An extensive body of thought in economics, political theory, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics and other disciplines deriving from the work of Karl Marx (1818–83). What chiefly distinguishes the Marxist approach is its concern with the material factors – the economic ‘forces and relations of production’ – that have given rise to different forms of social existence in the passage from antiquity to feudalism and thence to the various stages of bourgeois-capitalist development. Such analysis usually goes along with a critique of the existing socio-economic order and a strong commitment to alternative (i.e. socialist or revolutionary) programmes of political change.
To the extent that they have differed, often very sharply, on these and related issues commentators have also given different accounts of the implications of Marxist thought for cultural criticism and theory. Neither Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels left anything like a full-scale, detailed or systematic treatment of the topic. Still, there are sufficient indications in their work as to what such a treatment might have looked like and what would most likely have been its central areas of concern. In the case of musical aesthetics this problem is yet more acute since there are even fewer passages from which to start out in the process of critical reconstruction. Marx and Engels, in fact, show little interest in music, despite their impressive range of reference to sources in the literary and visual arts.
Nevertheless, there are several good reasons why music critics and theorists – not to mention composers and performers – have attempted to build on these somewhat shaky foundations. First, there is the fact that Marxist aesthetics grew out of a rich and complex tradition of German post-Kantian philosophical thought, in which music played an important and at times a central role. Of course, it was Marx's claim to have stood such thinking back on its materialist feet by insisting that developments in the cultural, intellectual or ideological sphere could be explained only through prior reference to economic forces and relations of production. Even so, he clearly allowed that the relationship between material ‘base’ and cultural ‘superstructure’ might take a more complex or ‘mediated’ form, as for instance when artists, philosophers or critical intellectuals opened the way for an advance in social consciousness which in turn brought about some decisive transformation in the economic sphere. Second, there is the rich legacy of Marxist-inspired theoretical work in literary and cultural criticism, work that very often has a pointed (albeit a fiercely contested) relevance to debates about the socio-historical dimension of musical forms, genres, meanings and values. Moreover (third) those debates have at times affected the course of musical history, as they did during the period of Soviet hegemony in central Eastern Europe when composers were subject to intense pressures of ideological recruitment, and as they have for Western composers (among them Bush, Henze, Nono, Stevens and Stevenson) with a strong allegiance to communist ideals of social and political justice.
Marx and Engels address these questions most explicitly in the preface to their 1857 Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Their chief aim here is to criticize those forms of classical economics that took for granted the existence of capitalist social relations and of bourgeois ‘human nature’ (acquisitive, self-seeking, private-individualist). Such ideas merely serve to conceal the underlying reality of a class-divided society, where the capitalists own the means of production and are thereby enabled to extract surplus value from those who have only their labour to sell. Thus the function of ideology, as Marx and Engels conceive it, has been to legitimize this grossly unjust state of affairs by representing it as a timeless truth of the human condition. Works of art may be seen as complicit in this process of ideological mystification to the extent that they offer a false – a partial or distorted – view of reality. That is to say, they obscure the various class-related conflicts of interest or ‘objective’ contradictions that characterize a given stage of economic development, as for instance by projecting an idealized (escapist) world view or by tacitly endorsing the current self-images of the age. However, there is also the possibility that works of art may both express those tensions and point towards a realm of human fulfilment beyond present conditions of social and political injustice. Such works would be progressive, not utopian, in the sense of preserving a critical awareness of the various factors that conspire to prevent social change. Nor would they always, or necessarily, represent the conscious intentions of the artist concerned. In some cases (Balzac is a favourite example) his overt professions of class-allegiance might well be thrown into doubt by various sorts of contrary or complicating evidence drawn from the work itself.
These debates have found numerous echoes in the history of Marxist musicology and music criticism. A central question is whether music offers any grounds for comparison with those aspects of the visual and literary arts that arguably offer a hold for the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content’. This issue became especially urgent during the period of imposed party-line orthodoxy in Soviet aesthetics, when the term ‘formalist’ was routinely applied to any work that exhibited an over-concern with matters of style or technique, and that was therefore open to the charge of Western bourgeois-decadent influence. Such was the doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ propagated – largely at Stalin's behest – through a series of now infamous decrees, notably those of 1936 and 1947, issued by the cultural commissar Zhdanov. This hardening of attitude went along with the entrenchment of Stalinist dictatorial rule and the adoption of a programme (‘socialism in one country’) which sought to exclude all elements of cosmopolitan thought and culture. It thus marked the end of that earlier period when Lenin had promoted his New Economic Policy, adopted chiefly with a view to normalizing trade and diplomatic relations with the West, and hence characterized by a much greater openness in the cultural, intellectual and artistic spheres. Among the chief victims of this policy-shift was Shostakovich, whose music – especially his Fourth Symphony and the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – had up to then shown distinct modernist leanings.
