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.

4 responses total.

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?

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.

IMNAAHO, what it reveals is something about the person making the comment.

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.

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