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Music from the Left

By R. G. Davis

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali argues that musical innovations prefigure social developments. For those of us interested in effecting changes in society he offers this thought: "Any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form" (1985, xi). The form of most folk and almost all jazz/pop music does not (cannot) even reflect industrial social relations as we know them, much less make a comment on them. Classical music, or music organized by a trained composer, art music, is more likely to produce an instructional metaphor (and form) with which to examine the foundations of corporate society. I think that the structure/form of a musical composition, no matter what the lyrics, influences the listener's thoughts about the world. The structure contains a view of the world which the listener reiterates in his/her personal musical repetition. The structure then becomes a metaphor for a view of the world. 1/

Am I being too literal if I argue that the musical forms which exercise complex listening are important to the thinking process that we necessarily must use in order to understand industrial, electronic, modem and postmodern society? Take, for example, the structure of the fugue: "written in contrapuntal style in a texture consisting of a certain number of individual voices, usually three or four. A short melody, called subject or theme by one voice, taken up by other voices and reappearing throughout the entire piece" (Apel 1961, 285). If we wished to find a musical form that supports arguments that have "variations on a theme," wouldn't the fugue help?

And the sonata form - exposition, development, recapitulation:

A musical form originating in the eighteenth century. The form has been developed and expanded in many different ways but its basic formulation is as follows: two important (and usually contrasting) themes are presented in different keys. The "exposition," it is followed by a transitional section in which the music usually modulates through distantly related keys and in which the themes may be developed or transformed in a variety of ways. The "development" section. The music (usually) returns to the tonic key, and both themes are then presented "reconciled" in the same (tonic) key. This latter section is known as the "recapitulation" (Apel 1961, 691).

Isn't that interesting? "Two ideas" (perhaps even three) move through development to recapitulation or reconciliation. The sonata is a form that entertains two thoughts working simultaneously. Although a Hegelian rather than an Althusserian notion of contradiction, it's a vast improvement over positivism.

How much closer is this form of music to the structure of political discourse than are the major keys and easy resolution of folk? 2/ The protest music which has come down from the 1930s into the 1980s via Charles Seeger and his followers is almost always "feel good" music (despite whatever the lyrics might say). Musically, it presents no atmosphere of debate because it provides only one side of a complex set of questions. Composed, intellectual music allows for debate within the form; folk has room for only one theme ("Unite!" or "Strike!" or "Victory!") and little for oppositional dialogue. Pleasing, nostalgic, and, above all, entertaining, it is useful at rallies and on picket lines.

In the 1930s and 1940s left culture in the United States came to a crossroads. The direction it chose to take helped to determine the future of American protest music and sent it wandering down the folk/jazz/pop one-lane highway, away from any contact with dreaded "high art." To illustrate this point, I look closely here at Hanns Eisler's reception in the United States and compare it with that of his acquaintance and contemporary Charles Seeger. The cultural map that emerges charts a brief but dynamic musical-artistic trend which was soon superseded by easy listening.
My approach to this subject is not without prejudice. My perspective is Brechtian - although this is perhaps an imprecise word in this age of anticommunist and liberal "Brechtians" whose effect is largely to undermine "Uncle Bert." So I will say my focus is Eislerian, for I see him as most illuminating territory to map: his peregrinations through the United States illustrate trends in the artistic theory and development of the Left; his reception is part and parcel of the Brecht reception in this country; and his music provided a strong challenge to commercial and middle-brow art as well as to other composers, theoreticians, and activists. 3/

Eisler and Seeger typify two radically different approaches to making music for the Left in the 1930s: intellectual composition versus the folk tradition. Charles Seeger, musicologist and collector of folk music, was a formative influence on his son Pete Seeger, whose musical legacy has virtually defined American protest music. Eisler's music could be tonal, dissonant or dodecaphonic (reflecting an urban, industrial condition), and it complemented (contrapuntally) an often disquieting text - most likely Brecht's.

