Saturday, April 23, 2011

Composing a Better World, Part I: Oh no... We discuss politics.

Introducing part one of our new debate series: How can we, as composers, make the world a better place?

Sarah: Since I wrote about Nicholas D. Kristof in my introduction post, let's start out with politics. Can we write political music that might actually make a difference, and if so, how? Considering most music is fairly abstract, without a text or some other representational indicator, I find it difficult to label a piece as advocating for something or promoting a cause. Personally, I've never really tried to write anything overtly political, although I did once write a feminist piece- but it had a text. Natalie, what do you think?

Natalie: I have not yet attempted to write a political piece either, but I certainly hope to! The classical composer is no stranger to political music and there’s strong precedence for this throughout history, most notably in the 20th century. Several examples of explicitly political works come to mind, including Louis Andriessen’s De Staat, Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, and John Adams’s Nixon in China.  

Sarah: I agree that those pieces all deal topically with politics, but they also all, to varying degrees, use text or other references to get their political points across. What about pieces that don't use text or any other kind of references, that are purely abstract? Music clearly has the power to incite people (I'm thinking about several infamous riots in the classical music world, most notably at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring), but the people who got so terribly upset at these premieres weren't exactly about to go out and create social change. Maybe it's a moot point because if you're interested in making an explicit political statement, you always have the option of using text or other referential material, and you wouldn't want your message to be confused. However, I'm still curious about whether or not we can actually write political pieces that can change things in a concrete way and whether that should be something that we're even thinking about. How do you feel about using classical music to create social change? Visual artists do it all the time; so do writers. Of course, so do musicians, but they tend not to be classical composers. Why shouldn't we be addressing this more directly in our music? And if we should, how can we? Can we be composers who occasionally write political music, or do we risk being categorized as "one of those political types?"

Natalie: To go back to what you said originally, music's abstract nature definitely puts a wrench in the works in terms of trying to explicitly create political or social change. Writers have a huge advantage in actually making change (e.g. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring), whereas artists and musicians interested in advocating causes have to somehow create an explicit message, often through implicit mediums. Sometimes it seems like advocating political and social change through music alone is a challenging, flawed, and perhaps unattainable aspiration. However (and this is a BIG however), there have been some interesting and revolutionary phenomena happening in the music world, even on a purely musical scale. The Minimalist movement was, and is, a rejection not only of the academy’s harmonic teachings, but also, in many ways, of elitism in general. Such a rejection of elitism invariably produces social, economic, and political overtones.

For composers such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Cage, Louis Andriessen, and Pauline Oliveros, the philosophy behind the music shifted its focus from the virtuosic and arcane notions of the academy to a music of the “people” or of a community (albeit much of Minimalist music is often virtuosic in its own right). Therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that Minimalism often embraces popular music, as well as the music of other cultures and traditions, thus breaking through Western musical barriers and stigmas. This movement isn’t just an attempt to break away from the academy—it’s also a rebellion against class structures, social divisions, materialism, capitalism, etc. A piece such as Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union probably wouldn’t have come out of a different backdrop. I can’t say that this has had a huge impact on national politics or even cultural norms, at least in the United States, but it certainly has made a difference in the music community and such a difference is likely to bleed into other facets of culture and life. 

Sarah: I think you make a great point, and you're right that in a more broad definition, music or a musical movement that creates any kind of change, even if it is within the music world, can be classified as political in nature. I almost wonder if we should think about it in two different categories. In the first category we'd have the more obvious definition, music that can create social change or that promotes a cause, political movement, etc. And then there's the kind of political music that you're talking about- music that is itself political by virtue of its different (from what came before) material, form, instrumentation, etc. However, in that sense, almost all music is political because usually we are trying to do something new, trying to depart from what came before and we can't help but react to it. Furthermore, composers don't live in a vacuum, as much as we may attempt to at times, and therefore everything we write must in some ways be political simply because we exist in society and our thoughts and opinions (whether about music or not) will come through (probably implicitly) in our music.

On the other hand, maybe the two categories are intrinsically related. For example, twelve-tone music and later, serialism, were in some ways both a reaction to the lengthy form, harmonies that almost stretched tonality to the breaking point, and general "overblown-ness" of late 19th century Romantic music (and more specifically, the Germanic tradition), and a political reaction to Richard Wagner's (who was one of the masters of this style) anti-semitic tendencies.

