Day One-Music and Politics
This time around, the turn of the New Year is a monumental one. At the stroke of midnight, (Brussels time), the UK left the EU and as such, I wanted to use this day out of my 31 available to discuss the relationship between Art and Politics. The two have enjoyed a mysterious relationship, manifesting itself in a myriad of different ways with an extraordinarily wide range of outcomes. Perhaps no composer, however, epitomised this relationship more than Dmitri Shostakovich.
The piece that I have chosen for today’s listening is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, IV. Allegro non troppo.
“Every artist, everyone who considers himself an artist, has the right to create freely according to his ideal, independently of everything”, were the words of Lenin. The discourse surrounding twentieth century art, especially in the USSR and even more so with respect to Dmitri Shostakovich, would be entirely different had he not continued with; “However, we are Communists and we must not stand with folded hands and let chaos develop as it pleases. We must systematically guide this process and form its result”. Thus the dichotomy of autonomous art and political censorship is presented.
Typically a shy person, Shostakovich played the system well enough in order to survive but had to make significant consolations in his music. Generally speaking, he chose the path of subversion as opposed to resistance, keeping his own ideas about music at bay in favour of writing music that was more in line with the party expectations, even to the extent of publicly smearing the musical language of Schönberg and Stravinsky, the latter being somewhat of an idol for him. He said himself that “Without party guidance, I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.” This begs the question of what would have happened if Shostakovich was born in a different place, at a different time. On the one hand, would we ever have the extraordinary dissidence found purely in his musical syntax, perhaps at a level deep enough to avoid Government interference but significant enough to still conform to the aesthetic of Socialist Realism, or would the free Shostakovich have used his extraordinary skill to provide a fascinating counterpart to the Dodecaphonic language being developed in central Europe?
Social Realism, the style required by the Soviet authorities, was based on the principle of glorifying the struggles and triumphs of the proletariat and on a traditional, classical perspective of art. To control this, the Soviets set up the Union of Soviet Composers that were to assess every piece that any composer wished to publish. Any piece which did not conform to the principles of Social Realism was rejected. As such, the music we now have from the Soviet period is based on largely diatonic, harmonically rich and melodic music, specifically with regard to Russian Traditional and Folk melodies. That a Government system can, as Lenin said, be active in “systematically guiding” the creative process and art of a nation and epoch is extraordinary and has huge ramifications.
It is clear that this is a severe restriction upon the freedom of artistic expression and, in the case of Shostakovich, forced him to find ways in which he could use his musical language to subvert the authorities and indirectly be a dissident voice. There are two such examples in his Fifth Symphony; the dissonant trumpets sarcastically mocking the authorities in a military march and the colossal shift to the major tonality at the end of the piece, interrupting a movement of violence, turbulence and mystery in the uplifting Soviet manner, such was the requirement of art as stated by the authorities. Yet, from a musical standpoint, it is rather unexpected, and at worst illogical, considering what came before it. This is something to be revered as an act of courage and serves as a remarkable example of how he was able to create art that is bound to his time whilst simultaneously transcending the dictates of politics.
One last point of conjecture I would like to raise is the similarity between blatant and unashamed Soviet censorship and the irony of the free, open and democratic art scene that we supposedly, at least in Western Europe, believe we live in today. Whilst under Soviet control the content and aesthetics of art was heavily censored, I would argue that even with the erosion of forced censorship, we have now a situation in which we have invisible and bureaucratic restrictions that are placed upon artists and affect the aesthetic of music in a similar fashion. This occurs mainly through the availability of funding to artists and the frequency, if any, of performance opportunities. Based on location, there will be institutions (much like IRCAM in France that was the brainchild of Pierre Boulez; an artist himself who was extremely active in destroying the music of composers for whom he did not like or did not deem as part of the aesthetic he was championing) that decide on who and what gets performed, albeit in a more discreet fashion to that of the Soviet Authorities. Whilst there is perhaps no one dictating what you can and cannot write, it will become very clear, very quickly as to what is accepted and what isn’t judging by how much food you are able to put on the table. The mysterious label of “industry” is another term used to disguise pre-conceived notions of the artistic good and bad, the accepted and the unaccepted. True originality cannot survive in this system for very long before being forced to conform, at least in part, to the ideal of an external authority.
My point is that fundamentally, perhaps art is unable to be truly free and democratic in the purest sense. Its importance and significance in stirring human behaviour has been understood since Plato spoke about it in his Republic. He understood that music had an effect on the human soul but that it was dichotomous, either good or bad. He based “good” music on the same mathematical proportions of order that Pythagoras put forward for the perfectness of the movement of the stars. With reference to anything that stood outside of his idea of the “good” he said, “For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes." The Republic, Book IV, 424c. This is not so different from Pierre Boulez’s attitude and certainly not different from the attitude of the Soviet authorities, their desire to keep control of the musical aesthetic and therefore the people being their guiding reason. I wonder if art will ever truly emancipate itself from the shackles of political and social ideology and become truly free.
