Classical music is weaponised in Russia’s war on Ukraine
NewsIn a NY Times op-ed today, conductor John Mauceri argues that serious music really matters to both sides – and to the outcome.
There is a trope often heard in discussions about culture that classical music is irrelevant — an elite and moribund art form disconnected from contemporary life.
If the trope were true, however, would Russian soldiers have assassinated a Ukrainian conductor in his home after he refused to conduct a concert celebrating Russia’s “improvement of peaceful life”?
Mauceri goes on the ocntend that Ukrainian refugees laid the foundations of American music.
Much of the music we think of as American was composed by the children of Ukrainians who escaped another kind of terrorism — anti-Semitism. Our country was the safe harbor for many who escaped the pogroms that surely would have killed them. And who were some of their children, their American children? Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, Alfred Newman, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin.
Any time you hear the music of “West Side Story” or “Rhapsody in Blue,” or watch “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Psycho,” “The Ten Commandments” or “The Magnificent Seven,” you are hearing the sound that freedom gave back to us and to the world.
Discuss.
Music is music, politics is politics. End of story, goodbye, the end.
“Are we going to do this again?” — Ernst Janning to “Judgment at Nuremberg”
Yes. Yes we are.
,Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Baryshnikov…
And don’t forget Gershwin, Copland and Leonard Bernstein, their roots were from Imperial Russia…
Classical music has always been used as a propoganda tool because it is seen as aspirational and used in a totemic fashion.
That proves nothing about its actual relevance or place in people’s lives, only the perceptions that people may have of it.
Two current prominent American conductors, Leonard Slatkin and Michael Tilson Thomas, are also of Ukrainian origin. Slatkin’s family is from Mohyliv-Podilskyi, and Tilson Thomas’s family is from Chyhyryn and Tarashcha. All of these places are in Ukraine.
Those places may be in Ukraine, but I doubt very much that their families thought of themselves as “of Ukrainian origin” or from Ukraine — that’s a concept that post-dates their emigration. They were Jews, from “Russia” or, at most, the “Russian empire.” To them, “Ukrainians” probably meant Cossacks, from whom they had to hide every year at Easter time. (But Mr. Slatkin might correct me.)
finally someone pointing out the truth
Banning any Russian music or trying to make people feel guilty for singing Rachmaninov songs or playing Tchaikovsky or anything else, is no answer to the war. It is destruction of another sort and a more insidious sort of destruction.
It’s equally worth remembering that Rachmaninoff (spelled as the composer preferred) left Russia for very good reasons. And his compositions were belittled by many Russian musicians during and after the Soviet era.
Russian soldiers would have assassinated a baker if he had refused to make a nice cake for Putin … so what? Yes cakes are relevant to society, just like toilets and soccer.
Classical musicians and the circus of classical music seriously need
to stop whining and look at reality for what it is. People are free, and in their freedom 99.9% apparently decided that classical music is indeed irrelevant to today’s society, and also gerontocratic, too white and yes, elitist.
Whoever wants to study it and listen to it can do so. If orchestra die because they can’t sell their product, there are still 100 years of recordings available. Everybody is happy, no?
Live and let live.
Wow! I mean just wow! Why do you come here if that is your feeling?
The writer made a very non-eloquent point: for most of the human population, classical music (also called Western Art music) is not relevant to their lives. Hard to argue this point.
And many other performers, including violinist Nathan Millstein ( from Odessa) and pianist Gary Graffman, whose family came from Kiev.
A little much….
By this logic, R. Strauss is and always will be Nazi music. Are you sure you want to follow this train of thought over the cliff?
I thought this was going to be about the practice of storing weapons of war in theaters to ensure they get bombed.
Your comment is very funny despite the serious subject matter.
Beethoven had to live under enemy occupation for a time. Napoleon placed armed soldiers outside his residence, maybe as a mark of respect.