Each year around awards-show season artists and athletes are reminded by a pugnacious chattering class to stop spewing progressive bromides and just shut up and play their guitars, as it were, to do the job of art and leave public activism to the experts. There’s a tension here that anyone who makes art has to appreciate: our job is, first and foremost, to make art, and in this blog I’ve questioned on numerous occasions both the motivations behind and, more importantly, the effectiveness of “political” art. At the same time we are citizens, with much to gain or lose from the machinations of any existing political order, and so in doing our jobs it’s inevitable that we veer from time to time into volatile and possibly dangerous creative territory. Even if our work is resolutely abstract, cordoned off from the comings and goings of pop culture and social media, it can’t help but bear the traces of our lived daily experience. Or at least one would hope. I think our lodestar here is to be found in Mark Rothko and Adophe Gottlieb’s letter to the New York Times in which Rothko stated, “There’s no such thing as good painting about nothing.”
Rothko matured, of course, into one of the most single-mindedly abstract painters of the twentieth century, and yet – as the term Abstract Expressionism suggests – no one standing in front of, say, Saffron, or Orange on Pink has ever doubted that the work was animated by an urgently expressive, spiritual imperative. There’s nothing explicitly political in these works, only what Rothko described as “the tragic and the timeless”, and yet they were known to get under the skin of Joe McCarthy and the red-hunting HUAC gang. Anything conceptually challenging and authentically emotional always poses a threat to conformist, authoritarian regimes, and so everyone who made art with intellectual and expressive rigor from the late 40’s through the 50’s was seen as a closet commie. It didn’t matter what the art looked or sounded like: Copland was hauled before the committee at a time when one might have concluded from his music that he was a staunch, flag-waving conservative (he was not). For several days he was grilled and asked to name names (he did not).
It’s worth restating, however, that there was nothing either explicitly or even implicitly political in Rothko’s work; it’s impossible to read his paintings as offering commentary on any of the dominant issues of the time. One takeaway from this is that in just doing our jobs with integrity and humanity, the politics will find us. When it does, how will we respond?
That we must respond is, I think, now self-evident. We’ve lost the luxury of pretending that we can sit this one out, above the fray, our hands unsullied by political engagement. We now must give individual voice to the collective nightmare of living under a kind of bumbling fascism, by turns cruel, incompetent and terrifying, racist, vindictive, lawless and spectacularly corrupt. Our creative work can’t help but reflect this new, debilitating normal, that is unless we willfully take refuge in fantasy. I don’t mean the genre itself; Fantasy has for over a century been the most resonant creative space we have for political allegory and often devastating social commentary. I’m talking about the willful fugue state in which one comes to believe that it is possible to do business with, to materially profit from a relationship with a tyrant and still do work that is meaningful as anything other than propaganda. This is as impossible as reversing the arrow of time and yet there are always artists ready to put the idea to the test. The ease with which one can become Leni Riefenstahl or Tikhon Khrennikov (or, since we’re in the United States, Kid Rock or Mel Gibson) should be sobering to anyone fancying a dance at the edge of this particular event horizon.
Khrennikov’s case is especially grim. General secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, he ruthlessly enforced Stalin’s impulsive, shifting directives with regard to soviet music, meting out punishment for “Formalism”, “Cultural Decadence” and all of the other meaningless, endlessly mutable charges that could be brought against composers deemed insufficiently triumphalist in their depictions of soviet life. Both Shostakovitch and Prokofiev were censured on these shaky grounds in the cultural purges of 1948. Shostakovitch was eventually rehabilitated, managing to find the middle way that somehow allowed him to retain his status as a public figure with his own musical voice, while avoiding direct, explicit confrontation with the State (though at the cost of his deepening depression and bitter hatred of both the Soviet Union and the West). Prokofiev never recovered, having been banned in perpetuity from soviet musical life; his music was left unperformed, and even his attempts at restitution were greeted with scorn by audiences and authorities alike. Both men were lucky, however, in escaping with their lives.
All of his protestations to the contrary Khrennikov profited enormously from his position, enjoying tremendous professional prestige and non-stop performances of his music at the highest levels of the soviet musical establishment, all the while upholding the regime’s negative values, right up until its dissolution in 1991. Showing no capacity for reflection on his long career as an apparatchik, Khrennikov lamented the fall of the soviet empire, placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Mikhail Gorbachev and declaring Stalin to have been a genius, and (in language that is today weirdly chilling and contemporary) “an absolutely normal person” who understood music “better than any of us”.
What is perhaps most tragic in Khrennikov’s story is that he wasn’t born a hack. Demonstrating a profound compositional gift from an early age, his first major works, a piano concerto, his first symphony, and the opera Into the Storm, are distinctive, personal and often brilliant. They’re marked, of course, with the rhythmic and textural signatures of Socialist Realism: ponderous, long-breathed “proletarian” melodies; bouncy ostinati with pronounced offbeats; liberal doublings of piccolo and xylophone; and canned, idealized climaxes, but they’re also colorfully orchestrated, harmonically fresh and emotionally complex. They don’t seem to presage the life of unabashed toadying and vengeful wielding of power that would come to define their composer. But proximity to power, access to influence at the highest levels, turned out to be the drug that Khrennikov simply could not resist. In this he was certainly not unique; we see it again and again, in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and today in the United States. The almost numinous draw of power, just the overwhelming desire to be near it, causes the very people in the best position to save their country to plunge it instead into chaos (for more on this read all of Anne Applebaum’s excellent work in The Atlantic over the last four years). Khrennikov’s early promise was squandered, and he contented himself for the rest of his life with patriotic blather, film music, and, ironically, orchestral showpieces redolent of early Prokofiev.
