I

Communisms, Communist Musics

ROBERT ADLINGTON

WITH TIlE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA in 1949, a third of the world's population came to live under communist regimes. I Forty years later, with the overthrow ofthose regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and with the market reforms and quiet abandonment of Marxist tenets that quickly followed in China, a prolonged era of international military, political and ideological tension appeared to have been brought to an end. In the interim, the lives of most ifnot all people living in the non-communist world were also shaped in some way by communism and the Cold War waged against it. In the case of some, this involvement was wished and active. The years immediately following the Second World War saw communist parties reach the height of their electoral popularity in many parts of Western Europe, in part on account of the role played by domestic communists in resistance against fascism. 2 1945 also saw the communist movement in the United States reach its 'peak of strength',3 though the onset of the Cold War quickly brought intense campaigns of persecution and intimidation, effectively obliterating the Communist Party USA and forcing members to find other outlets for their belief.,> and activism. On both sides of the Atlantic during the I 950s, prominent cultural and artistic figures Were enlisted - sometimes unwittingly - to the anti-communist propaganda effort.4 In the 19605 the Sino-Soviet split, and the growing prominence
I I al11 grateful to Robbie Liebcrman and 8en I1arker for valuable comments on early drafts of this chapter.

" ec the chart in the Introduclion to David S. Bell, cd., Western Europ(!(/n Communists and the ;'ollal'sl! o(Coll1munislI1 (Oxford: 8erg, 1993),2-3 . . Rabble LiebermJn, The Strangest Dream: COII/munism, Anti-Communism, alld the US. Peace 1945-1903 (SyraclIsc, NY: Syracusc University Press, 2(00), 55. Sce Franccs Stonor SJundcrs, Who Paid thc PII,cr? 711(' CIA alid till' ClIltllral Cold Wilr (London: Granta, 1999 J.

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Roherl Adlinglon

of communist regimes in other parts of the developing world - notably Castro's Cuba and 110 Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Victnam - lent a pluralistIC quality to communism that proved attractive both for dissenting youth and for older figures who had abandoned the Soviet model following the suppression of the Ilungarian urrising in 1956." Nuclear tensions the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the prolonged military conflict in Vietnam attitudes towards communism at all points along the spectrum of opinion. By the early 19705 the perceived of the previous decade's protest movements encouraged some in Europe and the United States to adopt more radical Marxist-Leninist and Maoist philosophies, which in some cases underpinned campaigns of violent activism. The industrial unrest brought about by increasing mechanization and the introduction of global markets led in France, Spain and Italy to the emergence of a rowerful 'Eurocommunism' asserting full independence from the Soviet Union. In Latin America and Africa, communist activists and roliticians engaged throughout the 19()Os and 1970s in struggles against autocrats, military regimes and neo-imrerialism (real and imagined). Into the twenty-first century, 'guerrilla comlllunism' - to use the term preferred by the historian ofeolllmunism David Priestland- continued to be an active force in countries such as India and Nepal.(' Given the broad and multi-faceted presence of communism outside the communist bloc after 1945, it is hardly surprising that many musicians' existences, practices and personal beliefs were also bound up with communism during this reriod. The impact was felt by Illusicians in many continents and working in every musical genre and tradition. Musicians were no difTerent in 7 this regard from writers, artists, III m-makers and other cultural figures. Yet while the left-leaning tendencies of artists and intellectuals have long been recognized, thc extent and depth of musicians' involvement in comll1unism specifically has been largely ignored in existing histories ofll1usic. This is not least by eOlllrarison with studies of the impact ofcommunisll1 upon ll1usicians behind the Iron Curtain, which have proliferated in the past two decades as archives and other previously inaccessible sources in Russia and Eastern Europe

\ See Max Elhaulll. Rel'oll/Iioll ill Ihc Air: Sixlics Radicals TI/rn 10 /'cllin. Mao olld ell<' (London: Verso. 2(02). " Davit! Priestlaml. The R"d Flog: COIIIJlllmisJll olld the Makillg o{rhc Modcrn /For'" (London:
7

Penguin: 20 I 0), 56X. See for instance DOlllinie Moran./'ah/o Neruda (London: Reaktion, 2(09); Gcrtje R. Utlcy. /'ahi" /'icusso: The ('Ol1llllllllisl Vear,l' (New Ilaven. Cl': Yale University Press, 2(00); Richard Wolin. Th" /Filld jiwlI Ihc FO.l'I: Frellch /111,,1/,,('11/(/1.1'. Ih" CI/llurul RCI"(}lulioll. uw/lh" Legacr ollll(' I'H>().I' (Princeton. N.I: Princc(on University Prcss. 200'!).

