Might I say something as a member of this so-called “elite” closed circle of the avant-garde which was just addressed here? * I think that if young composers were to come along and do something completely new—not simply an imitation of things done by Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, Riley, Kagel, Ligeti, etc.—the composers just named would be very happy about it and that every possibility for performance would be offered them with open arms. Speaking for myself, I’m actually always on the watch for new composers,. for young people who are doing something completely different and who will say—just as Boulez said fifteen or twenty years ago: “Away with Schoenberg, we’re going to do something different” “And now away with Boulez and Stockhausen and Ligeti and Cage and all those fellows: we’re going to do something completely different.” I’ve seen and heard an insane num-ber of scores in the last few years and my heart bleeds, for up to now I’ve found nothing totally new and nothing essentially different. Thus I feel that the idea—a type of persecution complex—that there are many composers who are not heard because they are shut out of an elite which exercises domination is an illusory idea. It does not correspond to reality. The essence of the matter is that the composers who are doing something new and essential have to demonstrate quality in their work, just as Boulez has done. Twenty years ago, when Boulez brought something totally new and shocking in his Polyphonie X or Le Marteau sans maitre, these works were convincing through their quality. And this quality is, I think, something which the members of the elite expect. 

But actually I wanted to talk about something quite different. As far as music and politics are concerned, I think massive confusion prevails in terminology. “Music” is a word and this word embraces many different contents. When, for example, one talks about march music— one possibility of functional music—and about a Webern string quartet, then I think the only thing that brings a march together with a Webern string quartet within one common concept is the simple fact that both work with definite acoustic signals; that is, both consist of relations of tones. Otherwise, discussions about them lie upon totally different planes. Such discussions do not get anywhere; they fail because actually that which “music” is is a far too complex subject. I’ve been thinking about the following facts for some time; they are thoughts which I have not formulated and which now, so to speak, emerge somewhat chaotically.

When I listen to music, I perceive a very definite structure, a context which is communicated through acoustic signals. But at this point the question is immediately asked: Indeed—and the score itself is only an optical matter? Then I am unable to exclude the fact that the score—i.e., something existing only on paper and not manifested directly in any acoustic way—actually is a part of music too. There are complex structures—I’m thinking of Bach, for example, arid several chorale preludes—in which a melodic line—let’s say a chorale—is worked out in canon and simultaneously a second canon is integrated into it. It is hardly possible to follow this structure with the ear, to say nothing of the much more complicated structures in serial music. And now I arrive at a question inherent in the remarks of Dahlhaus and Brinkmann. I think one would have to imagine things as follows: there is a nucleus which is musical structure in terms of something solely a matter of sound. One doesn’t really “hear” the row. In a piece by Schoenberg or Webern, the row is, to be sure, relevant for the struc-ture, but on the immediate acoustic plane of music it is not there. So there is then a second plane and this is the score itself, the “paper plane”. And then there is a third plane, e.g., the text; and a fourth: that which the composer reveals in the program notes or that which he keeps to himself. I’m sketching ever-broader circles. And then there is still one more plane: part of music and of every artistic genre is that which is taking place in society at this very moment. The source of confusion lies for me in the following: there can be a very definite relation between one thing and another. For example, the social situation or, if you wish, the conditions of production, the economic conditions which in Marxism constitute the substructure or base, that obviously is related—when we talk about music— with that which is musical structure, but it is not identical with it and the two are not inter-changeable. Might I offer an analogy? Mathematics is a structure of thoughts. It is strange today, when it has become so fashionable to make an absolute demand for political commitment from composers within music, but not beyond music, that the same commitment is not ex-pected from a mathematician.

Actually mathematics is not a science in the same sense as physics or chemistry. It is a type of language and belongs to a realm some-where between the natural sciences and art. For many mathematicians, mathematics is actually an art, because, for example, a certain mathe-matical thought process is only of value when it is of a certain elegance. It does not have to correspond to the real world. Only a very small portion of mathematics can be applied to the real world—physics, for example, is one field where this takes place. But now let me get back to music. We have to make a very clear distinction between musical works as thought structures closed in themselves or not closed, com-municated by means of acoustic signals, and the surrounding world. Musical works are related to the surrounding world. To be sure, a Mozart string quartet reflects the social situation: the decline of the aristocracy and the ascent of rationalism—but the quartet itself offers only traces of that which has happened socially. To call a string quar-tet by Mozart or 1-Haydn reactionary is infantile, simply because Mozart and—to a still greater degree—Haydn were in the service of a prince (I’m thinking particularly of Haydn in the service of Prince Ester-hazy). I think it would be equally infantile to make an absolute de-mand upon a composer or painter or poet today and to try to pin him down: “You have to do something relevant for society, for social justice! If you don’t, you’re a traitor!” I think this is simply a demand for something which is not adequate. One could just as well demand from a mathematician: “Lay off your stupid mathematics; you have to get out and fight in South America or God knows where.” I believe that the mathematician or the composer is actually doing something more worthwhile by concentrating upon his field. This does not mean that he closes his eyes and stops his ears in the face of the injustice which goes on in the world—this not at all. But I’m against this totally naive confusion of various fields and against this type of pressure: “Take a stand on political progress—and do it through your work as well. -If you don’t, if you stand aside, then you’re in line with reaction and with oppression !“ I think erroneous logic is involved here. If some-one says: “If you’re not for us, then you are our enemy”—that is demagogy and totalitarianism.

