Tyranny and Kitsch

Please bear with me while I go slightly off piste. This is a short essay about music but it requires a bit of speculation – perhaps wild speculation, unfounded and many may accuse me of taking two facts and coming up with something that is completely wrong. But stick with me. Please.

In 1945, the nation of Dichter und Denker was blown to smithereens. The nature of the trauma that followed is only just now beginning to filter through. One example of something that has come to light is the fact that racial and eugenic brainwashing of the German people was so complete that displaced persons, meaning people who were from German-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, were seen by Germans citizens as a different “race”. As a result, intermarriage between indigenous Germans, and the German speaking émigrés from Eastern Europe did not start to take place until the mid-1950s. The Nazis could be defeated, and a country brought to its knees, but the nation that produced some of the greatest scientists and philosophers civilisation had known could not un-see, un-hear and un-forget the things it had been shown as absolute truth by Hitler’s scientists, teachers and academics. Did the defeat of Nazism mean the empiricism demonstrated by the armies of Hitler’s willing scholars was wrong? Did ethics have a role to place in the search for truth? The icy view of Nazi science was ethics should not be allowed to stand in the way of their search for truth.

These were devastating realities to confront. The aesthetic reactions as expressed by the generation, who were children during the Hitler years, would resonate for decades. It produced music and indeed art that expressed rage at the insanity of an older generation’s willingness to kill and destroy everything of value. It sought to discredit artistic beauty as “kitsch”, dismissing it as residual Nazism. This cultural tabula rasa was to be so complete that it removed anything that potentially ignited any emotion. Art and music were meant instead to elicit critical evaluation. The aleatoric, the electronic feedback, the tape-recorded noises, sounds and screams, frequency modulators and filters replaced anything that might previously have transported the listener to different emotional realms. 

The arts were no longer seen as a means of escape, but as a critical confrontation with reality. Composition moved into spheres of complexity rendering traditional musical literacy inadequate. And yet, at the same time that music raged and hectored, post-war society was finding ways of becoming better, fairer and less divisive. Concepts such as the “Social Contract” were more widely applied and rich countries acknowledged that wealth was meaningless if ignorance and penury was the condition of the majority of fellow citizens. Education, healthcare and housing improved. The dissonant shouting from the artistic sidelines was imploring governments and societies to avoid the catastrophes of the past. The aggressive ugliness of art in the decades after the war implicitly asked for a better world. The marriage of beauty and art was broken. As Adorno postulated, a new post-Hitler society needed first to create a new culture. After the disasters of Nazism, it was obvious that a new society was required.  

And after some four decades or so of this, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and… Minimalism, a development that had been bubbling under the surface since La Monte Young’s Static Music and Terry Riley’s In C established the dominance that had begun with Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. Repeated c-major triads appeared to re-set the musical brain into diatonic order again. Tonality, structure and lyricism began its climb back into acceptance just as Mrs Thatcher pronounced that there was “no such thing as society”; there were only individuals. In retrospect, the repeated c-major triads became the proverbial “thin end of the wedge”. Over the next years, the greater the inequality, the more authoritarian society became. At the same time, music grew more tuneful, simplistic and attractive. Does art reflect society or does society determine its art?  It’s arguable that Adorno’s view that a new culture would create a new society was putting the cart before the horse.

The reason these thoughts occurred to me was because I have the occasional habit of listening to classical music on internet radio from the United States. Since American broadcasters don’t have their own Radio Orchestras, these classical music stations are compelled to play pre-existing recordings. Instead of culture-talk, American classical music stations just play music with someone telling the listener what was just played and what’s coming next. They may toss in the odd subjective observation, but compared with European cultural broadcasters, there is little explanation surrounding a work, the composer or the performer. Maybe it’s merely my imagination, but since the election of Donald Trump, the music by contemporary composers played on these stations is tuneful to toe-curling. Not great gorgeous melodies with lyric lines that keep resounding in the inner-ear but acreages of euphony.  And by no means is this only music by American composers. The harsher the governments, the more pacifying its musical tastes as reflected by its broadcasters.

Nor is this an indictment of the composers. I don’t for one minute think they are more inclined to support anti-democratic authoritarians than the population at large, indeed, it is my experience that musicians and especially composers are free-spirits and ordinarily have little time or sympathy for governments of any colour. But the taste in new music broadcasting in America if they are anything to go by, suggests a longing for escapist “Wohlklang” as excessive consonance is called in German.