In his ten years in the United States (1937-47), Eisler mingled with both Americans and European exiles and emigrés. He worked with communists in and out of the Party as well as with Marxists and liberals. He taught at the New School for Social Research and privately in Hollywood, and wrote scores for eight Hollywood films. Despite all this, his influence has been almost completely eliminated from our protest music. At least two categories of factors contributed to this: fear of Eisler's politics and the Left's anti-intellectual bias. The House Un-American Activities Committee sent Eisler away in 1948. The Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) was afraid to associate with a banned commie - those old communists who had escaped degradation and unemployment were wary of associating with known fellow-travelers. On the anti-intellectual side, the Left didn't agree with Eisler's notion of musical education and shied away from his level of expertise. Rural tune-making was the code for union songs, and these tunes dominated the left idea of music. The adherents of United Front art had decided that complex music was beyond the comprehension of the masses. Could a worker whistle an Eisler tune? 4/

There was indeed a direction developing in left culture in the early 1930s which could have supported acceptance and integration of Eisler's genius, but it disappeared at the end of World War II. It was a notion of culture that came over with European immigrants and exiles who brought old-world ideas and languages to this shore. High art was part of their cultural make-up. Italian workers sang Verdi, Austrians knew Strauss. But at the end of the war, many exiles went home and apparently took with them any notion of integrating high art and the American masses.

After World War II, America continued corporate expansion, anticommunism, and nativism. Foreign influences in the arts had been under great pressure in the prewar period, and those traditions continued to be suspect as "un-American." Immigrants repressed their native languages and traditions, while the consciousness industry tapped into this rejection by singing Buy American. At the end of the war, "high art," like abstract expressionism and Schoenberg's music, was the province solely of this country's elite. Yet both intellectual music and painting might, under other circumstances, have found entré into left culture and flourished there. Marxists could think dialectically and internationally. After all, abstract expressionism was embraced by former Trotskyists opposed to Socialist realism (CP art), and Schoenberg had been Eisler's teacher. There is of course no guarantee that an understanding and appreciation of, even a familiarity with, musical complexity will create a genuine, A.K.C. registered, politically correct leftist. I am not advocating a dismissal of the folk/jazz/pop tradition, only an expansion of the musical palette to include art that is comparable to a postmodern, historically materialist discourse.

Americans, some would say, are frightened of analysis. Their pleasure in the folk idiom replicates and maintains this point of view and prejudice. Simple music does and can reflect only simple political thinking. Eisler was well aware of this influence of form on the content of music:

The conventional man of the theatre uses music in only two ways: for singing and dancing (as in musical comedy) or for music emphasizing and illustrating a Drama. With these two outmoded methods, however, the newer music cannot be made use of. An artistically wrong presentation of the music leads, strangely enough, to serious political errors. Therefore the political content cannot be separated from the artistic as one conditions the other (1973, 359).

It is easier for people who appreciate complex music to move on to an appreciation of complex political problems, than for those who limit themselves to folk (pop, rock, gospel, blues, etc.) to do so. I do not guarantee that those who enjoy and understand complex music will engage in deep political discourse, only that the structure of their pleasure is similar to deep political discourse.

The folk road chosen by the Old Left in the 1930s paralleled the political line they toed at the time, as we shall see when we look at Seeger's writings. The idea was to use music as a weapon, as advertising for the struggle. A union song had a single dimension - to get people to join. In many or perhaps even most cases, the music was appropriate to the activity. However, it became problematic when the one-dimensional approach became all-inclusive and swamped people's critical abilities.

The Nation
Despite the passage of nearly half a century, Americans on the Left still defend the folk protest tradition as the only tradition. In a recent skirmish in the Nation magazine, the volatility of the American passion for the folk tradition came to the surface. Jesse Lemisch provoked seventy-five responses with the article "I Dreamed I Saw MTV Last Night" in which he called left culture moribund. Referring to the persistent cult around Pete Seeger, Lemisch specifically objected to Si Kahn who repeats the same codes as Seeger. He suggested that the Left could better use MTV's snap-crackle-pop forms than the old rural tunes. The Nation printed five of the seventy-five responses. The longest of them, from Dick Flacks, defended the "tradition" of left music and its representation of struggles. It concluded: "A critical reconstruction must be based on appreciation of the traditions within which such work has been accomplished - and of the ways in which the Left has been a force in the cultural development of this country" (1986, 674).

Missing in this controversy was any theoretical discussion of form and its relation to past or present social structures. Reflection theory did not come into question, nor did the implicit Aristotelian propositions accepted by both camps. Both sides in the Nation debate think that, in order to reach the masses, one must use old tunes with new words. Flacks and the Old or New Left would use hymns and folk tunes, while Lemisch advocates the more pop commercial music. Upscaled clothes with upbeat tempo, argues Lemisch. The advertisements, sales pitches, and music as a "weapon" can remain. It's OK with him.

