Notes on Art Theory    

Notes on Art Theory       

by C. Desmond Greaves 

Contents

Introduction

• 1.   Art and magic
• 2.   A scientific aesthetics: outline of a projected book
• 3.   Art as representation
• 4.   The interpenetration of content and form, subject matter and material
• 5.   The social significance of artistic content
• 6.   The instruments of artistic work: On the forms of material 
• 7.   On the things represented by art: three stages
• 8.   Art as the representation of labour in the products of labour: four cases
• 9.   Art in the earliest human societies: comments on cave art
• 10. The social content of music
• 11. Music and class development: from Rutland Boughton’s book,“The Reality of Music”
• 12. The nature of art: art as representing social purpose
• 13. On decorative art
• 14. Art as the creation of ideology
• 15. The analysis of art: art as a leisure function
• 16. Artistic symbolism
• 17. Art and the division of labour
• 18. All representation is not art 
• 19  Science and art
• 20. Artistic epochs
• 21. The weakness of bourgeois art
• 22. The varying influence of the bourgeoisie on various arts
• 23. A general point re art and socialism
• 24. The early beginnings of art
• 25. Ideology in ancient society
• 26. Religion and art
• 27. Drama: Stanislavsky on the art of acting 
• 28. Language
• 29. Romanticism and utopian socialism
• 30. Poetic drama: poetry and prose
• 31. Bourgeois and proletarian poetry compared
• 32. Schiller and Goethe: poetry and prose
• 33. Faust: German, English and French versions
• 34. Anthony and Cleopatra – an interpretation
• 35. Lenin on Tolstoy
• 36. On Henry Moore
• 37. Listening as labour
• 38. A “biological” theory of music
• 39. Work songs
• 40. Classicising 
• 41. Music and dance
• 42. Games
• 43. On someone learning the piano by ear
• 44. Capitalist forms in musical production: orchestra and choir 
• 45. Extemporisation and composition in music 
• 46. “Programme Music” reconsidered
• 47. The social content of “programme music”
• 48. Public performance: pop music
• 49. On occasional composition 
• 50. Polyphony and homophony
• 51. The Bach family and German opera
• 52. Beaumarchais and Mozart
• 53. On Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus133
• 54. Napoleon’s undeserved reputation
• 55. Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony
• 56. The secularisation of religious content: Beethoven’s Mass in D
• 57. Instrumentalism and vocalism in Beethoven
• 58. On the sonata in Ab, Opus 110, by Beethoven 
• 59. The late Beethoven
• 60. Rossini and the post-Beethovians
• 61. Mahler’s Symphony No. 2
• 62. On the virtuoso Clara Butt
• 63. Table-Talk comments on art and literature 
• 64. Table Talk comments on music

Introduction

Desmond Greaves was interested in art theory all his life, but he was never able to formalise his views in the book that he hoped to write on the subject. He wrote poetry from his youth. The first two volumes of his Journal detail his wide reading while at university and show an early interest in aesthetics. He says in his Table Talk that his theory of art was the only original theory he invented, and he paid tribute there to a friend of his, the Birmingham surgeon Roscoe Clarke, for coming independently to a similar view. 

He left three notebooks on art issues, written variously in the early 1940s, the early 1960s and again in the 1980s. On two occasions he drafted  outline plans for a book on art theory, once in 1940 and again in 1980. These are reproduced as Item No.2 below because of their suggestive interest. He expressed the hope of undertaking this project before he died, but remarked that he would need “plenty of time and maximum quiet” for it. It is probable that he put this idea aside because of the eye trouble that bothered him in the 1980s, when he concentrated instead on his unfinished verse novel or comic epic, Elephants Against Rome, which did not require extensive reading and which he could weave out of his imagination.  

The following is an attempt to summarise his view on art theory, based on the notes below and remarks in his Table Talk.  Greaves believed, with the Russian psychologist I. P. Pavlov, that human intelligence consists of the ability to form conditioned reflexes, and in particular the reflex of purpose, the ability to form conscious purposes, which is unique to humans. Human intelligence organises reflexes in a personal hierarchy and the reflex of purpose may in turn give rise to that higher extension of purpose – policy. He regarded art as the representation of work in the objects of work – work being the expenditure of human energy for a purpose. Used in this wide sense, even seeming leisure activities such as attentive listening to music, are forms of human labour or work. The artist produces a work of art, an aesthetic object, and that in turn represents human work in some form.  The more complex and socially relevant the work that is represented by the artist, culminating in what one might term “universal labour”, the better and more significant the work of art is likely to be, that is, the greater its aesthetic quality. That is why a symphony is likely to be a greater work of art than a pop song, although both may have aesthetic quality. 

As Greaves put it, the basis of art is the separation of a labour process without the object of a product: as a representation of the main labour process.  In early human society the social function of representative labour, that is art activity, was essential to productive labour by facilitating and encouraging human cooperation. The conflict between social base and social superstructure, the conflict between the productive forces, that is, the level of technology and science at any time, and the productive relations that determine how society and the people in it view themselves at the same time – in particular whether they are employers, employees or self-employed –  gives rise at a certain stage to the category of art. In this the roles of the two appear reversed: artistic form as the expression of the productive forces, artistic content as the expression of the productive relations. Artistic form is often thought to be the most mysterious element in art; yet what is usually called form is in reality the phenomenal form of content. 

Greaves contends that art changes consciousness rather than provides new knowledge, which is what science and discursive statement do. Symbols, which are so important in all spheres of art, stimulate human reflexes.  Using the distinction between social base and superstructure, between the productive forces and level of technique on the one hand and the social and class relations of production within which work takes place on the other, Greaves regarded art as belonging to the latter category. It is part of the sphere of ideology: how people see themselves and their society. Hence class relations influence it significantly. Science on the other hand is the accumulation of objective truths about reality, independent of class position. 

Greaves came from a musical family and he used say that the subject he knew most about was music. He was also widely read in literature and published three volumes of verse. The notes below have been selected and ordered by the editor as possibly having wider interest today. Omitted are notes that Greaves made on musical broadcasts that he heard or concerts or plays he went to. Some of these contain lines of musical notation, which is not easily reproducible. The notes were written at various times between the 1940s and 1980s. The dates and source of various notes are given below where that might be helpful to a reader – it being assumed that the later notes are sometimes a more definitive or better formulated version of the points made than the earlier.

Anthony Coughlan

2025

–   –   –  

1. Art and magic 

The varied forms of representation usually named “artistic” are of great antiquity and arise by a process of differentiation from the ritual performances of primitive magic. Our investigation must therefore begin with an analysis of magic.

Magic arises in the earliest forms of human society. All that is required is that men should cooperate in the process of production, however primitive that production may be, and that the ideological reflection of that cooperation should take the form of a series of observances existing apart from production. Thus the achievements of cooperative effort appear to be due, not to the multiplication of the individual powers arising from their simultaneous operation and interplay, but to a series of parallel operations which in themselves yield no tangible result, but which are regarded  as indispensable to the success of the other: this result is brought about by the imitation of the labour process, prior to the beginning of work.

Magic imitation is therefore the undifferentiated embryo from which all art has evolved. Imitation means that a process is repeated in such a way that the essential part is omitted, but all the inessential accompaniments are developed to the highest degree. This accompaniment may be of the greatest possible practical importance. Without their acquaintance, the process may be impossible. But the indispensable part, the materials and instruments of labour, and the actual labour itself, are absent in the imitation. The inessential stands for and takes the place of the essential, just as in physiology an inessential quality gives the signal for a reflex associated with an essential quality. The relations of production are expressed as the inessential attributes of the process of production. 

Examples can be found in any anthropological text-book. 

[1980s note]

Historically, art began as forms of magic and is probably as old as human cooperation. The productivity of the necessary labour needed to ensure human survival was ensured by the use of surplus labour – the labour of the artist – to represent the social cooperation without which the former could not be productive. 

