sense, had a similar project in constructing the “L’Oeuvre du XXe Siecle,” although his predominant aim was to expose the relative un-freedom of the Soviet Union. Nabokov chose to showcase Russian compositions that actively opposed the Soviet Union’s official ideology regarding music. In doing so, he demonstrated the Western Bloc’s unique ability to engage with music deemed avant-garde or “formalist,” works that could provoke discomfort or question existing moral codes. According to Nabokov, the lack of rules or censorship within the Western music world was precisely what made it “freer” than the musical culture of Soviet Russia.

However, Heller notes queer activist Yevgenia Debrianskaia’s assertion that “…people are much freer [in Russia] than in the West, because [in Russia] we spit on any rules, we break them whenever we want. This is exactly what freedom is” (Heller 204). This understanding of freedom suggests that Russia was keen on showcasing dissident ethos when they chose t.A.T.u. to represent the nation at Eurovision. t.A.T.u.’s image is based on transgression; the homophobia of Russia and other European nations combined with the presentation of “queer” sexuality is precisely what labels the performance as “free”, in the Russian sense of the word (of course, this is complicated by the role of Shapovalov – something I hope we can discuss further in class). This, in turn, begs the question of whether Nabokov’s festival actually demonstrated “freedom” at all. If, as Heller notes, Russian youth were continually engaged in the illicit distribution of unauthorized music, was the transgressive musical life of Russia more musically liberated than the relatively ungoverned musical culture of the West? How do we understand t.A.T.u.’s performance with regards to these two definitions of freedom?

I remember watching the Eurovision Song Contest as a child. I would wonder why Russia and Ukraine or Serbia and Montenegro would always give each other the most votes, and I would ask why ‘no one likes Britain’. In Bohlman’s terms, the “Europe of parts” would apparently prevail over the “Europe of the whole” (Bohlman 14): Balkan, Mediterranean, Nordic and ex-Soviet blocs would vote for one another and reject the cultural hegemony of the west (Britain has scored consistently poorly my entire life). Yet the prevalence of English as language-of-choice (the “those who want to win sing in English” logic (Heller 204)), indicates the dominance of the “Europe of the whole”. I am curious about the effect of the English language in performance (and t.A.T.u’s Eurovision failure in spite of this). In my experience, people in Britain would complain that a country’s contestant not performing in their native language was ‘inauthentic’. Rather than desiring a more palatable, English-sung entry, I feel as though English audiences often sought the most foreign performances possible. In that sense, national indicators or nationalist sentiments did not negate the music, but rather amplified it as an exotic performance. Clearly not without numerous problematic implications, Eurovision was a chance to see the traditions of foreign cultures paraded in as kitsch and euphoric a presentation as possible.

Still, the use of English by countries where English is not the first language might also suggest an inversion of British cultural hegemony. Using English to perform in and, more importantly, win a pan-European musical contest unites the rest of Europe against a British culture separated by water and an apparent hopelessness in singing competitions.

I acknowledge that the above paragraphs are quite informal and draw mainly upon personal experiences, so I’d like to propose another point. Looking back to Monday’s reading about Soviet musicians performing in the west, and comparing them to t.A.T.u’s various television performances in the UK and US, I find it interesting how significantly the receptions have apparently changed. Whereas Soviet musicians had formerly experienced freedom in their tours of the west, t.A.T.u were met instead by censorship and threats of bans. In contrast to the experiences shared in Caute and Carroll, Yevgenia Debrianskaia claimed “[P]eople are much freer [in Russia] than in the West”(Heller 204). How does the reception of t.A.T.u’s purposely provocative act reflect upon the west? And what benefit did t.A.T.u’s international controversy hold for Russia geopolitically?

As Mark Carroll abundantly makes clear, the beliefs surrounding serial music have changed drastically in the post-war classical discipline. No longer is atonal (but still structured) music a socially degenerating force, but instead an uncreative one. Carroll uses Boulez’s words to encapsulate this belief in musical stagnation: “[those who] in the name of liberty, forbid themselves to be prisoners of the [serial technique]” (Carroll, 14).What was once regarded as avant-garde is now mundane and a hindrance to composers. This concept is then furthered by Greenburg, who insinuates that the new avant-garde (that which is “defined against existing convention”)  is what will lead culture away from “ideological confusion and violence” (Carroll, 16). Although the way serial music is categorized has changed, the belief that it is inherently violent still persists within certain circles. However, from what I understand, this concept of violence has been inverted. (Atonal) serial music used to be referred to as ideologically violent towards the masses, as it was a separating force between believers in formalism and proletarian ideals. Now, the ideological violence seems to stem from its hindrance of progress for composers.

Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 (1943) was denounced as part of the 1948 decree for, I assume, its morose and tragic tone. It is the antithesis of the desired socialist realism of the period. Yet, while it evokes war strongly enough to have received the subtitle ‘Stalingrad Symphony’, I find it interesting that it was not also considered program music. While no clear narrative is followed and the music is far from incidental, it does certainly evoke imagery of war and loss. And clearly, this evocation was strong enough to render it dangerous in the eyes of the party.

Song of the Forests (1949) also evokes war. This time, however, it is of a triumphant tone. ‘When the War Ended’ carries a different narrative to Symphony No. 8; it is one of “victorious regiments” who had “defended our freedom” (Song of the Forests, A25). Assumedly, this is also in reference to the Battle of Stalingrad where the Soviet Union had decisively defeated German attempts at taking Stalingrad. I am curious about the dual depictions of the same war (and even same battle?). Memorial of lives lost seems to not have been part of the party’s desired music, but celebration of “defended freedom” was. With its resounding political success but immeasurable human losses, how was World War Two remembered – or rather, supposed to be remembered – under Stalin and his successors?

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party write, in their scathing resolution on Muradeli’s “Great Friendship,” that the opera is not only “vicious” but further, “inartistic” in both its “music and subject matter,” (Sovetskaia muzyka, No. 1 (1948), pp. 3-8.) due to Muradeli’s adherence to formalism. They identify the opera as oppressive due to the musical component’s decentralization of melody, the complexity of its harmony (primarily in Muradeli’s emphatic use of dissonance), and its lack of USSR-specific signifiers inside and outside the idiom of opera (folk-derived melodies, motifs, tunes). Simultaneously, they articulate that Muradeli creates a false narrative of an adversarial relationship between Russia and the people of the Caucus region. They conclude by accounting for “the failure of Muradeli’s opera [as] the result of the formalistic path which he has followed–a path which is false and injurious to the creative work of the Soviet composer.” (Sovetskaia muzyka, No. 1 (1948), pp. 3-8.) If, as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party note, the fault lies in the actions of the composers and in the music critics’ support of this formalist music, the “oppressive” and “vicious” qualities of this specific piece point to a larger societal and cultural issue for the State. I’m curious how, given the opera was in itself unsuccessful by many accounts, we can consider the nuances of its failure in the larger context of anti-formalism / soviet realism. What formalist qualities are identifiable in the opera, and can these be considered separate from (and not augmented by) its libretto? Or is the Central Committee identifying its libretto as a component of the piece’s formalism? Is this opera more than just an easy target which incorporates multiple factors the State cannot tolerate? Does this point to a larger issue of designating certain musics as oppressive to “the people” when in reality, there was a large group supporting and cultivating Russian formalism?

In the review of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk published in Pravda, the anonymous critic writes, “From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase, are drowned, emerge again, and disappear in a grinding and squealing roar. To follow this ‘music’ is most difficult; to remember it, impossible.” As I was watching the performance, I noticed that melodic and memorable musical sequences often accompanied scenes of sex or violence. For example, at 44:00, when Sergey and Katerina first consummate their relationship, the music grows increasingly loud and fast, finally culminating in a melodic, repetitive, circus-like theme. I would imagine that this is the kind of stylistic choice the critic was referring to in the quote above. By making the sexually explicit and violent scenes more accessible musically, Shostakovich invites the audience to remember these scenes, the same way that propaganda music effectively becomes an “ear-worm” for whoever is exposed to it. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why Shostakovich chose to make the scores for these particular scenes more melodic and repetitive than others.

Additionally, I’m curious about the censorship of a literary adaptation.The critic mentions that Shostakovich gave the story on which the opera was based “a significance which it does not possess.” If we are thinking about the issue of censorship in the Soviet Union, it might be useful to discuss why the operatic adaption of the story was banned, but the story itself (as far as I understand) was not. Does this have to do with the audience of the opera? The accessibility of opera versus literature?

I’ve started thinking a lot on the two converging pictures being painted of the German musical scene this week. First, we are shown in the Potter reading that a justification (among the many) behind the Nazi conquering of neighboring lands had to do with the musical influence Germany had. As Moser concluded, the entire system of tonality was a German invention among folk musicians (Potter, 216). Thus, every territory that also happened to use the tonal system (basically all of them) was already under at least some German influence, meaning their assimilation to the Third Reich would be that much easier. Second, in the Dumling article, the term “subversive internationalism” (Dumling, 46) pops up as a motif among major political and musical thinkers. Any and all musical processes that are not overtly “German” (ex. American Jazz) are deemed to be diminishing forces to German culture. With these two concepts in mind, it seems that a message of “if you’re not already with us you are part of the problem” was abundantly clear within the musical political sphere.