December 5, 2005
Music and Politics Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST Another piece of music recently premiered at Lincoln Center was Colin Matthews’s Berceuse for Dresden, which was performed over Thanksgiving weekend by the New York Philharmonic. I did not hear the piece, and in fact was unaware of its existence until I saw it mentioned by the music critic and conservative commentator Jay Nordlinger: http://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/
impromptus200512050824.asp Nordlinger says the title of the composition made him worry that it would be an Allies-bashing piece, but he notes with satisfaction that it is dedicated to Victor Klemperer, a Jew who had recently received a deportation notice but managed to escape Dresden in the aftermath of the bombing. (Nordlinger does worry, though, about the invocation of “They will beat their swords into plowshares” in the program notes, detecting a possible endorsement of pacifism over self-defense.) This search for a meaning in music reminded me of the first time I heard Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. It’s an extremely experimental piece from the late 1950s, filled with unconventional sounds made on string instruments. As I listened, I quite clearly made out, amidst all the aural clutter, the sounds of a massive explosion, followed by screams and cries, sirens, chaos (lots of this), and finally a fade to silence. The cumulative effect was overwhelming; I can’t remember another time when I’ve been so affected by a piece of instrumental music. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read the program notes and learned that Penderecki wrote the piece without any thought of an atomic explosion. It was originally titled 8’37”, for its length, and then Threnody for 52 String Instruments, the title under which it is usually performed today. He meant it as nothing but an exploration of sonic possibilities, but shortly before its first performance, the Polish government ordered him to insert the anti-American reference in its title. It reminds me of one of Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan stories, in which Kaplan gives a moving analysis of a passage from Shakespeare, imagining in great detail Julius Caesar’s thoughts on the eve of battle, only to be told at the end that the passage is actually from Macbeth. I don’t know what all this means, except that it’s easy to see and hear things that aren’t there—and that orchestral music is not a very effective tool for analyzing history.
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