Thus (a) surplus labour becomes the phenomenal form of necessary labour; and (b) productive relations are represented by labour of a peculiar kind.

The next form in which this same thing was expressed was religion. Here the social relations, through the appearance of a leisure class, are outside the labour process. Hence the idealistic form of religion.

The conception of “Art” needs to be widened to include magic and religion.

[1940s note]

–   –   –

2. A scientific aesthetics: outline of a projected book

Introduction, with an historical overview: Goethe, Heine, Riemann, Tolstoy, Belinsky, Plekhanov, Gorky, Marx, Engels, Adam Smith, Veblen

Chapter 1:  What is Art?

The essence of art is the representation of subject matter in working material so as to express and communicate social purpose.  This is true whether we consider either of the two great sub-divisions, plastic or dynamic, which have their common origin early on in the ritual of primitive society, but enter independently upon the status of art.

To justify this definition its component elements should be considered separately: (a) Subject matter and working materials; (b) Representation and expression; (c) Communication and social purpose.

• Subject matter and working materials: 

The distinction is obvious. Nobody looking at Da Vinci’s masterpiece believes that he is actually seeing Mona Lisa. Nor does a theatre audience believe that it actually has Hamlet before it rather than, say, Mr John Gielgud. The stone carved into the likeness of a horse remains a stone and does not become a horse. But in the eye of the beholder it now stands for a horse.

When somebody asks, “Do you understand” or “appreciate” an “abstract” painting or sculpture, you take him to mean, “Do you know what is the subject matter I am supposed to see in the form of this object?”

In the school of acting founded by Stanislavsky the measure of the actor’s success was his identification with his role – i.e. the completeness with which the subject dominated the material. In the attempt to make this as complete as possible the actor was encouraged to study not only the part indicated in the presented play, but general historical material which would be assumed as known by the author when writing his play. It is possible that this extreme arose from the influence of the school of psychoanalytical psychology in which “identification” plays so large a part. However, psychoanalytical psychology proved powerless to explain the effect of art on the perceiver. Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes makes the matter simple.

Instead of the thing itself, the perceiver is “conditioned” to accept certain normal or habitual accompanying observations. Thus the shape and posture accompanying the rider of the horse produce the impression of a horse, even without that which is most essential to a real horse, namely vitality.  In the same way, according to certain conventions which have a history of their own, actors are accepted as representing the dramatist’s subject matter, although they are in fact the main part of his working material. 

A reminder: The subject and the material used to represent it may, indeed usually will, grow simultaneously in the artist’s mind. This does not invalidate the distinction. Also the material is not necessarily “given” in nature. Much will depend on selecting and inventing. This has the character of “universal labour”. Art is great in proportion to the necessary labour involved in making the representation.

 (b) Representation and expression

“All art is representation,” said Goethe.  “All art is expression”, said Roger Fry. Both are right, but the German had reason on his side.

Representation is the reproduction of the form of one thing in the substance of another. It is by this means that the “expression” of art is achieved. The subject matter – which may of course be ideally conceived, i.e. not present at the time of representation – loses its substance. It thus becomes pure form, a disembodied idea. It then receives substance to the extent that the working material borrows its form. The working material loses form and becomes pure substance.  A horse can be represented in stone, bronze or jet, pipe-clay or papier machè. Each of these materials is capable of accepting the form dictated by the subject matter, although obviously there are staging effects.  In the dramatic parallel Messrs Gielgud, Olivier etc. can all play the part of Hamlet, likewise with varying effect. The actors become characters, the scenery a series of scenes, and the dialogue conversation –  all because Hamlet, Ophelia etc. have lost their substance and regained it by conferring their form upon Mr Gielgud and Miss Smith. By this means the subject of Hamlet is expressed.

Art is thus expression by means of representation, as distinct from description and measurement, which are the basis of scientific expression. Here let it be remarked that these things need not appear in their “pure” form. A dramatist may try using a prologue to explain what his production is about; a novelist may interpolate an analysis of his artistic problem, or a scientific writer illustrate his work with sketches which may pass beyond the visual equivalent of statement and measurement. 

The two forms of expression were thought by Pavlov to correspond to two distinct functions of the central nervous system: the scientific to the highly specialised frontal lobes of the brain that are concerned with language and its further abstraction as mathematical symbolism; the artistic with the totality of the cortex in which the visual and motor systems predominate. Thus, history and geography are sciences. But to the extent that a historian uses representative means to illustrate or adorn his narrative, to that extent art is incorporated in scientific expression. 

By the same token architecture, though usually spoken of as an art, is of course a science. But here again, insofar as the totality of a building seeks to represent some natural feature, as in the incidental decorations used in its appearance, artistic elements play a subordinate role in the result. When the object is to produce a useful article, art cannot be primary. This consideration is quoted in defence of “art for art’s sake”, but is a confusion. The function of art is not the function of science. The function of science is producing direct useful effects. It is not dependent on the form of society. It does not attach to the social superstructure, but is a division of productive labour, albeit indirectly productive, relating to the forces of production. Art on the contrary aims at living only through ideas.  It is part of the social superstructure and varies vastly under different social systems. 

The preconditions of artistic activity are time to work in, the availability of materials, and social conditions for converting expression into communication.

(c)  Communication and social purpose

There is no such thing as artistic expression that is not anticipatory of communication. But a period between them may elapse. Where communication and expression are far apart, “art for art’s sake” theories arise.  For example, consider the present as the age of unpublished poetry.

The artistic cycle is completed in communication. The subject matter becomes the form of a piece of stone, or the mode of a performance, but when the sculpture is looked at or the performance watched, the audience takes out the subject matter, and takes it out independently of its original form in reality – that is, what is essential to it, what is socially important to it. The audience gives to the form disembodied and incorporated in an alien substance, a new substance from its own lives, and thus the representational cycle is the means of stimulating social consciousness.

The audience plays a part by bringing its own experience. The effect of a sculptured horse to a society of field-sport lovers is one thing.  A sculptured camel would be another matter. Thus in drama national differences play their part. The active role of the audience ­– despite seeming passivity – is the social expression of art and originates in the ritual of primitive society. (Note the historical origin of the Greek chorus. Expression and communication are not necessarily the same thing.)

 It may be asked, why speak of social purpose? Why not just social “consciousness”? Because the consciousness only expresses itself in purpose, just as life expresses itself in activity and struggle.

The artist may not be aware of or share the social purpose communicated by his work. This is not a peculiarity of artists. The same applies to politicians or statesmen. They may not be aware of the social significance of what they do, because scientific expression of social issues is of only recent origin.

The question arises, now that social purposes can be scientifically expressed, is there any value in artistic expression? Will art die out under socialism? That it will not is indicated (i) by the great complexity of society, which no individual can ever be equipped to grasp scientifically in its totality; and (ii) by the inescapable fact of general critical communication – the persons signalling appreciation.

Other possible Chapters:

Chapter 2: The origin of art – how it differentiates from ritual, using George Thomson’s Greek material and his Irish material if available [George Thomson, 1903-1987, Irish scholar, Professor of Greek at Birmingham, author of “Aeschylus and Athens” and others works]. 

Chapter 3: The work of the artist – showing the element of artistic greatness in the context of Marx’s category of “universal labour”.  The artist is exactly as free as the scientist to undertake universal labour on the basis of existing techniques. (3b) the class struggle in art

Chapter 4: The artistic division of labour in general 

Chapter 5: The theory of music 

Chapter 6: The production of music

Chapter 7: The mechanisation of art 

Chapter 8: The capitalist production of art;   

                (8a) Art and commerce (pictures, values etc.)

