15.02.2007
Soundtracks for the new American century
Gordon Downie listened to BBC Radio's Three Composer of the week (John Adams), February 9
In Who paid the piper: the CIA and the cultural cold war, Frances Stonor Saunders offers convincing evidence that the dominance of certain strands of modernist art during the post-World War II period was due to covert intervention by the CIA and affiliated US government organisations.1 In the global political circumstances of the time, this was an efficient and relatively inexpensive means by which the US could capture, maintain and assert its cultural dominance. By championing the radical and experimental, epitomised in the paintings of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, the US could display its liberal credentials in order to emphasise the allegedly oppressive nature of Soviet cultural production, manifested in socialist realism.
Given this evidence, can the turn to the extreme right in new music since the 1980s also be sourced in similar interventions? As many of the artists that benefited from such interventions during the 1950s and 60s were hardly supportive of US imperialist ambitions, and produced art that was either explicitly or implicitly critical of the political systems and ideologies within which they worked, we can safely assume that covert CIA support was not given out of admiration for the artists or their products.
If cultural producers can be appropriated to achieve certain political aims in one historical period, then we should be unsurprised that, in a different historical period, though policies of appropriation stay broadly the same, the artists chosen to implement these aims may assume a different aesthetico-political complexion. In this context, the appropriation of cultural avant-gardism or conservatism is incidental and opportunist.
Though the Project for the New American Century makes no explicit reference to culture, its aim - to "make the case and rally support for American global leadership" - will be made easier if the international cultural context is one that is hospitable to and/or reproduces those neoliberal values and ideologies that it seeks to disseminate on a global, trans-cultural scale.2 It is not surprising, then, that those who reproduce within their art values that are congruent with economic deregulation and free-market hyper-individualism are legitimised with significant symbolic and monetary rewards.
Since the demise of the USSR capital has seen little reason to disguise its acts of cultural subversion. And, though the earlier forms of intervention took a largely state-bureaucratic or intelligence form, since the 1980s it has become common for entrepreneurs and industrialists to take the lead in engineering a cultural climate that rewards subservience to free-market ideology.
Advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi's patronage of young British artists whose work is created in their sponsor's mercenary image is the most well known example within visual art, whilst in new music the Masterprize, established by the investment banker John McLaren in 1996, is similarly focused on disciplining composers to the so-called realities of the market.
Within music, the largest financial incentives to date have been awarded by the US new music composition prizes established by the industrialists, H Charles Grawemeyer and Michael Ludwig Nemmers - offering cash prizes of $200,000 and $100,000 respectively (the Grawemeyer Awards also include categories for 'Improving world order' and 'Religion'). Almost without exception the majority of composers awarded the prizes have exhibited a right or centre-right aesthetic disposition - Oliver Knussen, Thomas Adès, Simon Bainbridge, Tan Dun and latterly, Pierre Boulez.
The recipient of the 1995 Grawemeyer Award and the 2004 Nemmers Award for Musical Composition was the American composer, John Adams - the subject of last week's BBC Radio Three's Composer of the week. The Boosey and Hawkes website devoted to the promotion of this composer proudly states: "A recent survey shows him to be the most frequently performed living American composer of orchestral music".3
Why is this the case? Given the extent to which cultural organisations are dependent upon corporate and private largesse, artistic decision-making and programming is determined by the ideological and cultural priorities of sponsors: he who pays the piper really does call the tune. As corporations engage in sponsorship in order to enhance their image of social responsibility, finance will only be awarded to organisations that complement and reflect these aims.
Thus, in the case of the New York Philharmonic that commissioned Adams's 'On the transmigration of souls', the new music that is featured is programmed to maintain the smile on the faces of donors prominently displayed on the orchestra's website - its chair endowments of up to $15 million help to secure musicians' and administrators' jobs. Its website offers numerous sponsorship routes, ranging from individual membership to the financial heights of corporate sponsorship, which currently includes Mitsui Ltd, the Bank of New York and BASF.
