Sands, Carl. “Proletarian Music is a Historic Necessity” (6 Mar. 1934)
edit- “Proletarian music is a historic necessity which will develop out of bourgeois music by carrying on and adding to its progressive tendencies, and by discontinuing regressive and decaying tendencies.”
- “Proletarian music may have all the worth-while qualities of bourgeois music, and many more, but it must and will express them by different means: with a changed content will come changed technical forms.”
- “In these revolutionary tendencies (which may be listed among the contradictions of bourgeois music) the bourgeois musical critics are now lost. … They do not see the contradictory and self-destructive nature of these tendencies. They only sense the fact that something is wrong.”
- “The critics only sigh or fume while they wait for a great man, a messiah, a fuehrer who will lead them out of the chaos. … But remember: from a proletarian viewpoint, not only is there no chaos, but there is a clear path.”
- “Naturally, the work of these men may be expected at first to be cruder in technique than the work of the great bourgeois composers. The history of music shows that the young, new style is always cruder than the old, dying style which it supplants.”
- “The revolutionary critic will differ from his bourgeois prototype, however, by regarding technique as a secondary matter: to him content must be the first desideratum in a work of art.”
- “He must assume, along with the revolutionary composer, that a revolutionary content will eventually lead to the perfection of a revolutionary technique by means of which it can be expressed.”
- “Form and content, it is true, are interdependent. Ideally, they should develop side by side. But it remains a fact: we have the content and we have not yet the technique. The content is given to us in a hundred years of revolutionary literature and action.”
- “The music-revolutionary tendencies that should have been integrated with these have been captured by the bourgeoisie and withheld from the masses. The revolutionary music critic must aid in their recognition, their recapture, and their identification with the revolutionary movement.”
- “The iconoclastic and revolutionary tendencies in the present decaying art of bourgois [sic] music are, many of them, part of the continuity of this art that belongs by right to the revolutionary movement as a whole.”
- “Already the masses, even in backward America, show a predilection for many of the newer resources of "modern" music.”
- “Their leaders, unfortunately, are too often less progressive in taste and still try to shield their lambs from the wolf of modernism. This gives us in music the parallel of socialist and A. F. of L. misleading and choosing of the ‘lesser evil.’”
Sands, Carl. “On Opera” (15 Nov. 1934)
edit- How can opera houses succeed? CS argues they should be municipal opera houses
- “The question whether the workers of America really want opera houses of any kind is still debatable. The galleries are almost always more crowded than the more expensive seats and most of the enthusiastic applause also comes from there.”
- “The question whether the workers of America should want or should be encouraged to want opera (as it is known at present) is even more debatable.”
- “Opera is of three distinct types: music-drama (the play with music), grand opera (the concert in costume) and opera comique (light opera).”
- “The first has practically no existence or following in America outside of such fantastic absurdities as the Metropolitan; the last demands a small house by itself.”
- “So we are left with the concert in costume or grand opera as the thing that would keep a municipal house going most of the time.”
- “Of all the vehicles for bourgeois propaganda, none is more typical and few more powerful than grand opera.”
- “Not only is the mere giving of it associated almost exclusively with conspicuous leisure, useless show and brainless time-wasting, but the plots and the manner of staging center mostly around the ideology of the royal, the noble and the very rich.”
- “The passions represented are almost always those which touch least upon social realities and the morals pointed are those which most support the dominance of the class that buys the most expensive seats.
- “The net result of a night at the opera tends only too often to be a certain amount of time spent day-dreaming and projecting the labor worn imagination into foolish stage personalities who are not, seemingly, beset by any of the real problems of life as known to us.”
- “The working class, the poor, the insane and diseased are represented, but always from the upper class viewpoint – picturesque, obedient, happy-go-lucky, vicious and punished, or pathetic.”
- “The sugar pill that makes this all go down is the music. Many fine tunes, intensely moving and deservedly popular are found in opera (partly because opera is almost the only form of composition that pays anything to the composer, so he does his best). But how often does one not see the class-conscious worker with tears in his eyes absorbed in and tolerating the show that, were it not for the music, he would scorn and quite correctly denounce with well-supported arguments!”
- “The question of how much bourgeois propaganda gets over cannot be side-tracked. And the question of how much bourgeois propaganda is actually in the music is giving some musicians no little cause for thought. We cannot answer the second as positively, yet, as we can the first. The class-conscious worker should give the matter his attention.”
- “As to the Municipal Opera House – when Soviet America is here, New York won't have one, but probably ten.”
Sands, Carl. “World of Music” (23 Feb 1935)
edit- Workers Music School, Division of Workers School, affiliated with the Workers' Music League
- fundraising concert – a full house
- program: “selected from the works of contemporary revolutionary composers who are members of the Composers Collective of New York City.”
- “Mordecai Baumann sang some of the Negro songs of protest, collected by Lawrence Gellert, with piano accompaniments arranged by L. E. Swift. Swift played his ‘Theme and Variations’ for pianoforte.” (Swift is Siegmeister)
- also, Handel sonata and two Russian piano pieces played by Ashley Pettis
- best pieces by the “New Singers under the leadership of Lan Adomian.”
- A “remarkable reinforcement of the music front in New York”
- the singers “all have trained voices and read music notation.”
- “Their performance is marked by a fine, clear tone-quality of great power, and a rhythmic precision and general musicianship nearly equal to the best bourgeois organizations of the madrigal and a capella type in New York today.”
