Mark Abel continues his analysis of how Marxists should appreciate and evaluate music.

In the first part of this article, I argued that critique was at the heart of any application of Marxist theory, and that therefore a Marxist musicology must be a critical, rather than a disinterested (or complacent) activity. But this immediately raises the question of what kind of judgments can be made about music, and on what basis. Where is the meaning in music and how might it be revealed?

Perhaps the most obvious and most common way that Marxists (in general) make judgments about any kind of cultural text, whether literary, dramatic, or visual, is on the basis of its discernible, or overt, political meaning. But since, arguably, music as such does not have a discernible political meaning, the focus of this method of attributing value in the case of songs tends to fall on their lyrical content. The immediate effect of this approach is to regard the music as no more than the accompaniment to the sung words, an enhancement of what is held to be really important in the song – the words.

On this basis, a strong trend in the history of Marxist approaches to music involved the valorisation of forms of music which prioritise the clear delivery of lyrics and downplay the importance of instruments. The ease with which judgments could be made on the basis of the political values expressed in the lyrics was one of the reasons why much of the Left in the mid-20th century became particularly associated with folk music. The other was that this kind of music proved to be well-suited to mass, amateur participation at political events. The protest songs of singers like Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger drew on a variety of sources, like this American union song, ‘Which Side Are You On?’:

The value being attached to the music itself, in this relationship between the Left and folk music, relates to the tunes’ simplicity, even unobtrusiveness, in relation to the message carried by the words.

To the extent that the actual musical content was a factor in making political judgments about folk music, it was an instance of the use of another kind of criterion – the supposed class basis of the music. Here we have a judgment based on a concept of popular authenticity: the idea that some forms of music are part of a folk culture which is the authentic expression of a people, that is, of ordinary, poor, oppressed or exploited people. This quality is held to set such music apart from ‘bourgeois’ art or highbrow music.

The authenticity criterion was applied at around the same time to another music – jazz – whose progressive nature was held to derive from its connection with an oppressed section of society, as well as its resulting difference from both the classical concert tradition and commercial popular music. The logic of this latter criterion meant that when jazz began to develop in both directions – an artistic one with bebop and a commercial one with the big bands – there was a need for a new focus. That need found fulfillment in the Dixieland Revival, which was essentially the celebration of early, ‘traditional’ (‘trad’) jazz as the authentic, popular and democratic original form of the music. Much of the soundtrack of leftwing political events in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain and elsewhere comprises both folk-like singing and marching jazzbands. This is footage of the 1959 Aldermaston march:

Although politically interesting things can be said about the musical procedures of jazz compared to other forms of music-making, part of its attraction for progressives was the perceived ‘outsider’ status of its original New Orleans protagonists. The British trad-jazz revival of the 1950s was an echo of a similar American revival led by New Deal progressives in the 1930s and celebrated the apparent purity of a music produced by an oppressed community in another part of the world.

If Billy Bragg might be regarded as a descendant of the folk-protest tradition, the late twentieth century fashion for ‘world music’ was a descendant of the trad jazz revival. Far flung parts of the globe were scoured for sounds to satisfy a demand amongst Western progressives for authentic popular expression which had not (yet) been poisoned by the values of capitalism. This was, however, a pale, somewhat compromised, echo of the earlier movements in that whereas both the folk and the trad jazz scenes were built around performances by idealistic musicians dedicated to keeping a form of music alive, those doing the scouring for world music represented the very forces that threatened this music’s integrity – multinational record companies. Listen to these tracks from Ken Colyer’s Crane River Jazzband, which performed at many political events, to hear the quality of the recreation of the New Orleans sound by 1950s British jazz musicians:

What is common to all these cases is that the political judgment is being made largely on non-musical, or extra-musical, grounds: this music is politically sound because of who makes it, or where it comes from. This is also true of the parallel tendency of valorising art-music composers for their supposed commitment to Marxism, socialism or progressive politics. On this basis, composers such as Alan Bush and Michael Tippett were celebrated by sections of the British Left, their political stance evidenced partly by their anti-elitist involvement with non-professional music-making, such as choral societies, but mainly by the themes of their works, particularly operas (thereby relying on overt verbal meanings). This is part of Bush’s opera about nineteenth century Northumbrian miners, Men of Blackmoor:

And this is part of Tippet’s oratorio Child of Our Time:

It incorporates arrangements of African American spirituals, thereby combining in one work all the criteria for progressive approval discussed so far.

