Finding Democracy in Music

Robert Adlington, Esteban Buch, Robert Adlington, Esteban Buch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367486921
• eBook ISBN: 9781000163759
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians' imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music's proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution.

Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music's manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.

1 ‘Unsociable sociability’

Orchestras, conflict and democratic politics in Finland after 1917

Tina K. Ramnarine

Democracy as a political frame determining how people relate to each other within and across states, as well as the relation between the individual and the state, is interwoven with conflict. In fact, conflict is a central problem in socio-political life. Conflict highlights ideological tensions in democratic politics, among which those relating to national patriotism and border processes are of particular relevance to this discussion. The exertion of military power, as an extreme act of conflict, seems far removed from the orchestra as a musical institution associated with harmonious working processes. Yet, high-profile contemporary orchestral examples such as the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are embedded in conflict situations, and they adopt diplomatic roles. During the Cold War, Leonard Bernstein hoped his 1959 tour of the Soviet Union with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra would promote cultural diplomacy and friendship between two world powers. However, when he later spoke on the topic of the future of the orchestra, in 1980, he turned his attention to the micro-level of orchestral social relationships, including this advice for musicians:

To the orchestral players I would plead: Cherish your love of your music; don’t ever let orchestral politics cause you to forget your joyful reason for having joined an orchestra in the first place; guard your standards of excellence, which mean much more than fluency or technique.¹

Whether focusing on state diplomacy or on individual experiences of playing musical works, Bernstein’s discourse alludes to the capacity of the orchestra as a musical institution to lend itself to modelling democracy in the political world. This is a capacity that seems to arise because of the collaborative working processes that are required in order to perform successfully as an ensemble. But the modelling process is flawed. A principal flaw lies in the idea of the democracy of orchestral collaboration, an idea that obscures the orchestra’s own hierarchies of cooperation and discriminatory practices – the ‘orchestral politics’ (to use Bernstein’s term) that highlight the orchestra’s internal dynamics, as well as its grounding in political life. In other words, the orchestra is more than a model for democratic political life; it is itself located within different exercises of power. The model is compromised, therefore, but it has an important conceptual function, operating as a destabilizing force to monolithic or universalist concepts of the orchestra or, indeed, of democracy, and therefore inviting pluralist perspectives and fuelling questions about the diverse mechanisms through which power is exercised.

This chapter explores orchestras against the backdrop of conflict. It refers to Finnish examples to discuss divergent democracies, noting that there is no single concept of democracy. Its starting point is Immanuel Kant’s philosophical idea about universal possibility, particularly within the frames of his fourth proposition. This proposition states: ‘The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order’ (Kant 2003a [1784]: 19). Kant’s concept of antagonism refers to the human inclination towards ‘unsociable sociability’, especially to the individual’s need to find a way of relating to others. Its influence on later philosophical discussion extends to biopolitics, particularly Foucault’s claim that ‘politics is the continuation of war, by other means’ (2013 [1976]: 15) and Agamben’s (1998) notion of biopower (life and death in the new political body). For Foucault, political power continues a ‘silent war’ by re-inscribing its force ‘in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals’ (2013 [1976]: 16). For Agamben, the relation between the individual and the state is formulated in terms of the sacred and ritual nature of human life within the state; the latter being able to deprive individuals of their rights while maintaining their places within legal jurisdiction. Biological life thus becomes a ‘politically decisive fact’, a perspective drawing on Kant’s insights into the form of law as an empty principle (Agamben 1998: 35). Agamben, like Foucault, was indebted to Kant’s political thought, and he commended Kant’s ability, two centuries earlier, ‘to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (ibid.).