Chapter 9: The myth of artistic freedom 

Chapter 10: Art and socialism

[Book 3,1980s note]

–   –   –

Above is Desmond Greaves’s outline of a book project on art theory written in the 1980s.  Below is an outline of a similar project written in the 1940s

Chapter 1: The categories of art to be developed historically from the basic conception of the separation of a labour process without the object of a product as a representation of the main labour process… A separation of art from work … The social function of representative labour activity as essential to productive labour by making possible cooperation … Art in the “pores” of labour … Art accompanying labour … Arbeit und rhythmus … The imperfections of the record … What is known and what is assumed …  The most primitive tribes extant … How the conflict between the productive forces and productive relations at a certain stage gives rise to the category of art, in which the roles of the two appear reversed … Production as individual, appropriation as social …How production is made to appear social by removing the individualised product; cooperation helped …Some account needed of primitive communist society.

Chapter 2: Art and the division of labour

1. Man and woman?
2. Youth and age?
3. Mental and physical
4. Social classes
5. The break-up of social art into class art, and its growing complexity
6. Art induces class co-operation
7. Hence also class collaboration
8. How the ruling class dominates art
9. How it does so incompletely
10. How total social art still represents the total social work

Chapter 3: Art and the productive forces

1. The expansion and sub-division of art
2. Artistic production
3. The Arts
4. Artistic technique
5. Production becomes social
6. Artistic commodity production; Gramophones
7. What happens to the performance

Chapter 4: The evolution of dramatic form and how content is expressed

Chapter 5: Sculpture and painting

Chapter 6: The dance

Chapter 7: Literature…Poetry

Chapter 8: Prose

Chapter 9: Music…How music expresses social content – a long chapter

Chapter 10: The counter-process of uniting the arts; their fusion

1. Song
2. Opera and oratorio
3. Ballet
4. Mass declamation; also the reappearance of primitive forms, decoration etc.

Chapter 11:  Summary on artistic materials…Form and content…Architecture not an art…Mistaken views current on this subject… Artistic form as an expression of the productive forces… How form was thought the most mysterious part of art and how what is usually called form is in reality the phenomenal form of content.

Chapter 12:  The content of art; Production individual, appropriation social; the revolutionary change

Chapter 13: Production individual, appropriation ditto; the content of feudal arts; the bourgeois pores in the feudal system; Egypt, Athens, Rome

Chapter 14: The bourgeois revolution – Italy

Chapter 15: The bourgeois revolution – Germany

Chapter 16: The bourgeois revolution – England

Chapter 17: The bourgeois revolution – France

Chapter 18: The decline of art under capitalism

Chapter 19: The Russian revolution

Chapter 20: Marx and Engels on art

Chapter 21: Romantic theory – Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley

Chapter 22: Christopher Caudwell – poetry

Chapter 23: Rutland Boughton – music

Chapter 24: Beethoven

Chapter 25: Shakespeare

Chapter 26: Art under socialism

Chapter 27: Revolutionary, transition art… The part it can play now

Chapter 28: Summary conclusion 

Bibliography. Index.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p. 32]

–   –   –

3. Art as representation 

Few will quarrel with Goethe’s dictum that the essential of all art is representation. But once this is agreed, further questions immediately arise. What is represented, and how, and how is the process possible?  Art has represented so great a variety of things, from the simple grapes and apples of a still-life to the most complicated conflicts within the human consciousness, that it is no small matter to bring such an assortment within one definition.

The analysis should therefore begin with the process of representation itself. This may be assumed to take place in its developed form, the process of attaining which can for the moment be taken for granted.

Representation of any kind involves the production of the form of one thing in the substance of another. John Smith plays Hamlet; Bob Williamson impersonates Patrick McGinn in an election; a sculptor produces the statue of Napoleon. It follows from this that representation is impossible without work. John Smith must paint himself and dress up. Bob Williamson must avail himself of the multiplicity of overcoats In the Orange Hall to cheat in an election. The sculptor must chip away at the stone till it assumes the form of a head. Consequently it is natural and correct to speak of a “work of art” and to regard artistic activity, i.e. the process of representation, as a form of production. But in this form of production what are produced are not simply products consumed in the normal way, but representations of things and processes, both natural and artificial, which have to be “consumed” in a special way.

If representation is in a sense a disguise, there must follow from it a reverse process, namely recognition. Here artistic representation parts company with impersonation. Bob Williamson is anxious to assume the form of Patrick McGinn so as to impersonate him and cast his vote in an election. It is therefore essential that he should not be recognised as substantially Bob Williamson. But everybody knows John Swift is not Hamlet, that the piece of stone is not Napoleon. How can the representation survive? Why the “willing suspension of disbelief”? What is the advantage of looking at a man pretending to be Hamlet or a piece of stone carved so as to resemble Napoleon? There can be no advantage unless the representation is carried a stage further. 

Acting and stone are the materials. Hamlet and Napoleon are the subject matter. But the representation of such subject matter in such materials achieves a third thing, which is the object of the whole process. It is not Hamlet or Napoleon which are represented. Their representation in foreign material frees them from inessentials and converts them into symbols. Symbols of what? Symbols of the social consciousness of the artist, and to the degree that this is developed, symbols of the collective purposes of the society in which he lives.

Reproduction is only possible through production. How is it possible to recognise the form of one thing in the substance of another? This is to ask how is it possible to represent form by another substance? The questions are inseparable. The answer has been given by Pavlovian psychology – namely that the inessential accompaniments of any stimulus, that is to say its form, can and do provoke the same response as the stimulus itself. The inessential stands for the essential. Nobody who looks at a statue recognises that he is seeing a man. But I recall vividly showing a baby of two a picture of a dog tearing a chair to pieces and hearing its indignant protest, “Du! Du! Wow, Wow! Nicht lieb!”

The form of a thing is the inessential by which the essential is recognised. In an artistic product the primary function of the material is lost. A sculpture’s value does not lie in the stone. As stone it is worthless; its sole utility lies in the form of something else that is impressed on it. Only its form is seen, not its substance. And that form is read as the content of something else, but a something else that has lost its substance. Artistic production consists of the refashioning of material in accordance with the characteristic form of another entity. The artist must select the symbols, the “significant form” – significant of another substance. 

The fundamental human activity is production. The purpose of production is consumption.  Even the most thoroughgoing believer in the sacredness of art will agree that it is a peculiarly human activity. It is not resorted to by sticks, stones or ocean currents, nor by fish, fowl, mammals or any other known living thing. It must therefore depend on what distinguishes man from nature, namely, the production of his means of existence. This, the precondition for all other peculiarly human activity, is the precondition for artistic activity also.

The consumptive aspect of artistic activity is performance.  The first split = cooperation + performance. A part of the product of society is consumed and made to provide a representation of the whole, and thereby imbues the members of society with a consciousness of social purpose. Art arises when the consciousness of social purpose first comes to be revealed in representational form.  The aim of art is the representation of the consciousness of social purpose in material form. 

If society consists of more than one class then there will be conflicting social purposes. Hence class struggle exists within art.

The category of art includes all public human activities which achieve the representation of the self-consciousness of society in material form. That self-consciousness arises in the first place in conjunction with certain social purposes, corresponding to certain social needs. Hence art is the representation in material form of the consciousness of social purpose.

Man’s purpose is of course a part of his consciousness. His consciousness arises as a result of his material conditions of life, which consist of bringing to bear his own vital energies on nature through the means of production – since in each society relations are entered into between men emerging out of their means of production.

Form is always neglected at first for content.

Questions that arise:

1. A possible scientific aesthetics? 
2. Why is one work of art greater than another? 
3. Communication, what by?
4. By movements of the body in general  – i.e. actions

         By movements of the vocal chords – i.e. sounds, noises, the first signalling system

         By movements of speech, the second signalling system

• By symbolic products

    (a) Pictures, sculptures etc. 

    (b) Musical notation

    (c) Printed pages

–   –   –

What is art but representation?

‘L’art n’est qu’une forme,” said George Sand.

