POLITICS, MUSIC AND OLIN DOWNES
Cork, Jim
Criticism of the Critic Polities, Music and Olin Downes By Jim Cork The oiM ilm af On. Domes*, mmm * 1* NY laser, bare!••*» lasaa • hum ol jiiIii tad fhaehat. la Mb article. Jlat Coak fanitas...
...On Downes' part, it was but the latest example of his long-standing animus against modern music...
...The single exception that he allows to his general condemnation of modern music is the output of the modern Soviet composers which he pontificially announces to be the best in the world...
...Though he has.unbent here and there on occasion, he has never yielded much enthusiasm, with one significant exception, for most of the music of the moderns...
...THIS ESTABLISHES Downes' overweening fixation on classicism, which, no sin in itself of course, seems in his case to constitute an overwhelming obstacle to an objective and just appreciation of modern music's logical, structural, harmonic departures from the classical idioms...
...dividual worker that education ha aaada readily available to him, There is no such thins a* worsers' education, if that be regarded as a kind tit education...
...O' LIN DOWNES' recent decrial of Mahler's Seventh Symphony as vulgar, empty, banal music raised a bit of a tempest...
...MOST SIGNIFICANT of all has been his expressed attitude on the infamous musical purges, which amounted to a virtual whitewashing of the Soviet bureaucracy...
...ha ha* written for "Tha American Marcury...
...They are ere ached 1st the products of our coaaaaaratel culture: radio...
...Cock contributes musical criticism frequently lo J he New Leader literary section...
...such -m museums, libraries, and uaavessttles...
...Is it worse for a composer, even at the behest of . his government, to write a piece inspire his people in a great struggle, or even to propagandize that struggle musically for the outside world, than for sophisticates of civilizations which have gone up in smoke to write symphonies for other sophisticates, for composers to write for the fashionables or for the cliques...
...Do marching songs, and anti-Nazi songs, and Leningrad Symphonies become good music by virtue of their having patriotic motives...
...And I have seen nowhere from Olin Downes' pen any forthright condemnation of the Soviet's murder of freedom and democracy in our contemporary world, though he has often prated about the necessity of building a new, free world...
...Modern Review" and othar magazines...
...C.) is concerned, we heartily concur with the ideas enunciated...
...Their hackground is Inadequate ta keep theas froan the intellectual corruption audi the dogonetatioa of values that panaoalss rssaiiHKlal culture...
...The Job Is aa huge that it cam be dona eaUy with the cosparaalaa of public and private instituwons...
...Among journalist-critics he is, perhaps, the most persistent defender of the music of Tschaikowsky and his offspring—Rachmaninoff, for example...
...Joliot-Curie's meeting here at which she defended Russian policy...
...Jlat Coak fanitas «a Maw cf those csatrnl psaaasel aed esthetic cob* victim of Mr...
...Tha larger union* have concern**1 ihemeelvau t^sbViently with tha problem so have creeled education departments nadar the laadarahip* of educational ilaoi Ina i yat their work hardly touches tha real Issue, which la adication itself, aft recreation or professional training for onion Jobs...
...It may admittedly be very praiseworthy for a~ Soviet composer to act as a responsible citizen...
...SOMEWHERE ALONG one of the many pipelines which radiate from the Communist Party as center to the Innumerable front organizations through which good-hearted but politically-naive personalities are collared for the party's disguised purposes, Olin Downes must have been influenced by the busy boys of 13th $t The evidence is admittedly cirjiniyttapiisl, but there is much of ttyuw 1j, adds up to a possible pattern...
...Ills a asatser af the tusaoet lm»srlaaea !• Ike moral health af out eeeletr aawl sa the itiialipsMui of the ha...
...Downes is a member of the Soviet-American Committee for Cultural Friendship...
...That is why his God among them is Sibelius, who is really not a modern at all, except in a strictly chronological sense, since he is completely contained within the traditional idioms...
...No Charley McCarthy of the Soviet regime could have expressed the cretinistic esthetic views of the bureaucracy any better than Mr...
...no one sentence in the book is as revealing as Sibelius' quoted words: 'It is curious, you know, the more I see of life, the more I feel that classicism is the way of the future...
...Merely Czar 1st Russia, Whose oppressions, bad as they were, were infinitely less in scope and cruelty than those being perpetrated by Stalin's inhumanly efficient totalitarian machine...
...We think that a change toward a better world must occur before tha composer will become again inspired ' and rapaMe of great tiaMflMs...
...he signed the telegram to President Truman objecting to the purported American interference in the Italian elections...
...It is the music of artists who, like the rest of humanity, are desperately in need for the good of their souls of real convictions and ideals...
...Education in tha bread tense is the transmission of culture...
...He received a well-merited public spanking from Arnold Schoenberg, among others, for his temerity...
...EDUCATION in tha United Stales ussier tha rnndlnatw af our day yields great competitive advaxdagee la its possessors...
...Then is no tassaa way every Basket university should *et provide the locals in its area with cjuaHskuMsasijirs to lead etaeeea he unaaa halls...
...The central issue involved is the character of music as music...
...This attitude would put Irving Berlin among the immortals...
...he was a member of the...
...At the end of 1946, when Shostakovich's 9th Symphony came under attack, Downes' reaction in his article at the time, "Politics vs...
...JAMES T. rAIUUXL'S "Hole on Workers' Education" is important and timely...
...Diw that bar* provad m alas fling sail disturbing...