Let me come back to mathematics and give an example of the way in which certain conditions of social oppression can give rise to some-thing quite progressive through transformation into an independent structure. It is well-known that cybernetics, an essential part of present-day science, actually plays a practical role in the progress of society, for through the use of computers and the cybernetic possibilities of organization, a better life can be achieved for more people. When cybernetics began, it was actually a bad affair. It served the destruction of people. In America, John von Neumann was assigned problems of anti-aircraft defense, i.e., the design of automatic weapons which could shoot down enemy aircraft with greater certainty. And what did Neumann do? One knew that one had to have immediate signals on the approach of planes and also had to know exactly where the plane would be at the moment when the projectile reached it. Consequently: one doesn’t aim at the plane, but somewhere else. To do this, a large number of data had to be brought into a single context, including the purely human data, e.g., the probable conduct of the pilot. A mathematical extrapolation was involved. And now just imagine—I’m being blasphemous— that it was not John von Neumann in America doing this so that the English and American armies could fight against the Nazis, but rather someone in Nazi-Germany. Would cybernetics, in this case, be looked upon as something evil in terms of a thought structure because it was concerned with these calculations in Nazi-Germany? No! Now I’m speaking with intentionally exaggerated blasphemy, for I am of course an opponent of the Nazis, simply in terms of my background. What I mean is, however, that the same science, conceived and developed in Nazi-Germany would “as science” have been of equal value. That is to say, under certain conditions a reactionary situation of oppression can give rise to a structure of thought which has a life of its own. For that reason—and now I’m getting back to New Music—I think it’s completely irrelevant to speak about the political progressivity or reactionary position of New Music. It is not progressive in a political sense nor is it regressive, just as mathematics is neither progressive nor regressive. It is of a region which lies elsewhere. There is no doubt but what it is related to life and to the social condition in many ways. That the so-called “broad masses”—who do not exist, but are also only a word—do not need this music or this book or these pictures, is nothing more than a demagogic argument aimed at putting this type of art of a smaller circle on the list of things to be eliminated. I think that it is a fascist, totalitarian attitude to call something reactionary which belongs to but a few people simply because it belongs to only a few people. In America—and again I’m making a point of saying some-thing blasphemous, because I really am on the side of the black popu-lation of America—the blacks account for 15% of the entire population. Now somebody might come and say: “We are 85% white and the blacks should get out!” Consequently: “We here are a mass of workers and this elite New Music has to be gotten rid of, for it is an affair of 0.1 % of the population.” When I still lived in Hungary, in the days of Stalin and Zdhanov, they told us composers: “You are against the people, because you’re doing something elite, something esoteric. Come on, write songs and marches for the people.” And that’s the reason for my last remark.

As a child I lived in Rumania, which then was a monarchy and a bad country with oppression of the workers and peasants. There was a royal hymn composed by some Austrian composer. King Charles I had commissioned it in the previous century from Hellmesberger or some-one else. In the Rumanian monarchy, in an ultra-reactionary, half-feudal country, this royal hymn, in terms of its use, was truly a component of the oppression practiced there. As a secondary school pupil, I was oppressed because I had to sing this hymn twice a day along with my fellow pupils at the beginning and the end of the day and thus I became a victim of “oppression”—I really did. But now, pay close attention: soon after World War Ii, when Rumania became a so-called socialist state—and I’d be inclined to underline “so-called” rather than “socialist”—this hymn was banned, along with the exile of the king, which was a truly happy event. No one was allowed to sing It. By coincidence, this same melody at some earlier point in time had gotten to Albania and was sung by Albanian partisans who fought against the Italian occupation and against Mussolini; with a different text—an Albanian text—it was sung as a song of the partisans. After Albania was free and also became a so-called socialist land, this parti-san song became the official hymn of Albania. What happens then when an Albanian governmental delegation comes to Bucharest and one is forced to play the Albanian hymn—the melody of which is forbidden in Rumania—at the airport? (But this is only a small in-tervening remark.) My goal in telling the story is this: the melody as such is neither royalist nor fascist; it is not communistic nor is it on the side of the partisans. However, it can become so through use and custom. In the Rumanian kingdom, a corrupt state with oppression and social injustice, this melody was included with all other means used toward these ends.