“None will comprehend the simple truth that the highest, the only, operation of art is representation,” says Goethe. (G.H. Lewes, Life of Goethe, p.157 Everyman edition) 

What I have added to this is the idea that representation itself carries with it  contradictions, between the material and the thing represented. This conception helps to unite the various forms of art, as various materials; and also to show how from the motion and development of society, being itself antagonistic, there arises the other contradiction.  The development of art is thus a two-fold motion.

[Book 2,1940s note, p.19]

–   –   – 

• The interpenetration of content and form, subject matter and material

1. The material receives a form which is not natural to it; the subject matter appears in an unfamiliar material;

• The material loses its own form; the subject matter loses its material;

• Corporeally we have material; formally we have human activity;

• The whole is represented in a part. Form dominate substance. The word “content” means life that is represented as pure form added to pure material.

Here are various examples corresponding to modes of the above: The human form imitates some other form, for example that of Julius Caesar. 

1. Julius Caesar appears in John Smith. The play notices say, “John Smith as Julius Caesar”, but it is Julius Caesar who appears on the stage!

• Julius Caesar loses his own form. John Smith loses his personal identity.

• Corporeally we have John Smith. Formally we have Julius Caesar, since John Smith is modified to that end.

• Julius Caesar is represented in John Smith. Appearance dominates reality. The content is Julius Caesar, but the “form” is but the modification of John Smith by various devices.

• The more the material is subjugated, the clearer does the artist appear.  The great artist is one who can to the greatest degree thus subjugate his material, by giving it a form that does not belong to it.  The substance of life becomes the form of artistic material.

• The material corresponds to the productive forces. The content corresponds to the ideological reflection of social relations. For example: Bourgeois art is most developed technically, but significantly devoid of content, for the bourgeoisie dare not represent social relations accurately, even ideologically, because of their glaring conflict with the productive forces.

• The material is forced on the artist; the content appears to be chosen by him. For example, a poet cannot become a sculptor overnight, but he can choose, or imagine himself freely choosing, whether to write about his mistress’s eyebrows or the destiny of nations. In fact of course he cannot escape ideologically representing society; but ideology hides this from him. 

• The world equals the author; the material equals the performer.

• The author equals the ruling class; the performer equals the working class. This is illustrated by the attempts of the mediaeval priests to check the extemporization of the people; also the attempts of the ruling class to dictate the compositions of composers. Haydn was treated as a menial who made his master’s music for him. That is to say, the decision as to content lay with the ruling class. Execution could be left to others.

    10.The author can retain his identity by being in his characters. The performer makes his reputation by excessively losing his identity.

    11.There is a constant struggle between author and performer in class society.

    12.In literature there is a struggle between author and reader. When it comes to the worst, the books put out are simply not read, except byn the author himself. This is the crisis of bourgeois literature. 

    13.Taste depends on good content. But content expresses itself as form. Hence it appears that form is the basis of taste. The form is the form of the material. The content is the substance of life. The artist creates content by adding new form to old material. The conflict between author and performer makes it appear that the form is dominant.  The productive power of labour can appear to be the productive power of capital. 

   14.The audience is deprived of all its activity but applause-giving.  “The public is a big baby.”

   15. Reproduction for production’s sake; art for art’s sake. 

  16. Content, that is human activity for its own sake, leads to material being endowed with meaningless form.

1.  The artist asserts: “I am rich”; the material amounts to “conspicuous waste”.

1.  The artist: The flesh is evil and women are slaves. The material: Boys’ voices and other slaves! Thus, life revenges itself.
2.  From time to time new content requires new form. From the other point of view changes in material become necessary, as when Beethoven introduced a chorus in the Ninth Symphony. This is even more obviously so when Soviet drama of today becomes quite different.

The reversal of the law that productive forces change productive relations is only apparent. Once real productive forces have burst through, the newly established productive relations assert themselves in the ideological field. “The whole superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”

When the changes of content are not so great, they appear as mere innovations of form and do not require serious alteration of material, if any; for example, the Eroica symphony. Given sufficient of these, changes of choice of material are required; the material is forced on the artist and the content appears to be chosen by him as in Point 7 above.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.162]

–   –   –

• The social significance of artistic content 

The performance only covers a part of the life it is representing. For example, the characters shit in actual life, but not on the stage. A selection of their actions is represented only. Percy Lubbock in “The Craft of Fiction” says that fictitious characters are people who do not shit, sleep, etc. This is untrue, but the artist represents only a part of their lives. Which part? The answer is, the socially significant part. Because the purpose of the representation is not to probe their biology or the chemistry of their bodies, except insofar as it contributes to the portrayal of events of social importance. 

Now if the writer is unable to select the socially significant elements, his art is called shallow. It may be because he cannot appreciate those elements. It may be that his ideology is such that he is blind to some, and hypersensitive to others. It may be that out of the whole possible representation of society, he always selects those parts which accord with his class interests and discards the rest. But the essence of revolutionary art is that it always chooses to represent most sharply that which is growing and developing at the time, and it shows how it is in constant struggle with what is dying and decaying in society. It can thus represent what has not yet come into existence – what one might term revolutionary romanticism – as a means, as it were, of putting under a magnifying glass the existing pre-conditions for the future circumstances depicted. Now for this reason revolutionary art alone can be aesthetically sound. However, there is such a thing as technical failure to represent. And here again it is not “technical weakness”, roughness and so on, which is the trouble; it is simply that the developing social elements have, in fact, not been represented – that in fact therefore something else has been represented. This principle of the selection of subject matter is of the greatest importance in the complex societies in which art flourishes as an accompaniment of the division of labour.

[Book 2, 1960s note, p.57]

–   –   –

• The instruments of artistic work: On the forms of material 

• Art as work

1. The basic materials

• Stone, bone and the like: These are originally shaped and worked as tools. Their use as materials is the natural outcome of leisure; whence tools, knives, chisels etc.

• Walls, rocks, hides; given curves or hairs on the object, one gets scrapers, chisels.

• Paint, varnish, dyes, wood:  given smooth surfaces, as on pottery, the walls of houses etc., likewise with wood and textiles, one gets daubers, brushes, pots. 

• The human body: arms, legs, etc.

• The human voice: words and cries.

• Combinations of these.

• Derivatives of these, such as human cheers.

• Instruments of human creation.

Thus there are two basic types of artistic material: (a) Human labour itself, and (b) The products of human labour (the repository of artistic representation is to be considered later). The first is the undifferentiated groundwork of drama, dance and music. The second is the undifferentiated groundwork of sculpture, painting and decoration.

As society grows more complex, as the productive forces increase in magnitude and complexity, the product of human labour plays an increasing part in the carrying out of human work (i.e. the production of the means of production). And so the dramatic form representing life in, by, and through work, using work as the material in which other work is expressed, becomes differentiated according to the degree in which the product of past work enters into it. 

• Primitive drama 

Here labour is represented as labour. The object to be represented is labour. The material of representation consists of mimicry, cries, words, puppets, models – a “show”.

Labour takes place in time; the product of labour appears to exist only in space. Hence the confusion of bourgeois critics. 

Already we see the basis for a new category: Instruments of artistic production, which at first are only visible as products of labour.

• Primitive plastics

Here labour is represented as the product of labour.  This appears in space only, as one other object alongside useful objects. As in primitive communist society leisure belongs to every man, and the necessary labour time merges imperceptibly into leisure, the same tools, the same materials, are used for work (production of the means of existence) and art (representation of work in other work). 

When class society separates the worker from his leisure, which is now incorporated in another person belonging to another class, first there is the destruction of primitive plastics, and then there takes place the production of specialised instruments of artistic production. These play a bigger and bigger part as time goes on. 

These instruments of artistic production cannot be used for any other purpose than the representation of human activity, and hence there arises the conception that art is useless. This idea comes from the social division of labour. Also the idea that art is the monopoly of a leisure class comes from the same source.

