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CLASSICAL MUSIC AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY: A RESEARCH NOTE1
We join that rare group of scholars who challenge the traditional assumptions of autonomy and insularity of art music. We demonstrate how three systems of political thought - or political ideologies - have found expression in classical music. We note that nine other systems are similarly inclined. We specify that classical music embodies such distinctly political-- sociological concepts as class, status, power, mass movement, revolution, liberation, experimentation, organization, and the like.
INTRODUCTION
Much has been said and written about the autonomy and insularity of all art, including music. Put bluntly, this is an illusion. All art evolves in a cultural, social, and political context. This article focuses on the political-- sociological bases of classical music. Politics shapes music; music expresses political ideas - such is our main theme.
Among Western philosophers, ancient and modern, only Plato (see entry in The New Grove' and the sources cited therein) stressed the centrality of music to politics: music-such as it was in the fourth and third centuries B.C.-was viewed as an essential component of all citizens' education because it contributed to both individual and societal equilibrium, balance, and harmony.
Other philosophers-from Aristotle to Adorno, and including St. Augustine, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer (see appropriate entries in The New Grove and the sources cited therein)-speculated about music, politics, or both, but none grasped the interplay of music and politics with the urgency that had Plato. Thus, for instance, the words "political" and "politics" do not even rate an entry in such standard reference sources as The New Grove or The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Randel, 1986). The principal political-sociological topics that appear with some regularity in the works of musicology and music theory are nationalism and socialism ("socialist realism").
Only in the 1990s did the picture begin to change. Kramer (1995) set out to de-mystify and de-idealize music, bring it down to earth, make it a part of human experience, and establish its cultural/social context. More to the point, Taruskin (1995) maintained that music is inseparable from the political universe; that the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven was written against the background of the Austro-German political tradition; and that the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich has Stalinism...