Out of harmony

The committees of both the visual artists and the musicians covered the same ideological ground, yet they did so in complete isolation of each other. Didn’t they notice that Shostakovich’s struggle with line was related to Rodchenko’s? Or that any of the composers who stayed in Russia (Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and Prokovief emigrated) would presumably have been as delighted to hear a working men’s chorus singing their tunes as Popova was at the sight of a peasant woman buying a piece of her fabric for a dress?

This disjunction of music from the other arts has been a feature of the cultural scene in Europe for at least the past 200 years. In the Renaissance period music was as much part of a general education as drawing or astrology. In the 19th century aesthetes like Pater paid lip service to the power of music, but one has the impression that he was already worshipping from afar. By the time of Kenneth Clark’s television series on Civilisation, music has been put to one side so that the main thrust — the visual arts — should not be too diluted. The final stage has come in our schools, where to study music (as opposed to mathematics) is something you must pay extra for, if you can have it at all.

But to expect our schooling system to reinstate music as a normal subject for study is to ask it to roll back 200 years and more of apartheid. When did music become so scary that ordinarily cultured people felt they had to hand over responsibility for its workings to experts? When did it become an art apart? My guess is when singing gave way to instrumental playing as the normal activity of a ‘musician’, i.e., when the power of the Church waned. The Soviets would have found that very correct.