Composing Workers (original) (raw)

How do creative specialists—in this case composers of serious music—forge a movement for the benefit of workers, a class whose members typically share neither the knowledge nor taste for what those composers are skilled at creating? How can creators make politically potent creative products that have no overt political content? These are the animating questions behind this paper. During the 1930s, the broad left-wing movement in the United States included artists, musicians, writers, poets, dramatists, dancers, and other creative specialists who attempted to foster organizations, mobilize their colleagues, invent new forms, and make creations on behalf of the cause. Most of them, especially in the early movement before a shift to folk art, faced a common structural and cultural challenge. All their training and professional success revolved around an aesthetic standard of quality formed in an aristocratic system that eschewed common taste. Yet their movement was putatively on behalf of the working class, many of whose members were indifferent or even hostile to refined aesthetic standards. For musicians, there was a further challenge that the political commitments that gave content to many artistic media found no direct expression in music, a medium without explicit message. How were they to create political music if music had no message? In 1936, the left-wing American Music League, in collaboration with the communist-influenced Composers’ Collective initiated a journal, Unison, to mobilize members and share perspectives. A mimeographed mixture of opinion pieces, announcements, news items, reviews, and analysis, it reached out mainly to sympathetic composers. The journal expressed the dilemma of seeking a role for composers in a movement with revolutionary aspirations and pragmatic practice. While they sought historical transformation, their activities involved discussions of ideology, workshops on composing, and concerts to bring people together. They were more familiar with violins than violence. This paper explores how they sought a political strategy for musicians, specifically how they attempted to reconcile the nature of art as they understood it, the effectiveness of reaching the working class, and the structural position of their profession.