[ Book 1, 1940s note, p.128]

–   –   –

7. On the things represented by art: three stages 

The content of artistic representation is essentially human activity in general. It might be objected that natural objects can be represented. I reply that if so these are but the ideological forms of human activity – the painting of a sheep, for example. Only seldom could this objection be raised. Because man’s relation to his surroundings is essentially practical, his representation of those objects must contain in it the practical relationship, whatever its phenomenal form.

Again it may be said that art interprets, not represents. The task of interpretation belongs to science. It is more practical than art. Nevertheless art does interpret, but in a different way – ideologically, that is to say, without knowing what it is doing, while science and philosophy are conscious of their objects.

The reason why art can interpret, can criticise, is as follows: The representation of the world in the human brain is the subject matter of consciousness, i.e. understanding. But representation in the brain must precede representation in material. For the same reason that consciousness corresponds to reality, interpreting it, art also corresponds to reality. But in this sphere the correspondence is very variable.  Only very recently has it developed greatly. And the accounts men give of their actions differ greatly from the reality of those actions. So we come to another conclusion. Social reality can be represented in the imagination before it is represented in the sphere of artistic production. Hence it can interpret reality. But interpretation may or may not take place. Or it may be very near to, or far from, a correct representation. Let us take the principal stages:

Stage 1:  Representation of animals etc. in early society. This is highly realistic, the correctness of some of the perspective not being proved correct until the camera was invented. Aurignacian art [ie. Upper Paleolithic art associated with early European modern humans, lasting from 43,000 to 26,000 b.c.]  is not ideological and corresponds to primitive communism. The catching of animals and the carrying out of public works entail the propagation of the ideology of social consumption of individual products – individual execution, but communal possession. Contradictions here? 

Stage 2:  From art we pass to class art, the representation of class society according to the outlook of the dominant class. Here we have the representation of gods, heroes, kings; the story of the love affairs of slave owners and feudal barons; the representation of the omnipotence of God and the powerlessness of the lower classes; the clash between good and evil, ruler and ruled; the representation of extensions of the productive forces, travels and so on – all these according to the ideas of the ruling class. Also the representation of the limitations of the ruling class, imposed on them by the restrictiveness of class society: the strength of man, the weakness of woman; the contradiction between town and country, the social division of labour etc. And finally, at the critical points where the productive forces burst through the productive relations, the aspirations of the new socially rising class. First, the woes of the defeated, the longing for a better world of classes which are not necessarily revolutionary. Finally, the inadequacies of bourgeois society. All these form the subject matter of class art – in other words, human activity.

Stage 3. Socialist art, socialist realism. Here art returns to its non-ideological form, the representation of socialist productive forces and relations.  Its effect is to strengthen the common ownership of the means of production, to strengthen socialist ideology.

Note the following points:  The formation of ideology produces representation as art. Ideologies are in fact poorly developed through the agency of art. So in studying the content of art, the first point is to determine the ideology – the mental reflex of the productive relations.

Given the ideology, what is called interpretation, the other side refers merely to the range of the material represented – multum in parvo, a lot of life in a little of it.

The ideology will naturally be self-contradictory. So will appear to be the things represented.

The only activity that cannot be represented is the artistic activity itself.

[Book 1, 1940s note, p.156]

–   –   –

8.  Art as the representation of labour in the product of labour: four cases: 

How the products of labour invade the sphere of artistic labour. This is a form of the developing social division of labour.  We look at four cases: differentiated music, literature, drama and the plastic arts.

Case 1: Differentiated music

The cries accompanying primitive drama develop according to (a) the social meaning of the cries, ie. the actions which they previously accompanied; and  (b)the properties of columns of air vibrating harmoniously. 

The development of differentiated music is not only from “primitive drama”, but also from work directly, for example singing while at work. On the other hand, singing at work may also develop later on the basis of pre-existing differentiated music.

The instruments of artistic production appear in swift succession as soon as a “leisure” class appears – that is, as soon as the social division of labour reaches the requisite point. As soon as this takes place music is truly “differentiated” and takes its place in developed drama as a distinct component probably composed and enacted by distinct persons. The instruments of musical production include (i) strings, (ii) reeds and pipes, and (iii) pieces of metal, wood etc.

The first two of these are characterised by Helmholzian harmonics, the other not necessarily. The use of the human voice becomes largely influenced by the harmonic laws of these instruments. On the other hand there are repeated attempts to make instruments correspond more and more to the sound of the human voice. Nations without strings and pipes use their voices differently from those where these instruments are fully developed.

The instruments of artistic production develop pari passu with the instruments of social production as a whole.

Consider the application of machinery to the making of music: First the complex instrument, the many-stringed harp, the stopped flute, the many-stringed viol, the harpsichord and piano, and finally the organ, the first musical machine.

The musical-box is not strictly machinery.  The gramophone must not be regarded merely as a musical machine. It is the final result of incorporating the musical work in the musical product of work. That capitalism should complete the process is understandable since not work, but the product of labour, becomes a commodity. The instruments of musical production are then the orchestra etc. The product is the record, with which the original performance is incorporated, and then a machine of reproduction, the gramophone, is introduced. Here note the important fact that the product of the composer is really not the work but the performance of the work. The work is not completed until it is performed and its performance is a social act. The ink and paper used are merely the blueprints of the performance.

Stage 1: The composer extemporises in public and the public join in with refrains etc. The composer and public are not therefore separated.

Stage 2: The composer invents a melody. This is incorporated on paper and in his head. The public extemporise on it or sing it as such.

Stage 3.: The composer invents the entirety. He is separated now from an audience. At the same time there appears the specialised category of performers. The completed social product is the performance. There is  division of labour among the performers.

Stage 4:  The composer ceases to perform, but now conducts.

Stage 5: The composer ceases to conduct; he makes up the plan of a performance and sells it. It is bought by capitalists who treat it as a new invention and proceed to patent it and start making the means of production. The sphere of production affected is publishing and printing. The score, that is, the means of musical production, is made. It is sold. Other capitalists invest in the labour of musicians who own their own instruments of production just as an engineer owns his tools. These capitalists advance cash for tools and produce and sell the performance. 

Stage 6:  A performance is not a perfectly capitalist form. But if another stage is inserted, it becomes a stage in the preparation of a commodity. The performance has no audience. It is recorded and sold as a record to the possessors of the means of consuming it, namely the owners of gramophones. Here is capitalist production of music at its final limit. Surplus value is the main consideration. Art has become a commodity and a means of the creation of surplus value by the unpaid labour of composers, printers, players and gramophone workers.

The growth of the instruments of production has altogether transformed artistic materials and concealed the fact that music is representation in work, in time, and not in the product of work. 

Case 2: Literature

This develops according to (a) the social meaning of the words, and (b) the nature of the language.

The instruments of literary production are (a) the human voice, which is rapidly differentiated into the voice itself, the ears, then ink, pen and paper, and then the eyes.

Stage 1:  All recite together and all perform

Stage 2: The poet speaks and others listen. Or the priest officiates while others listen and give responses. 

Stage 3: The writer inserts marks on a suitable background. These represent sounds. These sounds are reproduced not by the writer, or not necessarily by the writer, but either by the voice or in the imagination of the reader through the intermediary of his eyes.

Stage 4:  The writer writes a book or a poem or whatever other literary form you will. The social result is still the representation of action in action. The manuscript is bought, either outright or is treated as capital advanced in various ways. It is then published by the unpaid labour of printers etc. If it is sold, the buyer has a choice of using it himself by reading it, or not doing so. Or he may re-sell it. In appearance the book has been sold, but really the performance of the book – i.e.  its reading – has been sold. A visitor to a concert has the choice of listening or not, or of putting on the wireless or not, although he has paid for both. But in the case of a book, audience and performance are the one person, who is like a pianist playing a sonata to himself. Here again the representation in work appears to be representation in the product of work. It is another case of the inversion of this form due to the development of the social division of labour.