...He tends to evaluate modern composers according to the extent to which they have, in his opinion, remained "true" to the classic tradition...
...It certainly seams, doesn't it, as if Mr...
...cinema, sleek aaMt pulp magarlnos...
...Trade Union Education ly RALPH GILBERT ROSS The debute on trade union education, touched off by James T. Worrell's article three weeks ago in The New Leader, continues with the comments of Professor Ross of N.Y.Ur's Division of General Education...
...He is definitely of the "safe and sane" school, the enthusiastic defender of traditional classic values...
...he chaired Mme...
...and, most recently, was the chairman of the welcoming committee that arranged the dinner for the initial meeting of the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, who is excelled by nobody in his blatant stooging for the policies of Russian Totalitarianism...
...Tor the Matte eesuaaar* aad uadversity exaaaaaas, they steal a program af eemratian far ¦rashers...
...A column in which he reviewed a book on the music of Sibelius is quite revealing as to Downes' tastes: ". . . of the creative progress of the man whom some thoughtful persons mention as the most original symphonist since Beethoven...
...Perhaps he is merely a morally-weak character who, unable to resist basking in the limelight offered him, leaves unexpressed some gentle doubts thut may be troubling him...
...And what, by the way, are tha civilizations that have gone up in smoke that Downes sneers at...
...Downes has the beautiful, sew world of Russia in mind as the model...
...We also give three clirerj for the condemnation of the preuatlinj/ paucity of ideas, lack of conviction, and stylistic decadence of Die greater amount of all the music ihut the western world has been producing between the two world wars, It is music very largely « of moral n.i ieell as of artistic decadence...
...Art," straddled all the way the basic issue of freedom for the creative artist...
...Downes BUT DOWNES' basic distaste for modern music is even more dearly established by his complete solidarization with the regressive musical tastes expressed by the Russian bureaucracy in the most recent purge: "Where this principle of simplicity, directness, emotional and Idiomatic expression which is recommended (i...
...But what significant light does* this throw on the character, good or bad, of his music...
...Its most relevant and revealing passages state: "However naively (!) or unwisely directed, her (Russia's) methods may seem to be, she has imbued her composers with the ideal of their obligations, as artists, to their fellowcitizens . . . The Russian musicians during the war were asked and enabled to use their weapons of the spirit against the foe, and this in ways and on a scale attempted by no other government . . . And this may be asked, whether a Leningrad Symphony is not, after all, a much more vital document than the present sterilities of such a deraced composer of decadent and sterile leanings as Stravinsky...
...eMecttve sasriea» aheap popular novels...
...At iU height it is the enduring art of a classic master...
...IT IS his lack, therefore, of what should be the most essential virtue of any sensitive critic — the insight into and elucidation of the character of the new developments in his art — that more than anything else serves to dramatize the limitations of Olin Downes, that unique critic who brings joy to the hearts of both the philistines and the Stalinists...
...Only uaaen leaders committed to the Cose—unlet mierpr eta lion of Marx eats insist on special class alteration far workers...
...in tug, it it Isaraiag ta think, to coma to rouriuaiano independently and by rational process, to use and eajoy the objects of our cultural • • • TJWIOM tTATXSMANSHIP will be asset responsible whan it is applied ta the problem af educating all workers...
...the fact is that it is Sibelius, not Stravinsky with*his fake imitations of old masters, nor Hindemith with his modern revival of old counterpoint and pure instrumental forms who is the neo-classic master of the music of today...
...No wonder then that his views were so enthusiastically quoted in Masses and Mainstream, honored successor to the New Mosses...
...The core of the week Is the cooperation of union leaders and university ex tensions...
...We certainly bop* that the Times' critic will see fit to respond lo soma of tha questions thai tha author of this article puts to him...
...A national network af saa* classes would cansaltans s seel awiaettieliig at the aaaearatle peaasss and a new mitastty for labor...
...These are problems in and of themselves, and can be meaningfully analysed only in their own terms and not in those of an historically-outmoded tradition, however great...
...e., is in the Resolution—J...
...For he baa the same uncritical veneration as expressed by the Resolution of the Central Committee of the C. P. S. U. for the classical tradition, the same basic aversion to the new and experimental, the same expressed contempt for the most significant of the modems, especially for Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith et al„ whom he never seems to tire of berating...
...There is only education, or training, or indoctrination, f- Workers, like- others, need training both lot ihoii Jobs and for union participation: but again like other*, they need education even mora...
...national board of the Wallace PCA, and a vice-chairman of that Stalinist-backed movement...
...An article by Frank Marquarl em the same subject will appear next week...
...Aside from the oblique, implied defense of the "beauties" of Russian civilization, We could have no better representative example of the philistinic confusion of the categories "musical" and "political...
...In light of his musical tastes such a judgment is to be expected, in view of the fact that it is the most traditional, the most eclectic and unoriginal body of music in all of modernism, kept that way by the pressure of an oppressive, political regime...
...or does the generalization go beyond old Russia to include, perhaps, Downes' own country, America, which, being bourgeoiscapitalist, would presumably be classed as reactionary vis-a-vis the enlightened humanism of Russian totalitarian: m? We would enjoy being enlightened on this point by Mr...
...Washers, dosplss their Ugh average af literacy, passeas comparatively tittle formal education and are seldom marWitaal ta acquire mora...
Vol. 32 • January 1949 • No. 3