Although so-called politically active people on the Left derive much of their methodology from Hegel or Marx (and even some from Lenin), their view of art is likely to be Aristotelian and nonmaterialist. What is curious in these arguments is that the notion of art as different from entertainment is passed over, even among educated academics. In this country, the Aristotelian hides behind a false openness, and the nonmaterialist view declares itself popular and pragmatic: "why, everyone likes it, so it's popular." And as the consciousness industry pounds out its products, the history of previous cultural developments is buried and even destroyed. Before General Motors bought it all up in the interest of selling more cars, the United States had a diversity of public transportation; so too, prior to the advent of the Top 50, 40, and 10, ordinary Americans looked upon choral singing, opera, and symphonic music as familiar friends.

The left literary theory of the late 1930s resounded with the idea of literature as journalism, and this approach applied to other arts as well: literal painting, murals that depict real people, music that sounds like real events, plays that show real struggles, films that show real... That any representation of "real" was manipulated, and that the notion of "authenticity" was a romantic supposition manufactured by both the newly imported Stanislavsky system of emoting and the commercialization of reality, escapes the advocates of simple truths for simple people. 5/

In the 1920s and 1930s, Alan Lomax recorded thousands of untrained, amateur folk (or folkish) singers who were reflecting reality as they saw it, and as well as they could reproduce it. When nonfolk, nonauthentic (i.e., commercial) entertainers reproduce folkish songs, what happens? Nothing is made truer. Commercial entertainers also follow the "journalistic" code and try to re-create authenticity as they croon love tunes.

Among leftists, the Aristotelian notion that art is an imitation of nature reverberates in defense of bad art (just as it does for simple-minded newspaper reviewers). At every juncture, in any study of comparative art (or as one says today, intertextual reading), historical, geographical, and cultural determinants abound. The sophisticates among us on the Left realize that CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasters pose as if they were "objective" - but their notion of left is liberal, and their idea of center is between two nonactive states. This awareness vis-à-vis political-economic discourse is forgotten or objected to by the same people when looking at, listening to, and experiencing the arts.

If we grant the folkies their premise that "authentic" equals "real," what then can we learn? Not very much. As Arthur Danto says: "And I think it generally the case that unless mimesis becomes transformed into diegesis, or narrative, an artform dies of diminishing excitement" (1984, 18). Reality unexplained remains either a dumb repeat, or an undemocratic piece of blubber. "Get it man!" explains even less than "That's the way it is!"

Of the whole "folk" movement from Woody Guthrie through the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Josh White, to Holly Near, Si Kalin, and so on, the only oddity was Paul Robeson. Operatically trained, he sang folk songs as Lieder - truly a breakthrough in the usual limits of musicianship. He was authentically black, so it was permissible for him to present an operatic sound with international folk songs, along with Schubert and Schumann. No one accused this football player of being an elitist singer. Had he lived in this country during most of the thirties, he might have been able to argue for a reclaiming of elite culture for the masses - or at least for black singers.

There was another road available. Brecht and Eisler took it. Some American composers strolled along it for a while, especially some of the members of the Composers' Collective. A good many of those composers went on to work either with modern dance choreographers (Helen Tamiris, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey) or on animated films in Hollywood. They worked collaboratively and were unrestricted intellectually on these projects.

The concern of American composers in the 1920s and 1930s was to find their unique voice. Carl Ruggles, Charles Ives, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, and John Becker "were more than good friends and fierce champions of one another; they were united in the one cause of freeing American music from next to exclusive European influences and rarification." 6/

Unfortunately, this search for a national sound easily turned into isolationism and could dovetail with anti-intellectualism when it showed up in the American left. Rejection of European intellectual music could also mean rejection of so-called elitist art. There are major problems with this sort of thinking. First, and this was especially true in the 1930s, a large percentage of the "masses" in the United States were Europeans, and they had no fear of intellectual music. Did immigrating suddenly so alienate them from their culture that they could understand only folk music? Second, where is it written that music cannot be studied so that it becomes comprehensible? the turn toward the simplicity of folk was due, in part I think, to the absurd notion that if one can hear, one automatically knows how to listen to music. But if one has to learn plumbing, or how to drive a car or bake bread (none of which comes "naturally"), one can learn to understand complex music. It is impossible to see the use of such music without being able to understand it. A very important aspect of knowledge has been rejected because we cannot get over the barrier posed by the fact that study is essential to understanding.

