"Modernism", "Elitism", and "The Working Classes"

[Mal]

I wonder what Stravinsky thought about having the work performed in French... the left-wing composer Hanns Eisler designated this work to be the one in which Stravinsky abandoned modernism and became a reactionary composer. One assumes Eisler's objections to have been along lines that use of Latin was a decision that distanced the work from having any relevance to the working class...

Cocteau was upset with Stravinsky using Latin for the narration, but Stravinsky insisted on Latin, probably because of his adherence to Russian Orthodoxy. So Eisler's comment perhaps relates more to Stravinsky getting closer to the church, than anything to do with Latin per se. Abandoning modernism seems, to me, be a way of getting closer to the working class. Do working class people read Finnegans Wake?

[Bryn]

. . . Do working class people read Finnegans Wake?

I do, though I do have recourse to a conspectus to ease the way. However, what percentage of non-working class people read it, or indeed have even heard of it? Come to think of it, how many people of whatever socio-economic fraction know MG-M's intended pronunciation of "quark", even if they know it's incidental relation to Finnegans Wake.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Cocteau was upset with Stravinsky using Latin for the narration,

The "narration" isn't in Latin - the original is in French, and this is translated into the language of whichever country the performance is taking place in. The sung sections are in Latin, but Cocteau was aware that his French text was going to be so translated from the very moment that he was approached to provide the text.

https://watermark.silverchair.com/knq175.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAZcwggGTBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggGEMIIBgAIBADCCAXkGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMryGUEoR7xuDGsjwHAgEQgIIBSig-6B4I4ifClecPtLC9uzSHypOzObTO1KjJ0IEPu7DLCmHZEOcOgM4w4iDYeI0sy_WYA7TrOLGP_okX-HRSucXEG_C4oisbVpUWeQLBEDMDzy9VyHfSDlNecgrancTjvGaeIFWKcHIhp3yl6iXldNoe3iSBPh5oEtmsL3EMl1FecaJy1i4CoctcNAnjDJuUgXGSaIZHSmtqW2QGvJ9QL6M9RwalRzakiG7xnXw-5Ops0ibkzOEdt2T8_m7Ofe97OoklrmgwxbZt3YrqVSPOMrqu_0RukzMXUvF0y64lyjBJK3GoVpWapsoL0G7IzKBICkQKnzoQE0OhV1i6ZpDX_0bCJ5NCNBlGbRhqHT8LQG67cZS5-CipIwiMyYfYiUYH5RljomDfgFnDPJRDjCQqPkqnFr5HeKoH_5rag_YdqV50rLg8zk_tiJ7-Qg

https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/65/1/30/621570

Cocteau worked with both Stravinsky (making radical changes to his text to suit the composer's conception of the work) and with Jean Danielou (who made the Latin translation), writing to the latter (on 8th Jan, 1926) "I await your first text with the greatest impatience" ... and then eleven days later, making further adjustments to his own text on Stravinsky's insistence.

... but Stravinsky insisted on Latin, probably because of his adherence to Russian Orthodoxy. So Eisler's comment perhaps relates more to Stravinsky getting closer to the church, than anything to do with Latin per se.

I don't understand this - "Russian Orthodoxy" uses Church Slavonic, not Latin, doesn't it?

Abandoning modernism seems, to me, be a way of getting closer to the working class. Do working class people read Finnegans Wake?

Yes.

[Mal]

The "narration" isn't in Latin - the original is in French, and this is translated into the language of whichever country the performance is taking place in. The sung sections are in Latin,

Apologies, I meant to say that, shouldn't make quick posts before lunch :)

I don't understand this - "Russian Orthodoxy" uses Church Slavonic, not Latin, doesn't it?

Good point, but he may still be using Latin as a distancing device with a spiritual edge. Some support for my point:

"The Latin text was apparently a distancing device, perhaps also with a sacred dimension, as with the Latin of the Mass, or the Old Slavonic of the Russian Orthodox liturgy in which Stravinsky had been brought up."

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_LSO0751

But I'm not sure why he chose Latin rather than Church Slavonic, maybe he wanted some distancing from his Slavonic roots, while maintaining the spiritual and classical dimensions.

Of course there will always be exceptions, but I doubt many working class people have read Finnegans Wake. I think the argument that modernist art is more about excluding working class people than, somehow, including them is valid. The point is made at length in John Carey's "The Intellectuals and the Masses". Some critics on the far left, like Max Eastman, also accuse modernism of being obscurantist (see the latest copy of the TLS...)