COMMUNISMS, COMMUNIST MUSICS

have become available. x While the intersection of music and politics currently preoccupies a good many musicologists, the spectacular demise of global communism since 1989, and the opprobrium that has been heaped upon communist ideology as a consequence of that demise, have tended to lead to communist-related activities and involvement being ignored, suppressed, or dismissed as youthful infatuation or frivolous detail. 9 In recent years the emergent subfield of Cold War music studies has begun to address the relevance of ideological debates arollnd communism for musicians outside the communist bloc, III but the prevailing focus there has been upon those figures who declared themselves or their music entirely detached from politics, and thereby (ironically) emboldened their propaganda value for a US diplomatic effort revolving around expressive' freedom' and liberty. Neglected, then, are those musicians more outspoken in their political stances, and also the substantial role played by local communist organizations in musical life during this period. Only in folk music scholarship has there been more general recognition of the importance of communism to music outside the communist bloc. This has included explorations of the cultural initiatives of the Communist Party USA to support folk music ('the people's music') in the 1940s and 1950s, and of the centrality of communist figures to the British folk revival. 11 Ethnomusicological research has also produced compelling studies of the interrelation of communism and music in Latin America and Asia, although this too has tended to concentrate on developments within communist states. 12
'See for instance Rachel Beckles Willson. Ugeli, I\ur((ig and lIungarian Music nuring Ihe Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20(7); Danielle Fosler-Lussier. Music nil'ider!: 8arlok's regael' in Cold- War CU/lure (Bcrkelcy: University of Cali fiJrnia Press, 200(,); Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Naliollalism: Frolll Glinka 10 Sla/ill (New Havcn. CT: Yale Univcrsity Press. 20(7); Petcr Schmclz. Such Freedolll. I(Onl\' Musical: Uno!1icia/ SOI'iel Music f)urillg Ihe Thall' (Ncw York: Oxf(ml University Press, 20(9). 'I Exceptions arc single-figurc studies of politically committed musicians. such as John Tilbury. COl"llelills ("ardell': A Uti' Unlinished (1Iat'low: Copula. 200X) and Stephcn Chase and Philip Thomas. eds, ('hangillg Ihe S,'slelll: The Music o(("hrislian Wo/lj"(Aldershot: Ashgate, 20 I 0). III See f()! instance Mark CaIT(;II, Aiusic alld Ide%gy in Posl-War Euro!,e (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2(04); Richard Taruskin. The Or/im/llislor\' o(Weslel"ll Music, vo\. 5 (New York: Oxf(ml University Press. 200S); Amy Hcal, Ne\\" Music. Nell' A/lies: ,fmerican Er!,erilllenla/ Alusic ill Wesl (ierlllanr/i'ollllhe /el"O HOII/'lo Re-Uni/icalioll (Berkeley: University of'Cali f(lrIlia Press. 20(6); and two issues of'.Jollma/ o(AllIsic%gl' (2009). 11 See respectively Robbie Licberman, 111" SOllg Is i\!I' JYea!'oll: I'co!'/e '.I' Songs. AIIt('l"i("(/1I COlltlllllllisllt. and Ihe I'olilics o(CII/lllre. 11)30 50 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 19X5) and Lieberman, The Slrangesl f)rl'all/; Hen Ilarker. Class Acl: The CII/lllra/ and I'olilica/ Uti' o( 10\\"(//1 (I.ondon: "Iuto Press. 20(7). For a related but controversial perspective. see also J)ave Ilarkcr, Fakesong: The Manll/ilclwe o/Brilish 'Fo/honl!., 170010 Ihe Presl'nl !Jay (Milton Keynes: Open University Press. I'iR5). 12 A notable contribution is a volumc of' thc Brilish .Jollma/ o(l:'lhIlOIltIlSic%g.l entitled 'Red

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Rolierl AdlillglOIl

Whilst cOlllmunism thus does not loom large in histories of music outside the communist bloc, recent years have seen a resurgence of general scholarlY interest in 'Western communism'. This has been stimulated partly by the twentieth anniversary of the' fall of communism', which brought the launch of a new scholarly journal (Twenfiefh-Cel1fllrl' Co 111 m un is 1/1 ), and high-profile conferences (April and May 2009, for instance, saw major conferences in London and ltaly).ll But another reason for a resurgence of interest in communism is undoubtedly the global crisis caused by the collapsc of financial institutions in autumn 200S. As the Introduction to the volume of papers delivered at the April 2009 London conference has it, state 'bail-outs' of ailing institutions, and the economic downturn and austerity measures that swiftly followed, seemed to mean 'socialism for the banks, capitalism for the poor' .14 Stimulated by recent reflections upon 'the communist hypothesis' by political philosopher Alain Badiou, the bald intention of that volume (and of others to arise from the same debate) is to urge its readers to undertake a positive reassessment of the 'idea of communism' for the twenty-first century." In similar vein, Tariq Ali, the best-known British veteran of 1965, writes:
The of" official Communism in the twentieth century and the restoration of"capitalism in Russia and China, with all that this has entailed, f"ar f"rom negating some of" the premises that underlined the project in the first place, elllphasizes their continuing importance. I (,

The continuing attraction of communism for many intellectuals newly pronounced in the context of the very evident shortcomings of twenty-flrstcentury global capitalism remains the object of continuing criticism from cOllllllunism's entrenched opponents, especially in the United States. Recent studies continue to urge vigilance regarding the ongoing presence of Marxist

Rilual: Ritual Music and COllllllunism' (1111 (2(J02)). which includes chapters on Cuba, China, North Vietnam and Pcru. II These conferences were titled, respectively, 'On the Idea of Coml11unism', and 'VOIl1
11

l'urokOl11nlllnislllus /ur sozialcn DCl11oKratie. Costas Douz.inas and Slavoj Zi;ek, eds. The Idell O(C'Oll1l11l1l1i.I1II (London: Verso, 2(10). vii. I1 Alain Iladiou, 'The Communist lIypothesis', The Nelll.eji Rn;e\\', 49 (January February 20(}X).' http://www.newlef"trcview.org/A2705> (accessed 26 April 2(12); Alain Badiou, ill" ('Ollllllllllis/ /I1"/)o//H'sis t I.undon: VerS(I, 20 I 0). Iladiou summarizes the cOllll11unist hypotheSIS as asscrting 'thal a different collective organization is proeticablc, onc that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour' (Badioll, 'The ('onllllunist Ilypothesis'). Sec also Bruno Hosteci's The Ai"lIIIIIi/I' 11(( '0 III III 1111 ism (London: Verso. 20 I I ). the ail11 of which 'is to v'erify whether communism ... can be something l110re than a utopia Illr beautiful souls'
(19)
110

Tanq Ali. fill' Id(,1I

O(COllllllllllislIl

(I.ondon: Seagull Books. 200!)), 4.

COMMUNISMS, COMMUNIST MUSICS

and Marxist-Leninist seams within European leftist organizations, and attempt psychological diagnoses of the social prestige of leftist affiliations within academic circles and sections oflhe urban intelligentsia, a prestige that appears to have withstood the recurrent disastrous of all serious attempts to realize communism in practice,I7 Richard Posner's withering inventory of the attributes that ineline Western intellectuals to sympathy with communism undoubtedly applies to at least some of the schooled musicians drawn to a system to which they were, conveniently, not subjugated in their daily lives:
1\ proclivity for taking extrcme positions, a taste for universals and abstraction, a dcsire for moral purity, a lack of worldliness, and intellectual arrogance work together to inducc in many academic public intellectuals selective cmpathy, a selcctive scnsc of justicc, an insensitivity to context, , . an impatiencc with prudence and sobriety, a lack of rcalism and excessive sell'-confidcnce,IK

