Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (review)

The leading ‘classical’ composers in France played little part in the political upheavals of 1968. Messiaen’s magnum opus of the time, La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, reinforced his uncompromisingly theological values; there was no Evénements-Symphonie from Henri Dutilleux, no Portrait de Mai from Pierre Boulez. Even the major orchestral scores that Iannis Xenakis worked on in 1968–9, Nomos Gamma and Kraanerg—the latter appropriately described as ‘apocalyptic’ by one critic—have no explicit connection to the anti-government demonstrations unfolding in the city where they were composed. Would it be more surprising if they did than it is that they (apparently) do not?

So why research and write a book called Music and the Elusive Revolution? To show that ‘music’ is more than ‘classical’, and to explore the wider context of ‘cultural politics and political culture in France’ over the decade and more after 1968: that is, to argue that the events of May 1968 had long-term cultural as well as political repercussions, and displayed a significant and salutary degree of interpenetration between culture and politics. Eric Drott’s attempt to provide a comprehensive if not absolutely exhaustive narrative of that interpenetration means that, at times, he writes more as a general historian than as a specialist musicologist, and he is obedient throughout to the circumstance that relatively ephemeral musical artefacts were more directly representative of conscious attempts to socialize or politicize culture than works of art that might, forty years on, be thought of as relatively long-lasting. In any case, Drott subordinates close reading of musical texts to detailed scrutiny of the writings of those who were active or at least present at the time. The book is a vivid documentary, but also a shrewd commentary, an interpretation that doesn’t shrink from the attempt to tell it like it might have seemed to those on the streets at the time.

In the nature of the 1968 events, chanson-type songs, jazz, and pop music were far more evident in the immediate context of student’s and worker’s demonstrations than ‘serious’ concert or sacred music. The opportunity is therefore provided to demonstrate the kind of exemplary authorial versatility needed to validate the belief that all kinds of music have their place in the great narrative of cultural practice; even if it is their distance from active political engagement that is their most notable characteristic. Drott’s early declaration that ‘different kinds of music, performed or conceptualized in different social contexts, engage politics in different ways’ (p. 4) might seem to state the obvious. Yet his parallel contention that ‘scholars have paid scant attention to the myriad ways in which genre mediates political expression’ (p. 5) leads on to the shrewd observation that while the intersection of political cultures and genre cultures is inevitable—‘ both genre cultures and political cultures mobilize individuals around a common cause, one artistic, the other ideological’—the narrative that follows exposes that ‘fragility of musical and political alliances’ (p. 8); which is scarcely to be wondered at, given the radical disparities between the ‘cultures’ involved.

Drott’s belief that ‘music remained strangely at the margins of les évenements’ (p. 26) itself verges on the strange, taken at face value, since it could hardly have been otherwise; those musicians who believed themselves to be transformed from ‘artists’ into ‘workers’ for the duration still had to work out whether artistic professionalism was called for any more urgently than amateur enthusiasm. As Drott’s tale reveals at an early stage, to decide what would be involved in any attempt to move from the culture-political margins to the centre set up the kind of challenging paradox—‘artists would fulfil their revolutionary potential only in yielding up that which identifies them as artists’ (p...