Update: 400 Russian musicians join anti-Putin protest

Patricia says:

The ones who actually live in Russia best be careful. They’ll find themselves playing Shostakovich in the Gulag.

Anon says:

From Gabriela Montero’s Facebook page:

PUTIN POWER: musicians sound their outrage
(A statement of support, GM 11/02/21)

It is testimony to the moral bifurcation of the human mind that Kanan Mayaki’s “The Republic of Fear” and Seamus Heaney’s “The Republic of Conscience” coexist.
One, a depiction of human organisation as a hierarchy of tyranny spearheaded by a diabolical tyrant; the other, an exhortation to goodness in “a place where a person would find it hard to avoid self-awareness and self-examination”.
For twenty years I, a Venezuelan musician, have been asking myself one simple question; do I want to live, participate in and thereby profit from a Republic of Fear? Or do I want – in Heaney’s masterful words – to “consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue”?
Today, Russian musicians are asking themselves the same question. Can they satisfy the exigences of the human conscience while acquiescing to an autocrat who kills and imprisons his opponents, and surrounds himself with a court of thieves in order to indefinitely occupy the throne of a suffering kleptocracy?
It is heartening to find that more than 400 Russian musicians are following Yevgeny Kissin to the Republic of Conscience, where “public leaders weep to atone for their presumption to hold office”.
I applaud them.
In doing so, they have explicitly rejected the absurd, self-awarded presumption held by so many artists that “art is above politics”, and that artists are thereby immune from participation in a societal duty of care to protest tyranny. No human being is immune to the effects of tyranny, to its gruesome methodologies of torture, wrongful imprisonment, murder, deprivation, inequity and – in Venezuela’s case – the wholesale collapse of a state.
These Russian musicians have rejected the Miss Universe banality inherent in the fundraiser-friendly claim that great musicians make great citizens, that music morally elevates those who participate in it beyond the earthbound baseness of political engagement. Perhaps they have looked to Venezuela, Russia’s close ally, and observed the bitter irony that South America’s musically and minerally richest nation is also the continent’s most corrupt, most violent, most economically imperilled, and most morally disembodied.
Like any other metaphorical device, music is capable of reflecting the vast range of conditions that make up the complex human experience. It is as capable of codifying Shostakovich’s vision of Stalinism as it is Rückert’s impression of the moon over Lake Lucerne. It is a spiritual opioid, and, like all opioids, its effects can be both positive and negative. In the hands of a propagandist, it can obscure an underlying condition. In the hands of a musician of conscience, it can reveal what tyrants would have you ignore.
For too long, Venezuelan musicians have cooperated in a state-funded endeavour to whitewash Venezuela’s grave failures with the singular detergent of music. Where Russian musicians have had to face life under Putin, with an option to opt in or opt out of musical life in Russia, Venezuelan musicians allowed themselves to become the embodiment of Venezuela’s state apparatus. Subsumed as a branch of government, they actively wore the flag-bearing attire of their tyrant on the world’s most prestigious concert stages, from Carnegie Hall to the Albert Hall. They willingly sold the abject lie to a global audience that the musically accompanied “Revolution” back home would solve inequity. By now, we all know the truth, of course. A gang of concert-attending Chavistas, kept on life-support by Putin’s cash injections, absconded with the nation’s wealth as inequity found a whole new, infernal level of misery. Oligarchs of a feather, stealing together.
Today, as these principled Russian musicians reject the politics of tyrannical oligarchy, I feel – for the first time in almost two decades – accompanied. Tyranny by any other name is tyranny, and artists must use their unique voice to reject it, without equivocation, hesitation, or delay. I only wish I could have found 400 Venezuelan musicians principled enough to have done the same back in 2014, when our tyrant was killing students in the streets as concerts went ahead in our halls. I only wish we had had a Yevgeny Kissin in Gustavo Dudamel. How much easier our fight would have been. Alas.
Bravo Yevgeny. Bravo to all the signatories. Dictators can no longer rely on artists to dance to their tune.