Natalie: I think you've hit the nail on the head.  It's undoubtedly no coincidence that so many of the topically political pieces that we can think of today are created by composers who are intimately affiliated with a revolutionary stylistic movement, such as the Minimalist movement, the avant-garde, etc. Perhaps it's therefore logical to conclude that in order to write music that will promote social change, as composers we need to think not only about "revolutionary" topics, but also about pushing musical boundaries (or at least being conscious of the implications of our stylistic choices). The degree to which music can actually make change, however, will always be a debatable topic. Also, what you mentioned about being categorized as a "political composer" is a whole other can o' worms that we'll hopefully get into at some point. Anyway, many, many things to think about!  Stay tuned for our next "composing a better world" discussion!

5 comments:

  1. When I read this:
    "How do you feel about using classical music to create social change? Visual artists do it all the time; so do writers."
    my first thought was to doubt that writers are actually capable of creating social change anymore, because I was thinking about novels - and then when Natalie mentioned Silent Spring I realized you could also mean nonfiction writers, many of whom do try, and succeed, at inciting change. I'm now wondering whether it's possible to write "nonfiction" music, so to speak...

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  2. That's a really great point, Julie. I recently was thinking about The Jungle and wondering if a fiction work has as much power today as it did, say, 100 years ago. But regardless of fiction's power, nonfiction definitely continues to be a powerful and effective medium.

    Sometimes you'll go to a new music concert and hear a piece based on a true story or a specific message or something trying to evoke a very "realistic" situation, soundscape, etc.(often, because of the text and representation element that Sarah addressed, these pieces use vocals and/or multimedia). Two composers that I've heard work with this kind of material include Annea Lockwood and Jack Body.

    Even so, it still seems to me that such a form of musical "nonfiction," just by the very nature of the fact that it IS music, often has an element of reflection that separates it from the more direct effect of the written word.

    In other words, I DO think it's hard to write musical "nonfiction." And I also think it's interesting that those who try are often put into different categories of composer-dom (the "sound artist," the "political composer," etc.).

    Definitely an interesting conundrum!

    -Natalie

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  3. I agree that I'm not really sure what musical nonfiction would be, but I'm not sure I agree that fiction can't create social change. I think it's a similar sort of argument that writing fiction, similarly to writing music, probably won't create specific social or political change, but it might create change in someone's life. I know I talk about this book all the time (Julie you really have to read it!!) but The Book Thief (which is fiction and by Marcus Zusak for those of you who have never read it, and you should change that immediately) really changed the way I thought about the Germans in WWII. I don't know if it really changed my life, and it's hard to create social change about something that happened in the past, but it's almost always positive to influence how someone thinks about something or someone. So, in that sense, fiction can create change.

    Similarly, so can music- Natalie didn't end up addressing this in our final post, but she had used the example earlier that while maybe Beethoven's Eroica symphony isn't creating social change, it's still a very powerful piece of music that has the potential to change someone's life (and Natalie please correct me if I'm paraphrasing incorrectly).

    Anyway, I guess we're really talking about two different things- creating global social or political change through fiction/music vs. creating a more localized change in someone's life. In the beginning I set out to write more about the first, but as someone who spends a great deal of time with music, I guess I'm a good example of someone whose life has been changed by music so I shouldn't trivialize the second!

    - Sarah

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  4. Your post reminded me of Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa issued against him for his novel 'The Satanic Verses!' I also thought of fiction writers Dante, Thomas Hardy, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Perce Shelley, the Bronte Sisters, Henry James...all amazing novelists, who had very political points of view. And I strongly believe that art, in all its forms, initiates very real political or social change...

    Also thought of Picasso's Guernica, Goya's work on the Spanish Civil War, Nancy Spero and her anti-war/Vietnam work...

    I'm excited about learning more on classical composers who were doing work that also resisted the social conventions of their time...

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  5. This is great---thank you for these other examples. Guernica, in particular, has always made a huge impression on me--a great example of the power of art in addressing political topics, even through implicit mediums.

    I think part of the problem is that we have a culture that insistently demands measurements. How much is this affecting us? To what degree? What are the statistics? I can't measure the degree to which a painting like Guernica makes me feel passionately anti-war, but without art, books, music...I'm not sure I would really have enough perspective to think much of anything about anything that hadn't happened to me directly (and even then I might have no way of entry into analyzing it). The arts help us to think outside ourselves and to feel empathy, to consider situations we may never have thought about, to challenge our perceptions of each other, society, reality.

    The arts may not cause the passage of a bill in the senate, but then again...our senate may not be able to manage that much themselves...! I think we're just going to have to be satisfied with a nebulous conviction that what we do makes an important--and very real--difference.

    -Natalie

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