And what of Khrennikov now? Throughout most of the world a punchline, a distended factoid, losing year-by-year, like the forgotten ghosts in Coco, any meaningful connection with the world of the living, a sad footnote to a long and stupid history. Except in Russia, where he is now trotted out and treated as a great master by the likes of Vadim Repin and Valery Gergiev, the former resolutely “apolitical” and the latter an enthusiastic apologist for Putin and his illegal, savage invasion of Ukraine. These are the artists who have set to work on the long and arduous resuscitation of the General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers. We may soon hear Khrennikov at the Kennedy Center. I’m not kidding.
One would think that none of us wants to end up a modern-day Khrennikov, and yet pop music has Ye, Kid Rock, Jason Aldean and M.I.A. throwing their lot in with the current administration and, though they’re in the minority, the fervor of their support is unnerving. But pop artists supporting a pop culture president, a demiurgic creation of reality TV and social media, is not terribly surprising. What about classical musicians, practitioners of an art that, at its best, quickens imagination, intellectual independence and critical thinking? Well, hold on there. None of that is a foregone conclusion. Lest we forget, the Nazis loved Bach and Beethoven and wept during the St. Matthew Passion just like the rest of us. While deep musical engagement is, has been proven to be, an agent of cognitive and emotional development, it does not, divorced from a context of deep social engagement, guarantee a heightening of either political awareness or levels of empathy and compassion. And all too often when confronted with political realities that demand a public stance from our most celebrated artists the response has come in the form of shibboleths with regard to music’s “abstract” or “bipartisan” nature, its “power to heal” its inherent “diversity” and the need to keep it “pure” and untainted by political association, evasive action on every point worthy of the heroes of Top Gun.
A recent, welcome exception here is the letter instigated and penned by pianist Jonathan Biss and signed by over 600 musicians (including me) condemning the Trump administration’s attacks on free expression in the United States. That six-hundred of us were willing to put our names to this is both astonishing and inspiring, and a clear barometer of the crisis we are now facing. This is a start, a good start, but it’s only the beginning. We need work, strong work, that sings of the unique, formidable, terrible challenges that now bedevil our nation and, by extension, the whole world. Just how that is accomplished from piece to piece, painting to painting, installation to installation, is a matter for each individual artist to decide. The nature of the program; the text; the levels of musical onomatopoeia, of text painting and scene setting; the cultural footing; the level of explicit or implicit depiction of a specific event, cultural movement or worldview; where the work lands on the spectrum between direct political statement (Il prigioniero of Dallapiccola) and evocations of the tragic and the timeless (Rothko; Feldman; Carter), all should be, must be entirely open. What matters is that the work must push, must challenge, must shout “LISTEN TO ME!”. There can be no justification-by-subject, no hiding behind postmodern political doublespeak, no sloganeering. The political reading must flow from, must be encoded in the discourse, not grafted on after the fact. This needs to be our absolute best work, and we need to take the audience by the throat with no ironic distance, no arch winking of the eye. And we must remember that, in this culture, just to make something beautiful, densely, exhaustively, terrifyingly beautiful is itself a subversive act. To ask that the listener engage deeply, uncomfortably with a semantic process that seeks nothing less than the transformation of the psyche, the rending and repairing and uplifting of the soul, is to give a big double-bird to a socio-political system that runs on idiot distraction and syntactic collapse.
And what will all this accomplish? Who knows?! We’re not going to kid ourselves into thinking that one trenchant chamber or orchestral work is going to cause Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins suddenly to vote against gutting Medicaid. In the short term it’s likely that none of this will accomplish anything at all. But our work together forms a wave, a persistent, clangorous, collective voice, and the scream of that voice coupled with the scream in the street can and will bring this administration down and this nightmare to an end. They have the executive and legislative branches; the justice department; most of the Supreme Court; and the military. We have most of the lower courts; sharp and effective state governments; an army of pro-democracy and civil rights advocacy groups fighting day in, day out in the courts; and the streets. And make no mistake about it, this administration, like all illegal, corrupt and sociopathic regimes, fears the street, fears it the most when it fills from end to end with stubborn, unceasing and peaceful protest.
So yes, let’s just do our jobs. For Coltrane that meant serving as a messenger, a prophet of both ecstatic and terrible truths; for Beethoven it meant shattering conceptual barriers and raising consciousness in the service of the human family; for Henze, Rzewski and Hannah Kendall it comes as direct political action, music as violent confrontation with power; for Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer, and Jesmyn Ward it means confrontation with the past-as-present, with legacy and responsibility; and with Rothko it meant a direct expression of the human condition, the spiritual predicament, through stark contrasts of vividly oscillating color and shape. The tragic and the timeless.
They all have one thing in common and leave us with one unmistakable imperative:
The job of the artist is to tell the truth.
Whither Music? 