Stormy Scherzi, Day 5 – Symphony No. 10 by Dmitri Shostakovich

This week’s theme is…Stormy Scherzi!  A scherzo is traditionally defined as a “musical joke”, that is, a light-hearted movement that lacks the weight of a good sonata form essay.  And often that’s how they feel.  But, have you ever listened to a “scherzo” that seemed to fit the description of a musical joke, but darkly?  Some scherzi paradoxically combine lightness with intensely determined feelings, sometimes even bordering on malice and despair.  This week we examine some such examples.

Stormy Scherzi, Day 5 – Symphony No. 10 by Dmitri Shostakovich

There is a universal law that has recently been revealed to humankind.  Perhaps it has always existed, but simply could not be expressed meaningfully or intelligibly until the past few decades due to the medium that it governs.  Whereas the second law of thermodynamics, say,  governs matter and energy that have been around for considerably longer than the minds who formulated the law, the subject of Godwin’s law is the internet, and specifically the internet as it provides a forum for moral and philosophical dialogue, a comparatively recent phenomenon.  What amateur philosopher doesn’t love to wax over coffee?  Certainly this one does, and the coffee shop has been, since the Enlightenment, a fertile arena of erudition and pretension.  Some historians even speculate that the rise of the coffee house throughout eighteenth century Europe catalyzed the spread of Enlightenment philosophy and allowed it affect the social order so profoundly (for more about that phenomenon and some related musical manifestations, see this post and this one).

But today not even a coffee shop is necessary, thanks to the internet, as countless blogs, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, Reddits, discussion forums, chat rooms, and numerous other devices not even yet in existence provide all the stimulation that philosophical debaters need to spew, er, I mean, state, their points of view.  Of course, the state of the art does have its cons, the foremost of which is probably anonymity.  I guess it depends on how you look at it, but most internet debaters would probably tell you that anonymity is an issue because it’s much easier to unleash insensitive vitriol onto a faceless computer, which is essentially what an online debater feels like, than it is a living, breathing, flesh and blood person.  So, if you debate in a coffee shop, you will have a modicum of respect and decency, no matter how ardently you disagree with your partner.  But on the internet, in many of the places previously mentioned, all bets are off.

And based on his observations regarding the rather predictable “life of their own” that these debates tended to take on, even as early as 1990, an American attorney named Mike Godwin devised his law which states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”.  I’m sure you’ve noticed this in the comment sections and probably avoid them because of this.

But it makes me wonder – why Hitler and not Stalin?  Of course we all know what a monster Hitler was, which is why Godwin’s law is about him.  Hitler is the textbook example of unchecked totalitarianism yielding unspeakable evil and destruction.  But have you ever read a comparison of the two?  In many ways, Stalin was worse.  He actually murdered more of his people in his purges than Hitler did in the Holocaust.  And both dictators presided over terrifying and brutal regimes which probed into every aspect of the lives of their citizenry, albeit with different styles of governance.  And sure, you could say that Hitler comes out ahead because of the war he started, but it’s a worthy debate, if you don’t find the whole thing futile and irrelevant because after all, tragedy is tragedy and evil is evil.  Does it really matter who was “worse” in the end?

In addition to the tragic murders and genocides, both dictators and regimes made their presence deeply felt in the art and music of their nation’s creative class.  Again, the styles of the respective regimes, while both indicative of totalitarian tactics, were different.  In Nazi Germany artists and musicians were required to join the Reich Culture Chamber or risk being branded “degenerate”.  Degenerate artists were not permitted to publish their works and either repressed their authentic voices or exiled themselves to nations of greater freedom in order to express their uninhibited artistic statements.  See this post and this one for examples of composers who responded to this in different ways.

In Russia the approach was different.  There was no official club to join.  Artists and musicians had to work in public, never knowing when the time bomb of government denunciation would be triggered by some vague and unexpected criticism.  Whereas the artistic critics of the Third Reich were more or less transparent and forthright about the styles and practices that were forbidden under the regime, and its artists and musicians could count on staying safe as long as they toed the party line, the capricious and unpredictable Russian regime, in imitation of its terrifying leader, controlled its artisans by doing the opposite, never asserting clear guidelines, but occasionally pouncing upon terrified artists for an ill-defined crime called “formalism”.  Since the components of formalism were never exactly laid out for musicians, it was impossible to avoid, and this ambiguity gave Stalin’s cultural police the unmitigated freedom to strike whenever they saw fit to make an example of their musicians.  And no musician was made a bigger example than Dmitri Shostakovich (for more about that, see this post).