The orchestra covers the spectrum between conflict and cooperation, which means it is an appropriate subject for reflecting on the human relations that lie at the core of philosophical and political enquiry. Although the orchestra often operates as a metaphor for political governance, musicians’ practices of working together point to ‘the fragility of conceptualising the orchestra as a broader set of harmonious social relationships beyond the moments of musical encounter’ (Ramnarine 2011: 333). Nineteenth-century discourses on music and politics focused on the musical text, especially on the paradigmatic potential of writing, partly to express political ideas about unity and equality, as well as on players’ musical conversations and the capacities of ensembles to generate the harmonious and healthy social relations that characterize political sociability (see Hunter 2012, in relation to string quartets). Ensembles were prominent in public life and they stimulated private relationships, thus standing as a model for both ‘admirable social relations’ (ibid.: 56) and a polity within which discharging obligations (playing one’s musical parts) on ‘a basis of equality and respect’ would result in freedom (ibid.: 64). Critical re-assessment of orchestral equality focuses on limited creative opportunities for individual musicians, who are seen as being subject to the interpretative decisions of conductors (Cottrell 2004). Other musicians do not have the luxury of thinking about creative opportunities within the orchestra. They are denied access and the opportunity to become orchestral members, as studies on under-representation and segregation in classical music employment discuss (Scharff 2015).

Conflict and cooperation even characterize twentieth-century discourses on the technologies of the body that use the metaphor of the orchestra to explain the harmony of organic life. As Donna Haraway noted, the idea of the body as being in discord was embraced by the 1970s:

The joke of single masterly control of organismic harmony in the symphonic system responsible for the integrity of ‘self’ has become a kind of postmodern pastiche of multiple centres and peripheries, where the immune music that the page suggests would surely sound like nursery school space music. All the actors that used to be on the stage-set for the unambiguous and coherent biopolitical subject are still present, but their harmonies are definitely a bit problematic.

(1991: 207)

Haraway’s ‘problematic’ harmonies correspond with Kant’s assessment of political relations in terms of ‘unsociable sociability’, which are often most acute across the borders of neighbouring states with different forms of political governance.

As illustrated with reference to Finland in the following discussion, the border amplifies both antagonism and divergent ideas about democratic politics. In the nineteenth century, Finland was a ‘sensitive region’ (Hosking 2012: 337) within the Russian Empire due to the closeness of its borders to St. Petersburg, its autonomous status as a grand duchy, and the rise of Finnish nationalism. Although Finland’s distinct political institutions enabled a ‘largely peaceful civil resistance’ to Russian imperial policy (ibid.: 338), a programme of intensified Russification implemented by General Nikolai Bobrikov at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries affected diplomatic relations (see Ramnarine 2020, for discussion of Jean Sibelius’s violin concerto in this context).

In 1917, Finland became an independent nation state founded on liberal democratic principles, while socialist democracy underpinned the political direction of the Soviet Union. Important Finnish orchestral works composed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were connected with nationalist politics. Cultural interactions between Finland and Russia also marked this period. Notably, major figures in Finnish musical life, such as the composer Jean Sibelius and the composer-conductor Robert Kajanus, undertook music tours to Russia and, in turn, Russian musicians performed in Finland. The nationalist significance of orchestral life informed the establishment of several orchestras across Finland’s major cities throughout the twentieth century. These orchestras continued to develop the state’s cultural strength, in accordance with one of the guiding principles of Finnish nationalism. In the world of politics, Finnish liberal democracy shaped important developments regarding universal suffrage, civil society and welfare systems, although the immediate aftermath of independence, in 1918, was civil war. In the wake of this war, in the period 1920–1940, Finnish nationalism resurged to shape cultural life in the border region of Karelia, which had been divided between Finland and Russia after the First World War. By the late twentieth century, cross-border initiatives emphasized transnational interaction rather than national interests, and youth orchestra projects for the wider Baltic region were launched (Ramnarine 2014). Within the orchestral body itself, teamwork had become an important, and dominant, narrative. By discussing some details from these examples, which compare different forms of democracy over state borders, the aim of this chapter is to highlight the possibility for thinking about the politics of orchestras within Ferrara’s (2014) frame of a democratic ethos that rests on imaginative openness and hyperpluralism.

