Joseph Horowitz on The Propaganda of Freedom--too much book for too small a point about Cold War canards about the artist in free societies

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c045271
The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War
Joseph Horowitz
Cloth – $34.95   ISBN 978-0-252-04527-1
eBook – $14.95   ISBN 978-0-252-05479-2
Publication Date Cloth: 09/26/2023
 
Joseph Horowitz’s newest book is somewhat like an earlier book he wrote about Dvorak’s 9^th symphony, readable but kind of disappointing.  I don’t intend to go Douglas Shadle on Horowitz for a variety of reasons, the first being that I am a lowly blogger with a journalism degree and not an academic in music, and a second reason being that while I am sympathetic to Shadle’s semi-take-down of Horowitz I have more of a steeped in Richard Taruskin reservation about Horowitz’s recent thesis.
 
What is the thesis?  Basically the claim is that when John F Kennedy gave a speech about the significance of the arts in free societies he contended that art must be made by free people in a free land to be truly successful art.  Horowitz’s contention is that the Soviet musical legacy, specifically in the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, belies Kennedy’s boilerplate bromide that liberal societies make better art.  This bromide showed up among liberals and also among leftists and socialists.  Adorno dismissed the possibility that the arts could or would flourish in totalitarian regimes. 
 
It may be the case that Shostakovich and other Soviet composers give the lie to JFK’s bromide that free artists in free societies need freedom to make their best art but why would this merit a book?  Or why would the observation merit this book?  By now we know from the writings of authors like Michael Marissen and David Yearsley that Johann Sebastian Bach was a conventionally confessional Lutheran with literally autocratic political sympathies. Even within the already canonized symphonic precedent of Joseph Haydn there’s the well-known comment the composer made that by dint of being isolated and unable to keep abreast of the trends of his time Haydn was forced to become original.  If anything Haydn and Bach seem like sterling examples from within the already-canonized scene of classical music that whatever “freedom” is it is simply not a prerequisite for the arts.  This “defeats” the bromide of JFK by itself and it was as provably accurate in JFK’s time as any point that could be made.  Within the coldest moments of the Cold War, however, Shostakovich was not considered a composer whose works had “stood the test of time” or even could stand the test of time simply because the neutered lapdogs of tyrants, so the moral and aesthetic instincts of the NATO powers often had it,, was unable to create real art or music that would endure.  Horowitz’s thesis attempt to prove too much with too weak an argument, if I could even call it an argument. 
 
Since the end of the Cold War the music of Shostakovich has been among the relatively few post-World War II bodies of work that has a plausible claim to being added to the classical music canon. For Horowitz to contend for this axiomatic observation decades after the end of the Cold War counts as a failure of historical method.  Richard Taruskin made a point of writing a kind of defense of Nicholas Nabakov and the Congress for Cultural Freedom that appeared in his posthumously published Musical Lives.  Taruskin briefly looked at post-Cold War left/progressive polemics that music and art secretly bankrolled or endorsed indirectly by the CIA lost its artistic integrity.  This would be the point at which integral serialism or abstract expressionism or other high modern styles in the NATO nations got tarred with being stained by CIA bloodshed.  Taruskin had several rebuttals to these explicit and implicit claims (were Taruskin alive to react to Horowitz’s new book I wonder if he wouldn’t say that what Joe has done here is to invidiously build an ad hominem against the dead Nabakov on the surmise that as long as the indictment is implied and made by a credulous reader then Horowitz hasn’t really leveled any accusations).
The most substantive rebuttal Taruskin had to those who have damned the CIA efforts to promote arts that ticked off the Soviets was to point out that people who weren’t living in the actual Cold War era cannot, unless they consult the sources, have any idea how urgently NATO block nations felt it was necessary to stand against what they believed was a serious and severe communist threat.  Taruskin wrote that nobody complained about the musical cultural exchanges done by the State Department even though this was overt American and NATO propaganda of the most overt kind.  Why should people have complained?  In other words, the righteous anger was against the CIA for trying to secretly promote music and arts and literature that promulgated American values in ways that were not part of a transparent democratic process, but nobody was as incensed when the propaganda was overt and called what it was.  When the composer Nikolai Kapustin got to meet one of his heroes, Duke Ellington, he probably didn’t care that Duke was on tour as part of some over propaganda campaign on behalf of American values and participating in cultural exchange. Horowitz’s observation that cultural exchange probably worked better than secretly bankrolling highbrow arts that many Americans couldn’t and didn’t relate to on the grounds that these new directions such as abstract expressionism in painting and post-tonal music from Elliot Carter didn’t make any sense to ordinary citizens.
 