The leading American musicologist Richard Taruskin has been foremost in reminding musicologists and musicians alike of the dangers of utopian thinking, which in the cases of communism and fascism 'always implied a body count', I') For Taruskin, the 'purely aesthetic' consequences of musicians' involvement to immure those musicians fi'om negative ethical with dangerous ideologies evaluation, not least because the appeal to art's autonomy ref1ects the same arrogant utopian impulse to disregard the inconvenient reality of people 's actual preferences, desires and aspirations, Insistence on music's answerability to higher principles, in Taruskin 's view, lies not so far removed fi'om communism's coercive suppression of difference in the cause of a greater good. Clear-cut polemical intent, to one or other side of this debate, was emphatically not part of the agenda of the three-day conference in which this volume originated - 'Red Strains: Music and Communism outside the Communist Bloc after 1945', held at the British Academy in London in January 201 1. It was expected that the meeting would attract speakers with a range of views, from those with a personal commitment to the ideological standpoints they discussed, to those for whom communism was 'the biggest political delusion of the twentieth century'. 20 In the event, more dispassionate stances generally prevailed, although not without moments of sharp disagreement and tension. For
17 Paul Gottli'ied, The Slrallgc Dcalh ,,{MarxislII: The /,'lmJ/JCI/II I.cti ill Ihc Nelt' Mil/Cllllilllll (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 200S); Paul lIollander, The 1,'11,1 o{ ("Ollllllill/ICIII: IlIle//ecllla/s, IIc,'o/lIliollaric.\'lIl1d Polilica/ Mo/"(/lil.l' (('hicago: Ivan R. Dec. 20()(). 1< Richard I'osncr, cited in Ilollander, Thc 1,'lId o{e 'o1llIlliIIllCII/, X. 1<' Richard Taruskin, T!re f)allger ,,(MlIsic alld Ol!rer Allli-Ulopiall Essa.1's (Ikrkeky: University oj'Caliti)rnia Press. 2(10). xii. Cl' John (iray, review of Priestland, The Rcd F/ag, in New Statesman. 27 August 200'!,

Rohert AdlillgtOI1

those conccrned to stake out unambiguous positions on the question of communism, the present volume, in trying to preserve the balance of perspectives offered during the conference, may as a result be vulnerable to criticism from both directions - representing an act of bourgeois 'recuperation' on the one hand; veiled red apologia on the other. 2 ! Yet the complexity of the phenomenon of 'communism outside the communist bloc' militates against stock judgements or position-taking. This is made clear by asking the question: what, exactly, was (or is) communism? The answer is hardly straightforward. According to the cultural critic Raymond Williams, the word 'communism' was used to describe quite different ideologics even before Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto of 1848. This diffuseness was only exacerbated with the creation in 1918 of the Bolshevik All-Russian Communist Party (Williams describes this as 'an act of historical reconstitution of the word'), the subsequent splintering of the Third International, and the growing global influence of divergent readings of Marxism. 22 For the sake of the Red Strains conference, the term was pragmatically considered to encompass developments related first to those figures and entities who considered themselves 'communist', and secondly to those inspired by Marxist-Leninist thought and its myriad offshoots. But this does not make it easier to discern a common core of shared ideas or beliefs. It incorporates many individuals and groups with mutually contradictory viewpoints, as well as many Marxist-Leninists - for instance, most Trotskyists who rejected the term 'communist' itself. The Eurocommunism of the 1970s defined itself precisely by its distance from the pro-Stalinism of European Communist Parties of the 1950s. These positions were markedly different again from those of the small Maoist groups that sprang up all over Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s. The communist nationalism of parts of Latin America and Asia had its own distinctive characteristics; and the relationship of the great majority of Wcstern and Third World communist organizations to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was vexed and subject to frequent realignment. Many Westerners who considered themselves communist remained wholly independent of formal movements or groups, for principled reasons of ideological difference. Others attached themselves to ideas and idols of which
http://www.newstatcsman.com/books/2009/0S/ co mill u n ism -comlllun ist-sov iet > (accesscd 26 i\priI2(12). " The conference stimulated both reactions, as can be seen from the blog posting of composer .lames MaeMillan, and the subsequent readers' responses: <http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ j lllacllli Ilan/l O()OS0951/discord-alllong-the-colllradcs-as-elderly-comll1unist-Illllsic-Iovers-Iosetheir-rag!" (acccssed 31 January 2(11). 21 RaYll1ol1d Williallls, Kevl1'o,.ds, revised edition (London: Fontana, 19X3), 73 -75.
<

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COMMUNISMS, COMMUNIST MUSICS

they had little or no direct knowledge - Mao's Cultural Revolution, for instance and then promptly abandoned them when the appalling realities were eventually exposed beyond doubt. (The romanticism of revolutionary ideals attracted no small number of musicians for whom the artistic productiveness of the encounter was at times inversely related to the detail of their knowledge of Marxist texts and practices.) Little surprise, then, that many scholars of the left increasingly prefer to refer to 'communisms' in the plural. 23 A corresponding irreducible diversity marks both the attitudes and practices of communist musicians outside the communist bloc, and the various investments in music made by communist organizations. This was made vividly apparent by two sessions at the Red Strains conference involving distinguished musicians with a personal involvement with communism. A panel session was addressed by the composers Giacomo Manzoni and Konrad Boehmer, and the folk-singer and lyricist Ernie Lieberman. There followed an interview with rock musician and writer Chris Cutler, together with a response from musician and scholar Georgina Born, who had performed together with Cutler in the band Henry Cow. The present volume includes these five musicians' contributions in full. While other individuals would undoubtedly have different stories to tell, these statements nonetheless provide a remarkable and unprecedented crosssection of perspectives and reminiscences from musicians representing diverse national histories (Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom), distinct generations (spanning the entire post-war era), and contrasting musical traditions. Many of the 'red strains' that emerge both within and between these powerfully honest evaluations - in which ongoing strength of political conviction does not preclude elements of self-criticism continue to resonate throughout the remaining chapters of the book. In order to trace some of the more prominent binding themes within the contested territory mapped by the volume as a whole, I make use here of a schema offered in Georgina Born's presentation, which helpfully singles out five 'dimensions of the mutual mediation of music and politics'. These arc: the direct involvement of musicians and music in political and social movements; musicians' rc-imagining of the institutional and organizational forms supporting the production and distribution of music; the social relations of
2.1 Sce for instance the reeent conferences on 'Post-socialist Prospects and Contemporary Commllnisms in Art 1I istory', <http://networkingthebloc.blogspot.com/p/post-socialist-prospectsand.html.> and 'Local COl11munisms, 1917- iN', <http://histOlyresearch.glam.ac.llk/colllmunisms/> (both accesscd 26 April 2012). Along similar lines, Ernesto Screpanti refers to a 'proliferation of Marxisms ... [marked by] the richness and the diversity of interpretations and philosophical oricntations'; Ernesto Screpanti, Uhertarian COl11l11unislII: A/a/"X, Engcls and tlie Political Ec(}//olln' (}(Freedolll (Basingstokc: Palgrave Macmillan, 20(7). ix.