What is left out of such judgments is the musical success or otherwise of the outcomes of these efforts, as though good intentions are enough. In addition, this approach suffers from the ‘intentional fallacy’ of believing that art is simply the product of the execution of an intention on the part of its creator. This holds that an artist is solely responsible for the art she produces, and this will be socialist art if the artist holds socialist beliefs and principles.

In fact, this is a form of idealism which has nothing to do with Marxism. Marx initiated an approach which understood art, by virtue of its social roots, as expressing something beyond the intention of its individual creator, perhaps even at odds with its creator’s personal views. For example, he thought that the novelist Balzac had succeeded in cutting through bourgeois ideology to show the truth of social life despite his own conservative politics.

It is a cornerstone of Marxist approaches to culture that works of art are social products. Indeed, more than that, the very language available for the creation of artistic expression, whether literary, visual or musical, is socially and historically determined. This means that musical judgments based on the intentions of the composer can never be the whole story. But it also means that simply pointing to the social roots of a particular music is not enough either.

Both are ways of avoiding tackling the difficult issue of the meaning involved in the music itself, a meaning which is not stable but will mutate as circumstances change. For example, as time went on, the post-war British trad jazz bands arguably became a staid parody of the raw, innovative music they sought faithfully to emulate.

Exposing how those meanings inhere in the very language of music is the central task of a Marxist musicology.

In the second part of his series, Mark Abel asks how Marxists should judge music.

In the first part of this series of articles, I argued that critique was at the heart of any application of Marxist theory, and that therefore a Marxist musicology must be a critical, rather than a disinterested (or complacent) activity. But this immediately raises the question of what kind of judgments can be made about music, and on what basis. Where is the meaning in music and how might it be revealed?

Perhaps the most obvious and most common way that Marxists (in general) make judgments about any kind of cultural text, whether literary, dramatic, or visual, is on the basis of its discernible, or overt, political meaning. But since, arguably, music as such does not have a discernible political meaning, the focus of this method of attributing value in the case of songs tends to fall on their lyrical content. The immediate effect of this approach is to regard the music as no more than the accompaniment to the sung words, an enhancement of what is held to be really important in the song – the words.

On this basis, a strong trend in the history of Marxist approaches to music involved the valorisation of forms of music which prioritise the clear delivery of lyrics and downplay the importance of instruments. The ease with which judgments could be made on the basis of the political values expressed in the lyrics was one of the reasons why much of the Left in the mid-20th century became particularly associated with folk music. The other was that this kind of music proved to be well-suited to mass, amateur participation at political events. The protest songs of singers like Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger drew on a variety of sources, like this American union song, ‘Which Side Are You On?’

The value being attached to the music itself, in this relationship between the Left and folk music, relates to the tunes’ simplicity, even unobtrusiveness, in relation to the message carried by the words.

To the extent that the actual musical content was a factor in making political judgments about folk music, it was an instance of the use of another kind of criterion – the supposed class basis of the music. Here we have a judgment based on a concept of popular authenticity: the idea that some forms of music are part of a folk culture which is the authentic expression of a people, that is, of ordinary, poor, oppressed or exploited people. This quality is held to set such music apart from ‘bourgeois’ art or highbrow music.

The authenticity criterion was applied at around the same time to another music – jazz – whose progressive nature was held to derive from its connection with an oppressed section of society, as well as its resulting difference from both the classical concert tradition and commercial popular music. The logic of this latter criterion meant that when jazz began to develop in both directions – an artistic one with bebop and a commercial one with the big bands – there was a need for a new focus. That need found fulfillment in the Dixieland Revival, which was essentially the celebration of early, ‘traditional’ (‘trad’) jazz as the authentic, popular and democratic original form of the music. Much of the soundtrack of leftwing political events in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain and elsewhere comprises both folk-like singing and marching jazzbands. This is footage of the 1959 Aldermaston march: 

Although politically interesting things can be said about the musical procedures of jazz compared to other forms of music-making, part of its attraction for progressives was the perceived ‘outsider’ status of its original New Orleans protagonists. The British trad-jazz revival of the 1950s was an echo of a similar American revival led by New Deal progressives in the 1930s and celebrated the apparent purity of a music produced by an oppressed community in another part of the world.

