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Blitzstein, Marc. “Author of ‘The Cradle’ Discusses Broadway Hit” (3 Jan. 1938)

• “Unions…are used as a symbol of something in the way of a solution for the plight of the middleclass.”
• “The middleclass must sooner or later see that there can be allegiance only to the future, not the past; that the only sound loyalty is the concept of work, and to a principle which makes honest work at least true, good and beautiful.”
• “‘The Cradle Will Rock’ is in opera form because I have come to feel that the realistic theatre of our day has about outlived its usefulness, and that a new sort of theatre, in which music must function as a special integrating force, is inevitable if there is to be any theatre left.”
  • theater’s health threatened by television, radio, talkies
• all sorts of music – “to enforce a scene”, “combat a scene”, background, foreground, sung to, danced to, acted over, talked around
• success depends on the audience

Blitzstein, Marc. “The Case for Modern Music: III. Technique and Temper” (28 July 1936)

• “new composer” sees connection between “pressing realities of today’s life” and music
• no longer addresses music to “installed art-public” which is “superior, very knowing in names and terms, essentially mistrained”
  • “He has found the new vast wholly untrained ardent public of the masses. They are everywhere and so he is everywhere … he digs his way in and lets his music fly at them.”
  • will not “bore or mystify them with abstruse experiments dear to professionals” but “will not just pander to them”
  • will “write everything”
  • needs “an idiom, then, a language”: “he is to make a strong supple ordered warm music”
    • is this “ultra-modern or anti-modern or what?”
    • “The answer comes out of music, not theories”
• “contemporary technique in music is”:
  1. bourgeois
     • in its associations
       • innovators didn’t think about “extra-musical implications of their revolt”
       • “revolting in terms of art, not of the social system”
         • “their revolt was disagreeable to, but containable within the system”
  2. scientific
     • in terms of technique
       • “logical next step”
       • describes tonality as increasing “diffusion” culminating in Wagner
       • credits Schoenberg with atonality
  3. for use, useful
     • modern musical technique: the “revolutionary composer inherits it, it is his jumping-off place.”
       • “He should no more scrap it than a socialist society should scrap a machine because its functioning in a bourgeois system meant abuse or persecution or unemployment.”
         • “We don’t disdain the radio as a medium because of somebody’s toothpaste.”
     • determinism/materialism: “The technical aspect of present-day music is forward-looking, and actually unrestrainable, like scientific inventions.”
       • inevitability: “No matter who evolved it, or under what unsavory circumstances, the point is that it had to be evolved.” (em mine)
       • “it is about time that the doctrine of ‘original sin’ was got rid of.”
• technique is “a kind of musical energy, a specialized twentieth-century kind.”
  • “There is a body of materials, an equipment, a way of expressing which belongs to our time and to no other.”
  • old: “effusiveness, over-statement, windiness”; new: “directness, economy, clarity”
    • “Music heaves and sweats much less.”
    • “ripe for revolutionary treatment”
• “music of the masses is not going to be the music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky or Hindemith.”
  • but Schoenberg “implanted a discipline and logic” - but role is negative
  • Stravinsky made good “contribution”, but “landed in a bog of hyper-esthetic tendencies, snobbish and ingrown in message and character.”
  • “Hindemith is too deeply academic, to little lyric.” but propaganda work is related
  • others also, including Milhaud, Berg, Prokofiev
• “That they were unconscious preparing the way, beginning something whose counterparts and possibilities they did not dream of, was none of their business. It is distinctly ours, who appraise them in order to use them; who digest in order to eliminate, but also to absorb.”

Blitzstein, Marc. “Lines on ‘The Cradle’” (2 Jan 1938)