But besides my sense that Horowitz’ book sprawls and rambles; that his case that freedom as a mere shibboleth did not prove that the arts Nicholas Nabakov promoted even survived to the end of the Cold War is plausible but also too obvious; that “freedom” does not really mean much and isn’t much of a catalyst for the arts; there is a more basic problem.  This didn’t need to be a book-length project and there’s already been a mere magazine essay published in 2019 which laid out a simple case, the United States, to the extent that it ever even had a national policy of the arts, was fixated on an arts policy within the Cold War that was ultimately only anti-communist and not positively defined in terms of what the American experience was like.  That American priests of culture staked out either emulation of the highest of highbrow European standards (T. S. Eliot) or turning to homegrown American vernacular (William Carlos Williams) was the more cogent, cohesive and persuasive argument Philip Jeffery made in “A Cultural Agenda for Our Time” back in 2019 at National Affairs.
 
I’ve reached a point where I am not sure I agree with either Douglas Shadle or Joseph Horowitz about something, and I could be wrong, but here it goes—Shadle wants us to give Florence Price’s music a good hearing and I’m willing to consider it but I already love Scott Joplin and Theolonious Monk and Due Ellington and Stevie Wonder and I admire works by George Walker and William Grant Still and William Levi Dawson. Shadle’s polemic has its time and place but what both Shadle and Horowitz seem to want to do is for classical music to have a renewed lease on life and to more accurately reflect the American experience.  I’ve got no real beef with Horowitz going out on a limb to promote music by Arthur Farwell, some of which is shlock but some of which holds up decently.  I could take or leave both Price and Farwell in terms of whether either of them get canonized because I think the more obvious and salient point is that Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Bill Withers and countless other African American songwriters and bandleaders have already given us a perfectly great canon of popular song.  No symphony by Florence Price is likely to even get close to having a place in my heart near Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City”, one of my favorite songs from the American songbook.
 
I have beat this drum at Wenatchee The Hatchet in any number of ways but I believe that restoring or even simply pointing out the history of “classical” and “pop” synergistically relating to each other is more what we need now than to cheerlead overlooked composers from the past.  I don’t say that to imply that Florence Price or Arthur Farwell should not be heard because if they were any good they’d have been canonized already.  I don’t subscribe to that idea.  No, I mean to say that I get a sense that the rut scholars and journalists and pundits within classical music have been stuck in is that they want to “revive” the fortune of their favorite liberal art and they want this to happen on terms amenable to whatever they consider “worthy” of the art.  In a similar way, there seem to be strands in poptimist musicology that pine for Michael Jackson’s music to be regarded as equal to, say, Beethoven.  My skepticism about the Art Religion of highbrow and lowbrow is, I hope, attested elsewhere at Wenatchee The Hatchet so I don’t have to belabor the point by saying too much here. I think that classical music and pop music both have their canons and their ruts have come about because the partisans of these traditions are effectively policing what is and isn’t canon-worthy and acting as if those other traditions are bereft of “soul” or “argument”.  I don’t think you can spot the next wave of innovation, assuming such a thing even has to exist, if you are vocationally committed to being one of the gatekeepers of what  gets called “culture”. 
 
Horowitz had a more potentially interesting path that he could have taken, and here things tie back to Douglas Shadle’s comment that Horowitz flounders on the issue of race in the United States, specifically white and black relationships.  I am not sure how much work has actually been done on the reception history of jazz in totalitarian regimes but I have a handful of books that have been making a case that, in stark contrast to Cold War era bromides, various forms of jazz thrived in totalitarian states such as Poland, Hungary, Iran and elsewhere.  Stalin was in the ground for maybe a week and Polish intelligentsia rushed to advocate for jazz as a serious musical art, for instance.  Anthony Braxton worked with Hungarian free jazz musicians.  Horowitz is right to highlight that cultural exchange happened and this was good but I think the possibility that musicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempted to formulate and explore synergistic relationships between jazz and classical has not been the topic of a lot of music history, historiography or research that I am personally aware of.  I’d love to be wrong about that. That both the NATO bloc nations and the Soviet bloc nations had an ambivalent relationship to jazz in which it might serve a useful purpose in Cold War polemics and propaganda but the music itself was seen as susceptible to the stains of commerce of decadence could fill a library with books. 
 