Shostakovich thus found himself caught between the two main currents of Marxist aesthetic theory whose conflicts of aim and priority were especially marked at this time. One was the Hegelian-Marxist conception, developed most fully by Lukács, that great works of art were those encompassing the widest range of human experience during periods of world-historical change, along with the clash between opposing ideologies or forms of residual and emergent class-consciousness. Thus the classic texts of bourgeois literary realism (e.g. the novels of Balzac or Sir Walter Scott) could be read as manifesting the socio-economic and political truths of their time despite and against their authors' overt allegiance to a ‘reactionary’ (backward-looking) ideological perspective. What made this possible was the range and multiplicity of internal perspectives, along with the presence of a focal consciousness – that of the fictive protagonist – wherein they achieved both adequate expression and universal significance.
Against that view, some critics have rejected those elements of Hegelian thinking that are still to be found in the early Marx, and which are taken as evidence that he had not yet thought these issues through to a properly Marxist (dialectical-materialist) conclusion. On their account art is the more truthful, and politically progressive, for its refusal to offer the kind of comprehensive (or ‘totalizing’) world view that Lukács so valued in the tradition of high bourgeois realism. Thus the role of art is to sharpen our perception of the various conflicts that result from some particular stage in the process of socio-economic development. This can best be achieved through genres and art forms that incorporate certain refractory elements, as for instance by drawing attention to their own compositional or formal devices, or again, by holding out against the false ideal of a seamlessly unified (‘organic’) mode of artistic representation. Most influential here was Brecht, whose plays and theoretical writings argued the case for a deliberate ‘alienation-effect’, a dramatic device that would break the theatrical illusion and so require the audience to think critically about what was happening on stage, rather than taking refuge in that realm of vicarious cathartic experience which Aristotle viewed as the chief purpose of tragedy, but which Brecht denounced as a form of mass-induced ideological complicity.
It is not hard to see how these debates can be translated into musical (or music-historical) terms. Thus there exists a close analogy between Lukács's Hegelian conception of literary realism and the idea of certain musical genres, the symphony especially, as containing or projecting whole worlds of representative human experience. On the other hand, the Brechtian approach finds a parallel in varieties of (mostly Western) Marxist musicological thought that challenge both the continuing validity of those once hegemonic genres and the very idea that music should aspire to such universal or world-historical significance. To this way of thinking, what is truly dialectical is music's resistance to forms of premature ideological closure by its emphasis on conflicts or discrepancies of style that reflect the real conditions of life in an unjust, exploitative or class-divided society.
Such techniques might be adopted with conscious intent, as for instance by composers of a Marxist persuasion such as Weill and Eisler, both of whom worked closely with Brecht and carried his precepts into musical practice. In Eisler's case this activist commitment went along with a strongly marked modernist impulse that derived in part from his early apprenticeship to Schoenberg. That his music has suffered such undeserved neglect during the postwar period is no doubt a consequence of its forthright political stance, coupled with its use of deliberately incongruous expressive and formal resources. Similar techniques were deployed by some composers of the 1920s Soviet avant garde, Shostakovich among them, whose music very often implies an equation between formal or stylistic heterogeneity and the desire to subvert conventional, i.e. ‘bourgeois’, canons of disinterested judgment and musical taste. They assume a more overt (at times didactic) form in the music of such otherwise very different composers as Nono, Cardew and Rzewski, those who have sought to revolutionize social awareness by incorporating elements of agit-prop or direct social protest. However, the Brechtian-Marxist approach can also be applied to genres that would otherwise be thought of as belonging very squarely within the mainstream musical tradition. Thus a critic might point to certain moments of unresolved tension in a work, moments that witness the pressure of conflicting ideologies or a failure to achieve the kind of long-range structural integrity – the ultimate reconciliation of diverse elements – held out as an ideal by classical conceptions of form.
Again there is a parallel to be drawn between ‘symptomatic’ readings of this sort as applied to literary texts and developments within Marxist (or Marxist-influenced) musical criticism. Most influential here has been the work of Adorno. To call that work ‘Marxist’ is to beg some large and much debated questions. Certainly Adorno rejected any version of the argument that treated works of art as mere components of the ideological ‘superstructure’, along with philosophy, religion, ethics and everything bar the economic forces and relations of production. (But then it is doubtful that any Marxist thinker of consequence, least of all Marx himself, has ever espoused so crudely reductive a doctrine.) It was also Adorno's contention, as against Hegel, that dialectical thinking should not aspire to some ultimate truth or moment of transcendence beyond all the vexing antinomies of content and form, intuition and idea, particular and universal. Rather it should practise a vigilant critique of all such totalizing claims, a ‘negative dialectic’ constantly alert to the non-coincidence between thought and its object, or the impossibility of transcending that state under late-capitalist conditions of social existence.