[Mal]

In his preface to the B&H score, Malcolm MacDonald tells us, "Stravinsky wanted Latin because of its monumental quality, and because its distancing effect would allow the audience to concentrate on the tragic action."

Maybe he was just trying to cause a riot again! :)

I don't get this "monumental" argument, wasn't the language of Tolstoy monumental enough for him? The idea of translating the narration into the language of the country in which it is performed seems an excellent one. But then not translating the main body of the text just seems another incitement to riot. Wasn't the risk of no one listening to it considered more important than the risk of vulgarisation? It all smacks of modernist elitism, I suspect he didn't want the general public to understand it so he and his artistic friends could remain part of an elite club that were the only ones who could understand such works. Has there been an all English performance of the work?

[Serial_Apologist]

Of course there will always be exceptions, but I doubt many working class people have read Finnegans Wake. I think the argument that modernist art is more about excluding working class people than, somehow, including them is valid. The point is made at length in John Carey's "The Intellectuals and the Masses". Some critics on the far left, like Max Eastman, also accuse modernism of being obscurantist (see the latest copy of the TLS...)

That's the old Stalinist argument that sent Shostakovitch running back tail between legs to write a disclaimer on the 4th symphony - to which claims that working class people are alienated by modernist music which they don't understand and doesn't relate to them are countered by those who observed the positive responses of Italian factory workers to the music of Luigi Nono with its pro-proletarian messages about alienation and solidarity - and you can't get much more modernist than Nono. Lenin himself - since Stalin is often brought in in his train - is said to have argued against the idea of "proletarian art", arguing that the task of revolutionary socialist art was to pick up from the best of the most advanced examples of what bourgeois art had attained. He was thinking of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, and they were to become the furnishing iconography of Socialist Realism. My interpretation of that would be that while the occupational process of compartmentalisation that had taken place under capitalism had conferred time for the specialism of musical study and creativity, it had restricted the time for wage earners in most other lines of employment to enjoy its products that socialism, by reducing the necessary time to be spent producing, would make available. While it can be argued that subsequent evidence disproves this, the PR side of the musical side of big business has plugged easily consumed and profitably available product at the expense of artifacts deemed elite, implicating a layer of society whose pockets filling were generally to be ignored until such a time as now, by which time it's too late to do anything about them other than moan and squabble amongst ourselves because the balance of power has once again shifted in their favour.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Good point, but he may still be using Latin as a distancing device with a spiritual edge. Some support for my point:

"The Latin text was apparently a distancing device, perhaps also with a sacred dimension, as with the Latin of the Mass, or the Old Slavonic of the Russian Orthodox liturgy in which Stravinsky had been brought up."

But I'm not sure why he chose Latin rather than Church Slavonic, maybe he wanted some distancing from his Slavonic roots, while maintaining the spiritual and classical dimensions.

- and there's also the Roman Catholic milieu of France in the 1920s and the work of Maritain in particular, which Stravinsky was at least partly attracted to. Latin is also much more familiar to choirs than is Church Slavonic, of course.

Of course there will always be exceptions, but I doubt many working class people have read Finnegans Wake.

I doubt many people from any class have read Finnegan - or Cocteau or Sophocles, come to that. But Modernism - like any other cultural or intellectual concept - is not something that alienates anyone once the basic premises are grasped. Which doesn't mean that any such concept is then "liked" - but Birtwistle, Winterson, Henry Moore, and ... well, me ... have spoken of their engagement in Modernist Art whilst brought up in such a Working Class environment, and I have seen Comprehensive School productions of The Waste Land which were adapted and directed by Sixth-Formers including teenagers from Council estates.

I think the argument that modernist art is more about excluding working class people than, somehow, including them is valid. The point is made at length in John Carey's "The Intellectuals and the Masses".

Indeed - but that is concerned solely with British (indeed, English) cultural life in the '20s & '30s, and is a critique of the work of H G Wells and E M Forster (hardly "Modernists") as much as it is of Virginia Woolf (a modernist whose work was criticised by another Modernist, D H Lawrence - himself from a Working Class background, of course).

Some critics on the far left, like Max Eastman, also accuse modernism of being obscurantist (see the latest copy of the TLS...)

I don't doubt it that there are such critics (although I'm puzzled that you describe the author of Reflections on the Failure of Socialism as being "on the far left"). I reject such accusations.

[Mal]

I don't doubt it that there are such critics (although I'm puzzled that you describe the author of Reflections on the Failure of Socialism as being "on the far left")...

