Ask an American – perhaps one of 100 chosen at random off a busy downtown sidewalk in Kansas City at noon on a sunny day – what “May Day” means and if he’s old enough he might say a distress call for airplanes that took some Nazi flak in black and white movies. Or maybe, if he’d been traumatized in childhood, something about kids dancing circles around a 16-foot high phallus in a field of long grass and daisies, tethered by crepe-y streamers or ribbons of gauzy fabric.
It’s conceivable one of those hundred downtown Kansas City Americans would mention that May Day is an international holiday honoring workers. Or perhaps I am guessing too high. I have it from a reliable source – my twice-a-year cohost on Orchestral Maneuvers (ashevillefm.org) – that in European countries May Day is celebrated as a genuine holiday. Without advertising.
Stop and picture that: No advertising at a large-scale public gathering. Can you imagine?
I was surprised to learn May Day was in fact an American invention. May 1, 1886, was the first May Day and it saw a mass strike at a McCormick Reaper factory in Chicago. Two days later, violence erupted: a bomb was thrown into the midst of a crush of police and the police retaliated with bullet fire, killing at least 8 and wounding at least 40. (https://www.iww.org/history/library/misc/origins_of_mayday)
The composers on this briefer-than-usual and narration-free mixtape were all committed socialists, if not communists, several hardcore, and at least one of them paid for his convictions with his life. Aaron Copland, on the other hand, managed to morph into a Norman Rockwell figure of a kindly Jewish composer by his lauded life’s end.
This is an expanded version of the May 1 edition of my radio show, which (somewhat ironically) took place during a fund drive and so had long talking segments. (The show episodes are at the following site: https://www.mixcloud.com/deafmix3/ and there are complete playlists with full information on performances and labels at ashevillefm.org > shows> orchestral maneuvers.) It’s an upgrade of the show, too – the selections by two of the composers are better than the broadcast ones “IMHO” and there are two composers featured on this mix we didn’t have time for amid the pledge pleas. The huge error was not playing a Luigi Nono piece, since he was a vocal Communist Party member and a composer of pointedly political work. On this mix, most of the pieces reflect the ideology, while some (10 Verses of Emily Dickinson, e.g.) obviously don’t…
The “knowledge” I purvey (a pleasing word to say slowly – pleasing for the neck bones) comes from reading reference books, liner notes and websites over and over until it’s imprinted. Mostly now (since the books are essentially memorized, at least until my brain sinks a lot closer to total memory loss than it is now.) I learn from websites. The possibility that a substantial portion of the facts I present could be fabrications doesn’t really alter the world I’ve created in my head, just as it does lend the proceedings an air of mystery, in much the same manner as my dullish mispronunciations of composer and performer names and titles lend a DIY charm to the radio show. Or not.
I’m doing the best I can.
Again, no intros but there is complete information below…
:00
Concentration Camp theme
__________
:51
Conlon Nancarrow: Study for Player Piano #37 (1965-1969)
from Studies for Player Piano (Wergo (DE) 1999)
The pride of Texarkana, Nancarrow (1912-1997) left the U.S. to fight against the fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and then, upon returning, left for good after learning many of his comrades in the Lincoln Brigade were being harassed mightily by the U.S. government. He moved to Mexico in 1940 and became a Mexican citizen in 1956. Best-known for his laborously-punched player piano rolls, of which he wrote/punched over 50, Nancarrow was “discovered” late in life; Gyorgy Ligeti (one of the four godhead figures for this show, the Theodore Roosevelt of the Mount Rushmore) called him “the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives.”
__________
4:32
Erwin Schulhoff: Five Pieces for String Quartet
Quatours Voce String Quartet,
from Lettres Intime: Bartok, Schulhoff and Schulhoff (Alpha Classics (FR), 2016)
The Prague-born Schulhoff (1894-1942), praised by Dvorak and a student of Debussy and Max Reger, among others, was a devout communist who applied for citizenship in the USSR and made a 37-minute cantata out of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. He was arrested by occupying Nazis not for his Jewish faith but for his communist sympathies. The fact that he had fought with the Germans in WWI was an irony he shared with scores of thousands. He died in the Wülzburg camp in Bavaria, succumbing to tuberculosis. He left behind him a lot of genuinely brilliant music that is played and recorded with (what seems to me) increasing frequency.
__________
18:02
Hanns Eisler: Cantata on the Death of a Comrade (1937, text: Ignazio Silone)
1. Die Nachricht. 2. Die Verhaftung. 3. Die Ermordung. 4. Der Nachruhm
Roswitha Trexler, soprano w/ Leipzig Chamber Ensemble
from Eisler – Songs And Cantatas In Exile (Berlin Classics, 1996)
A card-carrying Communist Party member, Eisler (1898-1962) was expelled from the U.S. in 1948 and returned, deeply embittered, to Germany, where, prior to the Nazi scourge, he had collaborated w/ Bertold Brecht on multiple musicals. In the U.S., he had befriended Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Igor Stravinsky – all of whom participated in benefit concerts to raise funds for Eisler’s legal defense after he was among the first artists tried to be as a communist agent. To no avail. Once back in East Germany, Eisler composed the GDR national anthem.