• music theater in America is either opera (only at the Met) or musical comedy (“on its last lap”)
  • “Vaudeville has died a scurvy death; revue is rapidly deteriorating”.
• Must “find a new form, one which will work in a new way and yet manage to offend nobody by its newness.”
• three problems with The Cradle
  1. it was colloquial
     • subject matter demanded it
     • casting was a problem – trained singers would sound terrible singing colloquial text
       • so, use singing actors: “‘Operatic’ tone was to be avoided, theatre tone was the point.”
  2. it was an opera
     • developed “an elaborate and quite sensible theory about how that relation (between music and drama) was to be established”
       • but “the theory got kicked out as soon as I began to work”
  3. music and stage action “were to be so integrated that they never overcrowded each other nor were swamped by each other”
     • “The ‘number’ form of Mozart, used successfully in our day by Weill and Eisler, worried me.”
       • this is basically the form of musical comedy in US
     • “On the other hand, the symphonic style of Wagner, the atmospherisms of Debussy, even the miraculous solution of Verdi, all seemed inapproriate.”
       • all share a common problem: continuous music which not only “enrich(es)…the scope”, but “shift(s) it to the realm of the heroic”.
         • Meaning not realistic
       • “‘The Cradle Will Rock’ also had to present a kind of heroism, and in order to be even remotely credible it had to make terms with realistic procedure.”
     • form arose naturally, “without a great deal of initiative” from MB
       • all different kinds of music “pitchforked into it”
       • a “casual use and function of the music”
         • MB thinks this “raises the status of the music rather than lessening it”
       • doesn’t know about the form; we’ll see

Blitzstein, Marc. “Music Manifesto” (23 June 1936)

• About a Hanns Eisler pamphlet: “very possibly the manifesto for the revolutionary music of our time.”
• Hanns Eisler speech: “...here was a way for music in the present social conflict; an authentic, exciting, possibly complete plan projected.”
  • speeches can be trickery, and translation was bad; but it was distributed as a pamphlet, with good translation – good!
• “Eisler is more than a composer. Rather he is the new kind of composer, whose job carries him to the meeting-hall, the street, the mill, the prison, the school-room and the dock. Concert-hall, opera-house, theater are still in the picture; but the artist is not only artist but worker, his responsibility to all workers shows itself in all his work. Eisler is a Marxist. Other composers have been, are, Marxists; Eisler is possibly the first instance of the real fusion of Marxist and musician. His music in pre-Hitler Germany and in the post-Hitler outside world has been a wedding of music and dialectics; he is a leader as Gorky is a leader; he has experienced deeply the life and problems of the working class, his thought propels him to music and to action. Sometimes the action is the organizing of a music-front; sometimes it is the formation of a class of young composers; sometimes it is the music itself, or the teaching of socialism, through the clear, light, wiry structure of the lehrstuck, which he created with Brecht.”
• Eisler’s pamphlet says music today is “undoubtedly produced as a luxury. When misery increases in such proportions as today, this luxury takes on the character of provocation.”
  • MB indicts Stravinsky, Sessions, “platinum-studded operas and opera-balls”, and “hothouse virtuoso conservatories” in this regard
  • “the situation of composers”: “ivory-tower wish-fulfillment artists, ‘dealers in narcotics’ against their will or without their knowledge.” ... “we have so long dwelt in the high reaches of ‘art’ atmosphere...that it isn’t nice to realize we are the tool of a vicious economic setup. The unconscious (sometimes not so unconscious) prostitution of composers in today’s world is one of the sorry sights to see.”
    • “Even when we starve, we think of it as a poetic ‘upper-class’ starvation, quite different from the starvation of the ordinary unemployed worker. It is about time we discovered where our allegiance lies.”
• Eisler says social situation creates music organizations dedicated to making music for “‘struggle for the radical change of the capitalist order of society’; for ‘the crisis in music can only be overcome insofar as music itself takes part in the liquidation of the worldwide social crisis.’”
• But “there is a deep-seated reluctance in musicians to change their ways; something in the special training music requires seems to engender a defensive, aggressive, reactionary attitude.”

Eisler has a plan: For the old purpose vs. new purpose

some are:

1. predominance of Instrumental music vs. vocal music
   • “‘The trend no more means the death of instrumental music, than the growth of the orchestra meant the death of chamber-music.’”
2. ‘Songs: performed by a specialist in the concert hall before passive listeners. Subjective-emotional in mood’ vs. ‘Mass Song,Song of Struggle: Sung by the masses themselves on the streets, in the work shop, or at meetings. Activizing.’
   • “probably more accurate to speak of the Mass song as a new short form, not necessarily replacing the concert-song, for which there is still a big field”.
3. Old ballad, opera, operetta, oratorio vs. new ballad, opera, operetta, Lehrstuck
   • due to “social criticism of the texts, and, in the music, a destruction of conventional effects and an interspersing of ironic comment and quotation.”
4. ‘The Composer: as a personality, Individual Style’ vs. ‘The Composer: as a specialist, mastering several styles of composing’

• not all Eisler’s thinking; some has been “tested in the Soviet Union”; some “is the product of contemporary musical thinking” e.g. Stravinsky, Les Six
• Eisler “finally says: ‘To the criteria of “Invention,” “Technical Skill,” [and] “Emotion,” the decisive criterion of the “Social Function” must be added’”.
• MB says, “I think that this little essay is very possibly the manifesto for the revolutionary music of our time.”

