English
中文Ideas become propaganda when their dissemination is framed by a specific intention to influence. This ideological ‘propagation’ seeks to spread and cultivate the seeds of an innately politicized and in most cases, an overtly political idea. The term ‘propaganda’ itself is a derogatory attribution applied to a particular style of promotional brainwashing. It implies carefully selected informational content to suit a cause and as a consequence, an imposed social hierarchy within the intelligentsia in having had the prerogative to make such selections.
The tampering of lyrics has been used to great propagandist extent throughout the history of song, with a notable example being the complicated ruse concocted by the Nazis using American jazz standards. Jazz’s inseparable sociological and historical link to Negro and Jewish subcultures ensures the genre is already politically loaded. In addition, jazz melodies exist largely to represent an associated song text which is often commonly known to a contextual public. This familiarity makes the original texts of popular jazz tunes well-suited for replacement with political satires, as was the case with “Charlie” Schwendler and his orchestra in a grand ruse to communicate the corruption of Churchill to a British audience. As this kind of censorship is innate to the concept of propaganda itself, the remainder of this study will focus on political manipulation as it applies and is applied to untexted music.
Propaganda seeks an emotional rather than a rational response in a similar way to musical appreciation, but the application of literal ideas to instrumental music nonetheless remains a slippery concept. Compositional language is so completely autonomous that it defies qualitative explanation in literal terms except through metaphor and assimilation to the other senses. The particular qualities of aural sensation and thus of musical appreciation have not yet delineated a unique verbal descriptive idiom and this absence largely accounts for the elusive nature of the listening experience and, it may be argued, the elitism that has developed in the field.
Thus untexted music’s absoluteness of content infers that its carrying of an idea, in this case a political agenda, must be enacted primarily through sound associations and connotations. In the absence of a text, programmatic ideals must and can only be invoked through referential composition of a cultural, historical and/or locational inclination. This specificity of place and influence suggests an immediate National if not necessarily nationalistic tendency. The particular nuances of sound and style in a country’s compositional and interpretative instincts very often mirror the subtle inflections of that country’s language and accent.
A significant question is raised by the musical representation of oppressive dictatorial power. As will be evidenced through the specific politico-musical scenarios of Wagner, the quashing of the minority is so great and the assertion of Fascism so overbearing that its result is an obliteration of the opposing party. When the cited political agenda is in this case Anti-Semitism and any recognizable Jewish musical influence has been deliberately eradicated from Wagner’s musical palette, it must be considered whether the resultingly ‘pure’ musical product is then in itself Anti-Semitic as a standalone work, even if the compositional process may well have been?
The evaluation of any artform as a vehicle for propaganda is likewise a loaded question. As a means of mentally manipulating the vulnerable masses, it begs clarification of the evaluation criteria: might a truly effective vehicle for a damaging agenda not be one by which the masses triumph and the poisoned message, whether Ant-Semitic, Stalinist or otherwise, be overthrown?
Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883)
Wagner’s music is concrete evidence of a highly-publicized and historically unmatched case of anti-Semitism in the arts. His outspoken socio-political writings, most notably his contemptuous published and re-published essay Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music), secure Wagner as the ultimate progenitor of modern Anti-Semitism, arguably deeming him morally responsible for the subsequent war crimes committed by Hitler, who adopted and usurped Wagner’s revolutionary social idealism and advocated his music as a supreme illustration of their party’s brutal political stance.
Wagner’s Judentum unapologetically declared its intention to “demonstrate the destructive effect of Jewish participation in artistic endeavours, especially in the composition of music” (Katz, 1986, 33). Wagner believed that the Jews’ access only to the richer classes of society denied them the authentic folk soul which he glorified as the true root of musical and cultural creativity. Within Wagner’s cultural context, Jewish character was synonymous with economic shrewdness, stereotypical mercantile behaviours and motivations, and art-commodity-exchange. His allegations reveal at their base a Socialist enthusiasm for the ultimate destructive power of money, with Judaism vindicated as an identifiable scapegoat for the Capitalistic world order. Applied to musical composition, Wagner denounced the citation of topicalisms, humour, eclecticism, exaggeration, tragicomic tendencies; all that would now be deemed ‘Pop culture’, as a gratuitous exploitation in the interests of cultural marketing and industry. Publically condemning the work of his Jewish contemporaries Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer and likening their compositional style to “bric-a-brac glued together” (Wagner, 1850, 18), Wagner implicated the typical socio-economic agenda of the Jewish character in an increased disposability in German music and opera, equally superficial in its reception as in its delivery, with audiences noted to have been winking and chattering throughout.
One would be enthralled by Mendelssohn’s music if it were meant to satisfy the “entertainment-seeking fancy” but not the “deep and genuine feelings of the human heart,” wrote Wagner. Our whimsical imaginative powers are entranced by Mendelssohn, “but our purely human inner yearnings for a clear artistic vision are scarcely touched.” (Katz, 1986, 39)
As was mentioned earlier, in his own music Wagner vehemently avoided any and all compositional tendencies with possible links to Jewish culture. His operatic oeuvre was the antithesis of disposable, upholding grandiose medieval Volk heritage – Volk meaning both ‘the people’ and ‘the race’ (Rose, 1992, 66) – as an archetype for German nationalism and cultural salvation. The unprecedented structural proportions of the Ring cycle over a four night duration, for example, imply and evoke the timelessness of nationalistic sentiment on a near-mythical scale. Although there are no outwardly Jewish references in the libretto, the two characters of the opera perceived to be evil and irredeemable are developed musically with distinctly recognizable reference to the particularly pronounced Jewish-German speech accent and dialect of Wagner’s milieu.