A similar case is shown where the performance is distinct, in the recording of speeches, verses etc. on gramophone records. That should make the point clear. Also note lending libraries, which sell the performance only.

Just as the composer is able to compose music which it is all but impossible for the average performer to perform – thus by the division of labour compelling an all-round improvement – the division of labour and the performance of the book in the imagination, and in the free interruption of the performance at the wish of the listener, illustrate that the author is enabled to overcome the fatigue which a human voice would suffer from in speaking a long book aloud, apart from the labour of memory. Thus artistic production develops pari passu with the means of social production.

A musical work is not completed until it is performed. A book is not written until it is read. Hence the woes of musicians who cannot get their works performed, and of authors whose works cannot be published.

Case 3: Drama

This retains more of the basic material of work. Instruments however play an increasing part. The instruments of music production are useless for any other purpose, whereas those of literary production are quite the reverse, since they are also the instruments of all ideological production. For this reason literature is the most “useful” art and “art for art’s sake” seems clearly absurd when applied to literature and merely reflects the artist’s isolation. With drama as the central art form there is an intermediate position. The instruments of artistic production develop pari passuwith those of social production, as before. They consist of the most varied assortment of articles, including literary instruments such as pens, paper, objects of everyday utility like chairs, tables, etc. Then there are the means of making significant noises, peculiar dresses, wigs, disguises, even Pepper’s ghost. There are halls, stages, trap-doors and also that important thing, the ground, which in its prepared form of “the stage” serves as the name for the whole art-form in its developed form.

Stage 1: Communal performance, with no distinction between performer and audience.

Stage 2: Custom fixes the performance. The audience watches, joining in responses – that is, participating in musical and literary sideshows or occasionally taking a direct part.

Stage 3: Complete separation of the performer from the audience. The communal part is played by the “chorus”. The play is written down and copies distributed among potential performers. There is no copyright.

Stage 4: The play is composed.  It is printed and sold. It differs from a literary work only in consisting of “stage directions”, that is, directions to performers as to  what they shall say and do when they are on the stage and acting as artistic material – whereas a literary work being performed by the audience does not require these (Whether the reader reads the novel or not is no matter for the publisher who sells it, nor how he reads it).  A capitalist who has invested in theatres buys the “blueprint” of the performance, which is an invention patented by the author, and he also buys the labour power of the actors, stage designers, clerks, attendants etc. He rehearses and performs the play, which performance the audience buys in its corporate capacity, paying according to the share of it which they are judged – by their position in the house – to enjoy.

However, a play can also be performed in the imagination of the reader. This must take place before it is “produced”.  So we get another stage.

 Stage 5: The play becomes a literary product. This makes possible the representation of quite impossible actions, or actions beyond the scope of any corporeal stage. This extension of the scope of drama is achieved by jettisoning all instruments of dramatic production, and as before it is based on the division of labour.

Forms where art is a representation of labour as labour as a whole:

1. Drama is the typical form. In opera it becomes musical. In such plays as Hardy’s “The Dynasts” or Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” it becomes literary. The film is the application of machinery to drama.

• Music as one component of early drama becomes a separate form by the development of specialised instruments of musical production, and the development of the division of labour to its ultimate degree, completely separating composer, performer and audience, and finally incorporating the performance as a whole in a commodity, a gramophone record. 

• Literature, prose or poetry, develops the division of labour least and ranges most widely, by the device of performing the social action in imaginary material and thus freeing itself from the limitations of other materials, and resolving itself to the production of simple instruments of artistic production, paper and print.

• The same process can be gone through with the dance. Composite forms also apply as particular cases of differentiation, for example opera, which is musical drama, or ballet, which is musical dramatic dance. 

But there is not time to develop this just now.

Case 4: The plastic arts

Here the further invasion of the products of labour is easier to follow. The instruments of artistic production follow very closely improvements in the instruments of social production.

• New materials, for example stone, wood, glass, gold, cement, bronze, steel, cellulose, paints, dyes, photographic materials etc.

• The process of social production is never completely differentiated from that of artistic production – for example crafts. Thus architecture, decoration, pottery, etc. 

• New instruments such as chisels, scalpels, brushes, etc.

• The division of labour with, for example, one person making a model and its casting in bronze by other people.

• The application of machinery. The representation of action in the product of labour by the choice of action – then the taking of a photograph. Finally meeting the representation of drama in the product of labour – the film or moving talking picture, a very high form of art.

Note that when it comes to the plastic arts (i) There is no performance. The object itself is observed; (ii) There is no performance even in imagination, as with literature, which is also observed or seen; (iii)  The representation of motion is not excluded by the material being of a stationery kind, because the material is itself the product of the artistic labour.

The discussion on the forms of artistic material as a whole leads to some interesting conclusions:

(a) That the forms of art are the forms of the materials in which the representation of human activity is made;

(b)  What is represented is of no concern in the choice of a material. This conclusion is apparently paradoxical; but a moment’s thought will suffice to show its correctness. Artistic labour is subject to the same division of labour as social activity. Materials are therefore specialised, but subject matter is essentially generalised. The definition of artistic excellence as “multum in parvo” illustrates this.

(c) Human activity can be represented either in other activity, or in the corporeal product of other activity. It is this “other activity” which we have been dealing with. 

(d) Human activity cannot be represented as such; it can only be represented as something else. 

(e) The productive forces exercise the most direct influence on the means of representation. The materials of artistic production are the means of social production, or to be precise a part of them. The skill employed is of the level of skill belonging to society at that time. The instruments, though specialised, are of the general level of technique prevailing at the time. Into the bargain, the prevailing social division of labour – the productive relations – are reflected in the organisation of artistic production. Moreover, they are reflected directly as they exist, and not merely as they appear to the contemporary mind. The object represented has no part in determining this, but is perfectly or imperfectly represented according as the conditions of representation are suitable or not. 

Suppose we take an example, such as Bach’s music:  The material representation is the performance. The nature of the same may be decided by such factors as it being in a church or small concert hall, the players few, the degree of technique poor, the division of labour advanced as far as the chorus, with various soloists, instruments of many-stringed type, viols, wind etc., the technique of counter-point and singing in canon. The instruments are the same as described above.

There is no word here of the religious or social ideas which were expressed, that is to say, the religious and social activities which were represented in the material described by means of the instruments specified.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.133]

–   –   –

9. Art in the earliest human societies: comments on cave art 

From Nikolsky [V.A.Nikolsky, Russian art historian; read in Woolwich, 1940]

Cave drawings appeared towards the end of the third interglacial period – or the early last glacial presumably. There are representations of:

(a) A bison, a mammoth, etc. 

(b)  A collective hunt, showing hunters pursuing animals with spears etc.

(c)  Hunters dressed in the skins of animals, so as to approach them unseen.

Here the educational function is clear. The fact, often remarked, that correct perspective of animals is unusual positions was achieved, its correctness being discovered later only with the camera, is clearly based on the practical task of hitting the vital spot with a spear.

