Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (review)

This engaging volume focuses on the politics of orchestral and chamber music in the early years of the Cold War. The starting point for Mark Carroll is a concert of chamber music presented in Paris in 1952, which was apparently intended to showcase “Western”—as opposed to Communist-bloc—musical achievements. As the Cold War heated up, Carroll notes, the tendency in both East and West was to read musical styles as either “Western” or “Soviet,” with socialist realist music as the classic embodiment of the latter. But serial music was ostentatiously independent, and its practitioners refused to identify with either bloc.

Soviet leaders ultimately spent more time than the Americans worrying about the messages carried by music. During the era of Josif Stalin, the charge of “formalism,” levied at such symphonic works as Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 and Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, was tantamount to an ecclesiastical anathema. Of course, some composers such as Charles Koechlin (1867–1950) resisted being classified as either Western or Soviet and insisted on artistic liberty. Koechlin maintained that there was no necessary contradiction between art for art’s sake and a constructive role for art or music produced in that spirit.

Stalin famously declared himself in favor of lively tunes that one could hum or whistle. Twelve-tone music, which had its origins during World War I, was relatively inaccessible and openly elitist, and it therefore was incapable of winning Stalin’s favor. No surprise, then, that Sidney Finkelstein, a New York Marxist, would criticize twelve-tone music for having “failed to represent the [concerns] of the workers and peasants,” indeed as a genre that “actually signified the abandonment by intellectuals of the desire to portray the real world” (p. 53).

To be sure, Stalin was not the one who coined the term “socialist realism.” The term was first used by the novelist Maksim Gorky in his address to the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Carroll argues, quite reasonably, that if the socialist realist genre had been developed as Gorky intended, perhaps socialist realism would have been seen as “a perfectly defensible theory of art,” as Jean-Paul Sartre once put it (p. 103). The notion that political purpose could be expressed in prose went unchallenged, but some intellectuals—Sartre included—doubted that music was capable of conveying clear and intelligible political meanings. Even painting was not as perspicuous as prose, and Sartre averred that Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, depicting the suffering of Spaniards whose city was bombed by Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War, could be interpreted in various ways. In a polemic directed at René Leibowitz, Sartre went further in contending that the same music, wedded to different texts, could sing the praises of a variety of political figures and political systems. Having watched a film many years ago in which the bacchanalian strains of the Witches’ Sabbath movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique were used as musical backdrop for a patriotic American film, I am inclined to agree. Change the text or change the visual images, and the meaning we read into music can indeed bend.

Also discussed in this volume are the Prague Manifesto of 1948 (which forced composers and critics to confront the dilemma of musical meaning), the story of serialism (a technique for arranging musical composition) in France, and debates about serialism in postwar France.

Carroll, a lecturer in music at the Elder Conservatorium of the University of Adelaide, has written a fascinating book in which arguments about the meanings of music are shown to have political dimensions and in which the interests of political establishments in exploiting music for their own purposes are revealed to be never entirely successful. This is, in short, a brilliant book, wonderful to read!