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 9th 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.
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
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.
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”.
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.