Next point: The representation of men seems inferior to the representation of animals, except in the basic poise of arms, legs, etc. This is perhaps due to the fact that men were not yet hunted on a large scale. Now according to my view, art which is to be looked at is a highly developed derivative form, arguing that the separation of performer and audience has already taken place, and the performance has been replaced by a symbol. This seems odd at such an early age. Therefore it seems desirable to investigate the habits of societies still at this stage of development, as well as to consult the standard works on early mankind in the Dordogne etc. I don’t know enough about it to say, but such an interpretation as this is worth looking for – that this represents the pre-history of art, before the category was genuinely defined. Note the following:

1. Presumably this work would only be done by the adult males, who had already hunted. 
2. Also presumably all adult males indifferently would have this ability. 
3. The tools used for this? Would they not be the tools used for the production of tools – i.e. production goods – and not spears etc.? Thus we see a division in the function of production tools: (a) to produce other tools, and (b) to represent the production process as a whole.
4. Because the whole of society does not participate in the basic productive activity, we get a primitive elaboration of an “audience”. But is the actual execution here the performance?
5. Art is here also an expenditure of additional labour over and above that necessary for productive purposes. Time which need not be spent producing tools – because the social process was so simple that each man satisfied his own needs very rapidly and no exploitation as yet existed – was spent in the use of the same instruments for representative purposes.
6. Note that art arises out of production. It is not the leisured class but the productive class which originates it. More correctly, it arises as a subdivision of productive labour, and not as result of surplus labour.
7. Does the execution of a drawing precede or follow a hunt? I say precede. Is it done always, or on some special occasions, as when several communes unite, or when a migration is undertaken?
8. Or is it when a youth is incorporated in the hunt? Given 90 people reproducing every 30 years, one new hunter would be initiated, at age 15 or so, as one replacement every two years. Thus this initiation would be a great event. Alternatively, the same may apply here as with agricultural performances – the communal nature of the labour is emphasised by the performance before it begins.
9. Again were the drawings drawn in common? Did each man draw himself, or some men draw some animals?
10. Were there any special means of production for this artistic work?
11.  Who made them, how and when?

I think the cave drawings were “occasional”, drawn in common by theadult males, in the presence of the whole commune prior to important hunting expeditions. 

The next point worth investigating is the fact that the leaders of totems used to carry special objects of bone on which were engraved suitable animals. Were these the animals which gave their names to that particular totem or were they the animals which it was customary to hunt tribally?

Another important thing: the periodic councils of the tribe and festivals for the admission of youths to the company of adult hunters. Here they had to undergo an examination which in public tested knowledge and endurance etc. This itself was in the nature of a performance. Care of animals, how to use weapons etc. had been taught; also how to dress in the skins of animals. 

Thus in embryo there is: 

A Performance;

Cries, which gives rise to Music; 

Hunting, which gives rise to Drama;

Cooperation, which gives rise to Dancing, the use of clothes etc., which in turn gives rise to the Plastic Arts.

One or two general remarks on early art will not be out of place: the matter seems clear enough, that art arises within production and not outside it. Religion on the other hand is essentially outside production. The function of art is the ideological coordination of the social labour process. 

To take examples: Cave drawings educate the young and are made by the makers of tools, which are means of production. Here the entire ideological superstructure appears to take artistic form.

• Initiating performances, mimicry, masquerading as animals, the mock hunt. 

–  The substitution of a representation of labour in the place of actual labour for educational purposes. 

• Note the absence (a) of the State, and (b) of religion. 

The co-ordination of social effort was necessary because of the growing division of labour. The individual, being no longer capable of participating in the whole work of society, must he brought to see the whole, or he would not see the justification for common appropriation. The division into age-groups, and tribe and totem, corresponded to this simple form of artistic representation. On the other hand, the absence of a state, religion etc. necessitated this ideological cohesion.

Thus at this stage art has not yet clearly separated itself from production. It appears as a special phase of production, the purpose of which is the reproduction of the total productive forces of society. The origin of art is thus in education. 

Further comments on cave art:  See the quotations on the origin of representation as having a “magical purpose”. Nikolsky’s book is for children and presumably avoids dialectics in order to establish certain facts clearly. But suppose what he says is true. Suppose that the representations of animals on clubs were actually to lure animals, and the cave drawings were to “make the animals fall into our power”. Suppose the first artistic products were magical – what does this mean?

What in actual fact did defeat and “bring the animals into our power”?  The answer is the common hunt, the social organisation of labour. So we can take it that the belief that the work of representation facilitated the work of production was the reflection of the fact that the social forces of production – in fact the common labour of the totemistic union – made possible the sustenance of the family. Above all, a primitive form of cooperation was required amongst individuals wielding weapons separately, also freely – and in order to secure this object it was necessary to bring it before the eyes of all the participants in a ritual form invested with social significance. Hence we have the stages:

• Coordinated social effort brings in hunting;

(b)Coordinated social effort is created as a hunt without animals, or real clubs etc. – as representation.

Hence the opinion that the representation causes the success, whereas it merely provides the most important prerequisite for success

Here again we see the form of art. The relations between men appear in the guise of work done by them.

We must distinguish between the subjective opinion given by the savage and the actual facts of the case. Civilised people do not know the purpose of art, so why should savages be conscious of it?  In the artistic representation they see reflected the life of their own society. Hence art can be progressive. Note that this art is “occasional” and not “professional”, at least to begin with.

Even so, the whole question is of major importance to my theory and must be worked out fully.

Nikolsky writes (p.40): “Each tribe organised an annual solemn festival in honour of its totemistic animal. The feast consisted in part of the hunters dressing up as their totemic beast and jumping in imitation of their movements and antics, for example a frog. These were the first dances. The rest of the hunters sang songs that told about the totemic beasts, related different happenings at hunts of the help and protection granted to man by his totemic animal. These were the first songs and fairy tales of man. The festival ended in the sacrifice of the totemic animal.” 

This is a very important question as showing, as I imagined, the common origin of the arts in the totemic drama. This can be developed further – the relation between song, dance, literature as a difference due to the division of labour. I will later go further and show how music bears a particular dialectical relationship to dance, which is here seen in his simplest and earliest, cellular, form. See my “History” for notes on the origin of religion and similar subjects.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p. 59; also p.67]

–   –   –

10. The social content of music

Without having thoroughly examined the problem, I can say to begin with that the reason why the social content of music has not received great attention lies in the nature of musical expression as distinct from literary or representative expression. If we place the genesis of literature in speech, representation in the decoration of the body, drama in the dance, and all in the ritual, fetishistic or magical form in which the low level of productive forces cast all human activity at that time – music still contains an element corresponding to something more primitive, that is to say, the expression by sound which preceded speech. 

This form of vocalism – undifferentiated vocalism – differentiates first into speech where the new relations between men, corresponding to the development of the new productive forces, compel it. Thus speech is first technical, linked closely to human labour; emotion is still expressed by the more primitive form. Recall Freud’s story in “The Relation of Art to the Unconscious”, where the doctor attending the woman in labour neglects “Ah. Que je souffre”, but attends to her when he hears “Ah…Aiii!” as an example of this. Only later, with the division of society into distinct classes, does emotional language appear. And the fine manners of Marcel Proust are only possible with the flourishing of all leisure classes in the bourgeois writers.

 I therefore make the origin of music a distinct and separate departure, out of undifferentiated vocalism, corresponding to the low development of speech, especially in the expression of abstract or emotional ideas. This division between “emotion” and “thought” has of course nothing in common with the absolute division given, for example, by Jung in his “Psychological Types”.

Likewise “expression” means fundamentally “communication”. The invention of writing, by making possible the communication of the living with their children and grandchildren, as well as removing much fetishism from ancestors, added this reverence to the “work of art”; that is, the concrete embodiment of their communication, set down on paper or in stone. Thus the products of artistic creation began to have a life of their own apart from their creator – and incidentally set foot on the way to becoming commodities. 

The invention of writing was the starting point for literature. The invention of musical notation likewise ended the pre-history of music. The bourgeoisie, while depressing the artistic value of artistic products by transposing artistic labour into a commodity, has made possible the greatest yet extension of reproduction – in photography and gramophone recording, in which a single actual performance can be repeated an indefinite number of times. And this has the effect of again shifting the interest back from the product to the performer. The human being is coming into it again. 

Thesis:      The artist is the performance … Primitive society

Antithesis: The product dwarfs both the producer and the performer, corresponding to the feudal and bourgeois periods

Synthesis:  Materialist art

The modern film illustrates what I said about the “congealing” of drama into sculpture and picture. 

The process of increasing reproducibility of art which began as action, and became an artistic product, or its representation, is of essential importance. Today bourgeois critics overlook the original action. The division of labour achieves this.  That few composers conduct, let alone perform, their own works is taken for granted. And this process it is which conceals the essentially communicative, active nature, of expression (To be artistic expression it must fulfil another function, that of creating ideology, but that has been dealt with). Art is social communication in content, and ideological in form. 

