Like me, you need not have any knowledge of modern music to to be fully absorbed by this manifesto from composer Marc Blitzstein. A year after this was written, Blizstein’s collaboration with Orson Welles, The Cradle Will Rock, was barred from showing for its radical politics. Gifted and prolific, Blitzstein was called before HUAC where he admitted his past Communist Party membership and refused to give names or cooperate. A gay man, Blizstein was killed in an alleged homophobic attack in 1964.

‘The Case for Modern Music’ by Marc Blitzstein from New Masses. Vol. 20 Nos. 3, 4, 5. July 14, 21, 28, 1936.

I.

SOMETHING began to happen in music around the turn of the century. It was a revolution; an “art revolution.” Artists are the ornaments of a society; in another sense they are its vanguard, its bloodhounds; for the most part caged, or let loose only to trail insurgents and rebels, they have been known to turn on the guards themselves, track down the unintended real criminal, smell out the true direction. An acute sense of smell doesn’t always obey orders; sometimes it simply follows its nose. The musical revolution of 1890-1910 had both good and bad elements. But make no mistake about it; it was a reflection and a prophecy.

It had three aspects: technical, esthetic, social. The three were independent, they also dovetailed. On all three counts the decline of certain values and the rise of new ones were plain. On the technical side music underwent definite changes: syntax and grammar became altered, tonality was dissolved, harmonic procedures were both enriched and telescoped, rhythm was reborn, the art of instrumentation was extended and sharpened. It didn’t all happen overnight; both the decadence and the new vitality were contained within the traditional technical system; you can say that inherent contradictions caused the collapse of the system, and forced out the new thing. Esthetically there was a tie-up with other arts, which were having similar revolutions: Cézanne, Whitman, Wedekind, Rodin; later Picasso, Brancusi, Joyce, Corbusier, Eliot. Everywhere you looked you found drastic things like death and birth, rather than growth; the impressive swan-song and the childish barbaric yawp; the question instead of the statement; explosions. Looking back, one sees that disorder, breakup, negativism were the chief signs of the period. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Remember what had become of the powerful majestic romanticism. born with Beethoven: the deliriums of the Post-Wagnerians; the overblown war-lord-boss-hero music of Richard Strauss; the smug-to-drunken poetic flights of Scriabin; the metaphysics and unction and gross “charm” of the lesser lights; the whole “dream-mood” and “expensive flattery” quality a capitalist society turning imperialist demanded of its music. It is too much to say that the new men sought deliberately and fundamentally to battle the whole conception. They were still the “art-for-art’s-sake” boys, they didn’t see much beyond their artistic revolution. They flayed Philistinism; they had a healthy revulsion against pomposity, against the “soul,” against the grand manner; and they had a dim vision of something beyond the confines of the dear dead world the masters wished to keep them in. Their music fell into new ills; it went idiosyncratic and eccentric; each composer worked out his own peculiar idiom, surrounded himself with a clique of admirers, aped his patron’s “rugged individualism” with an “ivory tower.” Esthetics went on a tear, theories were a penny a handful. Destruction became an end in itself in the soft brain of Marinetti, futurist composer and noise-maker, now the darling of Mussolini’s Academy. But there were the others, the bloodhounds; Debussy, Satie, Bartók, the early Ravel, Schoenberg, the early Stravinsky were all groping for a new speech, because they had begun to feel there was something new to say.

What then happened to their revolution? The term “Modern Music” today conjures The term “Modern Music” today conjures up a picture of alien unreferable sounds, called “discordant,” with obscure enigmatic meanings, called “meaningless”; rare and distrustful performances in quarter-filled halls; dull, nervous, gloomy atmosphere, bored disparate applause; little excited clubs and societies, all ladies and lions, fomenting some concerts and many teas; composers who are either long-haired Baudelairean throwbacks or smart well-dressed businessmen; “experiments”; reviewers who flounder and beg the question, or plunge in with abandon and an almost uncanny ignorance. What is the reason for this picture?

