GEORGE EDWARDS
697
more we view it as art) the less it influences our behavior. Such a claim
would cause us to be shocked, but not surprised, that men who loved
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and who spent their evenings playing
Schubert's chamber music, could also willingly participate in genocide.
Western democracies typically encourage the consumption of music as
art, and claim to regard it as of little political importance: like coffee
and chocolate, music is no longer perceived as a dangerous stimulant.
It
all
too easily becomes a useless pastime or a mere social ornament.
If we care about music and want it to be taken seriously as a social
and political force, we will want to take care that interpreting it as such
will not make it vulnerable once again to totalitarian control.
According to Arac, Trilling's generation "eradicated from American
culture the dangers of Stalinism; now that it is gone, we are again free to
explore possibilities on the left." However,
nothing
in politics is
eradicated for all time. Even Zhdanov still has his supporters, at least in
Great Britain. Malcolm Barry's contribution to
Music and the Politics of
Culture
treats Zhdanov's notorious speech to the Union of Soviet
Composers Congress of 1948 as "a middle-brow reaction to
contemporary music that could be voiced anywhere in the world" -
ignoring that it was the only reaction that then could be voiced in the
Soviet Union. He also defends Zhadanov's 1936
Pravda
article, "Chaos
Instead of Music," which "ensured the disappearance of [Shostakovich's]
LAdy MacBeth of Mtensk
from the Russian stage," and the duty of the
government to intervene. Noting that Shostakovich revised the opera in
1963, Barry asks:
Could it be that the intervention, brutal and traumatic as it was,
might have been
helpful
to the
composer,
even within the context of a
"value free" approach to music
as such?
Barry continually praises the "explicit nature of Soviet Realism as a
philosophy of art," in contrast to the implicit ideology of Western aes–
thetes. But in his introduction Norris discusses Barry's contribution in
terms of his own idea that the reception of Shostakovich in the West
was distorted by "cold-war ideological imperatives." Without any hint
of irony, he describes Barry's essay as an attempt to "grasp what is at
stake when music is subjected to such pressures of political and ideologi–
cal circumstance" - in the West!
Just as Stravinsky's famous claim that "music is, by its very nature,
powerless to
express
anything at all" can be understood as an overreac–
tion to the excesses of nineteenth century programmatic readings of
'absolute' music, the retreat of composers in the fifties from "worldy and