If Billy Bragg might be regarded as a descendant of the folk-protest tradition, the late twentieth century fashion for ‘world music’ was a descendant of the trad jazz revival. Far flung parts of the globe were scoured for sounds to satisfy a demand amongst Western progressives for authentic popular expression which had not (yet) been poisoned by the values of capitalism. This was, however, a pale, somewhat compromised, echo of the earlier movements in that whereas both the folk and the trad jazz scenes were built around performances by idealistic musicians dedicated to keeping a form of music alive, those doing the scouring for world music represented the very forces that threatened this music’s integrity – multinational record companies. Listen to these tracks from Ken Colyer’s Crane River Jazzband, which performed at many political events, to hear the quality of the recreation of the New Orleans sound by 1950s British musicians:

What is common to all these cases is that the political judgment is being made largely on non-musical, or extra-musical, grounds: this music is politically sound because of who makes it, or where it comes from. This is also true of the parallel tendency of valorising art-music composers for their supposed commitment to Marxism, socialism or progressive politics. On this basis, composers such as Alan Bush and Michael Tippett were celebrated by sections of the British Left, their political stance evidenced partly by their anti-elitist involvement with non-professional music-making, such as choral societies, but mainly by the themes of their works, particularly operas (thereby relying on overt verbal meanings). This is part of Bush’s opera about nineteenth century Northumbrian miners, Men of Blackmoor:

And this is Tippet’s oratorio Child of Our Time, which incorporates arrangements of African American spirituals, thereby combining in one work all the criteria for progressive approval discussed so far.

What is left out of such judgments is the musical success or otherwise of the outcomes of these efforts, as though good intentions are enough. In addition, this approach suffers from the ‘intentional fallacy’ of believing that art is simply the product of the execution of an intention on the part of its creator. This holds that an artist is solely responsible for the art she produces, and this will be socialist art if the artist holds socialist beliefs and principles.

In fact, this is a form of idealism which has nothing to do with Marxism. Marx initiated an approach which understood art, by virtue of its social roots, as expressing something beyond the intention of its individual creator, perhaps even at odds with its creator’s personal views. For example, he thought that the novelist Balzac had succeeded in cutting through bourgeois ideology to show the truth of social life despite his own conservative politics.

It is a cornerstone of Marxist approaches to culture that works of art are social products. Indeed, more than that, the very language available for the creation of artistic expression, whether literary, visual or musical, is socially and historically determined. This means that musical judgments based on the intentions of the composer can never be the whole story. But it also means that simply pointing to the social roots of a particular music is not enough either.

Both are ways of avoiding tackling the difficult issue of the meaning involved in the music itself, a meaning which is not stable but will mutate as circumstances change. For example, as time went on, the post-war British trad jazz bands arguably became a staid parody of the raw, innovative music they sought faithfully to emulate.

Exposing how those meanings inhere in the very language of music is the central task of a Marxist musicology.

In the first of a series of articles, Mark Abel discusses music and Marxism. We hope they will stimulate further contributions on this topic. 

Part 1: Explanation or critique?

This website welcomes discussions of how Marxism relates to art and culture. But what does Marxist inquiry look like? This might seem obvious when we are looking at political questions, but is less so when Marxism is used as a tool to talk about things like art or music. Specifically, to what extent should we be attempting to provide explanation, and to what extent critique?

This dilemma might be said to be a question which arises from Marxism becoming an academic discipline. Only in academia has the idea grown up that Marxism might be for ‘objective’ analytical purposes only. Outside of academia it is taken as obvious that Marxism is critique, to the extent that it is more likely that the reverse is assumed: that it is only critique, i.e. that it is pure political ideology with no claim to objectivity.