Here is where the social aspect comes in. “There was something new to say.” Society, privileged society, did not wish anything new to be said, or even thought or surmised. It didn’t matter that many things in the new music were a faithful reflection of the society itself; or rather, it mattered a great deal. Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a masterpiece in the spirit of fantasy; but instead of the languorous or gushing or thrilling fantasy that might have been expected, full of plaster-of-Paris pixies and ogres, he wrote something devastating, horrible, neurotic, sick, grimacing, hysterical. He knew what he was writing; it was the truth about the dreams of humanity in a world of war and violence. The unendurable truth; the masters listened, shivered, and said “no!”

The riot that took place in Paris at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps in 1913 was no accident or mere gesture. The music broke the bounds of decorum; it dared, in a high place, among genteel surroundings, to expose lust and wantonness and bestiality to the auditors; Caliban saw himself in the mirror, and yelled for the militia.

Both Pierrot and the Sacre are supposedly accepted today–it was all so long ago; but how often are they heard? Stravinsky is now treated as the good gray composer of L’Oiseau de Feu and Petrouchka, a fairy-story and a puppet-show. Schoenberg has been efficiently suppressed, neatly buried; the Schoenbergian silence is deafening.

Other new works, the movement as a whole, fought a constant fight with a reactionary society and reactionary musicians. Wherever possible the “crazy” or “insincere” or “difficult” or “dangerous” or “subversive” music was crushed; or it was forced through pressure into conventional and innocuous molds. We now have something that passes for “Modern Music” and yet offends no- body, something that lets the leisure-class eat us and have us too. Do I have to mention the Bolero of Ravel? This choice opium-package was not smuggled in; we got it at the hands of Toscanini and the Philharmonic. It is a piece whose vulgarity and cheapness are consummate; a Bolero to end all Boleros. It goes directly about its business, aiming for the portal area; if we like we are soon dizzy and swimming in a lascivious aphrodisiac current, getting hotter by the minute. Modernism has here the function of a cosmetic. The work is dolled up with new chords, new orchestral effects, and a bright up-to-date sophistication. To anyone with ordinary sensitiveness to music the monotony and flatness of the tinseled Bolero are fearful; and even high society couldn’t keep it from finding its level almost instantly in the night-clubs and movie-shorts. There is also the Pines of Rome of Respighi, another smash hit and example of the well-known sell-out. And there are others, sufficiently re- mote from reality, or “abstract,” or “colorful”–all cut to fit the ears of the overfed. That anything exists at all of the original impulse is a wonder. It is because of the courage of the few who held on; also to some individual patrons who possessed a genuine and impartial interest in the progress of the art; also to some snobs who were an inevitable part of a society of classes, and who insisted on being several steps ahead of everybody else. For the last group, anything went so long as it was new.

II. Second Generation

MUSICAL revolution, then, during pioneers, they were already answering a felt the years 1890-1910.

And at the same time the larger thing was taking place throughout the world. The tangled imperialist forces, the combustible forces of the contest for power, were verging upon one another; at one point in 1914 they burst into a war. We know the outline. Horror, disease, shame, cheapness, massacre. And then the “adjustments”: trickery, looting, bargains, mass famine. Everything was settled, the crisis was supposed to be over. It went on, it is steadily more acute.

Capitalism, with hysteria or with hysterical calm, caught in logic, moves towards the brink. It confounds itself at every turn. It takes great masses of workers, it joins them through large-scale industry in a common work, it makes them endure with their families the same privations, the same persecutions. They learn a common lesson.

Then capitalism needs science, the advance of certain aspects of science is unrestrainable. Communication (telephone, telegraph, newspapers); transportation (air, land, water); photography, then the movies, then the radio, then the talkies. It all goes on while the economic evils tighten and intensify.

