Music and Politics, an Ancient Marriage: Origins (2)

This series of articles offers a wide-ranging overview — both thematic and chronological — of the various relationships between music and the space of the City across the ages. The first in the series, divided into three parts, examines the origins of the bond between music and 'the' political — both as concept and as practice.

It is in eighteenth-century Europe that the debate on music and freedom steps briefly outside its relationship with the sacred to resume an explicitly philosophical form, as it had in the time of ancient Greece. And the credit belongs essentially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. History has certainly retained him as one of the pillars of Enlightenment political philosophy, but his dual condition as composer and musicologist remains largely overshadowed by his philosophical legacy.

Rousseau, for whom music is not an aesthetic question separable from the moral and political one, develops in his Dictionary of Music and in the Essay on the Origin of Languages the thesis that melody, bearing the natural inflections of the human voice, is the original language of the passions. It represents a language anterior to reason, immediately communicative, founded on shared emotion rather than on the articulated concept.

Consequently, the sophisticated harmony of the European courts, with its learned counterpoint and academic conventions… all this is, in his eyes, nothing but corruption of that original purity. A music reduced to a social artifice, in a sense, which has lost contact with the very nature of the human voice when it still exists outside power, its discipline, its constraints.

The Rousseauist position, well beyond any aesthetic consideration, is fundamentally political. Natural music is the language of freedom, whereas institutional music is nothing other than the funeral oration of voluntary servitude…

Diderot and Music as Founding Order

Denis Diderot, who is not without sharing with Rousseau this fundamental intuition concerning the link between music and natural feeling, brings to it however an additional dimension, social and collective, of musical experience. In the articles of the Encyclopédie that he devotes to music and genius, Diderot conceives of sound no longer merely as the language of individual passions, but as what makes possible a 'sensible community.' In this light, music becomes a space of emotional sharing anterior to all political convention, where men experience their common belonging before formulating it in terms of rights or contract.

What Plato formulated in the prescriptive register of the ideal City, Diderot transposes into that of shared sensibility, making music an anthropological condition prior to any social contract, where the Greeks had made of it merely an instrument of governance. What Diderot does, in Rousseau's wake, is properly revolutionary. With him, music becomes a founding element of the political order, which it precedes. It no longer operates in reaction to an order, but participates in its elaboration. It is precisely this founding power, music conceived as the matrix of political community and anterior to its conventions, that Kant will regard with growing mistrust.

Kant and the Mistrustful Voice of Reason

These reflections Immanuel Kant reads, no doubt, with the admiration he holds for Rousseau and Diderot… but also with suspicion. And for good reason: the emotional power of music, its capacity to act on the body and the soul before reason has had time to intervene, constitutes for the philosophers of the Enlightenment its fundamental virtue. For Kant, it is precisely this that is a source of threat. A music that bypasses rational judgment to speak directly to the passions renders men, in his view, available for collective enthusiasm as much as for individual freedom.

Kant is not entirely wrong. Nor are Rousseau and Diderot. This philosophical tension between their readings — music as natural vehicle of freedom against music as vehicle of emotional manipulation — prefigures a binary that will traverse history, from La Marseillaise to totalitarian hymns, from the negro spirituals to the Nuremberg rallies, and from civil rights concerts and Vietnam War protests to the recycling of pop songs as promotional propaganda at electoral rallies…

La Marseillaise, precisely, will vindicate both the Rousseau-Diderot reading and Kant. Born in 1792 as a revolutionary war song, it is perhaps the first, or one of the first, modern examples of a music that fabricates a political community in the very act of singing. The song thus produces a popular will, transforms individuals into an organised collective united by the single fact of sharing a rhythm and a melody. In this sense, it is the demonstration of what Kant dreaded above all, since the euphoric sentiment that the melody and words cement in the group does not distinguish the just from the unjust or the liberator from the conqueror. It confirms, in the same movement, Diderot's intuition: music precedes the contract, it fabricates the people before the people endows itself with institutions.

