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.