Robcrt Adlington

. practice . and penormance; r i t' it ' -I.e., ., of musicalf 1e po I ItlCS 0 f th e aest 1e IC musical materials themselves; and the use of music as a vehicle for and mediator 0 texts. Of these, it is the fourth dimension - the politics of the aesthetic - that largest in the contents of this volume. This. be a reflecti.on ongol11g resonance of what was arguably the defll1ll1g cultural antithesIs . the Cold War era, between the realism of Soviet art and the abstraction (Of, iD 24 Soviet terms, 'formalism') of much modernist production in the West. chapters in this book demonstrate that positioning on the realism-abstractiOn spectrum was by no means a reliable indicator of political stance, and how the vcry idea ofidcntifying a particular musical style as authcntically 'red came under increasing strain from the 1960s onwards. The chapters by Anne Red Shrefller and Gianmario Borio - keynote speakers at - each pertall1 to these key questions. Shreff1er delll1eates two 11lstoncs progrcssive music' in the twentieth century: the one privileging accessibility to the masses; the other prioritizing advanced idioms that pose as criticism of the establ ished order. Focusing upon musical works and debates from the 1920s to the 1950s, shc argues that assumptions made about the appropriate musical idiom to embody a leftist political message depended significantly upon time and place. The bifurcation between Populist and Modernist impulses, she noteS, 'reflects tensions with Marxism itself', whose dual imperatives of mass reYOlutionary action and the liberation of individual consciousness arguably pointed in opposite directions as far as musical style was concerned. 25 Local conditions could incline communist musicians one way or the other, as is clearly evident from other chapters in this book: compare Giacomo Manzoni, who 'never any contradiction' between artistic experimentation and his communist la convictions, with Argentinian folk-singer Yupanqui, who is quoted by Fabio Orquera as stating simply: 'I play the music of the people'. musicians vacillated between the two impulses. Konrad Boehmer, schooled In Marxist critical theory and post-war serialism but drawn towards Maoism in the early 1970s, dcpicts the compositional dilemma that this new presented in terms of the triangular poles of Stock ha us en, North Korean socialist realism, and the appealing synthesis of Hanns Eisler's militant music - none
For an account, sce Karol Bergcr, A Theory 0/Art (New York: Oxford University Prcss, 1999), 140-50. Peter Schmelz, however, has noted the manifold difficulties in adhering to a rigid equa-

2j

tion of abstraction with anticommunist West and realism with communist East; see Schl]1c1Z., 'Introduction: Music in the Cold War', Journal a/Musicology, 26/1 (Winter 20(9), 3-16: 9. , 25 In the early years of the new Soviet Republic, furious debates between the main musicians organizations revolved around precisely this dilemma; scc Amy Nelson, Music/or fhe Musicians alld Power ill Early Soviet Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univcrs 1ty Press, 20(4),41--44.

COMMUNISMS, COMMUNIST MUSICS

of which, however, could completely satisfy. What Beate Kutschke describes as th' I' e pro etanan turn' of the West European left at the very end ofthe 1960s propelled many engaged avant-garde musicians into fraught territory that frequently resulted in awkward creative compromises between populist and experimental impulses (the collective 'Mannesmann Cantata', cxamined by Kutschk' '. , e, IS a case 111 pomt), and rendered the most ardent convcrts - such as Cornelius Cardew - adrift from both established institutions and former col26 leagues. Communist movements, too, could find realignments on the question of aesthetics to be necessary or strategically beneficial. A striking example is what Ben Eade terms the 'remarkable volte-face' of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the late 1950s, when a new generation of young communist COI11achieved decisive influence upon official policy, and the 'nco-realism' of party stalwarts like Mario Zafred was abruptly abandoned in favour of serial experiment. 27 Eade intriguingly takes sharp issue with the verdict ofhisloryone determined in no small part by what he calls a 'modernist musicology' that the subsequent obscurity of musical neo-realism was well-deserved. Dilemmas of this kind were especially pressing after 1960, when demo?raphic shifts, re alignments on the terrain of musical genre, and the growing Imperative upon communists to demonstrate their distance from the diktats of the Soviet authorities rendered claims for the ideological rectitude of either avant-garde or vernacular musics ever-more problematic. Gianmario Borio examines a later phase of Italian communist-inspired thought on music, from the eurly 1960s through to the mid-1970s, when a widespread desirc to resist the 'planning of everyday life' /cd to a politicization across multiple musical genres, both 'Populist' (folk and rock music) and 'Modernist' (improvisation and avant-garde music theatre). This movement represented, as Borio notes, an 'original conjunction of popular and experimental ventures', one that culminated in the PC!'s open declaration in 1973 of the need to resist 'any impulsc to identify with any specific "poetics" or "tendency", ... 10 ignore the great variety of creative experiences' .2X Nonetheless, all 0 f the developments traccd by Borio share a faith in innovation of one sort or another, as the vehicle for 'antagonist' sentiment - afIirming ShrefTIer's observation that the Modernist mOdel for socialist music has predominated in Europe (thc Populist one, by
cc the critique offered by admirers of Cardew in Eddie Prcvosl, cd., COI"l1f!/iIlS Cardew: A (Harlow: Copula, 2006), xiv-xvii (Michael Parsons); 350-52 (Richard 13arrett). Another case of a Western European communist composer (Serge Nlgg) responding sympathetically though not uncritieally to socialist rcalist tenets is explored in Leslie A. Sprout, 'The 1')45 S travlllsky . . F ranee,. ' /Olll"ll{l . I (!/' Debates: Nigg, Messiacn. and the Early Cold W ar 111 26/1 (Winter 2(09),85-131; see especially 123-24 on Nigg's Piano Concclio (1954). (Jlorgio Napolitano, cited in Gianmario Borio's chaplcr in this yolumc.
2"

