Politics and the Avant-Garde

How do you make a political statement?

Thanks to our democratic structure, the possibilities are endless. How you make your statement is limited only by your abilities as a person. Most people usually write online petitions to speak their minds. Some join mass protests, joining their brothers and sisters to speak out for or against a similar interest. These are common ways, but they are not the only ways. Some strip naked in support of Animals and Muslims (recognizing the awkward wording in that last sentence), some boycott products from countries because they dislike the way it’s being run, and others still will plant bombs in cats to end a rival forever.

Or you can do what John Cage did in 1969, get everything and their grandmas into the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois, and compose HPSCHD.

Certainly (and literally) the biggest thing John Cage has ever composed, the piece is more of an exhibition than a composition. With dozens of tape players, hundreds of computer-generated tapes, thousands of slides, and the kitchen sink, it was a virtual computer engineer’s Noah’s Ark.

And that was quasi-intentional on Cage’s part.

Cage intended this work to be a massive political statement, one that was “...not about politics, but political itself.” He wanted to showcase his vision of utopia: a world where man had personal freedom, abundance, and where each opinion differed but was nonetheless regarded with equal dignity.

Yes, John Cage was a massive anarchist, why do you ask?

But of course, one man’s vision of utopia may differ from another’s.

This begs the question: what was the politics of the Avant-Garde composers?

One would assume they were all leftist liberals because of their willingness to accept what all others have vehemently shunned. But though it’s true or some, it’s not true for others.

Let’s look at a man we've discussed before who was very much Avant-Garde for his time: Charles Ives.

For his time, Ives was a decidedly Avant-Garde composer. He dabbled in Dark Arts that many composers refused to acknowledge, let alone touch. Cluster Chords, Polytonality, and a lack of Time Signature ran rampant like blood through veins in his works, often resulting in pieces like this:

But it’s also easy to determine from that same music that Charles Ives was a deeply religious man. Not just because many of his pieces borrow religious melodies (Ives did that sort of thing now and again), but because of his conservative beliefs. He’d disown you as a confident if you’re so much as suspected of doing anything that can be interpreted as promiscuous (as Henry Cowell learned the hard way), and let’s not forget the amendment he proposed.

Of course, many Americans in the late 19th-early 20th centuries held these beliefs. But many Americans were not Charles Ives. Many Americans, as I said, wouldn’t dare touch the musical conventions Ives embraced during the times. It’s reasonable to assume Ives a conservative, but he was a crazy conservative.

And I mean the GOOD types of crazy conservative. Not like most of these guys.

In contrast, Cage’s newfound sense of anarchism seemed to have been spreading to the rest of the New York School. To be clear, though, I couldn't tell exactly where on the political spectrum the men lie. However, the differing viewpoints in the meaning of music, as best demonstrated by an interview conducted between Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Morton Feldman & Earle Brown, should be enough to know there is a difference.

Morton Feldman believed that his music, at least, was not political in the U.S., because he had lived under the presumption the it was actually a free country. The belief that America is a dictatorship is a common one for those who seek change. Earle Brown feels similarly (though he does have disagreement about Feldman’s love of quiet, but that’s another matter entirely), famously saying that “...there is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.”

So what does all of this have to do with anything? The point I’m trying to make is that all these men’s politics differed significantly. It’s clearly shown with Ives, and though they were influenced later on, the composers of the New York School came in with their own points of view and their own political beliefs. Additionally, their music was influenced by the politics of the time. The only reason Charles Ives fared better than his modern day counterparts is because, as I said in a previous post, his music was more of a compromise between Mainstream and Avant-Garde.

But maybe I’m rambling too much. Maybe it’s as Morton Feldman said and I’m seeing politics in places where it’s not really there. Maybe, but I guess it all depends on how you see the world.