Charles Seeger "gave" folk music to the American left. He could as easily have "given" it a more complex vehicle for protest. After all, he was a trained composer and ethnomusicologist, married to an intellectual composer, Ruth Crawford, who continued to compose art music. Had he chosen to do so, however, it would also have been his (and his comrades') responsibility to make it clear, to explain it to the "masses" so that it could be used. But he was a popularizer, and he relinquished intellectual music to the swells in the three-piece suits and floor-length gowns, even though it hadn't been entirely theirs to begin with.

Eisler
Let's look at what Eisler and Seeger were saying in the 1930s about the nature of protest music and see what we can learn from their own words: Eisler toured the United States early in 1935 for the Committee for the Victims of German Fascism. His Solidaritatslied and Einheitsfront were sung around the world, the CPUSA accepted him as an exile from Nazi Germany, a communist fighter against fascism, and the militant composer/director of workers' choruses. He was well received. The announcement of his arrival in the United States appeared in an article by Sergei Radamsky in the Daily Worker of 18 February 1935 surveying Eisler's work with the German Communist Party and his studies with Schoenberg. Radamsky articulated the musical issue of that day, and perhaps of today as well:

The difficulty has been, and still is, in finding the right idiom to express the class struggle in music, so as not to be obliged to follow in the tradition of the old bourgeois ditties. At the same time the masses, who have not had the opportunity of studying and listening to good music, must be given simple but vigorous songs. It is one thing to discard the idiom of the decadent composers, but it is more complicated to create a new one (4).

Eisler began his tour in New York, went to Boston and then through fifty towns to Hollywood. In the evenings he usually lectured on culture and fascism, concluding with a few political songs in which he accompanied the young New York baritone, Mordecai Bauman, at the piano. Although insightfully critical, Eisler liked the United States. He thought that there was "a great lack of superstructure," and that "the class opposition was extremely naked." Yet, despite the Depression and a substantial amount of social activism, he found "music and politics more widely separated than ever" (Betz 1982, 143). Eisler conducted choral performances organized by local committees of the League Against War and Fascism, and in May 1935 Bauman made the first recordings of Eisler songs in this country. The American press responded sympathetically, and "professional interest too was great, because serious music in the USA had hitherto been the preserve of rich old ladies who made their influence felt by financing it" (Betz 1982, 144).

At the end of his tour, Eisler received an invitation to return that same autumn as a guest lecturer at the New School for Social Research, and "he urged the Executive Board of the New York Theatre Union to perform Brecht's dramatic adaptation of Gorki's novel The Mother" (Lyon 1980, 6). He returned briefly to London, Strassburg, and Prague and, in September 1935, took the steamer to New York to begin his term at the New School. Taking Eisler's advice, the Theatre Union went into rehearsals for the U.S. premier of Paul Peters' translation and adaptation of The Mother. In November 1935, Eisler and Brecht were invited to attend rehearsals.

Enormous personal and political conflicts evolved, especially between Brecht and the director, Victor Wolfson. Eisler did not fare well, either. He tried discussing the music with the pianist only to be told that his music was stolen from Richard Strauss, to get off the stage, and if he said another word, he, the pianist, would "break every bone" in Eisler's body (Lyon 1980, 9). Brave as these two young leather-jacketed wiseguys were, they took their leave of rehearsal, wrote a complaint to the Communist party and went to gangster movies on Forty-Second Street.

The production of The Mother aside, Eisler's reception in the United States was much better than Brecht's. In the article "Composer in Society" for the Daily Worker of 5 December 1935, he announced a speech he was to give on "Music in Crisis" two days later at Town Hall. Other speakers included Aaron Copland, Oscar Thompson, Henry Cowell, and George Barrère. Mordecai Bauman was there to introduce Eisler's songs.

"In our social system," Eisler wrote,

music is undoubtedly produced as a luxury. When poverty increases to the extent it has today this luxury takes on a provocative character. The question of whether music can take on a new social function becomes increasingly urgent.