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R oherl AdIi nglol1

contrast, finding greatest purchase in the United States and the Soviet bloc). It should be noted however, that not every instance of communist position-taking on musical genre and style was motivated by questions of principle. As we will sce, in the desire to capitalize upon the dissent and activism of the 1960s youth counterculture, many communist organizations countenanced an instrumentalization of kinds of musical expression that, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, were undoubtedly theoretically problematic. A second contested axis which pertains to the question ofthe politics ofthe aesthetic -. that is to say, to the notes themselves (so to speak) - involves the handling of cultural difference. That this was a germane issue for Marxist aesthetics is clear enough from the history of Soviet negotiations with the cultural 'others' containcd within the borders of the USSR. Marxist theory advocated the international unity of the proletariat and regarded nation states as bourgeois entities; national sentiment functioned to hold back social progress by uniting exploited and exploiter against external oppressors. Despite this danger, Lenin opted for considerable state support for the ethnic minorities of the new Republic, support intended, in Marina Frolova- Walker's words, 'to win the confidence of the peoples' .2'1 Yet the sanctioned musical expressions of local nationalisms in the Soviet era typically took the non-indigenous forms of opera and symphony, and in their handling of folk material aped the oriental isms of the nineteenth-century Russian nationalists - aspects fully in keeping with the growing centralism and imperial nostalgia of the Soviet leadership, not to mention its disregard for basic human rights ..l O Revelations about Stalin's grotesque crimes, and especially the convulsions of 1956, convinced many communists outside the Soviet bloc of the need to develop a communist theory and practice clearly distinct from that of the USSR - an 'other communism', in Manzoni's words, onc that was specifically attuned to human rights and individual freedom. This view received confirmation with the pronounced emergence, in the course of the 1960s, of what Ben Piekut (in his interview with Chris Cutler) describes as 'a field of different struggles that aligned themselves along different axes - of gender, race, nation, sexuality', replacing what had previously been thought of as a single struggle delineated along class lines. More than ever, social dissent was forming around a recognition and valuing of difference. Identification with 'others' had been intrinsic to much communist activism well before the 1960s. American communists had championed the rights of

2'1
1i,

rrolova-Walker, Russiall Music lIlId Natiollalism, 303.

Ibid., 304 OS.

COMMUNISMS, COMMUNIST MUSICS

II

African Amcricans many years prior to the civil rights movement; Ernie Lieberman, for instance, recalls the centrality of interracial collaboration to his singing activities in the United States of the 1940s and early 1950s, a commitment that came at a heavy cost to the professional lives of all involved. The conviction that anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism were related struggles similarly aroused communist sympathies and sometimes active involvement with the distant national liberation struggles of colonized peoples in the wake of the Second World War. Yet arguments for equality of treatment did not equate to a commitment to preservation of difference; and debates around dillcrent musical cultures reveal this to be a point of sensitivity for Marxist musicians and organizations. Eamonn Kelly's examination of uses of music by the Black Panther Party (BPP) at the end of the 1960s highlights the party's growing opposition to the 'cultural nationalism' of other black nationalist movements that is to say, their focus upon African ancestry through clothes, hairstyles and other cultural forms (including music). The BPP's Marxist theorists viewed such preoccupations as a distraction from the underlying economic causes of oppression, and their own propagandistic uses of musie consequently came to downplay the overt Afrieanisms of other black activist musicians. In the very different context of the opera The SlIgar Reapers (1961 by the British communist composer Alan Bush, clear attempts were made, as Joanna Bullivant shows, to incorporate elements of the indigenous l11usies of the dillcrent ethnic communities ofl3ritish Guiana. But strikingly, full endorsement of cultural difference was withheld by the fact that the characters most associated with socialist ideals are represented by the least 'exotic', most 'Western' music. Amongst the studies in this volume, some of the strongest examples of advocacy of national difference emerge in response to the specific threat of 'coca-colonization' or 'the Marshall plan in the field of ideas', as l3ritish communists regarded the growing global pervasiveness of American popular culture (sec Ben I-Iarker's chapter). This 'brain-softening cultural invasion' (to quote I-Iarker's characterization of the communist view) gave new impetus to the Communist Party of Great l3ritain's engagement with Britain's national folk culture, which had hitherto held an ambivalent status in relation to the party's internationalist and revolutionary agendas; reconceived as a 'radical nationalism' rather than a 'bourgeois' one, home-grown folk traditions were now regarded as having potential to counter the spread of the synthetic products of the US culture industry. Similarly, in Australia the folk musical Reed\' River, staged in 1953 by a communist theatre group (and discussed in Anthony Ashbolt and Glenn Mitchell's chapter), conspicuously rejected American models for musical theatre, and in the process symbolized a new confidence in the potential

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Robert Adlinglon

31 Tl e flip side value of home-grown traditions as f0D11S of cultural resistance. 1 b the to this stance was that those vernacular musics of other peoples touched .'jwed clear influence of an increasingly global American culture tended to be etter with disdain, quite regardless of the fact that Marxists ought to have been pan equipped than most to comprehend the historicity and economic relations of all cultural forms. Bullivant reports Bush's dIsapp .can ment that the repertoire of many Guianese musicians revolved around Amen tie t R construe songs learned from the radio. A few years later, in the libretto 0 e oserS (,Reconstruction'), a music-theatre work by a team of young Dutch ssa about Latin American resistance to US imperialism, Astrud s nova style was bluntly dismissed as a 'US interpretation of Latin-American I of music' .32 Conversely, Fabiola Orquera's description of the European trave/en_ Atahualpa Yupanqui emphasizes the appeal ofthe perceived purity and aut 1 ticity of the songs of this 'Indian Casals' to his French communist 11 tlO d' h' I f' . I thnic libera , For t1 10SC Immerse ID t clr own strugg es or natlOna or e . d no the legitimacy of culturally specific forms of expression usually reqUIre d a defence or explanation. In Chile and Argentina, the nueva cancion primary role in the anti-colonialist movements ofthc 1960s and 19705, al1 re . Iy f'ostere d b ' musicians and orga11lZatlons. . . 31 This gen y active y coml11Ul11st was expressly rooted in indigenous folk music, but conspicuously steered. from 'traditional "tourist" folk' in favour of a progressive idiom that dl a . . . 34 abjure US ll1fluence. In her chapter on Nepalese commu11Ist mUSIcla, . I Stirr shows how sentiments of national unity were common both to the offiCla , rOculture of the 'Panchayat' dictatorship of the 19605 and 1970s and to the P r . songs , 0 f' tI ' resistance. It was commu11Ist . song, hoW eve , le communist gresslve that found more room for musical elements from minority ethnic partly due to the desire to convert regional populations through 'shared I? en sounds'. More recently, communist and Maoist parties in Nepal have glY j e morc formal recognition to distinct ethnic cultures, although Stirr notes that . 0 f et1 "d . d neces sa1 assertion 1l1IC 1 entity appears to be regarde by these groups as a I .) .. I . . I'd' tators lIP transltiona stage, rather than a deSired end-pomt. Somewhat as t le IC <