Blitzstein, Marc. “On Mahagonny.” (July 1958 - MB wrote it earlier)

• considers the opera to be “the crowning achievement of the Weill-Brecht collaboration” – better than Three Penny Opera
• Nazis said it was Bolshevik (‘Kultur-Bolshevismus’); Communists said it was “anarchistic, even nihilistic”.
  • But MB says it “lends itself to no specific social or political sponsorship.”

Blitzstein, Marc. “On Writing Music for the Theatre.” (Jan.-Feb. 1938)

• “Music is among other things theatre.”
• “Music was meant to be performed” — as opposed to hardcore formalists
• difference between music “which is its own theatre” (concert music) and “theatre-music”
• American attempts at opera have been “discouraging”
• “the exalted heroism of grand opera is not for our twentieth-century American ears.”
• BUT “simplicity is often on the precious side”
• “The Broadway boys, of course—Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin—have caught wonderful slices of colloquial talk into neat and racy rhyme schemes.”
  • Although “Occasionally their danger is sentimentalizing a sophisticated mood”.
• Doesn't see a difference in requirements for musical quality of theatre-song versus concert song
• discusses movie music
• theatre music has no set rules
• “music in the theatre is a powerful, an almost immorally potent weapon.” Follow your “inner conviction”.

Blitzstein, Marc. “Popular Music—An Invasion: 1923-1933.” (1933)

• popular music invaded the concert hall – primarily jazz
  • tidbit: “Vladimir Dukelsky becomes at times Vernon Duke for Broadway consumption (neatly reversing the usual procedure whereby plain Maggie Smith becomes Maria Panorama for Carnegie Hall's sake).”
• dependence on neo-primitivism (post-Stravinsky)... “A wave of infitilism”... “a search for materials” that are “fresh”.
• “A new deification—of the savage, the child, the peasant, the artless music-maker—had set in.” *Embraced jazz as new material.
• Europe aped jazz (e.g. Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf)
  • “This is real decadence: the dissolution of a one-time genuine article, regurgitated upon an innocent public, ready, perhaps even ripe to learn.” (on Kurt Weill)
• “Serious music might even learn a lesson from this persistently “low” art, in the matter of discovering one's place, and respecting it.”
• SO: argues that jazz (e.g.) is not a great material to be used in “serious” music... he's ultimately condescending to popular music, though he does appreciate it a great deal.

Blitzstein, Marc. “Towards a New Form” (1934)

• at beginning: “The period of experiment in establishing a new language is ended.”
  • “Three currents are left in the wake of the "Modern Movement" - Primitivist, Classicist, Popularist.”
  • “The period of experiment in finding an integration for the three trends has just begun.”
• “composers are no longer testing new materials.”
  • “music shows a waning preoccupation with discoveries, and a waxing tendency to use what is at hand, to rest upon the labors of the pioneers.”
• explains Primitivists and Classicists
• on Popularists: “The Popularists descend in direct line from the Primitives. ‘We must get back to fundamentals.’ Their ideology, displayed in music for the masses, is Communist Russian; their idol is Erik Satie, the Celtic Frenchman; their social system is Central-European (note their utilitarian Gebrauchsmusik); they have found practical uses for the virus of jazz, bred in America and spread the world over. They are internationalists.”
  • “When Satie's dream will be realized – it is a dream of some importance to us – we shall see that Popularism is more than a cheap bid for public response, or a big-city snobbishness. In particular, the Communist composers are developing the idea with cogency. Their theory meets Classicism by relegating individual tendencies to the background. They are unfortunately committed to a policy of effusive virility and stormy protest, with the result that their music, so far, is for the most part loud and fast. But they are learning, and they have authentic, purposeful intensity to support them.”
• he thinks that “the trends begin to merge. … towards the emergence of a new large form.”
  • “Even when one cannot cite instances of combined tendencies in a single composer, his music will display technical borrowings – of procedure, manipulation – from alien territory.”
  • “Everything is usable, even the scraps – ‘this pulp that makes the pancake.’”