Peter Dorman wrote: in my opinion, Hans Werner > Henze's Raft of the Medusa will be listened to for a long time to come. > (People who care about political art owe it to themselves to check this > one out.) Yes, not to mention the recording of his 6 symphonies on DG with Henze himself conducting the BPO. BTW, the 6th was composed and premiered by Henze when he was composer in residence in Havana during the late 60's.There was an interesting article on Henze in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Every once and awhile the TLS runs something interesting instead of the usual half-baked drivel about 3rd rate poets and novelists. Many of the writers of TLS excel at that particular skill of going on and on about absolutely nothing. Back in the USA, Frederick Rzewski has produced the finest > piano music in recent years, especially his Variations on The People > United Will Never Be Defeated. But on the other side of the ledger, > Erwin Schulhoff's political ambitions interfered with his output, and > Aaron Copland's pop-frontish stuff (e.g. Lincoln Portrait) is his least > successful. > > My guess is that in "classical" music, political goals complicate the > problem of music-making in a way that they don't in popular music. Most > popular music is "about" something (love, sex, anger, politics) that can > be expressed fairly well with words alone; politics fixes the subject > but doesn't otherwise change the job that music sets out to do. > Classical music, however, focuses on the forms of expression for which > words are not adequate. (Is opera an exception?) Opera is an exception because it has a libretto that can express anything the written word can. There are some very political operas out there like the N.Korean "Let's Dismember the U.S. Imperialists" rumored to be co-written by you-know-who. It may not tingle the spines of music fans but it's interesting to a student of propaganda. > > And what about jazz? Mingus, for instance, was deeply political in just > about everything he did, and he was one of the great jazz minds of all > time. Did his politics feed his music, feed from it, or was something > else going on? > I'd say politics played a part of it simply because of the time and cultural mileau in which Mingus composed. The music of people like Coltrane, Shepp and Pharoah Sanders used to be referred to as "angry" music because it was intense, at times ferocious and dissonant. Yet these artists claimed they were doing the opposite, creating a music of peace and harmony. But of course a work of art can have meaning outside of the artist's intention. Sam Pawlett > Peter