The opinion is frequently heard that music by its very nature is not able to effect changes in the social life of man. However, it must be pointed out that this opinion has only arisen out of a peculiar practice over the last hundred years and previously was seldom voiced. The history of Chinese music, of European music in the Middle Ages and of our own time shows that music has attempted again and again, more or less consciously to play a part in social life.

It should be apparent to composers, that the great music of Orlando di Lasso, of Bach or Beethoven is today being used for social functions in absolute contradiction to the original intentions of their composers. Think, for example, of how Hitler in Germany uses Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. In fact, music not only serves certain social functions, but allows of a change in these functions, so that it is then made to serve an aim different than that for which it was written (Grabs 1978, 115). 7/

That music has an active life was the subject of much discussion and work among American composers as well, especially among the members of the Composers' Collective.

On his first trip to New York in early 1935, Eisler visited the Composers' Collective, an offshoot of the Pierre Degeyter Club, which in turn formed part of the Communist-led Workers' Music League. The Collective was launched in 1931 by the CPUSA to investigate political music; it survived until 1936. It was there that Eisler and Charles Seeger first crossed paths. Henry Cowell, a member, had introduced Charles Seeger and his wife Ruth Crawford to the group, which included Norman Cazden, Marc Blitzstein, Wallingford Riegger, Lahn Adohmyan, Elie Siegmeister, Earl Robinson, and a dozen other musicians. Aaron Copland and George Antheil visited, and Hanns Eisler addressed the group on a number of occasions (Dunaway 1977, 2).

Music from the Left - Part Two

Footnotes
1/ Ernst Bloch opens his book The Philosophy of Music with this one-liner: "We hear only ourselves." And in various readings about biographical cognition I learned that people have a number of tunes to which they are attached and which they replay in their mind's ear.
2/ By "folk" I mean "fixed key, fixed pitch, fixed tonality, and regular beat" (Charles Seeger's definition in a 1966 essay). However, one source comments that this fixity is a result of art song seepage from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
3/ By "middle-brow" I mean musical composition that requires little attentiveness - romantically interpreted eighteenth and nineteenth-century music, often labeled background or "movie music." Besides scoring eight Hollywood films, Eisler wrote Composing for the Films (1947) with Adorno. He was in the thick of it.
4/ The international proletariat did whistle "Solidaritatslied," (Solidarity song, with a text by Brecht) and "Einheitsfront" (United front song). However, even though it was intended to be whistled, "Solidaritatslied" was composed with a hitch, a break in the 6/8 rhythm, because Eisler did not wish to repeat the familiar Nazi marching rhythms in a left mass song.
5/ Authenticity is a current, fun subject. Rather than present a Heideggerian survey, which I am not capable of just yet, nor is this the place for it, I will quote Peter Wollen: "For realist aesthetics, the cinema is the privileged form which is able to provide both appearance and essence ... the aesthetic rests on a monstrous delusion: the idea that truth resides in the real world and can be picked out by a camera ... Realism's claim rests on a sleight-of-hand: the identification of authentic experience with truth" (Wollen 1969, 166).
6/ Liner notes by "D.J." for Carl Ruggles, Organum (Composers Recording Inc., no. 127).
7/ "The Crisis in Music" (1935), a speech also later printed in Down Town Music (1936).
8/ Gorki's view of socialist realism was not Zhdanov's, nor was it Brecht's explanation, which one can find in his essays on the matter. Not everyone gave up on the subject because the dogmatists barked (Arvon 1973, 87).
9/ Seeger's views became extremely populist; however, as an ethnomusicologist he remained thoughtful and critical. In a collection of essays from 1935-1975, Seeger opens with a discussion of "Synchronic and Diachronic Orientations in Musicology" and in a 1966 essay he engages that inflammatory topic, "The Folkness of the Nonfolk and the Nonfolkness of the Folk" (1977).
10/ Accounts other than Goldstein's are less anti-communist, like Lee Baxandall's introduction for his translation of the play The Mother, and John Willett's "Brecht on Brecht."
11/ Speech to the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union on 25 June 1938, "Labor, Labor Movement and Music," in Eisler (1973, 416-18).
12/ "On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre," in Willett (1964, 87-88).

References
See Music from the Left - Part Two/References

Music from the Left - Part Two/Text