“Democracy” comes to mean the opportunity for all to find out from many sources what they are missing in the way of comfort and pleasure. The workers are finding out; also they are joined by their common interest. The prerequisite for organization, for collective consciousness, for collective demanding, is there. A great new public is born, it storms the gates. It wants culture, it asks for art. A culture, an art that will bring to it a deeper knowledge of itself and of reality, that will show it a possible new reality.

Capitalism has owned art, as capitalism has owned everything else. I have mentioned some of the works of the lackeys and ornaments. They sing praises, they prop up the obscene old dowager with assuring sonnets and sonatas, they lull her with Stabat Maters, they goose her with gaudy ballet music.

But the rot and decay of capitalism is a kind of humus; the crumbling soil is rich with new life. Other artists (artists who are sometimes a vanguard) see the death-march, smell the decay, feel a new strong wind, and are impelled to tell the story. The rift between the lackeys and the bloodhounds becomes wider, reflects the larger schism.

In 1925 there were signs that the new public for art and music was beginning to be a fact. There were signs, too, that composers sensed the fact and were making some attempt to meet it. The first generation of “modern music” had been pioneers, tracking down something unknown, getting tools in order. The new composers were no longer need. Experimenting died out; not completely, there are still reverberations among the incorrigibly experimental, the new-style academicians. But certain ideas and methods. It got amalgamated, and were freely used. There was now something more important than means to worry over; there was audience, and communication; not yet content.

Take the Gebrauchs-musik movement. began among bourgeois composers mostly in Central Europe, where the effects of the war were most ruinous; also where news came quickly from the Soviet Union, where music belonged to an entire population. Gebrauchs-musik means useful music,¹ functional music, whose purpose is clearly defined. Here was a fresh turn for an art which was still submerged in notions of traditional etiquette, of the right time and the right place. The new composers said that music is still music even when heard outside the consecrated concert- hall and opera-house, even when performed before two in the afternoon or after ten at night. They wanted music to be simple, understandable. They wanted to reach someone they called “the man on the street,” they even wanted to know, and to some extent to heed, what he wanted and liked to hear. They penetrated to where the “lower classes” were accustomed to get music: the movies, the radio, the phonographs and schools, the beer-gardens and circuses and music-halls and homes.

Paul Hindemith wrote Frau Musica, a set of simple studies for voices to be sung by members of the family, in the livingroom after dinner; a piece clearly non-professional, non-public. He also wrote Wir Bauen Eine Stadt, a group of games for children; Hin und Zurück, a music-hall sketch; Neues vom Tage, practically a revue; other works. Hindemith’s wish to get to the crowd was greater than his capacity. He had developed a complicated yet fluent idiom in a great quantity of instrumental compositions; curiously it sounded stiff, formal, high-brow, over-intellectual when applied to his Gebrauchsmusik; and he was apparently unable to modify it.

Kurt Weill wrote the Dreigroschenoper with Brecht, a theater sensation all over Europe; Der Jasager, a school-opera; Lindberghflug, for phonograph and voices; many other theater works. Weill had more courage than Hindemith; he turned his style upside down. He evolved the “song-typus” as opposed to the well-known “lied-typus”; the “song” of Weill is relaxed, popular, and appealing, technically very easy yet extremely well-written, regular in rhythm, conventional yet fresh. Sometimes it is pretty banal, some of it is almost super-bourgeois, as though Weill had miscalculated and aimed too low. Ernst Krenek in Austria fell for American jazz, and wrote the opera Jonny Spielt Auf, an indigestible hash of grandiloquence and fox-trots, Gershwin and Richard Strauss, decorated with inept ultra-modern mannerisms. Milhaud, Honegger, and Auric in France confined their Gebrauchsmusik to incidental theater-music and films; Milhaud’s best film is La Petite Lilie, Honegger’s is Rapt, Auric’s is Le Sang d’un Poète.

AS a movement Gebrauchsmusik was important; it was also muddle-headed. It had a direction; but it had little content. It aimed at larger audiences than had ever had contact with good music before, it was realistic; but when it was complicated it went over their heads, and when it was familiar you could hardly tell it from commercial music except that it seemed less up to date.

