| Grex > Classicalmusic > #32: Can "pure" music be political? |
| Can "pure" music be political? | 
Mar 28 13:38 UTC 1998 |
I once entered a description of Barber's Violin Concerto here in which I said the first movement was like a summer morning in the suburbs with kids playing and lawn-sprinklers sprinkling and it's easy to forget that most of the rest of the world is starving to death. I don't know how an innocent piece of music, with no overt program or even subtitle, can inspire such feelings, but it does. The leftist avant-garde conductor Pierre Boulez refuses to conduct Brahms because, in his words, Brahms is "bourgeois and complacent." Once again, how can you say that about something like Brahms' 4th symphony? In what sense is it bourgeois? Where are the complacent parts? But the truth is that, to me at least, the over-all impression much of Brahms' music leaves is exactly as Pierre Boulez says. Discuss. Go ahead, I dare you.
| response 1 of 4: |
Mar 29 22:54 UTC 1998 |
Bartok wrote a good bit of music that's "pure" in the sense of having no plotline and not trying to describe anything concrete, but a lot of that pure music does express a political view - supporting nationalism by drawing on local folk music. The same goes for many other nationalist composers. Does that count?
| response 2 of 4: |
Mar 30 11:12 UTC 1998 |
Absolutely. In Bartok's case, I don't think he was expressing nationalist sentiments so much as his love for peasant music and his belief in its superiority to "decadent" popular music. But is it possible for a composer's music to give his politics away without him necessarily being aware of it? I think Boulez meant something of the sort about Brahms.
| response 3 of 4: |
Mar 30 12:22 UTC 1998 |
IMNAAHO, what it reveals is something about the person making the comment.
| response 4 of 4: |
Mar 30 14:06 UTC 1998 |
Too some degree the "politics" would simply be the desire to make a living. Many of today's most revered composers were dirt poor and writing so their music would sell. They were writing for the market or a king or a church.