Greg Stepanich

When musicians do politics, or don't

I've finished reading (twice) the second volume of Stephen Walsh's biography of Igor Stravinsky, and I greatly enjoyed it. I've completed a review of the book that I'll submit this week, and hope it appears in print soon.

I'll expand on the book's finer points in the review, but there was one thing that struck me in particular: How essentially apolitical the composer was, at least in his American years. There were times when he poke politically (most famously about not wanting to return to Russia, then the Soviet Union, because people there weren't free), but his life was mostly about music, society and family relationships, and that's where he expended most of his effort.

For instance, one his last attempts at composition came in two arrangements of songs by Hugo Wolf, written in the tumultuous year of 1968:

In one other respect these arrangements share an attribute that has run through Stravinsky's work like a vein of crystal: the quality of detachment from daily life and current affairs . . . (1968 was) one of the most politically momentous years since the war. Insofar as Stravinsky's work or correspondence reflect any view on them, it is, if anything, a liberal one. But it is the passive liberalism of an old man whose mind is turning away from the Third World and toward the Next World.

So is it important for a composer or a performer to be politically engaged? Should they be heard when they feel like speaking out, and should we judge their art differently because of what they said — or didn't say?

The program notes at the New World Symphony concert I attended that featured the Webern Op. 6 pieces pointed out that the composer might not have been as innocent of Nazi complicity as first believed (and that the U.S. soldier's gunshot that killed him was less accidental than has been said).

Richard Strauss was compliant with the Hitler regime — he was president of the Reichmusikkammer — but basically, as Harold Schonberg once wrote, he was "opportunistic, amoral and apolitical, and all he wanted was to be left alone to write his music and make money.�

Russian music in the 20th century was full of compromises with a brutal regime, and those who spoke out, especially when Stalin was alive, found themselves in difficult circumstances. It's impossible for me, no matter how many times I read about it and talk to people who lived through it, to understand completely what it must have been like to try to be a creative artist in a political system that utterly dominated every aspect of your life.

Of course, there is positive political engagement as well. We're in the middle of a new wave of attention being paid to artist involvement in big causes — Bono pursuing a worldwide campaign to urge wealthy nations to forgive poor countries' debt, for example — and this is taking place across the creative spectrum.

The current president, too, has his supporters and detractors from the arts world, and both sides feel strongly about their respective positions. Those positions will one day be judged by history, and we'll probably reassess their work accordingly.

It seems to me that a life in music is most often a life spent in the grip of a passion, and most of the musicians I know do indeed have big opinions about the world around them, partly because they live those lives for much of the time in the public eye. I would lean toward giving a politically engaged artist — whether I happen to agree with him or her or not — a little more of my attention, and I think that's because if you have the ear of the public at some time and you bring up something political, you may be the only person a listener encounters who raises uncomfortable or important questions.

And so insofar as their system allows them to, I think it's good for musicians and other artists to speak up if the spirit moves them to do so. I don't have anything against those who disengage themselves, but there's something more exciting, more vital, about those who make a political gesture. I should clarify that point a bit and say that it's admirable to see this as long as the ideas are within the spectrum of normal political debate (I can't admire the politics of people like Richard Wagner, merchant of odium, though his music is often wonderful).

I guess I'm with Yevgeny Yevtushenko on this one. This is from a poem he wrote for Shostakovich, when they were talking about writing a piece about "conscience":

And if in this wide world where no one,
No one is guiltless, someone has heard
Within himself the cry "What have I done?"
Then something can be done with this world.