VI:

11 . . I wave of . 1 IllS was but a tcmporary phase however; Ashbolt and Mitchell show that the SCCOll( . !lin folk revival ill Australia was nourished by thc political folksong culture emerging from WIt the United States. 13" 32 L ' . OUIS Andnessen c/ al., Blaudruk van de opera Recol1s/ruc/ie (Amsterdam: De !3 cz igc I]. , 1969),32. For lllorc on this work, sec Robert Adlington, "'A sort of gucrrilla": Che at the opera, Opcra Journal, 1912 (2007), " 3/711 Jan hurley, 'La Nucva Cane ion Latiuoamcricana', Bulle/in of La/in American Reseal 1./1, (\9!l4),107-15. . H Ibid., 109.

COMMUNISMS, COMMUNIST MUSICS

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of the proletariat' W ' d' . . conum' . as regar ed m orthodox Marxism as a transition to true 1l11Sm In Nep I ' . " . " Stirr's " a promotmg sohdantJes wlthm oppressed groups' is (in Words) '1 111 f' . groups ' ' c eans 0 movl11g towards the dissolution of such distinct , as well as the' I' . " A' ' mequa ItteS wlthm and among them'. fi. '" s will be cl the ki d ' ear lOm the foregomg conSIderatIOn of debates surrounding . n sot music plaYed as . appropnate to communist ideology, communist movements musI'cI' active a role in staking out positions as did individual communist , ans B 'f" POlitics'th' o,rn s I:St 'dimension of the mutual mediation of music and and P I' . rows attentIOn directly onto the engagement of musicians with social the COol ItJcaJ movements, a topie of primary interest in the present volume. In IrSe oftl '1' 11 . national le .0 OWIng chapters, we encounter musicians who belonged to OPPOsed parties; who belonged to Maoist or Trotskyist organizations ' J commU11lst .parties; . who were not them, In vanous W selves. ays, 0 t natlona party mcmbe b t . . run by rs u were Immersed 111 cultural orgamzatJOns set up an d eommuni,t . . otherw' s parties; who performed at commU11lst events or were ISe patro' d b ' .. mitmcnt YeommU11lst orga11lzatlOns; or had a deep personal comMany Marxist or Ma:xist-Leninist ideology without any formal affiliation. Which th e chapters testify to the activism of musicians within the groups to was "f"J' ey belonged, as well as to the ways in which their musical practice c, lected b . of direct .. y their political engagement - not least through setting texts irnport PO.ltttcal import (Born's fifth dimension, and a topic of particular . .. . ance 111 th h . e c apters by Erme and Robble Lleberman, FablOla Orquera, Antho n A Und Yj .shbolt and Glenn Mitchell, Eamonn Kelly, and Anna Stirr). f : ' . . . er Y111g (h got involv . e acts (often undisclosed or forgotten) of which 1l1USICHl11S ofintere ed WIth which organization lie significant considerations of the kinds differ st afforded by music for those groupings. The attitudes of parties could . . markedly fi' In this b IOm those of affiliated musicians. In several cases examJl1ed nizatl' ook, musicians were left disappointed by the decisions of the orgaonsto wh' I for inst . IC 1 they belonged or felt drawn. Ben Harker and Jeremy Tranmer, . . Party .of ' Great B'" ance (CPGB) .' hlghl'Ig htt he cautiousness ofthe C01l1mul11st IIta111 caSe d WIth regard to the folk revival and punk respectively, which in the first 1 roveprOl . Maoi. 11l11ent communist folk musicians such as Ewan MacCoJJ towaf( S sm, and i th . 11 e second case laid the way open for the energetic grassroots activ' , IS111 ofth T . " On 0 . e rotskYlst Socialist Workers Party, who champIOned punk as lIr SIde' B new G . eate Kutschke records a parallel reluctance on the part of the ef]l1an 'K' (' . ' 1 Cantata' Kommunistisch ') parties to patronIze the expenmenta , Wntten b , At th, b Y some ot their own members. reach e. ase of these party stances lay the strategic need to prioritize electoral andlnflu' .. . ence Over more abstract questions ofcuJtural polItiCS. Expediency freque tl n Y det . . I en111ned organizations' investments in music. Thus Jl1 the ate

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1950s, as Cold War tensions started to thaw and transatlantic hostility appeared to offer fewer electoral dividends, the CrGB accordingly retreated from the anti-American nationalism favoured by MacColl. Two decades later, the CPGB's desire to forge alliances with mainstream political parties determined a focus upon respectability that proscribed association with punk. In Germany, the cOlllmunist 'K-parties', for their part, simply couldn't see any benefit in investing in music that spoke only to a tiny audience. More outwardly ambitious were the cultural programmes of the largest European communist parties in France and Italy, although this was in part a luxury afforded by their substantial established electoral following. 3 .1 In both countries large cultural festivals were regularly held, which from the late 1960s onwards featured increasingly diverse musical programmes, incorporating rock and avant-garde music alongside the traditional music and popular classics of yore. Part of this diversity arose as an attempt to respond to the new manifestations of dissent evident in the youth counterculture, which revolved around kinds of music previously considered by communists to be beyond the pale. Eric Drott characterizes this pluriform cultural policy on the part of the Parti Communiste Franyais as a strategy of 'impression management', designed to reach as many potential sympathetic constituencies as possible. In concocting 'a programme for every taste', as pUblicity for the 1970 Fete de I 'humanite declared, the idea that di fferent sorts of music possessed differcnt ideological value was entirely abandoned, in favour of an attempt to portray the communist family as encompassing of all social difference. As Drot! observes, from an electoral perspective this was considered an unavoidable move in a context where the industrial proletariat constituted a steadily diminishing proportion of the population a drastic challenge for parties historically formed around the interests of precisely this sector. As is indicated by the fact that the yearly PCF-sponsored Fete continues to draw huge audiences, whilst the party itself today attracts less than 5 per cent of votes for the French National Assembly, the use of music to attract a wider crowd by no means necessarily brought electoral gain. Drott notes how a pleasurable music festival carried the risk of 'papering over' the very fissures from which the party's onc-time vigour stemmed. Music's corporeal pleasures, and its affordance of forms of solace and escape, carried distinct risks for organizations hoping to stoke revolutionary resistance and contestation. Ashbolt and Mitchell describe the deep suspicions of senior Australian communists

" In Italy, lill' instance, on account of its strength in local government during the 1'I70s and I'IX()s the I'C'I enjoyed substantial authority over prestigious cultural organizations such as La Scala; see I'aola Mer/i, 'The Opera I 10llse and Cultural Policy: The Post-war Politics of La Scala, Milan', Ph.D. thesis, De Montii)rt University, 2007.