Eastman moved to the right, but was on the far left when he made his attack on modernism for being obscurantist. Carey specifies that modernism is the main target of his attack in the first paragraph of the preface of his book. Although, indeed, his first sentence indicates that his book is also about the response of the English intelligentsia in general. He does criticise several other modernists besides Woolf (the usual suspects: Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pound...)

[Serial_Apologist]

Eastman moved to the right, but was on the far left when he made his attack on modernism for being obscurantist. Carey specifies that modernism is the main target of his attack in the first paragraph of the preface of his book. Although, indeed, his first sentence indicates that his book is also about the response of the English intelligentsia in general. He does criticise several other modernists besides Woolf (the usual suspects: Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pound...)

Ah that explains a lot! It's not difficult to transition from a Stalinist position regarding anything experimental as elitist and anti-working class to what Richard and I would describe as a "capitalist realist" one that claims the market to be free and consumer choice as an almost divine right. As easy as a Soviet bureaucrat changing into a Christian Orthodox-supporting Russian nationalist!

[Joseph K]

For me, modernism is full of utopian potentialities that seek to transcend and revolt against the commodification of art.

I wouldn't call it elitist... in the same way that acknowledging the expertise of one's medical doctor is not elitist. Marx celebrated the achievements of the bourgeoisie and medicine is just one example where you would be insane to dismiss it as 'elitist'... Socialism seeks to make everyone privileged, in their own way... what the USSR was was state-capitalist, every Marxist knew or knows that genuine communism wasn't possible in a society which wasn't wholly rid of feudalism.

I'd consider myself working class, even though my dad's side is middle-class, because I was brought up by my mother, who is working class. And I've even read Ulysses and some but not all of Finnegans Wake... it's slightly patronising to suggest that working class, any more than middle class people don't get modernism. As things like bebop and Charlie Parker show, under highly progressive, redistributive tax regimes, the less well-off are likely to make their own kind of modernism.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

For me, modernism is full of utopian potentialities that seek to transcend and revolt against the commodification of art.

I wouldn't call it elitist... in the same way that acknowledging the expertise of one's medical doctor is not elitist. Marx celebrated the achievements of the bourgeoisie and medicine is just one example where you would be insane to dismiss it as 'elitist'... Socialism seeks to make everyone privileged, in their own way... what the USSR was was state-capitalist, every Marxist knew or knows that genuine communism wasn't possible in a society which wasn't wholly rid of feudalism.

I'd consider myself working class, even though my dad's side is middle-class, because I was brought up by my mother, who is working class. And I've even read Ulysses and some but not all of Finnegans Wake... it's slightly patronising to suggest that working class, any more than middle class people don't get modernism. As things like bebop and Charlie Parker show, under highly progressive, redistributive tax regimes, the less well-off are likely to make their own kind of modernism.

This sums up my own experience - and my observation of quite a few others' experiences, too. "Modernism" covers a vast range of aesthetic ideas and expressive styles - and, of course, "the Working Classes" aren't an individual "identity". The attitude of some principal figures of Modernism towards "the Masses" has done little or nothing to prevent people from lower-privileged backgrounds from developing a great love of their work. (And, of course, little or nothing to prevent those who share such socio/political attitudes from thoroughly detesting Modernist Artworks.)

[Mal]

... It's not difficult to transition from a Stalinist position regarding anything experimental as elitist and anti-working class to what Richard and I would describe as a "capitalist realist" one that claims the market to be free and consumer choice as an almost divine right. As easy as a Soviet bureaucrat changing into a Christian Orthodox-supporting Russian nationalist!

Maybe, but Eastman wasn't a Stalinist. I get the impression from the TLS article that he was just against wilful obscurity. That's a position found across the political spectrum, as is a dislike for cryptic crosswords.

Imagine teaching a class of Polish kids and they, knowing you don't speak Polish, insist on "experimenting" by answering you only in Polish. They say they can only express themselves properly in their own language. But you suspect they are just winding you up for "a laugh", and it's "letter to the parents" time.

In the case of Stravinsky's Oedipus, I don't really want to play this modernist game, I especially don't want to struggle with Latin! Go and see the headmaster Mr Stravinsky.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Why are you teaching a class of Polish kids if you can't speak Polish?

[cloughie]

Why are you teaching a class of Polish kids if you can't speak Polish?

Sounds like an instruction to a dumb cleaner!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Sounds like an instruction to a dumb cleaner!

I think that we should gloss over that.