__________
22:25
Iannis Xenakis: Jonchaies for 109 Musicians (1977)
Orchestre National de France
from Iannis Xenakis – Cendrées – Jonchaies – Nomos Gamma (Erato (FR), 1983)
After establishing himself as a revolutionary architect in Paris – his home after his political views got him expelled from Greece – Xenakis (1922-2001) began composing in earnest only in his thirties. He’d lost an eye and had the left side of his face mangled fighting occupying forces (Nazis by most accounts, British by one) in Greece during WWII. He applied mathematical and architectural principles to his music and the results – oddly enough – are more often than not fun to listen to, and I don’t use that word lightly. I hear melodies all over, in molecular form. It gives me a feeling of giddiness, even, and it is beautiful the way all of nature is beautiful. It is, really, all there, if you concentrate.
__________
37:26
Cornelius Cardew: Revolution is the Main Trend in the World Today (1974)
Fausto Bongelli, piano
The British Cardew (1936-1981), admired by “art rockers” like Sonic Youth (perhaps for his visually compelling scores – ovals, loops and circles in Calder-like arrangements) – was such a committed communist (“Com-Com” henceforth) that he quit writing music altogether to devote himself to the revolution that would never come in the years prior to his death at the hands of a hit-and-run driver who was never found. Of course, some suspect MI5 (the British CIA) foul play, though they must’ve had something on him heretofore undisclosed because Cardew had not changed the world with his music. But then, that would be early Thatcher-era…
Cardew: Scores more interesting than sounds?
Cardew was a Maoist and evolved from writing borderline improv pieces for ensembles to short ditty-type songs glorifying the Great Leader and adapting Chinese anthems for piano. Aside from his piano pieces, I can not find much in his music that I like a lot. I don’t understand Maoists; One question: how can anyone portray the Cultural Revolution as something other than genocide, with thinking people its targets? I shared an apartment with a Maoist once, out of necessity; I could not speak with him about anything beyond rent and utility payments, so greatly did we despise one another. I don’t believe Marxism has ever been instituted by anyone beyond human monsters, and so, to me, it can’t be judged historically. I’ve never read anything from Marx (all of that in shards, due to its dull density that I didn’t completely agree with, assuming I understood it. In other words, the economics are, to me, impenetrable and nothing my utterly money-crippled brain would work to remember.) Stalin, Lenin, Mao – they were all demons who embraced cruelty and genocide. Desecrate their tombs with your feces and your urine!
__________
59:38
Giacomo Manzoni: Verses of Emily Dickinson (1988)
Lilia Shalomei, soprano, w/ Echo Ensemble
Daniel Pacitti: Chamber Orchestra of Moldavia
from Manzoni: Doktor Faustus, etc. (BMG Ricordi (IT), 1999)
Giacomo Manzoni (1932- ), a contemporary and friend of dedicated red Luigi Nono, wrote the opera La Sentenza about a person’s responsibilities to his community and turned to folk – the people’s – music for forms and inspiration. I mainly include this because I am an Emily Dickinson fan. She achieved a starkness and clarity of mind that is the polar opposite of the mindframes we live inhabit. Mine now, at any rate, is a wobbly and wavering frame. Which has everything to do with politics.
Seriously, people are going to need to get active in a way they’re not used to if this is going to change. The people running the government now, along with their Congressional minions, do not give a flying F*CK about anyone outside their social circle. I suspect I would feel, upon reading of one of their – Paul Ryan’s, say – death-by-assassin in a full-page NY Times obituary, almost exactly as distraught as he feels when he reads of a kid being shot in the back while walking away from cops. Which is to say: Not. At. All.
__________
1:06:36
Luigi Nono: Per Bastiana Tai-Yang Cheng (1967)
Michael Gielen: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
from Nono: Canti di vita e d’amor – Per Bastiana – Omaggio a Vedova (Wergo (DE), 1993)
Like Nancarrow, Nono was hardcore. One of his first major successes was an opera-like piece (in English, The Suspended Song) in 1958 honoring the victims of fascism and included executed political prisoners’ letters home for its text, among other things. They say Nono had a way of making atonal music sound emotional and involving not seen since Webern, but I wouldn’t know because Webern was an enthusiastic Nazi and so fuck that shit. I would not waste my time on someone who supported Nazi Germany even if I loved his music. This piece is an interesting proposition, essentially three different pieces of music running concurrently but deliberately connecting in places, music performed in microtones and featuring magnetic tape as an instrument in itself. One of the threads is a Chinese revolution anthem “The East Is Red” (which Cardew set for a rather jaunty and insipid piano tune). Nono dedicated it to his second daughter.
__________
1:21:46
Aaron Copland: Our Town Suite for Piano (1940)
Eric Parkin
from Copland: Piano Music (Silva America, 1995)
Copland (1900-1990), remembered as the avuncular and gentle dean of American composers – I saw him conduct a 4th of July patriotic pops concert on the White House lawn in Reagan’s first term, e.g. – was a full-on fellow traveler during the Great Depression, stopping short of joining the Communist Party but endorsing candidates for office from that party and, like several of the composers on this tape, adopting folk and ethnic idioms and eschewing forms that might challenge a 100 IQ as he matured. His score for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is built around one of the most beautifully melancholic melodies ever written. Today it suggests a lament for a time when people’s ideals were less polluted. Our minds are completely polluted.
Concentration Camp 