,1' .. '''(;

1 j

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towards jazz, whose young audiences threatened to succumb to 'the inanities of Tin Pan Alley, or the eroticism of Bessie Smith'. Their fears appear to have been confirmed, in so far as the jazz club established by the party's youth wing, in the hope that (as Ashbolt and Mitchell felicitously put it) audiences could be 'danced into the party', drew a large but fickle crowd who quickly moved away once the best bands moved on elsewhere. Ambivalence about the unwanted effects of music was similarly encapsulated in the description offered by the Black Panther Party of the agitprop vocal group formed in 1970 out of the party's own members: the Lumpen (as they were aptly named) 'sing not to make profit or stimulate emotions, but to make revolution and stimulate action'. Yet as Eamonn Kelly remarks, these priorities carried the converse risk of failing to engage audiences at all, for in underestimating what Brian Ward has termed 'the politics of pleasure', they 'neglected the sensual gratification which crucially shapes an audience's potential receptivity to any message in popular music'.36 As Eric Drott has shown elsewhere, in the wake of May 1968 in France it was precisely the issue of pleasure as a medium for revolt that separated the new 'cultural leftists' from the more orthodox Marxist groups - the former accusing the latter of reproducing 'essentially capitalist forms of rationality' and the 'same repressive system of little bosses and duties to fulfil' Y Many communists found it difficult to draw a clear distinction between the bodily pleasures afforded by jazz and rock, and the industry that was fuelled by such pleasures, with its associated extremes of wealth and exploitation. An acute awareness of the mediating presence and social consequences of the 'institutions of musical production and distribution' - the focus of Born 's second dimension of musical-political articulation - was second nature to many communist musicians. The machinations of commerce were regarded with acute suspicion by most of the musicians surveyed in this book - not that their music was typically of much interest to the music business, making the suspicion an affordable as well as principled one. There was not complete impermeability between the two fields, but contact tended to be viewed with ambivalence. The band Henry Cow made its public breakthrough with an album on the then recently launched Virgin label but, as Chris Cutler describes, the group's later, more pronounced political awareness came about partly because of the very difficulty of sustaining the relationship with Virgin as the band's music became

\(, 13rian Ward, cited in Eamonll Kclly's chapter in this volume. Eric Drott, MlI.I'ic alld l!lI! EIII.I'i\'c Rc\'(}llIlioll: Cllllllral Polilics alld Polilical Cllllllre ill Frallcc. 1%8 11)81 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 201 1), 1HR-n. french Maoists, in return, accused their opponents of indulging in 'petty bourgeois illusions concerning the possibility of individual "liberation'" (192).
11

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Roherl Adlinglon

more experiment'cl. I A' C l ' . . , S ut cr stnkll1gly expresscs it, 'we came to our I10litical . ositions by way )(', II " . . . an envlP , t cl eo eetlve IInperatlve to protect and survive 111 , , ronment in which wc had very little support from the mainstream structures, ent Henry Cow wa' ' s wouncI up Just as the Rock Against Racism (RA R) l11e)vel11 . was gaining momentum in Great Britain, which deployed popular l11usicl.ans who had already achieved market success to further the message of anti-racism at a timc when racist political parties were making some national Jeremy Tranmer's account of the support offered to RAR by the TrotskYlst Socialist Workers Party (SW!') makes clear that many in the SWP viewed punk, in particular, as 'a genuinely working class movement with revolutionary potential'. Yet the patronage offered by SWP was criticized by others the radical left - including members of the CPGB and the Marxist MusIC For Socialism group - as represcnting a tacit endorsement of the capitalist mUSIC industry. 1l' communist ' . mUSICians , . . d bY ,'ISS0 were generally unprepared to be tall1te . ciation with structures that used music as a means to the acculllulation of capital, what other mechanisms were available to support the production and distributIOn of their work? For those plying music recognized as 'high art', there was sometimes the possibility -- in Europe at least _ of governlllental patronage, either directly (from a culture ministry) or indirectly (through a performing or.gan lzation funded by the state). A known communist affiliation could dramatically compromise onc's chance of success with sueh funding - it contributed to the neglect of Alan Bush's music, for instance - but this was not necessarily the case: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it suited somc Western European gOV, . tlle ti"eedom ernments to f'und overtly oppositional art as a way of dClllonstratll1g of expression permitted in liberal capitalist soeiety.3x Consequently, some communist musicians (like Konrad Boehmer) becamc wary of acceptll1g domestic government subsidy even when it was rcadily available, because it could be seen to offer an implicit endorsement of the bourgeois state." Whether for reasons of necessity or choice, communist musicians sometllnes turned instead to patronage from communist states. Bush's The Sugar Rcapers and the collectively composed' Mannesmann Cantata', for instance, were both premiered in the German Democratic Republic. Boehmer even recounts hiS youthful decision to accept a commission from the authorities in North Korea, subsequent visits to which country, he wryly asserts, 'contributed in a substantial way to cure me of nearly all "romantic" party-diseases'.
"For an example, sce Adlington, '''A sort ofgllcrri//u''', IH3-H5. 1'1 Konrad \lochmer, 'I'cn socialistische cOl11ponist schrijli lievcr in opdracht van arbeidcrs dan van het Ilolland Festival', I'ri! Neder/ulld. I August I'no.