There is little denying that Reagan and Thatcher’s return to free market thinking and away from social democracy was a return to the values of 19^th century Liberalism. It would be strange if macro-economic changes were not reflected in aesthetic changes. The arts and music in particular had become complex in the wake of the defeat of Western Europe’s dictatorships.  The surge to social equality that followed was meant to be a levelling up rather than a levelling down and to level up required the consent and cooperation of those who were already levelled well above everyone else. Bourgeois paternalism and its refined tastes in the arts had to make room for the kids from the council estates. It was often angry, and edgy. New composition, more than any other cultural discipline, split between popular and serious music, though paradoxically, both had the same goal in mind: a more just and equal society that would never allow Fascism to return.

There was one major problem with the Reagan/Thatcher view that “a rising tide lifted all boats” – it allowed the very rich to stay very rich and indeed, become even wealthier. With the hoarding of assets and money, access to power inevitably followed. Private funds poured into the engines of governance fulfilling the (apocryphal) Mark Twain quip that “America had the best government money could buy.” It wasn’t just parliaments, legislators, councils and Congress that could be accessed with money, it was the media that largely fell into the hands of those with a self-interest in justifying their entitlement.

Of course, wealthy press barons have thrived in all democratic countries even since the nineteenth century. But in the UK there was always some degree of balance present in the media until Margaret Thatcher’s government lifted the bar on ownership by non-stake-holders. The BBC continued to be turned to when newspapers presented purely partisan commentary. But when Boris Johnson dragooned his chums onto the board of the BBC, journalists started to leave and those who stayed were happy to toe the party line. With traditional media losing credibility, social media became the new means of staying informed. With social media, new gates controlling the dissemination of information and disinformation were created and owned by even more unscrupulous plutocrats. These so-called “free-speech absolutists” were able to manipulate algorithms to serve their own purposes. When regulators and watchdogs are revealed to be at best powerless and at worst, corrupt, trust in democratic institutions is lost. With so much information mixing with disinformation, nobody knows what’s true and what isn’t. No wonder people turn to comfort music. Is it a coincident that the arts reclaim “Kitsch” as a legitimate aesthetic marker with the same boldness as Black people reclaiming the “n-word” or gays reclaiming “Queer”?   

This blog is dedicated to essays about the music that was lost in the political upheavals of the previous century. The music modernist composers of the 1920s and 1930s dismissed as delusional, escapist and kitsch was often by composers who travelled along organic roads of individual development. What was thwarted by subsequent authoritarian regimes was the convergence of these many developments into an overall picture. Many of those who might have continued along the road from which they began found themselves lucky to escape with their lives. Personal artistic development was a luxury that was sacrificed in the name of survival. So the last century offers a complex and truncated trajectory of artistic development. It was largely stop and start: feel-good-empowerment through wars that ended with defeat. There followed artistic sobriety until new rulers took charge and feel-good-empowerment returned followed by worse wars and worse defeats. This is an obvious pattern:  the more authoritarian the governments, the more crowd-pleasing and escapist the artistic production.

Today, Western democracies have a degree of surveillance that the Stasi, the KGB, the Gestapo and the FBI could not begin to imagine possible. Facial recognition, cameras on every street corner, digital transactions, mobile telephones, GPS all mean those in power can know exactly where we are and what we’re doing at any given time. It is enormous power handed to those we trust and believe to be benevolent, but what happens when those whom we believed to be benevolent abuse the powers we’ve given them?

The first thing such malevolent leaders do in power is subvert the arts. At its most brazen and obvious, the arts become cultish. Less obvious, the arts create the outward appearance of bringing people together, building communities and stoking pride in their identities. This purposeful art could be referred to as “Socialist Realism” except the United States was as guilty of creating “feel-good” patriotic art and music as any totalitarian state. Appalachian Spring, or Fanfare for the Common Man could be seen as America’s answer to Mao Zedong’s Yellow River Concerto. Building communities that create a sense of belonging is obviously a positive thing, and Aaron Copland is indisputably a very fine composer.  What becomes dangerous is when these compliant, wholesome communities are made to feel insecure. This is what unscrupulous political leaders can bring about by creating a threat coming from whatever or whoever happens to be considered an “outsider”.   

Can I draw a conclusion? Maybe it’s so obvious it was a waste to write it down. When people are frightened, they want “feel-good” music and art. When leaders are ruthless, they need the arts as anaesthesia. I can’t help having the feeling that political leaders are becoming more and more ruthless while at the same time, our artistic output (and consumption) is becoming more tranquilising. If the arts are the barometer of society, then the stormier the political weather, the more pacifying the artistic output.