Biopower and the orchestra

The concept of ‘unsociable sociability’ primarily addresses conflict in effecting changes in governance and social order. Kant formulated his fourth proposition in 1784 when he was working on his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. This proposition dealt with conflict as a way of transforming an enforced social union into a moral whole, as well as of developing human talents. Kant argued that it was a human ‘inclination to live in society’, but that it was also a human ‘tendency to live as an individual’ (2003a [1784]: 19). Without these opposing tendencies, humans would remain dormant in nature, but it was nature, according to Kant, that bestowed humans with this capacity to develop their talents, and, above all, to develop rational thought. Thus, the fourth proposition, bearing repetition at this point, states: ‘The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order.’ In this proposition, antagonism is a state of ‘unsociable sociability’, which is a state of opposition between the social and the individual. The opposition must be reconciled since humans cannot bear to live with their fellow human beings but also ‘cannot bear to leave them’ (ibid.). A decade later, in 1795, Kant reflected on perpetual peace as a state that must be formally instituted since the natural state of humans is the state of war (2003b [1795]: 28). Moreover, in searching for political mechanisms, he suggested that nation states are ‘a standing offense to one another by the very fact that they are neighbours’ (ibid.). Kant’s route to reconciliation was the formation of a federation of states: a federation rather than one international state. The federation should be capable of securing the rights of every nation state (through treaties, hospitality and cosmopolitan right), and its role would extend beyond trying to solve problems between neighbouring nation states by taking a more global view of the relationships between all states. In this regard, Kant mentioned European colonial projects, which lived on the ‘fruits of iniquity’ even as they were ushering in ‘a universal community’, heralding the possibility of global responses to rights violations. As Kant writes, ‘the violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (ibid.: 36). His reflections are late eighteenth-century examples of anthropological, as well as philosophical thinking about politics and society.

Kant’s view of conflict underpinned Foucault’s approaches to biopower, especially to the pursuit of power through war. In his 1976 essay, ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, Michel Foucault, who situated his work within the critical tradition of Kant and not only translated but also wrote an introductory essay (2008 [1961]) to Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (2006 [1798]), considered how bodies began to be administered from the seventeenth century onwards, how institutions embodied discipline in the eighteenth century, and how the technology of power saw concrete arrangements for the ideological doctrines of apprenticeship, contracts and the regulated formation of the social body in the nineteenth century. This biopower was, he suggested, ‘without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’ (Foucault 2013 [1976]: 45).

For Foucault, power is the capacity to decide on questions of life and death. While sovereigns once had the power to seize bodies and life in the pursuit of war (ibid.: 42), including in processes of building capital, Foucault outlined the sovereign principle of our time that ‘one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living’ as the widespread ‘strategy of states’ (ibid.: 43). This strategy means that power over life is exercised in two ways: one that sees the body in terms of its usefulness and its integration into effective systems, and the other that sees the body as serving a biopolitics that serves biological processes of propagation and longevity (ibid.: 44). Foucault suggests that all regulatory controls are ‘directed toward the performances of the body’ and they characterize a power that invests in life, thereby supplanting old notions of sovereign power over death. Foucault’s discussion on how performances of the body are regulated brings a performative dimension to understanding the dynamics of biopower, which is a crucial point in this reading of the orchestral body as one of the institutions of power. Moreover, the orchestra is an institution in the workings of biopower that achieves a high value in biopolitical categorizations of utility because it emphasizes the realization of individual potential within the collective (ibid.: 48).

The context of biopolitical power informs the development of various forms of twentieth-century democratic politics, as Agamben makes clear in looking at rights issues. In fact, for Agamben, the body of the sovereign subject is the foundation of the nation state, which is a compelling perspective for unravelling the complexities of national orchestral history. He writes:

It is not poss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Titlepage
• Series
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of music examples and figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: looking for democracy in music and elsewhere
• 1 ‘Unsociable sociability’: orchestras, conflict and democratic politics in Finland after 1917
• 2 Dismantling borders, assembling hierarchies: Percy Grainger and the idea of democracy
• 3 How democratic is jazz?
• 4 Curating difference: Elliott Carter and democracy
• 5 Getting exercised: ensemble relations in Christian Wolff’s Exercises
• 6 Defining audible democracy: new music in post-dictatorship Argentina
• 7 Network music and digital utopianism: the rise and fall of the Res Rocket Surfer project, 1994–2003
• 8 As the band hit full throttle: live event, mediatization and collective identification in popular music concert films
• 9 Reinventing audiences: imagining radical musical democracies
• Index