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For musicians opcrating outside of accepted canons of art, there was frequently no alternative but to group with like-minded artists and create alternative, mutually sustaining networks. Robbie Lieberman's chapter gives an evocative account of the alternative circuits created and sustained by US folk musicians associated with the communist movement in the early years of the Cold War, circuits shaped by the Red Scare, which blacklisted performers and frightened off patrons, promoters and record companies alike. Songs of the left were heard instead at hootenannies, summer camps and political rallies, and disseminated in limited-circulation magazines. (Ironically, in the changed political circumstances of the 1960s, many of these same songs latcr enjoyed great commercial success.) Similarly inventive thinking about the institutions of musical production and distribution characterized the activities of Ewan MacColl and Chris Cutlcr in 1960s and 1970s Britain. As with the American folk scene of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the restricted scale of this bottol11up, non-proflt-oricnted entrepreneurial ism necessarily constrained the reaching of a broad audience, but in recompense some independence could be claimed from the political and economic structures that communist ideology opposed. Such bottom-up collectivities sometimes merged into the social relations of musical practice itself - Born's third dimension. If private intcrest and the exploitation of labour werc to be rcfuscd in the institutional and economic spheres, the argument went, so they must be refuscd in the relations structuring music-making. This posed more of a challenge for some musical culturcs than others. The high regard enjoycd by folk music in communist circles was in part to bc explained by the ways in which it appeared to be 'communal' through and through, with no named composers, no requirement for specialist musical training (Ben Ilarker reports that the 'participatory' quality of folk was found particularly attractive by the post-war CPUB), and no fixed constraints on the creative renditions of successive generations of performers. Less ideologically straightforward were the traditions of art music, with their elaborate divisions oflabour, and associated sharp distinctions between individual creative geniuses (composers, soloists, conductors) and anonymous, uncreative 'mass' (orchestras, choirs, audiences). It was partly in response to such overt hierarchies that, from the late 1960s onwards, many avant-garde groups embraced a radically democratic performance practice, in which (to quote Born, who is describing llenry Cow) the musicians 'debated every major (and some minor) decisions collectively' .40 Similarly, just as Fidel Castro urged at the 196R Ilavana Cultural Congress that 'more and more, analysis and concepts must be the work of teams
411

In the Netherlands, a Trotskyist interpretation of alienated labour in the field of music \cd to the founding of a 'Movement for the Renewal of Musical Practice'; see Robert Adlington,

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of men rather than of individual men' ,41 so were leftist composers inspired to form creative collectives - as in the case of the 'Mannesmann Cantata' Reconstructie - and thereby ostensibly to reject the romantic individua\lSt11 embodlCd 111 bourgeois artistic practice. At the same time, such experiments were often marked by ambivalence. Beate Kutschke notes how the 'communist-collectivist aesthetics' of the 'Mannesmann Cantata' was tempered by the individual credits ve that were received by the six composers in programme booklet and LP sl:e altke. In interviews about and commentary upon Reconstrllctie, 'the team (as it was frequently described by the work's principal creators) likewise only ever referred to composers and librettists, consigning directors, stage and costume designers, not to mention the performers, to a deCided y secondary rank. Of course a similar contradiction attended the assertions. of Castro himself, whose own personality cult, not to mention authoritartan . as a tendencies, were already well established by 1968. 42 Reflected here W well-worn and unhappy tension that had existed within communism at least since Lenin had insisted upon the need for a revolutionary vanguard separate .. as the f ram th e masses. Notoriously, as the twentieth century progresse cl, It w an e unanswerable individual or elite, rather than the egalitarian collective, that c : to be regarded as the primary organizational characteristic of com11lunism.; 111 sm this light, it was perfectly consistent for the burden of musical socialist reah to be carried by obediently regimented orchestras and choirs. Kutschke proposes rm1l1 g that the parts of the' Mannesmann Cantata' that accorded the pe r fo musicians the greatest degree of creative licence likewise represented a over from the composers' New Left days, one that was uneasily reconciled with ed their subsequent turn to the 'new Old Left', under which a fully pre-form non-negotiable authorial message necessarily took precedence. The ideological difficulties that a radical rethinking of the modalities of musical performance posed for some Marxist-Leninists were expressed with stunning directness by Cornelius Cardew, in his 1974 critique of the early practice of the Scratch Orchestra (founded by Cardew in 1969, before his Marxist conversion):
We [the Scratch Orchestra] wanted to break the monopoly of a highly t.rained . .. h 1 ' ' I d I)'\rtlclpate elite ovcrthe avantgarde, so we madc a musIC II1 w lC 1 anyone cou ' rcgardless of their musical education. We wanted to abolish the useless intel-

.Organiz.ing Lahor: Composers, Performers and the "Renewal of Musical Practice" in the Netherlands, 19(,9 72', Musical Quarterly, 90/3 -4 (2007), 539-77. 41 Fidel Castro, closing speech at the Havana Cultural Congress, 13 January <http:// lanic.utexas.edu/project!castro/dbll96X/ 19680 I 13.html> (accesscd 26 April 2(12).

4' Priest land, The Red Flag, 46869.

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lectual complexity of the earlicr avantgarde, and make music which was quite concretely 'simple' in its assault on the senses. We wanted to devise a kind of music that would release the initiative of the participants. In breaking out of the elite we succeeded only in forming a kind of commune and were just as isolated as before. In rejecting intellectual complexity we landed ourselves in situations of brutal chaos in which mystical introspection supervened as a method of selfpreservation. And in releasing the initiative of the performers we slipped into the cult of individualism. Hippy communes, mysticism, individualism: our various 'refonns' led us straight into a number of cul-de-sacs of bourgeois ideology that are being widely promoted today.43

No single volume could claim to offer an exhaustive account ofthe relation of music and communism outside the communist bloc, and this onc certainly has its conspicuous omissions - of which Cardew himself is one of the most glaring. However, by offering perspectives on developments across six decades, in fIve continents, and in the widest range of musical genres, this book gives, for the first time, a representative overview of the relation of music and communism outside the communist bloc, a relation that, as I have sought to establish here, is characterized by contentiousness and an irreducible plurality of positions on key debates concerning music's role in society. In so doing, it sketches out a far-reaching and hitherto largely untold story that touches upon figures, practices and controversies of continuing importance to the postcommunist world.

4'

Cornclius Cardew. S!ockl/(IlI.\('1/ Scn'cs Il11l'criali!>IIl (London: Latimer New Dimensions. 1(74); republished online by Ubudassies (2004). <http://gu3eiara.files.wordpress.com/2010105/cardew_ stockhauscll.pdl'> (acccsscd 26 April 2012), 102.