These arguments were laid out programmatically in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer. Here they offered a powerful, deeply pessimistic account of how ‘enlightened’ reason had betrayed its original promesse de bonheur, its self-proclaimed role as an emancipatory project that would bring about the transformation of society in accordance with ideals of truth, justice, autonomy and freedom. So far had this project miscarried, in their diagnosis, that it now stood exposed as a form of oppressive instrumental reason that had subjugated nature and culture alike to an order of exploitative technological mastery and ubiquitous mass-media control. Hence Adorno's constant injunction: that critical reason must always be deployed against itself in a negative dialectic that steadfastly refused to identify truth, in Hegelian fashion, with some existing (or soon to be achieved) standpoint of Absolute Knowledge.
Thus Adorno denounces any premature appeal to ideas of fulfilment, reconciliation or imaginative transcendence through art. Those ideas had once found authentic expression in works (for instance the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and other compositions of Beethoven's middle period) conceived at a time of revolutionary hope when it was still possible to write such affirmative music without falling into bad faith, naivety or emotional self-indulgence. But already in Beethoven's late style – the subject of a classic essay by Adorno – this prospect had receded to the point where truth could only take the form of a negative, intensely critical relation to those same expressive resources. It is on this account also that he finds much to admire in the music and literature of European modernism, unlike Lukács who notoriously viewed it as a terminal phase in the bourgeois-decadent flight from reality and reason. For Adorno, on the contrary, modernism is the last refuge of that critical spirit which refuses to make terms with a bad (inhuman and distorted) reality. Thus he mounts a strong case in defence of those works, especially the music of Schoenberg and Berg and the plays of Samuel Beckett, that hold out against the lure of a false utopia by expressing without compromise the harshness and alienation of contemporary life. Only in this way, Adorno maintains, can art and philosophy live up to their jointly inherited role as purveyors of a truth that has been distorted almost beyond recognition by the blandishments of mass-culture. It is an outlook epitomized in his withering attack upon Hegel's (positive-dialectical) claim that ultimately ‘the rational is the real’, as also by Adorno's famous question as to how lyric poetry could continue to be written after Auschwitz. Hence his practice of a rigorously self-critical style which pits its resources against all forms of delusory substitute gratification.
Other members or associates of the Frankfurt School – Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse among them – can perhaps best be seen, in contrast to Adorno, as espousing a somewhat more affirmative view of the prospects for social change. With Bloch this took the form of a sustained meditation on hope as the ultimate horizon of human existence, a transcendent – and potentially transformative – dimension that is implicit (though often concealed or obscured) in our every act and thought. Bloch's writings range widely over music, literature, philosophy, political theory and history. His aim is always to draw out those intimations of a future utopian state whose advent is prefigured – so he seeks to show – in even the most apparently debased or commodified forms of cultural production. These ideas placed considerable strain on his relationship with Adorno, though the two came to achieve some degree of reconciliation as each acknowledged the other's work as in some sense a necessary counterpart to his own. In the case of Walter Benjamin, a Brecht-inspired Marxist commitment to dialectics and historical materialism went along with a marked (and some have felt a strongly countervailing) strain of Jewish mystical or messianic thought. This produced a tensile configuration of images, metaphors and analogies in texts which often contain passages of extraordinary cryptic power.
Marcuse was, by comparison, an exoteric thinker whose ideas had great influence on the New Left movement and student revolts of the late 1960s. The sources of his thinking were mainly in psychoanalysis (as interpreted by his Frankfurt colleague, Erich Fromm) and in those writings of the early, Hegelian Marx that envisaged an end to the alienating forces of capitalist social order and a consequent liberation of our human powers of expressive and productive self-fulfilment. Unlike Adorno, he also took heart from that line of affirmative aesthetic speculation – descending chiefly from Kant by way of Schiller – which treated art as the promise of a harmony between reason and imagination beyond their present (fractured or discordant) condition. Various factors have conspired against serious assessment of Marcuse's work, but his thinking has exerted considerable influence, not least because it pointed an alternative way forward for composers and cultural theorists averse to what they saw as the self-denying rigours of Adorno's negative-dialectical approach. Hence the emergent polarization of attitudes between those in the broadly Darmstadt camp who equated progress with formal complexity (e.g. through the extension of serial techniques to every compositional parameter) and those who reacted against that idea in the name of a ‘new tonality’ or a return to more intuitive (less stringent) criteria of musical worth. It is not hard to guess what Adorno might have said about recent minimalist or neo-Romantic trends given his analysis of ‘regressive listening’, the culture-industry and the fetishized character of musical perception in an age of commodity capitalism.
