World Music For The Working Class?
Luigi
Nono, Hans Werner Henze, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Kurt Weill and
Cornelius Cardew have all written ‘political music’, that is to say,
music which features actual (rather than abstract) political issues as
integral aspects of their composition. I have no objection to that. On
the contrary, it’s laudable. Classical composers, especially those who
work or have worked in an avant garde (and therefore elitist,
essentially bourgeois intellectual middle class) idiom, should remind
themselves that there is a world outside their ivory towers of academia
where raising a child in a deprived area matters more to most ordinary
people than the problems of serialism versus indeterminacy.
Of
the 5 composers mentioned above, is it a coincidence that 3 of them are
German? I think not: all of these composers were children during the
second world war. For German artists, writers and composers, a major
problem had to be confronted: what should be their contribution to the
artistic creativity of the world when their own government tried (with
formidable success) to ignore or at least attempt to divert attention
away from what happened during the period 1933-1945. The risk that major
industrialists and current government members may be accused of
collusion in the national socialist regime of Herr Schickelgrüber was
to be avoided whenever possible. To an extent they succeeded: Krupp,
Mercedes, Volkswagen and their western ally, Mr Bush (grandfather of the
current American president) were able to continue to count their
profits, unimpeded by that spot of bother circa 1939-1945. In fact, the
second world war was largely irrelevant to all these subhuman scum since
they continued to trade throughout the hostilities. This must be a
sublime example of a triumph for capitalism: that commerce can continue
and profits be made even while the nations involved are sending tanks
and hurling mortar bombs at each other. On Christmas Day, 1943, as the
Americans, New Zealanders and British joined forces to shove the nazi
hordes out of Italy, the allied troops were heard singing Silent Night
– a German carol.
So,
for those of you unfamiliar with these composers, take the most extreme
example, Luigi Nono. His most ardently political works were composed
during the 1960s and common features were: a total absence of melody,
harmony and rhythm (he was an avant garde composer, after all);
fractured, fragmented sound incidents set amid long periods of silence
or very quiet sounds; voices accompanied by or interacting with
electronic sounds on tape. Texts tended to be taken for multiple
sources, including Marx, Gramski and Adorno.
Now,
how many ordinary working class people have read books by Marx, Gramski
and Adorno? How many such people would even understand them if they did?
I have an impressive (self) education and even I have difficulties with
these interminably tedious tomes – most of which are crammed full of
so much incessant waffle that I really wonder why they bothered in the
first place. Then how many ordinary working class people actually listen
to avant garde classical music? Go to the home of a supermarket worker
in Wigan – there’s his CD collection – how many discs by Xenakis,
Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen will you find? In one memorable interview,
Nono imagined car plant workers in Havana with The Lighted Factory and
other such works being played as the background music piped across the
factory floor. I suggest there’d be a distinct danger of industrial
action before the end of the day should such a policy be adopted.
‘Hey, Miguel, what this shit you play us? Give us some decent dance
bands or we wreck da place.’
When
I worked in a factory (which, fortunately, was for only a brief period
during my youth), the music played through speakers across the factory
floor was whatever Radio 1 or Capital decided we should hear –
standard commercial pop pap, much of which was very popular among the
majority of those working at the lathes and packing departments of
Shetack Tools (Balham) where I was ensconced. For me it was hell – not
the work but the insidious aural pollution to which I was subjected each
day. This absurd (and spectacularly patronising) notion of ‘music for
the masses’ must rank as one of the most gross perversions of Marxism
ever devised. ‘Music by the masses’ would be marginally less
insulting, for a start. But ‘the masses’ represents a concept
against which I automatically rebel. It makes human beings sound like
ants. I can accept that government and church leaders perceive the
people as ‘the masses’ because to them, that’s all we are: the
mere nuts and bolts designed to hold together the machine which
manufactures their wealth and power. I resent Marxist intellectuals who
use the term ‘the masses’ as a term imbued with glory and triumph.
The moment I ceased to be a part of the masses was the moment I became a
creative, original thinker with a personality that fascists and
communists were unable to define. That was my first major victory. Do
you want to be merely a tiny, faceless part of some amorphous crowd,
nothing more than a nameless ant?
Our
Russian pals Dimitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev also wrote
‘music for the masses’ but they were singularly more successful –
primarily because they understood what ordinary working class people
wanted to hear and they were sufficiently skilful to be able to compose
music that was of high quality yet accessible to ordinary people, what
these despicable Marxist ‘intellectuals’ refer to as ‘the rank and
file’. Here, the situation was rather unusual, of course: the
government required its writers, artists and composers to create works
that they believed to be relevant to ordinary working class people. This
is primarily why so much drivel was created in Russia for nearly 50
years – because those ordinary working class people probably had
better taste and cultural awareness than their leaders. Did Josef Stalin
really regard himself as one of the toiling masses? I doubt it. Mao Tse
Tung certainly did although how much he was deluded here is open to
debate.
In
Britain, it used to be the case that the government saw the cultural
aspect of its job as a need to educate the working classes, to raise
their pitiful desires up from the gutter, so to speak. This attitude was
most evident during the early days of the BBC. It is therefore somewhat
odd that the situation has altered radically since then: now the
government wants us all kept as ignorant and stupid as possible so
instead of classical arts and educational programmes (however flawed
these may have been), we are given Eastenders and Big Brother. Cornelius
Cardew alone among politically motivated composers elected to tackle
this problem in a practical manner. That he failed completely and
profoundly need not be a criticism.
The
plain truth is simply this: the moment you elect to write music in an
avant garde idiom, your work will cease to be of interest (and will
therefore be irrelevant) to ordinary working class people. Deal with it.
I am allowed to compose and perform as much wild, weird and wacky avant
garde music as I like because I am honest about my creativity, I am not
a Marxist and I stopped being working class back in the 1980s. Well, to
be more specific, I realised that being proud of your class was a
dangerous and damaging concept for people and should be avoided at all
costs. The class system was invented (and imposed upon us) by the ruling
class in order to maintain a system of control and coercion designed to
protect their own positions of plundered wealth and social privilege. So
long as ordinary people claim to be ‘working class and proud’, the
security of the wealthy elite is assured. I do not for one millisecond
posit that we should be ashamed to be working class (or any other class
for that matter). I assert that the most useful and healthy response to
the class system is to defy it in all its hideous manifestations and
reject it utterly. Why allow yourself to be hindered and stifled by
limitations and proscribed behaviour set by those who seek to use you as
factory and cannon fodder? Be classless – confuse and confound the
enemy!