Years ago I wrote a largely negative appraisal of Andrew Durkin’s Decomposition.  I have a somewhat more sympathetic take on what I still think he failed to do.  Taking aim at concepts like “authorship” and “authenticity” is a mug’s game in the arts but I think the problems of Romantic art asceticism and art mysticism do need to get shots fired at them.  If we need to take the idealized notion of authenticity down a peg I would dare say (writing as the son of a Native American dad and a white mom) that the reason we should be wary of the rubric of authenticity is authentic/inauthentic dualisms tend to be cast on ethnic and racial essentialist lines, which was one of the points Richard Taruskin kept coming back to in his long career as a music historian.
 
Now I think that Durkin wasn’t wrong to take aim at ideas of authorship and authenticity but he tried to attack versions of those concepts that, if they were even dismantled, get no real work done.  For instance, you can attack the idea of single authorship as much as you want but what good does that do?  What does it actually achieve?  Would Ralph Ellison’s Invisble Man be less brilliant a book if it turned out to be produce by a committee?  Even Terry Teachout’s controversial biography on Ellington could be construed as affirming that collaborative genius was essential to Ellington’s career, even if Teachout has understandably come in for criticism for a variety of reasons, I’m just noting a kind of irony in which Andrew Durkin’s point against single authorship in some dogmatic sense was essentially made for him in Terry Teachout’s Duke.
As for authenticity, I am still of the mind that Wesley Morris’ contribution to the 1619 Project replicated the worst elements of Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” and merely played a substitution game in which Wagner’s “Germans” were replaced with “black” and “Jew” was replaced with “white”, the sentiment was still to express at least a sometime yearning that black music would have roots so deep nobody could steal it.  That’s the problem with authenticity, that it is the academically safe harbor for the most racist sorts of essentialism about music is “authentic” and who is able to “authentically” make it.  I admit that as the child of an inter-racial marriage I have zero interest in those variations of the meaning of “authenticity”. 
 
The history of the Pacific Northwest has its white separatist aspects but also its history of inter-racial and inter-tribal collaborations and those are the traditions I find more inspiring for the simple reason that that’s the tradition of people trying to live together that brought me into the world.  That is not necessarily a “liberal” value.  That may be the core failure of Horowitz’ thesis but also a failure that Theodor Adorno found in the generically affirmative liberalism of the cultural commentariat in the NATO powers.  He contended, acidly, that the reactionaries were more able to honestly assess the problems in contemporary music (classical music that had no tunes, for instance0 than the anemic defenses offered by liberals who were not really defending the music itself as something worth remembering but the mere claim that the capacity for composers to make such music was important because it revealed that people in the NATO countries had “freedom”.  I can personally savor the irony that years after his death the compositions of Pierre Boulez are not even remotely as well known or loved as the songs of David Bowie and Billie Joel (can’t say I’m fond of the latter though I like quite a bit of the work of the former).  Sure, these days people can lament the demise of “culture” but to that end I ask whether people avidly listen to Virgil Thomson’s music or even read his music criticism.  He’s yesterday’s man as a music critic and even more as a composer.  It’s not that he wrote bad music but, to go by the axiom beloved of partisans of fine art, his music has simply not endured.  Horowitz seems to drop hints and insinuations across his book that the proof was in the pudding that most of the music backed in the name of JFK bromides about “freedom” have not even survived until the end of the Cold War, let alone endured into the present.  Camelot as a civic religious political mythology may be more vibrant than any of the art, or would-be art, that was or wasn’t entirely bankrolled by the United States in the name of freedom.
But where Wesley Morris was right was to point out that the music most popularly and commonly associated with freedom in the United States came from black musicians, people who arguably had very little of what most people would consider “freedom”. That was arguably the bigger, more mysterious and ultimately damning rebuttal to Kennedy’s bromide than the fact that the string quartets of Shostakovich are still widely heard in classical music in 2024.