Musicology was not immune to the kinds of ‘free-world’ or ‘liberal’ triumphalist rhetoric that greeted the end of communist rule in central Eastern Europe. Very often such claims went along with the idea that nothing distinguishes the heritage of Marxist political, social and philosophic thought from communism as it existed and developed in the Soviet Union and satellite states. In which case, so it is argued, Marxism now stands exposed as an utterly bankrupt and discredited doctrine whose various more specialized manifestations – in economics, sociology, historiography, ethics or literary and music criticism – must likewise be viewed as mere relics of a false and pernicious political creed. Against that reductive simplification one may point to the depth, range and diversity of Marxist criticism and the continuing relevance of such classic debates as those between Lukács and Brecht or Adorno and Bloch. Fortunately this lesson has not been lost upon a younger generation of musicologists and theorists. Nor has it failed to leave a significant mark upon disciplines such as musical anthropology and the study of popular musics in their broader socio-political context. For here also the insights of Marxist criticism are such as to provide a strong counter-argument to other, less historically (and ethically) informed varieties of cultural theory.
CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
K. Marx: Das Kapital, i–ii (Hamburg, 1867–85; Eng. trans., 1887/R, 1976–8)
K. Marx: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Moscow, 1939–41; Eng. trans., 1971)
T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer: Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam, 1947; Eng. trans., 1972/R)
H. Eisler and T.W. Adorno: Composing for the Films (London, 1947, 2/1971/R)
T.W. Adorno: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949, 3/1967; Eng. trans., 1973)
G. Lukács: Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg, 1958; Eng. trans., 1963, as The Meaning of Contemporary Realism)
T.W. Adorno: Quasi una fantasia: musikalische Schriften II (Frankfurt, 1963; Eng. trans., 1992)
P. Demetz: Marx, Engels and the Poets (Chicago, 1967)
V.I. Lenin: O literature i iskusstve [On literature and art] (Moscow, 1967; Eng. trans., 1967/R)
W. Benjamin: Illuminations (London, 1968)
H. Arvon: L'esthétique marxiste (Paris, 1970)
S. Morawski: ‘The Aesthetic Views of Marx and Engels’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxviii (1970), 301–14
P.N. Siegel, ed.: Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art (New York, 1970)
E. Kamenka, ed.: The Portable Marx (New York, 1971)
D. McLellan, ed.: K. Marx: The Early Texts (Oxford, 1971)
F. Jameson: Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectal Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1972)
B. Schwarz: Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: 1917–1970 (London, 1972)
W. Benjamin: Understanding Brecht (London, 1973)
H. Eisler: Musik und Politik: Schriften 1924–1948 (Leipzig, 1973)
C.V. James: Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London, 1973)
M. Jay: The Dialectical Imagination: a History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley, 1973)
M. Solomon, ed.: Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (New York, 1973)
L. Baxandall and S. Morawski, eds.: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art (New York, 1974)
E. Bloch: Zur Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt, 1974; Eng. trans., 1985)
P. Anderson: Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976)
E. Bloch and others: Aesthetics and Politics (London, 1977)
H. Marcuse: Die Permanenz der Kunst: wider eine bestimmte marxist Ästhetik (Munich, 1977; Eng. trans. rev. 1978)
M. Solomon: Beethoven (New York, 1977)
L. Baxandall, ed.: Marxism and Aesthetics: a Selective Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1978)
L. Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism (London, 1978)
S. Volkov, ed.: Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov (London, 1979)
A. Bush: In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays (London, 1980)
L. Fay: ‘Shostakovich versus Volkov: whose Testimony?’, Russian Review, xxxix (1980), 484–93
A. Betz: Hanns Eisler, Political Musician (Cambridge, 1982)
E. Lunn: Marxism and Modernism: an Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, 1982)
C. Norris, ed.: Shostakovich: the Man and his Music (London, 1982)
T. Bottomore and others, eds.: A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1983)
M. Jay: Marxism and Totality: the Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Cambridge, 1982)
J. Attali: Noise: the Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, 1987)
M. Sprinker: Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (London, 1987)
R. Leppert and S. McClary, eds.: Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge, 1988)
D. McLellan: Marxism After Marx: an Introduction (London, 1988)
D. McLellan, ed.: Marxism: Essential Writings (London, 1988)
C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds.: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London, 1988)
T. Eagleton: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1989)
D. Kellner: Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Cambridge, 1989)
C. Norris, ed.: Music and the Politics of Culture (London, 1989)
F. Jameson: Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London, 1990)
I. MacDonald: The New Shostakovich (London, 1990)
J.M. Bernstein, ed.: T.W. Adorno: The Culture Industry (London, 1991)
T. Carver, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge, 1991)
R. Rosengard Subotnik: Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis, 1991)
F. Mulhern, ed.: Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (London, 1992)
M. Paddison: Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993)
M. Chanan: Musica Practica: the Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London, 1994)
E. Wilson: Shostakovich: a Life Remembered (London, 1994)
D. Fanning, ed.: Shostakovich Studies (Cambridge, 1995)
M. Solomon: Mozart: a Life (London, 1995)