What Kant senses with dread in the emotional power of music anticipates, in a certain way, the passionate sense of History that Hegel would soon theorise, he for whom History does not advance through rational deliberation alone, but through the passions of men who, often without knowing it, serve as instruments of the World Spirit. The future does not entirely prove him wrong, since the same music that sings the freedom of peoples will soon accompany Napoleon's armies across Europe…

Hegel, Beethoven and the Torn Dedication

If one must choose an archetypal example to illustrate the tortuous and tormented relationship between music and power, it is surely that of Ludwig van Beethoven, because he lived it in his flesh and in his work, and because his disillusionment is emblematic of that which committed music will experience again, in different forms, both similar and different, in every generation.

Beethoven dedicates the Heroic Symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, in whom he sees what Hegel himself called 'the World Spirit on horseback.' The Revolution made flesh. Freedom become History. The symphony he creates commensurate with this faith breaks with all the formal conventions of its time… as Napoleon himself is a sequential rupture with what came before… or at least so one still believed at the time. Long, complex, unpredictable, it is traversed by an energy that resembles nothing that preceded it. It is certainly not dedicated to a victorious general. It is dedicated to an idea, the idea he represents. That Spirit which, Beethoven believes, will at last humanise history…

When Napoleon crowns himself, Beethoven tears the dedication page. This small gesture, private and without witness, remains one of the most politically significant in all the history of music.

Through it, Beethoven proclaims in fact all the splendour and decadence of what musical genius is in its contact with 'the' political. Music can believe in a political project, it can give it its highest form, but it cannot survive the betrayal of that project by those who embodied it, he already tells us, well before the birth of the music industry. It is not in the service of the men who represent ideas, but in the service of the ideas themselves. And when men betray the ideas, music must tear the dedication. And, if possible, the musician himself, if he has the courage, the lucidity, and the desire for coherence.

A Universal and Timeless Lesson

This lesson Bob Dylan will learn in his turn by refusing to be the mouthpiece of the pacifist movement — or of any other cause thereafter. Marvin Gaye will learn it by moving away from Motown to sing what Motown above all did not want to hear, the committed songs that threatened to scratch the smooth, mass-market image of the label. Or Nina Simone, leaving the United States, fleeing a climate that had become unbearable, marked by systemic racism, political pressures, and the boycott of her songs by the American authorities because of her intense commitment to the civil rights movement…

Invariably, the gesture will remain everywhere the same, including beyond American shores: committed music knows, at a certain moment, that it cannot stay where it has been placed if that place is no longer worthy of trust. It then displaces its commitment, without renouncing it. It thus remains faithful to its soul, while realising that the medium, the transitory body that inhabited the melody, is inevitably fallible. It remains perfectly free… failing which it is extinguished, compromised.

It is Beethoven himself who teaches us this, since despite his Napoleonic disappointment, he will not have done with the tension between music and political ideal. The Ninth Symphony, composed when he had become deaf, takes up the universalist, Weimaresque utopia of Friedrich Schiller, but transcended by his genius. Beethoven magnifies the idea that joy can reunite what history has separated and that sound can build bridges and extend hands where politics has created frontiers.

And it is no accident that this Ode to Joy became, decades later, the musical fresco of the European Union, a political project founded precisely on the idea that what unites men beyond their national identities can take on an institutional form and create a different style of civilisation, against all odds.

Significantly, the European Union chose to adopt an exclusively instrumental version of it, without Schiller's words, as if the melody alone were sufficient to express what words risked confining within a single language and national memory.

By his gesture, Beethoven discredits the heroism of conquest in favour of the joy of universal humanism. This gesture itself, private, without witness, without declaration, constitutes no doubt the alpha lesson, perhaps the most precious that committed music has ever received. What Beethoven tells us is that the most radical political act does not necessarily require spectacular gestures, but can hold, in all its fullness, far from the glare of the spotlights, in the solemn and solitary silence of a room.

It suffices to refuse to let the idea be abandoned to die with those who betrayed it.

The torn dedication is thus the first modern manifesto of music's autonomy with respect to power, and of the artist with respect to the cause that had dazzled him. A political act in itself, before even being a symbol, it lays the true first stone of the history of committed music in all its complexity, at the threshold of the nineteenth century and well before the twentieth comes to reveal, beneath its murderous ideologies, all its ambivalences.

By anticipation, Beethoven in fact proposes the antidote to the Wagnerian superman… but Hitler is completely deaf to Beethovenian Joy, swept away to mephistophelian madness by his Aryan Valkyries, their phantasmal rides and their apocalyptic dreams.

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Music and Politics, an Ancient Marriage: Origins (1)