In Nazi Germany you could expect to stay safe provided you belonged to the right group, and their treatment of artists, with the Culture Chamber, reflected this.  Stalin’s primary tactic was to control his entire populace through fear of retribution that seemed unexpected and inevitable.  As the most gifted and also the most prominent composer in Soviet Russia, Shostakovich’s treatment at the hands of the Stalinist authorities necessarily reflected this approach.  Shostakovich was denounced unexpectedly for various works and summarily sought to backpedal in order to make amends with the regime.  This happened several times over the course of his career during Stalin’s reign and it must have intensely wearying to Shostakovich to spend so much of his life living in fear of consequences that never came, both for his life and that of his family.

But the secret is that Stalin never intended to actually punish Shostakovich.  The composer was worth more to the dictator as an example than as a victim.  And so, he dutifully worked through his career, pivoting and apologizing when necessary, as did many other Russian composers, and somehow managing to generate an impressive body of work that breathes the spirit of Stalinist Russia.  His friend and colleague, Sergei Prokofiev died on the exact same day as Stalin – he did not have the opportunity to live in a post-Stalinist age – but Shostakovich survived him by more than two decades.  After the dictator’s death Shostakovich felt greater freedom in making musical statements that he suspected would have been deemed contrary to the regime’s accepted standards, nebulous as they were.  One of the best-known examples is the furious scherzo of his 10th Symphony.  I have long admired this compact, concentrated, and explosive movement.  It is said to be a musical portrait of Joseph Stalin; capricious, blustery, horrifying, infernal, maddeningly unpredictable, and unremittingly intense, even in its most reserved passages:

 

Can you imagine living for so many years under the oppressive and whimsical grip of a tyrant such as this?  Shostakovich did, and managed to survive.  Would it be worse ultimately to have arbitrary and bigoted standards clearly established and then be forced to remain silent for fear of violating them, or to work steadily with a knife suspended overhead, never knowing which stroke of your pen will release it to pierce your tender skull?  Maybe for discussions of aesthetics and censorship, Godwin’s law would do better to chart the inevitability of evoking Stalin.

 

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All That Glitters, Day 4 – The Golden Age by Dmitri Shostakovich

This week’s theme is…All That Glitters!  Gold has been attractive to humankind and symbolic of opulent wealth through all of recorded history.  It has shaped human civilization and provided an evocative poetic metaphor.  This week we explore music that was influenced by gold as it altered the course of history and provided poetic inspiration.

All That Glitters, Day 4 – The Golden Age by Dmitri Shostakovich

The most famous dystopian novel, that is, a novel which extrapolates disturbing political, social, and military trends to a logically possible and terrifying conclusion, is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The harrowing story of theoretical future Englishman Winston Smith, making his way through the oppressive police state of Oceania, with its dehumanizing bureaucracy, endless wars, and shadowy central governing power, has given rise to several tropes that most of us recognize, most especially “big brother”, describing the omnipresent, paranoid security system which could be watching anyone at any time, and “doublespeak”, the verbal sleight-of-hand which is used to spin horrible realities into palatable fantasies.  Orwell was writing 40 years in the future, making predictions about the nature of society based on actual observations of wartime England and Stalinist Russia; his keen ideas about the nature of authoritarian government often become unsettlingly prophetic whenever centralized governments overreach, motivated by their aim to preserve societal order and their own power.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the most recently penned of three dystopian novels, all written by different authors, which are often grouped together as a thematic trilogy, reacting as they all do to disturbing authoritarian and moral currents flowing through European societies around the time of the World Wars and rise of Communism in Russia.  Slightly less known than Orwell’s vision is that of fellow Briton Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, written more than a decade earlier, and set in a different kind of nightmarish future, albeit one that many of us would find more seductive at first glance.  

And then there is the earliest of the trilogy, written yet another decade prior to Huxley’s, We, written by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin.  

My guess is that We is the member of the trilogy known by the fewest readers, but it is certainly worth a look.  It is the only title of the three that must be translated for English speakers and its prose boasts, in part due to the translation, a more poetic and minimalist approach than those of its British cousins.  While We echoes many of the predictable totalitarian themes of the others, it is the visual and aesthetic touches that make its world truly interesting to imagine.  The characters which inhabit Zamyatin’s nightmare are forced to live in a city made entirely of clear glass which makes their behavior completely transparent, so to speak, to the spies of the police state.  (Aside: one might argue that our cell phones have a similar effect to those who control the technology that is able track us in today’s world…eek!).  It is arresting images such as these which set We apart from the other two dystopian novels as the masterpiece that it is.  And so it is not altogether surprising that Zamyatin devotes considerable passages of the book to exploring art and music as means to control and pacify the drones of his imagined society, and in a way that came uncomfortably close to reality in the ensuing decades.