The real lack was that the composers were trying to reach a lot of people, but had as a rule only a very vague idea what they wanted to say to them. They used timely subjects, which was good (the earlier moderns went in for fantastic or ancient or metaphysical or exotic ones); but most of them had little political or social education, they were satisfied with merely risible satire or superficial comment or no comment at all. Jonny Spielt Auf is based on the old saw that all European culture is dead, and only America, the “West,” and “hot” Harlem can save the world. Neues vom Tage recounts with heavy Teuton morality how two people got trapped by their greed for publicity into a permanently spot-lighted life; a silly, false, unsound premise; however, very theatrical.

But one thing leads to another. The Gebrauchsmusik movement brought forth men who had political education, who saw the possibilities. Brecht, the German poet, was chief among them. He saw the new great public more clearly, more intensely than anyone else. He saw too that you couldn’t just give the new public what it wanted; for what it wanted had been conditioned by generations of capitalist exploitation and treachery. He saw the need for education through poetry, through music. Note that as he became more and more revolutionary in content, Brecht turned more and more to Eisler for musical collaboration. He had made the Jasager with Weill, an extraordinary work. Now he became alarmed at certain defeatist interpretations which might be placed on it, and wrote the Massnahme, which he called a “concretization” of the same theme; he made this with Eisler. I have written of Eisler and his contribution to the movement in music which belongs not only to the musical revolution but to the world revolution as well. This is the stage at which composers at last feel themselves joined to the proletarian movement, to the struggle of laboring classes everywhere for liberation, self-realization. The composer is now willing, eager, to trade in his sanctified post as Vestal Virgin before the altar of Immutable and Undefilable Art, for the post of an honest workman among workmen, who has a job to do, a job which wonderfully gives other people joy. His music is aimed at the masses; he knows what he wants to say to them. Communication; enjoyment; knowledge; spur.

III. Technique and Temper

THE new composer is at hand. He sees the pressing realities of today’s life, he has come to realize the connection between them and his music. His music is addressed no longer exclusively to an installed art-public, superior, very knowing in names and terms, essentially mistrained. He has found the new vast wholly untrained ardent public of the masses. They are everywhere, and so he is everywhere. School, church, cabaret, film, club, mass meeting, theater, salon, picnic are all potential arenas for him; he digs his way in and lets his music fly at them. He will not bore or mystify them with abstruse experiments dear to professionals, or unvocal songs, or new orchestral effects filched from this or that ragbag. At the same time he will not just pander to them, he will not give them the Hearts-and-Flowers or the Hungarian-Rhapsody dregs which have been thrown at them until now, and which they have picked up like hungry dogs. He will write everything, from political songs to chamber music to bugle-fife-and-drum fanfares. He must have an idiom, then, a language, a vehicle which will carry them as well as him; he is to make a strong supple ordered warm music. Is there a formula for this? Is it ultra-modern or anti-modern or what? The composer is at hand, but the answer isn’t. The answer comes out of music, not theories. But before we do any wholesale excommunicating, before in our zeal to clean up the tub we let the baby out with the water, there are a few facts to see.

The contemporary technique in music is (1) bourgeois; (2) scientific; (3) for use, useful.

First, it is certainly bourgeois in its associations. I have said that the innovators probably thought very little about any extra-musical implications of their revolt. They lived in the bourgeois mode, by means of bourgeois transactions. They composed for existing concert audiences or for their own coteries. Of course they yearned for posterity and universal acclaim; that is artists’ pie in the sky. When they turned against smugness or infantile grandeurs, they were revolting in terms of art, not of the social system; and their revolt was disagreeable to, but containable within the system. They were the unwelcome seed in the womb: denied, deformed, corseted out of existence; and still fed and growing.

When I use the word “scientific” I mean that modern music as a technique is not the personal unrelated idea of some individual. It fits the past, it is the logical next step.

