Unlike its sister disciplines, classical music has been spared a fixation on politics. Paintings and sculptures may be more political than artistic, and novels and poems more political than literary. But music, dwelling in its otherworld of notes and modulation and rhythm, has been able to sail on. Composers can make their work shapeless, banal, or perverse. But they are hard-pressed to render it explicitly political.
John Corigliano, for example, is free to nickname his Symphony No. 1 “The AIDS Symphony,” but it remains for the listener to determine what the piece is “about” — if it is “about” anything, since music need not have a recognizable program, and seldom does. Shostakovich may have inscribed “A Response to Just Criticism” on the title page of his fifth symphony in 1937 — Stalin’s government had been offended by his previous work — but the score that follows is only ignorantly construed as a tribute to the Soviet state.
If you happen to be hungry for the Stalin-era spirit expressed in music, you have to turn to the Kronos Quartet and its latest recording, Howl, U.S. A. (Nonesuch, 79372-2). The Kronos is among the most famous chamber ensembles in the world, concertizing on all continents and garnering near- universal critical praise. According to Billboard, it sells more recordings than does any other string quartet.
The Kronos-ers are routinely described in the press as “risk-taking” and ” avant-garde,” meaning that they (a) eschew traditional (i.e., great) repertoire, (b) dress informally, and (c) champion new music that is charitably dubbed “experimental.” They are indeed a magnet and boon to the contemporary composer, commissioning generously and receiving thousands of unsolicited manuscripts in the mail.
With every year and every trip to the studio, the group endeavors to get avant-garder, and its politics are increasingly worn on its sleeve. Here are arrangements of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa; there is a work christened “The Peace Piece”; royalties are sent to the trendiest foundations. And the Kronos- ers are no garden-variety left-liberals. Asked to recommend a book to the public, founder and first violinist David Harrington cited The Managua Lectures by totalitarian academic Noam Chomsky, “so amazingly riveting that I can hardly tear myself away from it.” “It is startling and shocking and all the things that go into a major experience. . . . As a musician, I trust my ears, and this book definitely has the ring of truth.”, With the politics- choked Howl, U.S.A., Harrington and his partners seem to have reached their limit.
The cover of the album features a photo of a tattered American flag. The photographer? Robert Mapplethorpe, and no image ever more accurately portrayed an album’s contents. The recording begins with “Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover” by Michael Daugherty. If you think the late FBI chief has been sufficiently demonized, you haven’t seen anything yet: Lillian Hellman’s harshest indictment is child’s play by comparison. Daugherty has taken tapes of Hoover’s speeches, extracted choice sentences and words, toyed with them mischievously, and apposed them to other sounds, some of which emanate from a string quartet.
The piece opens with Hoover’s unaccompanied voice, stating the composer’s purpose: “I hope that this presentation will serve to give to you a better knowledge and a deeper understanding of your FBI.” Then phones ring and ambulances wail. The quartet enters, menacingly, and it is clear that this is Gestapomusik: martial and intense. The noise-pastiche is meant to suggest chaos, a society out of control. “We are as close to you as your telephone,” Hoover is saying, and we are trapped in Amerika. The letters “F-B-I” are chanted over and over (by whom?), as Hoover continues to intone “your FBI, your FBI.” The music is crude and dissonant and crazed — like that heard in movies when horrible, incomprehensible injustices are being done to heroes.
Suddenly, the FBI is making an arrest: “Get your hands up!” Apparently the suspect is not cooperating. There is gunfire, and the music ceases. “The charge is murder,” a voice says, and this is the composer’s charge, really, against the Bureau.
Next there is ticking — relentless, maddening — along with piquant strings. “Look at your watch this morning,” Hoover tells an audience, illustrating the frequency of crime. But we know who the real criminal is, of course. Hoover’s phrases — commonplace in their natural settings — are repeated endlessly, thickening an Orwellian fog. A radio announcer cuts in: The Director is to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. A military band plays a patriotic march, on a crackling old recording; the quartet joins in, first straightforwardly, then lapsing into mocking disharmony (a technique perfected by modern Russian composers like Prokofiev).
