Search Results

This chapter introduces the political landscape caused by World War I, the crisis in capitalism, the Great Depression, and the Popular Front, crises that would shape Copland’s and Eisler’s individual musical and political perspectives. Their political commitment led them to embrace film music and to seek employment in Hollywood. Their decisions took place within the debates regarding the aesthetic and political values of high and low culture as exemplified by culture critic Gilbert Seldes (The Seven Lively Arts), George Antheil, and others. The chapter also discusses Hollywood as an industrial enterprise and the conditions that composers like Copland and Eisler faced working in the movie capital.

This chapter examines the political aspects of the works of Jewish composers. It explains that the vast majority of secular Jewish composers and writers were resolutely anti-religion and discusses the work of Hanns Eisler, who used music as a political weapon which would be a defining element in Weimar Germany. The chapter also highlights the emergence of Berlin Cabaret during this period and describes some of the most memorable ones, including those composed by Friedrich Hollander.

Identifying certain forms of music as Jewish and establishing the criteria for how Jewishness in music would be recognized preoccupied ideological and aesthetic concerns of many Jews entering modernity by the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter concerns itself primarily with the ways in which Jewishness would counterbalance the nineteenth-century notion of absolute music, in which textual meaning negated contextual functions. Richard Wagner’s invective 1850 essay on “Jewishness in Music” unleashed responses until the Holocaust, and the chapter summarizes many of these, especially by leading Jewish music critics. Examples are drawn from Mahler, Jewish social organizations, and political musical traditions of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Tucholsky, and others from the Weimar period separating the world wars.

Chapter 3 introduces double projection as a phenomenon that occurs when well-known music calls up preexisting associations on the viewer’s mental screen while watching a movie. With the advent of film, such music-induced double projections proliferated, creating a qualitatively new experience of intertextuality. While compilers of early film scores worried about such "interferences" when recycling well-known songs or operatic numbers, film makers soon began to exploit the potential of intentional reference and allusion. The two case studies of this chapter focus on the potential of critical interference and formal synchronicity in the montage films of late modernist European cinema: Alexander Kluge’s quotation in The Patriot (1979) of Hanns Eislser’s score for the Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955); and Jean-Luc Godard’s use of of a phrase from Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, op. 11 in his Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-89). In as much as intertextuality has become rampant in both modernist and post-modernist media, the chapter concludes with the suggestion that music may at times become buoyant and free itself from being visually overdetermined.

The chapter covers Blitzstein’s marriage to Eva Goldbeck; his involvement with the Dartington School; his and Eva’s deportation from Brussels for alleged communist activities; his return to New York and involvement with Charles Seeger and the Marxist Composers’ Collective; his growing interest in the German socialist composer Hanns Eisler; and the illness and death of Eva from anorexia.

The conclusion presents a summation of Copland’s and Eisler’s political music and their contributions in both their writings and their film scores to the history of the Hollywood industry and American music and film scores. As modernist composers and outsiders to Hollywood, they were able simultaneously to challenge and assimilate Hollywood’s expectations while producing work that coincided with their own political agendas.

It was Bertolt Brecht who gave Los Angeles a bad name in German literature. Even critics who are not familiar with the original German verse love to cite Brecht's scathing poem comparing Los Angeles to hell. In the poem's first stanza, Brecht refers to Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem entitled “Hell,” which was part of a parody, “Peter Bell the Third,” ridiculing a cycle of poems by William Wordsworth. Brecht continues his diatribe against the movie industry in his “Hollywood Elegies,” a cycle of six poems that he wrote for Hanns Eisler's Hollywood Songbook. In order to understand Brecht's California poetry as modernist poetry, one has to look at his household poems and at his garden poetry written in imitation of classical Latin poetry that reflects on nature and politics. This chapter explores Brecht's lyric poetry as a paradigm of dialectics in exile modernism. Brecht had to reinvent Los Angeles as a city of exiles in order to be productive as a poet.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Red Army as a symbol of power was supported in many other arenas so as to counteract the rival influence of the United States on Central Europe. The Soviet Union brought new urgency to these efforts from 1948, with music—and culture more broadly—providing a case for Russia’s attractiveness and superiority with respect to the West. This chapter discusses the nature and scope of Soviet influence in the Central European music world through the examples of East Germany and Poland, and through the prism of the music and persona of Sergei Prokofiev. After his return to the USSR in 1936, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich, became associated with the very definition of what made music Soviet and thus worthy of emulation. And even more than Shostakovich, Prokofiev and his music functioned as powerful but malleable symbols that could be appropriated by all Soviet actors for their own ends.