Abstract
Can music tell us anything about history? The well-known American music critic and historian Alex Ross thinks it can, as history has been silent on music. By this, he means that historians in the academy have been notoriously reluctant to approach the history of music in any meaningful way. But a range of scholars (Charles Rosen, Richard Taruskin, Edward Said, Susan McClary and Nigel Cook) working on the rich tradition of Western classical music have shown that all the questions that historians ask about the modern history—on the nature of the state, communitarianism, ideologies like imperialism, nationalism and secularism, the crucial role of popular and mass culture, gender, the generation of modernities, urbanism, even political violence—can be addressed through music. Music remains a constitutive part of our public and private selves and no historian can afford to ignore its vital role. Music may seem esoteric and other-worldly and historians familiar with the written archive may be wary of tackling unconventional sources, but even here a range of scholars, ethnographers and audiophiles have striven to unpack music material in innovative ways and made them accessible. Fortunately, a very powerful school of pioneering historians in India have been tackling questions of society and music. Janaki Bakhle, Lakshmi Subramaniam, Amanda Weidman and Amlan Dasgupta have been publishing, establishing archives, organising seminars, making a dent in the conventional world of history writing.
It is in this context that the publication of the Indian edition of Antony Copley’s book becomes significant. On the face of it, a history of Western composers in the first half of the twentieth century is unlikely to strike a chord among Indian historians. Western classical music has a tiny constituency among the Westernised elite in Indian metropolises, and even among them there is hardly any interest in twentieth century European composers. But what Copley has to tell us about the collision of musicians with the modern state and the terrible fate of musicians who survived this encounter has lessons for all historians grappling with the predicament and politics of artists in the twentieth century. The ramifications of state power—its reach and control of culture, the creation of consensus through persuasion, bullying, hectoring and crushing of dissent anticipated—mirrored many such strains in modern Indian society.
The dramatic story of European dictators and composers has been explored brilliantly by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise (2007). Their awesome power, among other things, was derived from the conviction that they represented ‘popular will’. It did not help matters that Hitler and Stalin were interested in the arts and knowledgeable about classical music. With artists generally and music composers in particular, they liked to play cat and mouse, unleashing fear and terror, arbitrarily bestowing favours or withdrawing them. Some artists buckled and made a pact with the devil, became willing courtiers at terrible personal cost. Another consequence was amorality, a scenario perceptively explored in 1936 by Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann) in his German novel Mephisto set in Nazi Germany (it was also made into an award-winning film by Hungarian director, Istvan Szabo in 1981). Others submitted publicly but kept their faith in private. Copley builds on the work of Ross and explores this tragic dilemma of artists who were unable to escape the ‘tyrannical conformity’ of totalitarian regimes. According to Copley, one response of music composers was to turn to the ‘spiritual’. Some composers drew on traditions inherent in their Christian faith; others who were agnostics explored the transcendental. In the introduction, Copley writes ‘maybe the simple explanation for the expression of the spiritual in music in the 20th century is quite simply as compensation for this Age of Barbarism’ (p. 20).
The book is divided into short biographical chapters. The most dramatic accounts are of two Russians: Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Copley explores their fate under Soviet rule. Prokofiev’s first wife, a Spaniard, was promptly arrested as an ‘outsider’ after his marriage dissolved and she was sent to the Gulag. Shostakovich was sent to the USA after the Second World War on a propaganda tour and had to undergo personal humiliation as he unconvincingly defended Stalin to the Western world. Copley suggests that public humiliations and private fears had close links with their music. Indian readers may be familiar with Shostakovich’s famous ‘Leningrad Symphony’ thanks to the availability of Soviet LPs in India during the 1960s and 1970s, and they may also remember Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938). For the more unfamiliar introspective works discussed in detail by Copley—Shostakovich’s late quartets for instance—they will have to sample the music on the net. Another Russian composer discussed in the book is Scriabin, whose professional life predated the 1917 Revolution. He was influenced by Theosophy and drawn to India and he even planned a music retreat in Darjeeling!
Chapters on Polish composers, Kzrystof Penderecki and Henryk Gorecki; Soviet dissenters, Arvo Part, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina; French composers, Francis Poulenc and the celebrated Olivier Messiaen; and Germans, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze, showcase the range of Copley’s survey. Many of these composers had to confront war, occupation, incarceration, hunger and deprivation. Some of the artistic choices they made were controversial. The tumultuous times through which they lived affected their music in unexpected ways. Copley, in his analysis of their compositions skilfully shows how classical music in Europe from the 1930s to the 1970s underwent profound changes in tone, colour and theme. The ‘dark continent’ (historian Mark Mazower’s famous characterisation of Europe in the twentieth century) had to come to terms with its violent past and classical composers responded by producing music that sounded radically different.
Copley is an accomplished and veteran historian of modern India. He has written on Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Indian religion. This book depends for its background on revisionist histories of Europe published in the last two decades by well-known European and American historians, such as Anne Applebaum, Ornaldo Figes, Timothy Snyder, Simon Schama, Gitta Sereny and others. An absorbing read, Copley’s account explores the fraught relationship between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ in modern history. Indian historians have a lot to learn from Copley’s approach, especially about building bridges between music history and social history.