And now 1 think I’m coming to the essential thing which 1 wanted to say about the political relevance of music. Music, a totally-defined ordering of acoustic event, can through use actually become something repressive. I refer to the Rumanian royal hymn or to the Soviet hymn, which is likewise a component of repression. But to become this, music needs the addition of something semantic and conceptual, for the text and even the program belong to music as well. In the interior of music, however, it is only a very definite structure of tones which is of con-cern. I’m not an aesthetician; I do not know what the aesthetic criteria of music are, but I want to come back to this point: to bring politics into this structure is akin to bringing politics into mathematics. Mathematics can—indirectly—be a political tool. For example, through cer-tain mathematical methods an agency of espionage or defense might build an apparatus to be used for the purpose of oppression. But mathematics itself does not oppress. And it is equally true that music in itself does not oppress; neither is it democratic nor anti-democratic. To be sure, certain definite injustices are subject to political criticism in their relation to musical society. But please leave music itself out of it! Don’t confuse musical structure with social and economic concerns which are on a different plane!

COMMENTARY BY WES BLOMSTER

The idea of the engaged and committed artist has been popular in the West since the end of World War II. A new chapter in the history of the relationship between art and society began, however, in the late l960s with the demand vociferously made by the New Left and those sympathetic with it for “relevance” in art. The response of many younger artists in all fields was both positive and enthusiastic; protest poems, posters, and paintings were produced in quantity by writers and painters who appeared in demonstrations and participated in po-litical campaigns. Hans Werner Henze, to mention an example from the field of music, provided shelter for Rudi Dutschke, following the attempt to assassinate the German revolutionary on the streets of Berlin in 1967; Henze also wrote music intended as an indictment of political injustice in many parts of the world. A decade has passed since this demand for relevance was most concretely made and it is time to pause for a moment of stock-taking to contemplate the present relationship between art and politics, viewing it particularly from the perspective of music. Some remain—Luigi Nono is perhaps the prime example—who in their continued production of politically-oriented art almost exceed the current somewhat diminished demand for a committed muse. Others have settled into the comfort of a renewed  l’art pour l’art attitude, finding relief in the feeling that the turbulence of the ‘60s now lies in the distant past and seeing again in art a beauty which the realm of reality should never hope to realize. Most disturbing are those whose padded earphones kept out the noise from the streets a decade ago and who continue to cherish the war horses of the classic repertory as music per se, never having concerned themselves with the possibility of a political dimension in the music of any age.

In the literature on art and politics which has appeared during the past ten years, much too little attention has been focused upon funda-mental differences between the verbal and visual arts, on the one hand, and music, on the other. It has been somewhat blithely assumed that music could serve the expression of political conviction in much the same manner as the poem or the painting. Correction of this facile view is offered in the preceding statement by György Ligeti. When the demand for political proclamation is made upon music, it becomes clear that the quality commonly praised as the universality of the musical idiom becomes rather a matter of ambiguity—an aspect which Ligeti makes clear in his account of the old Rumanian national anthem,
Worthy of recollection here are several thoughts from a statement made by Lukas Foss several years ago when he was asked about the political and social ends of music. Foss referred to Picasso’s Guernica and the fact that it had not stopped the Spanish Civil War. He then continued:

It did, however, help to create a climate against violence, a climate for social change. It did influence the more intelligent people, which makes it something other than propaganda. (Prop-aganda art is stupid art—art for the stupid.) To influence the mind of the intelligent, this every artist wishes to do. I want my music to change the minds of others like me. . . . I have written somewhere that composers today all work on one and the same piece (each from different angles, of course), that we all have a project in common.... Whether actually in a new kind of composer-performer-audience teamwork, unthinkable even 30 years ago, or whether laboring alone, we seem to be working out a solution for each other, for all the people in the same boat... in the same trouble: our new music, our art, which wants to help change us and become a weapon for peace.’ 

*  Ligeti’s remarks were made spontaneously in Darmstadt in 1972 during the discussion which followed papers given by Carl Dahlhaus and Reinhold Brinkmann on aesthetic and political criteria in compositional criticism. Subsequently, the re-marks were published in German in the Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik XIII, ed. Ernst Thomas (Mainz, 1973), pp. 42—46. This translation is offered with the gracious permission of B. Schott’s Söhne, to whom gratitude for their kindness is herewith expressed. —Wes Blomster