Thus, the composers that feature in subscription series are those that reflect a willingness to internalise and sustain those affirmatory and neo-conservative values that orchestras need to portray in order to attract corporate and private funding. In consequence, the musical resources that neo-conservative composers use must affirm the cultural biases and preferences of their listeners and sponsors. This can include the adoption of those harmonic, formal, gestural and dramatic resources associated with the concert repertoire that forms the dominant and most sustained cultural experience of the majority of listeners - a familiarity that is a result of its perpetual recycling in educational programmes, radio and TV broadcasts, and CD catalogues.
And tonality, in whatever extended or degraded form it may take, is the ideal vehicle through which neo-conservative composers can signal their intention to affirm and reproduce within an aesthetic context their submission to commodity form. As Swartz states, "Cultural goods differ from material goods in that one can 'consume' them only by apprehending their meaning".4 Thus, the most successful cultural commodities are those that erect no barriers to easy consumption. And to maximise the accumulation of cultural capital, listeners will favour those products that require the least cognitive expenditure.
These are also the programming priorities that inform the content of Composer of the week. On the rare occasions that a living composer is chosen, it is always from the right or extreme right of the aesthetic spectrum. The ready availability of composers of an aesthetic disposition to fulfil this role also enables Radio Three to defend its coverage of new music, especially if the composers that are featured supplement their otherwise reactionary scores with occasional splashes of ersatz modernity or experimentalism. By this tactic, claims of conservative bias can be neatly deflected.
In the case of John Adams, the composer's intellectual credentials have been in large measure fabricated through an association with musical minimalism. Within the visual arts, minimalism has functioned as a means to explore fundamental, primary structural and visual relationships in order to foreground processes that tend to be masked in work of a more expressionistic or rhetorical complexion.
Within music, however, it has a more overtly political function as a vehicle for neo-conservative composers to rebrand or resuscitate tonality and restore musical materials or forms that objective historical processes of development have already superseded. The frequently repetitive nature of such music, projected in a simplistic harmonic and rhythmic soundscape, aids its easy assimilability and placement in conventional concert programming contexts. It is also ideal material for marketeers and publishers seeking to widen the audience for their products in order to gain market advantage.
Such tendencies were evident in the majority of the scores featured in the survey of Adams's output, much of which is virtually indistinguishable from that which adorns the aural soundscape of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Notwithstanding the occasional dissonant twist, it is clear that both he and John Williams have been consulting the same 'How to score for orchestra' undergraduate reading list. The reified materials and gestures that constitute the fabric of this music offer an ideal vehicle to trigger and control audience responses and signal the composer's recognition and deference to commodity form. The titles of Adams's works, such as 'Short ride in a fast machine', 'Shaker loops' and 'Roadrunner', signal the composer's populist intent.
One method that neo-conservatives use to fireproof their work and ingratiate themselves with their listeners is the examination of events whose extreme emotional content is chosen to signal the composer's compassion. Their writings are frequently littered with such expressions as 'suffering', 'touching', 'anguish', 'death' and 'sorrow'. British composer James MacMillan's 'Child's prayer', commemorating the murder of primary schoolchildren in Dunblane, and his 'Cantos sagrados', written to signal the composer's solidarity with executed South American political prisoners, are both good examples of this tactic.
And it is one that John Adams effectively deployed in his 'On the transmigration of souls', composed to commemorate those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The work significantly avoids examining the event politically by focusing on the experience of personal bereavement. Over a suitably calculated atmospheric orchestral accompaniment, a collage of voiceovers recite sentiments expressed by the bereaved posted on missing persons notice boards.
Conversing in hushed, serious tones with the programme's presenter, Donald Macleod, Adams declared his main aim in the work was to focus on personal anguish in order not to "cash in" on the horror of the event. Given the numbers that died in 9/11, we may wonder whether it is his intention to compose a sequel to commemorate the even larger numbers that have been massacred in Iraq since the invasion in 2003.
As the Bush regime prepares to fabricate yet more reasons to attack another Middle East state, one may legitimately question any time spent analysing the superstructural phenomena discussed here. However, it would be mistaken to underestimate the significance of culture as a channel through which the underlying ideologies of capital and exchange are reproduced. Such a perspective arms Marxists with a wider repertoire of tools and strategies with which to analyse, comprehend and engage with the disparate and frequently chaotic and contradictory forms those ideologies take.