The Ring has lent itself most readily to productions which interpret it as an allegory of a nineteenth-century German bourgeois capitalism about to be overthrown by a redemptive revolution. Its fundamental vision of a world driven by the need for power and domination – both quintessentially seen as ‘Jewish’ tendencies in the German revolutionary tradition – is personified in the grasping Nibelung brothers Alberich and Mime, whose very singing patterns echo what in Judaism and Music Wagner had called ‘the Jewish manner of speech – shrill hissing, buzzing, a wholly foreign and arbitrary distortion of our national idiom’. (Rose, 1992, 171)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975)
The cultural empire built and implemented by Stalin has been acknowledged as one of the most effective artistic dictatorships the world has ever known, securing from Soviet creative figures an “unprecedented degree of submissiveness in the service of his continually shifting propaganda goals”. (Volkov, 1980, xxv) Within this climate, Shostakovich launched his compositional career by fulfilling various propagandist commissions for Stalin and the government. Reluctant to assume academic techniques for fear of losing his ‘own self’, he assumed the unofficial but publically lauded role as the second great yurodivy composer following Mussorgsky and became somewhat of a revered cultural prophet.
The yurodivy has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way, in code. He plays the fool, while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy is an anarchist and individualist, who in his public role breaks the commonly held ‘moral’ laws of behaviour and flouts conventions … These writers and artists chose unremarkable, crude, and purposely clumsy words to express the most profound ideas. But these words did not carry a simple meaning; they had double or triple implications. (Volkov, 1980, xxi-xxii)
Operating in this way within overtly terroristic conditions, Shostakovich began to enjoy international compositional acclaim. This relative ease was brutally sabotaged when, in 1936, Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth – a composition of which he did not appreciate the structure nor the soundworld. By editorial means, Stalin began a series of very public berations of the composer, threatening him so openly as to suggest Shostakovich should fear for his life. This placed Shostakovich in a position of vulnerability at the whim of the leader which was to force him into extreme oppression and consequent unhappiness which would last, certainly until Stalin’s death, and essentially hold political ramifications for the remainder of the composer’s own life.
The newspapers of this period were filled with letters and articles demanding death for ‘terrorists, spies and conspirators’ … A wave of Stalin’s hand created and destroyed entire cultural movements, not to mention individual reputations. The article in Pravda was the start of a vicious campaign against Shostakovich. (Volkov, 1980, xxiv)
In 1948 the music of Shostakovich was mysteriously but significantly withdrawn from the public sphere. His works disappeared from concert platforms and young children in schools were made to recite texts from memory citing the ‘great harm’ Shostakovich had brought to art. Occasional but mandatory public appearances saw him uncomfortably reading speeches which he had not written and with which he quite obviously did not concur.
Perhaps the most obvious vehicle for overt propaganda were Shostakovich’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies from the WWII period and dubbed the ‘military symphonies’. These opposed alternating march and requiem moods which served Stalin’s various publicity needs. Certain elements of these two works were encouraged increased popularity and evolving propagandist purposes according to topical political events. Ironically, it was universally accepted that the war years were a comparatively safe period for Soviet artists as the blame for the country’s ‘grief and destruction’ lay with the German foreigners rather than within the internal political system. Stalin’s reputed campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ and Western glorification is one of his propagandist whims which has enjoyed particular retrospective attention and which resulted in mass submission, arrests and deportations in the vigorously renewed Communist crusade for Russian nationalism following the independence and internal strength achieved during the Second World War.
Propagandist Appropriation
Thus far this exploration has concentrated primarily on symphonic music which carries its political intention at a deep structural level as set in place by the composer; either by the wilful hand of a megalomaniac such as Wagner, or as a response to governmental death threats, as was the case with Shostakovich. The evolution of contemporary mass media regularly demonstrates the further motivational powers of music when it is attached to Propagandist causes externally and independent of its original compositional intent.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)
In terms of retrospective propagandist appropriation, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is quite possibly the most celebrated political anomaly in the history of Western music. As a grand hymn to freedom and victory, its theme has surely represented hundreds, if not thousands of opposing causes – governmental regimes, revolutions, brotherhoods, calls to anarchy – and yet remarkably still remains essentially freestanding from attachment to any one political agenda. As a deservedly worthy finale to a groundbreaking symphonic work and a lifetime of extraordinary composition, it was the fruit of a profoundly deaf ear. It is testament to human achievement, determination and mortal success. Compositionally, it defies generic, cultural and sociological categorization in its resonance with both lofty and dance styles, secular and sacred idioms, combines military, noble and sacrilegious references. It has been liberally and majestically quoted by such disparate parties as the Nazis, the French Revolutionaries, the International Olympic Committee and the European Union. It evokes ownership, patriotism and unity, and represents greatness and grandeur as equally as it does rags to riches. According to Beiswanger (1939), even on its first hearing certain music has the capacity to invite an “unexpected aura of familiarity and joyous recognition”. It is ultimately music’s inexplicable propensity for eliciting that so-called ‘luminous moment’ – that heart-thumping motivation – that cements its place in the artistic world as probably the most effective and timeless communicator of social propaganda.