Fragments of Hoover’s testimony are heard, the key Scoundrel Time epithets highlighted: “communism,” “the enemy,” “Nikita Khrushchev,” “deadly menace,” ” Communists and their dupes.” The quartet insinuates a distorted quotation from “My Country, ’tis of Thee.”
“The time has come for Americans to wake up!” Hoover exhorts, and what can the common man do? “A lot.” With that, citizens are put to work spying on one another, and no one is safe. An old typewriter clatters — tappety, tappety — as a file is prepared on some innocent. The quartet responds with little upward glissandi, annoying and intended to be. Hoover laments that “more young people appear to know the words of popular soap jingles than the meaningful words of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and here the composer has his excuse to ride the national anthem all the way to the end. An old-timey crowd sings it (perhaps at a ballgame), the quartet provides sinister counterpoint, and all the while Hoover cries “Brain-washed!” and “Fear!” The phrase “home of the brave” is presented as a terrible irony. At the climax, it is “Fear! fear! fear!,” then more gunfire — bang-bang-bang — then Hoover: “I thank you” (probably the close of his HUAC testimony).
For all its lunacy, “Sing Sing” is a rather brilliantly conceived, surprisingly effective . . . creation. Is it a work of music? It is agitprop, certainly, but is it music, too, or a political diatribe garnished with musical commentary, or a Fantasy for Two Violins, Viola, Cello, and Hoover Splicings? What it is is fodder for the Kronos Quartet — commissioned by Lincoln Center — and unlike much of anything else.
Except, that is, for the other pieces on the album. Scott Johnson’s “Cold War Suite” has a speaking voice, too, but it is far from a villain’s: It belongs to the late leftist journalist I. F. Stone, and he is uttering his holy words: about “the secret network” that makes honest Americans afraid, the iniquity of Reagan-administration policy in Central America, the danger of nuclear weapons (particularly those owned by the United States). The quartet aims to imitate, or collaborate with, Stone’s voice in pitch, intonation, cadence, and rhythm. But it doesn’t take long for the music to seem an interference rather than an enhancement. It’s as though you’re listening to some atonal string quartet composed by a promising high-school senior for a college entrance exam, and someone has inadvertently left the radio or television on. You want to holler, “Hey! Could you turn something off — preferably the stereo?”
The album concludes with Lee Hyla’s “Howl,” which uses the famous poem of Allen Ginsberg, one of the most important in recent American literature. The piece is different from the first two in that there is less — in fact, no — doctoring of tape: The poet reads his work straight (if that’s the right word) . The music is simply accompaniment — not more or less — to the poet’s recitation.
In the days of silent movies, the larger houses employed organists who improvised accompaniments to the action on screen (minor keys and tremolos for the black hats, bright, triumphal odes for the white hats, soupy melodies for the kissing). Hyla attempts to do much the same here for “Howl,” but Ginsberg’s recitation is already complete, unimprovable. The quartet, without the recitation, would be purposeless; but the recitation, without the quartet, would be liberated. The piece was commissioned for the Kronos-ers by the National Endowment for the Arts “in partnership” with the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. Allen Ginsberg and Annie Sprinkle, meet Ward and June Cleaver!
Howl, U.S.A. is an atypical recording of atypical music performed by an atypical string quartet. It can therefore be dismissed — or enjoyed — as anomalous. Musical life is not immediately threatened by the infection of politics, because most musicians are still more interested in music than in the extra-musical, or the anti-musical. Nonetheless, it’s a pity that the Kronos Quartet should descend into the fever swamp, because it plays extraordinarily well, and while the world has more than enough political ideologues, it does not suffer from a surfeit of first-rate chamber groups. If the Kronos-ers were merely a bunch of radicalized mediocrities, coasting on the arts dole, their obsessions would be simply risible — instead of sharply disappointing.
By Jay Nordlinger