I read all three of these notable dystopian novels in high school during a few months of obsession with the genre, and it is Zamyatin’s description of sanctioned state music that I still remember the most, probably more than any other passage out of three books that are just packed with vivid and terrifying vignettes.  Zamyatin writes in the form of a diary, kept by the protagonist D-503, here attending a lecture and demonstration which compares their rigid, predictable, and mathematically ordered music with the fantastic and frenzied ancient music of a millennium prior:

“…I returned my attention to…the main subject: our music, our mathematical composition (the mathematician is the cause, the music is the effect), and the description of the recently invented musicometer.  By simply turning the handle, any of you could produce up to three sonatas an hour.  What struggle this was for our ancestors.  They could create only if they drove themselves to fits of ‘inspiration,’ a strange form of epilepsy.  And here is an amusing illustration of their results: the music of Scriabin, twentieth century.”

At this point I-330, the female who will soon rise to prominence within the story as D-503’s similarly-embattled leading lady, takes the stage, sporting striking formal evening dress, and proceeds to present a raucous and overly dramatic interpretation of the aforementioned Scriabin upon an ancient musical artifact, a grand piano.  Following I-330’s frenetic show, by way of relief, one of the machine-generated sonatas is played as D-503 listens…

“…with particular pleasure….Crystal chromatic degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Maclaurin formulae with a gait like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy; the melancholy melodies of diminishing oscillations; pauses producing bright rhythms according to Frauenhofer lines, the spectral analysis of planets…What magnificence!  What unwavering predictability!  And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy…”

As it turns out, D-503 is somewhat enchanted by I-330’s performance, though he realizes he shouldn’t be; it is the first glimmer of the ensuing drama, following as it typically does the gradual realization that this perfect world is not all it is cracked up to be.

While I suspect Zamyatin was bandying about some musical terminology he did not fully understand, I take his point, and his elegant and poetic description of bland, formulaic music is wonderfully evocative.  There are certain guidelines one could master in order to write music like that, to the point that it sounds mechanical.  After all, computers can write music if you teach them the rules.  Thousands of music students learn the basics of bland tonal composition, and bland atonal composition for that matter, every year in music schools across the world.

There are real world analogues to the music theorists Zamyatin makes up: Soviet Russia looked to music theorists and musicologists who devised contrived codes of semiotics that Russian composers were encouraged to work within in order to stay ordered, uncontroversial, and inspiring to the proletariat.

But beyond that (and I’m certainly not downplaying the prophetic vision of state-sanctioned musicologists – that was a brilliant insight on Zamyatin’s part), musical totality was not realized quite that he imagined, for having machines compose state-approved music, had it even been possible, would have cost Stalin’s regime what turned out to be a most effective tool with which to propagate public fear, the shameless manipulation of their superstar composer, Dmitri Shostakovich.  Shostakovich was just coming into his own during the Soviet Communist regime’s first major transition of power, with Joseph Stalin assuming a monarchical role in all but name.  Stalin decided to make an example of Shostakovich, exploiting the composer’s public visibility in order to keep all who observed his struggles in line.  In retrospect, it is obvious that nothing could actually have happened to Shostakovich, but he could never have known this.  He was always much more useful to Stalin alive than dead.

As Stalin was ascending to his powerful position, Shostakovich was poised to assume his artistic maturity, and it was at this point that the state media began to attack and denounce him, bringing early echos of this prospect to full fruition.

In 1930, his first ballet, The Golden Age, was censored due to scandalous dancing, although it is largely the point of the ballet to criticize Western European decadence.  Even as he attempted to write to party tastes, and writing within the semiotic guidelines of Russia’s finest music theorists, per Zamyatin’s brilliant predictions, Shostakovich experienced the first stirrings of the maddeningly arbitrary criticism which would plague him until Stalin died.  Here is a suite of dances from The Golden Age, demonstrating much of Shosty’s mature voice, already coming through in his mid twenties:

The three great dystopian novels were all prophetic in their own ways, and all regarding different aspects of authoritarian societal control, but none of them so acutely recognized the role of the arts, and music in particular, within that mix as Zamyatin’s We.  How appropriate that it was written in Russia, the setting of some of the harshest tactics which sought to bend music to the will of the state.  But unlike Zamyatin’s predictions, the music of Stalinist Russia was not generated by machines, but flesh and blood people with feelings, dreams, and great vulnerability.  There was a human cost, and Shostakovich remains the leading protagonist of that real-life dystopia.

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