- A “remarkable reinforcement of the music front in New York”
- what is the difference between “revolutionary” or “proletarian” music and bourgeois music?
- I've offered an attempt at explaining; but consider something else:
- you can see it in the audience: “it sits at absolute attention. No rustling of programs, shifting in seats, talking or writing of notes back and forth. The applause seems unusually spontaneous – but then, the audience is acclaiming its own and might, conceivably, be partisan and deliberately ignoring faults. But when member after member of the audience says without there being any suspicion of premeditation, and with a kind of delighted surprise, that this music sounds unlike ordinary music, that it has an unaccountable freshness, a power, a capacity, one turns again to examine the scores to see what technical means there may be to bring about such a result.”
- “These young composers … are all trained in the best traditions of bourgeois music – that very music that we so often accused of dying along with the decaying capitalist class for which it is predominantly made.”
- “But their music does not sound like the music of bourgeois composers.”
- “Although they represent most varied temperaments and express varieties of stylistic and technical developments, their works hang together with a consistency that seems difficult to analyse.”
- “With some exceptions, omitted from Sunday's program, they show a common avoidance of melancholy and defeatist moods, musical day-dreaming and fanciful castle-building.”
- “But one is not struck so much by the presence of these qualities as by a positive purity and restraint which dominates alike the sobriety, the lyricism, or the gayety of the various numbers.”
- “But their music does not sound like the music of bourgeois composers.”
Seeger, Charles. “On Proletarian Music” (1934)
edit- musicians are in the proletariat, albeit as part of the superstructure
- music, as a part of society, evolves as do other parts: historically
- “The humanizing of humanity is regarded as a thing that is happening simply because an increasing number of people cannot help striving to make it happen. Creative minds and abilities especially, tend to desire its happening ‘as soon as possible.’ They cannot resist the desire to work with all their might to facilitate the process. They constitute a ‘vanguard’ whose self-appointed task is the acquainting of the proletariat with the facts of life.”
- but not by forcing revolution – can't be done, would be suicidal.
- “Its task is, rather, the better preparing of the proletariat for its historic task. Only the proletariat itself, the vast majority, can achieve its own liberation.”
- “Music is one of the cultural forms through which the work of humanising and preparation operates. Thus it becomes ‘a weapon in the class struggle.’”
- Music for the proletariat
- proletariat may at times want to eschew bourgeois music; other times, it is “proper for it to want to be as bourgeois as possible”.
- But “a second period is being entered” in America. “The proletariat of advanced countries is beginning to be highly critical of what it takes from the bourgeoisie in the way of music.”
- No “bourgeois composer [can] be said to be able to express the grand and the sublime as artist of strong cultural periods have always been able to do. They cannot do this because grandeur and sublimity do not characterize the social system under which they and their art flourish. It is a decaying system.”
- no one wants to hear Rococo, Renaissance music – no “revolutionary content”. But Beethoven (“especially the third, fifth, seventh, and first two movements of the ninth”) is still revolutionary. Not most of Schumann, Chopin, not even Wagner.
- “The proletariat has a clear realization of the content it wishes to have in the music it hears and in the music it will make for itself. It is a content expressing, and contributing to the success of, its struggle—a revolutionary content.”
- “But it has lacked, so far, a musical technic for the expression of this content. It has relied upon and found some use for trite and debased echoes of the existing bourgeois idiom.”
- “Bourgeois art music, on the other hand, has achieved much in the twentieth century that is definitely revolutionary in character—not revolutionary as to the class struggle but as to the technic of music.” but “content has been lost sight of” - divide between base & superstructure
- “The technic hitherto characteristic of proletarian usage has proven hopeless; but the technic of bourgeois contemporary music, though uncoordinated, is full of promise.”
- These two are not “disconnected” - “They are part and parcel of the present-day situation as a whole.”
- “The obvious thing to do is connect the two vital trends—proletarian content and the forward looking technic of contemporary art music.”
- “It can be done and is being done.” and workers like it
- example of workers chorus that has no trouble with complicated metric pattern that bourgeois chorus would have trouble with. But workers are critical: “see straight to question of basic content.”
- “We are moving already to a realization of the thirds stage in this evolutionary process—the time when there will be music of the proletariat.”
- “content first, technic second, accords historically with the usual evolution of musical styles.”
- technical crudity should therefore be expected at first
- “technic and content are not two separate things, but rather two different aspects or ways of looking at one and the same thing.”
- but, “content can exist apart from its musical-technical expression.” - “a characteristic of the structure of society, whereas musical technic is of the superstructure.”
- “In this two-way relationship, technic and content become identified and then we have art-products of the highest type.”
- “Art, then, is always and inevitably a social function. It has a social significance. It is a social force. It is propaganda: explicit, positive; implied, negative.”
- “The better the art, the better the propaganda it makes: the better the propaganda, the better art it is.”
- recent bourgeois music has “ceased to have positive social value.”
- ivory tower composers are “broadcasting negative propaganda (tacit approval) for the social system that gives [them] a tower and allows [them] to sit in it.”
- “On the other hand, the art element in the proletariat’s propaganda for a better life has been slighted. Too servile acceptance of a debased bourgeois musical idiom has constituted a negative approval in music of the social system against which it must revolt.”
- Composers have three paths:
- fascism: positive propaganda for the old order
- isolation: negative propaganda for it
- proletarianism: propaganda for the new order
- Music for the proletariat