I don’t want to get too involved about this. I will simply say that the concept of tonality, which runs through all Occidental music, got more and more diffused as Monteverdi was followed (a hundred years later) by Bach, Bach (a hundred years later) by Beethoven, Beethoven (fifty years later) by Wagner; until something we call the chromaticism of Wagner signifies a state of almost total diffusion. Or you can say that a structure becomes so weighted down with elaborations and superimpositions that it collapses from sheer weight. When I say that the historical development tended always towards more elaborations, then it is easy to see the collapse was inevitable, even correct. Atonality, Schönberg’s contribution, is the answer; the collapse, the dead-end. Polytonality is more positive, if more synthetic: a counterpoint of chords as inspired by the old classic counterpoint of single musical lines…These are two devices out of a carload of devices. An integration of them all is happening slowly. It is not yet complete, and there are plenty of personal disagreements, and there will continue to be. My own feeling about the value of atonality is that it has punctured the chromatic myth, it has shown it to be sterile, it is once and for all the horrible example. But I don’t see how we could have dispensed preparing the way, beginning something with atonality.

Modern musical technique is for use. The revolutionary composer inherits it, it is his jumping-off place. He should no more scrap it than a socialist society should scrap a machine because its functioning in a bourgeois system meant abuse or persecution or unemployment. Modern music has often been the vehicle for trivial, stupid, vicious statements; but we don’t disdain the radio as a medium because of somebody’s toothpaste. Electricity fells trees, it also makes telephones. The technical aspect of present-day music is forward-looking, and actually unrestrainable, like scientific inventions. No matter who evolved it, or under what unsavory circumstances, the point is that it had to be evolved. And listen to Forward, We’ve Not Forgotten, or Massnahme, or parts of Weill’s Jasager, if you want it proved that the technique can be used for a revolutionary statement. It is about time that the doctrine of “original sin” was got rid of.

The technique is above all a kind of musical energy, a specialized twentieth-century kind. There is a body of materials, an equipment, a way of expressing which belongs to our time and to no other. Behind the mannerisms and stenciled dissonances and hash of styles there are the elements of a musical speech. And also of a temper. Certain things are gone from music because of the modern movement: effusiveness, over-statement, windiness. Certain things have arrived directness, economy, clarity. Music heaves and sweats much less. It has thrown off the airless bunchy petticoats and the scented dry-goods roses of the late nineteenth- century composers. It is in a way ripe for revolutionary treatment.

I am as aware as anybody that the new music of the masses is not going to be the music of Schönberg or Stravinsky or Hindemith. But they were preparing the way. Schönberg, developing a method out of atonality, implanted a discipline and logic; terribly important, especially for those young proletarian composers who are quite sure they can get along on “instinct” and “intuition.” His role is negative, but it is honorable, prophylactic. Stravinsky is an enormous contribution, and an involuntary one. He has pared music down to the essentials, he has brought in order, he has insisted on a communicable speech. On the other hand he has landed in a bog of hyper-esthetic tendencies, snobbish and ingrown in message and character. In a world of cataclysmic unrest and change, he appears to be saying, “We can at least play at tiddlywinks like gentlemen.” Hindemith is too deeply academic, too little lyric; yet in his propaganda work for Gebrauchsmusik he is a link to the new period. There are also Milhaud, Berg, Prokofieff, and others. Most of the others wrote music which is full of talent, and not so full of character. They have done small necessary jobs. That they were unconsciously whose counterparts and possibilities they did not dream of, was none of their business. It is distinctly ours, who appraise them in order to use them; who digest in order to eliminate, but also to absorb.

1. Maurice Ravel, who was once one of the pioneers, was asked lately if he intended to write some of the new “useful music”; he said: “I never write anything else.” One must remember the lickspittling uses of Ravel’s recent music to see how a witty statement can boomerang.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1936/v20n03-jul-14-1936-NM.pdf

PDF of issue 2: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1936/v20n04-jul-21-1936-NM.pdf

PDF of issue 3: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1936/v20n05-jul-28-1936-NM.pdf