However, within academic disciplines – especially cultural studies – we find the notion that a Marxist analytical method can produce important insights without being connected to any political project or wider goal of changing the world. Probably the key statement against this approach by Marx himself in the second of his Theses on Feuerbach:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

I take the practice in question here to be political practice, and, therefore, the meaning of this thesis to be: all (social) theory which is not connected to political practice is idle, since there is no way of grounding it outside of practice. The test of the correctness of theories about economy, politics, social structure etc. is the extent to which they facilitate the fruitful practice of those engaged in the struggle for socialism. Conversely, the best way to ensure the correctness of one’s theory is to develop it from the vantage point and perspective of engagement in the struggle for socialism.

When it comes to theories not directly relating to the class or political struggles – for example, cultural questions, aesthetics etc. – the test of practice seems a little stringent.
Perhaps for that reason, the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists developed an alternative justification for taking a critical stance. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that to take for granted the current state of affairs – a false society, divided against itself – was to produce theory which was complicit in present society, and was, in effect, to act as an apologist for it. Theory was not worthy of the name, said Horkheimer, if it was not ‘dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life’.

It is of course Theodore Adorno who is the most obvious example of the deployment of that stance in relation to music. His writing is full of the most excoriating and uncompromising critiques of composers who, he argued, produced music which capitulated one way or another to the mystificatory and oppressive tendencies of modern society. Stravinsky, Wagner, popular music and jazz all came under fire, while Adorno was unashamedly partisan in his support for Schoenberg, Berg and Mahler.

This method of producing theory is diametrically opposed to the standard of disinterested positivism upheld by mainstream inquiry, particularly musicology. That shouldn’t surprise us. The dominant mode of doing musicology is to pay due deference to the canon (the greats of Western art music) but beyond that, not to make value judgments. It is felt that to do so would only serve to reveal one’s personal preferences which are of no relevance to academic study.

Lukács is one Marxist interested in cultural questions who is scathing about this ‘parading of one’s lack of convictions’. Nonetheless, it persists, even among self-styled Marxists. Take, for example, Adam Krims and Henry Klumpenhouwer, who claim to deploy a ‘postmodern Marxism’ in their musicology. They argue that there is no basis on which to make value judgments about culture or music, and the task of Marxism is to be analytical, not critical. Because capitalism, under its contemporary regime of ‘flexible accumulation’, has achieved the total commodification of cultural products, and because, as any good Marxist knows, art cannot transcend its socio-historical circumstances, they conclude that there can be no moment of resistance or opposition in art. Those, like John Storey on this website, who search for such resistive elements have been misled by a distortion of Gramsci and an anachronistic concept of civil society, while those who believe that Marxism is consistent with aesthetics (or that there can be a Marxist aesthetics) are clinging to the residues of idealism present in Marx’s early works.

Art is not a realm of freedom, or even a premonition of a future realm of freedom, they argue. All we have are commodified cultural products bearing the stamp of the regime of capital accumulation under which they were produced. Therefore, says Krims, the task of Marxist musicology is ‘to trace flexible accumulation in the very sound of the musical tracks’. Klumpenhouwer goes further and asserts that ‘it is pointless to struggle towards an exit in such a closed system as capitalism’. In other words, echoing the Borg in Star Trek, resistance is futile.

Marxism here is understood as an analytical tool shorn of all political purpose. Marxist musical analysis becomes a quasi-scientific practice whose task is to explain why music is bound to sound the way that it does.

We have arrived at a paradox. Despite the attempt at objectivity, or neutrality, this approach is not a bad definition of ideology: the naturalisation of the existing state of affairs and the refutation that things could be other than they are. The only way to avoid being ideological in this way is to do what Marx himself did and take a determinedly critical stance to one’s object of study from the outset.

The kind of Marxism which eschews critique is a complete misunderstanding of Marxism. Any attempt to dissociate a Marxist analytical method from the critique of capitalism and the project to supersede it effectively turns it into something else.

So, a Marxist musicology must be about making judgments as well as analysing music. In fact, ‘musicology’ is an unsatisfactory word for it, since it tends to imply a forensic examination of compositional techniques. ‘Marxist musical critique’ might be a better description of what I have in mind, but ‘musicology’ at least has the virtue of emphasising a focus on the musical aspects of music, something that much Marxist writing on music has ignored.

But what kind of judgments should a Marxist musicology make, and on what basis? Clearly, they would ultimately be political judgments, but in what sense political? I will address the possible alternatives in the next instalment.