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PARTISAN REVIEW
sociopolitical concerns" was an understandable reaction to the repression
of advanced music wherever such concerns were paramount. The failure
of the university to provide a haven for such composers for long need
not be lamented. But it is lamentable when, as with Barry and Morris,
intellectual contortions in defense of the repression of modernism come
from academics.
Much of the best writing in
Music and the Politics
of
Culture, Music
and Society,
and
Noise
virtually ignores actual music in order to focus on
the repression of composition or on the excesses of politically interested
reception: the French Revolution's program for music, the 'Englishing'
of Delius, Elgar as pastoral. But more often these writers merely demon–
strate that any (unstated) set of value judgments can be connected with
any (stated) political position. This is a game any number can play.
Music then becomes a sort of Rorschach test in which one can find
whatever one wants. A tragicomic example is the understanding of
Schoenberg'S twelve-tone method in political terms in the thirties
(Auden's "low dishonest decade"). Some saw the twelve-tone method
as
inherently democratic, since the twelve tones were, in theory, equal;
Milton Babbitt describes this view as "one note, one vote." For others,
the control of the series over the twelve 'proletarian' tones signified
Bolshevism, or even Nazism (the series as FUhrer) . In "Is It Fair?"
Schoenberg ruefully mentions an opera in "twelve-tone style" by the
Danish composer Paul von Klenau, which Klenau defended in a Nazi
periodical on the grounds that (in Schoenberg'S words) "this method is a
true image of national-socialist principles." Schoenberg ridiculed
all
political interpretations of his own music and method, and described his
political views as moving from vaguely social democratic to monarchist
(from 1914) to apolitical (in America). Evidently Schoenberg's politics
were incoherent. But since most people hated Schoenberg'S music, they
felt free to identify it with whichever political movement they most de–
tested. Adorno defended Schoenberg, in
Philosophy of Modern Music,
as
representing the only genuine reaction of bourgeois composition to the
twentieth century. The "defense," however, tends to collapse into
something like the puerile contention that modern art is chaotic
(Mondrian? Klee? Picasso?) because we live in chaotic times. Now that
Adorno is coming into fashion again as an unintentional prophet of the
postmodern left, Schoenberg may need a defense against him similar to
the one Adorno tried to provide for Bach: a defense 'against his
devotees.'
Susan McClary's attempt to update Adorno's interpretation of
Bach in "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year" is of
great interest. For it is one of the few essays by a musical scholar to treat
specific pieces in a social context and with an explicit political and post-