Musical expression, from the very fact that it corresponded to social requirements which were subsequently supplied, at least in part, by speech, provided in primitive form –  in active form, compare gestures,  to explain how to do a thing you do it; to explain an emotion you make a facial expression or a noise – for the expression of a field more difficult to particularise, requiring greater intellectual powers than primitive production could give rise to. Music was therefore a more primitive thing than other forms of expression. It accompanied the dance, the ritual ceremony, and added the qualities which speech could not provide. This was partly due to its primitiveness asspeech, partly due to its advanced nature in comparison with the vague fetishistic emotions which primitive man possessed, emotions which only modern man could begin to present in intellectual form.  It was the Cinderella of the arts. It developed most slowly. Musical notation came late, and until musical notation was invented, music, though with a distinct origin, had no separate history, just as the endosperm in a seed has a distinct origin but no separate history; it merely subserves the growth of the embryo. Music merely served other forms. This is not to deny that at a later stage the first signs of independence preceded actual notation. The need for notation had to be expressed first. Members of the ruling class had groups of women or eunuchs to play to them in ancient times. The song of Miriam, supposed by the Hebrews to represent the origin of music, is of course an interpretation foisted upon history at precisely this time – when music was beginning to demand a separate history and was coming to be hailed consciously as the expression of abstract emotion. 

Another consequence of the primitive origin of music is the fact that in its capacity of expressing abstract human emotion, in sounds, its connection with society is indirect.

Music: Words, Dance, Performance  – Social meaning 

Neither the words nor the music of a folk-song are sufficient by themselves. The music of a Greek dance is of no value by itself. The dance dictates it, as the words do the music of the folk-song. The music of a primitive church service is founded on the liturgy. (Note that in the Middle Ages the Church violently opposed tendencies towards complexity in church music, as expressions of a secular kind drawn from the folk-song and dance.) 

Thus music is profoundly affected throughout its pre-history before notation, and in its history, after notation, by the other arts. It comes into the world as a dumb art. It is still in the stage before speech was invented. And the dialectical movement of history transformed this backward movement of vocal expression into the typical expression of abstract human emotion, which stage by stage secures a more influential position as the accompaniment of artistic expression, and under bourgeois production relationships soars into the skies with an independent history and a commanding position. The fact that literature and representation flourished in previous epochs, but that it was left to the bourgeois epoch to bring music to its highest development – even though the same bourgeoisie rapidly set about degrading it after its conquest of political power – is thus attributable to the division of labour and the abstractness of ideological relationships corresponding to commodity production. Music is the bourgeois art par excellence. 

Contradictions within music:

1.Speechlessness as an expression of abstract emotion. 

The efforts of composers to solve this contradiction constitutes the technical history of music. Every new development in ideology demands a new development in the content of “pure” emotional expression. Thus we come to another contradiction. 

2.Music is “abstract” in form, emotional in content. Every note in music is as emotional as every other note. The drama is only emotional at certain places, when certain ideas emerge with clarity. But while literature generalises a differentiated medium, music differentiates an abstract medium. The mere saying of a word or sentence does not involve the emotional expression inseparable from the shortest phrase of music.

3.Music is universal in structure, and intensely historical in significance. At each point it is connected with the ideology of the time of its composition. Forms of musical structure correspond to ideas, sometimes openly, sometimes less obviously: for example, Bach’s themes, Wagner’s leitmotivs, Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” theme throughout the whole of his work.

[Book.1, 1940s note, p.101]

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11.Music and social class development: from Rutland Boughton’s book, “The Reality of Music” 

1. The originally communal and un-individualised production of music … Its essential linkage, indeed the essential linkage of all art, with the means of production … The transition to a stage in which a class owned the means of production involved a process by which art became progressively individualised and became increasingly a means of class domination, but only in precisely the same way as the means of production themselves were means of class domination. Art is thus more than a propaganda machine. It pre-existed class society. Music permeates production … Art as one of the prerequisites of qualitative production. The final stages of the process of abstracting art (quality) from work takes place only under capitalism. Here also its use as an organ of class domination is pushed to its highest development, so that some people have noticed only this. Boughton’s great advantage is in having taken a very wide historical view. He linked music with its origins – the division of vocal noise into speech and the howl, the development of both under broader social relations, each finding their greatest development with the advent of capitalism (i.e. in Austrian music and the English language.)

• The importance of the transition to capitalism: for example, the significance of the fact that that there is no English music of the greatest quality, just as there is no trace of much English folk song. Contrast the wealth of the folk sources from which Bach and Beethoven etc. drew … The fading-out of music into virtuosity as this great stream began to dry up … The importance of a school of music set in the tradition of Central European folk music … The richness of Central European folk music …The form of the transition to capitalism governs the artistic milieu: on the one hand where the enclosures take place early – England; on the other where capitalism has not progressed far while within the framework of feudalism – Germany … The increased resources – for example public facilities for playing (Note that 18^th century England relies on foreign musicians) – are not available until after the folk basis of music, the reservoir, has been largely lost and forgotten.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.3]

–   –   –

12. The nature of art: art as representing social purpose

In my early notes on art –  I seem to remember writing them in Liverpool, possibly in the summer of 1940 when I had read Capital right through and was most impressed by the dialectic method of analysis – I said “Art represents social activity”. I could then not explain certain static phenomena, and also came to grief over the boundary between art and religion, and art and science etc. I think perhaps a better definition is that “Art represents social purpose”. Then its raison d’etre becomes obvious. Its subdivisions and contradictoriness become more clearly understood. Once society splits into classes, so do social purposes. With the dominant, ruling class, purpose there exists the other pole, which may never gain overt expression. A part of the product of society is consumed – and must first be produced, even in a specialised form – to imbue the members of society with a consciousness of social purpose. Hence the vulgarized conception that “art is propaganda” (Upton Sinclair).

[Book 2, note written in 1960, p.100]

–   –   –

13. On decorative art

The same criteria which serve to distinguish representation as it appears in science, in the service of production as such, also serve in another way to distinguish fully developed art from decoration. Decoration is never “decoration for its own sake”. Nobody has ever claimed as much for it. “Art” has frequently been degraded as low even by art-for-art’s-sake fanatics. (Incidentally, this is an amusing backwash in a world which says, “production for production’s sake”. Its logic is “reproduction for reproduction’s sake”!)

Decoration is always the decoration of some useful object, a pot, a pan, a textile, a wall, a ceiling. The principal consideration is always the use of the article itself. The finest embroidery is permitted to wear out. If kept for show it is merely as a testimony to the skill that can produce it for consumption. Here production and decoration may be distinct stages of production, in which the decoration is added to the already useful article, as in the papering of a wall; or it may be entirely fused with the process of production proper, as with a piece of tapestry. This makes no difference. Even if a famous picture is reproduced on the tapestry, that is no matter. The purpose of the act of production remains the simple one of consumption. The fact that the product lasts a long time has led people to describe Gothic cathedrals as works of art – because their consumption takes place so slowly and, for one thing, they have outlasted the purpose for which they were put up. There are on the other hand finely executed pieces of decorated production, but they do not a1wwepresent anything; there are no “abstract ideas” to be got out of them. Their peculiar shape is due to their peculiar purpose, and they do not require to be works of art in order to give an “aesthetic” pleasure, which is obtainable in numerous ways – from nature for example. But that these cathedrals may house works of art is quite a different matter. And I believe that many of the works they do house noticeably contradict the purposes for which the edifice was built. I once read a book titled “Vienna” by a man who was in love with the place, and he explained Gothic by one set of ideas, Baroque by the striving after the mastery over Nature, and so on. I think that is nonsense. The form is part of the function. Once decoration leads to loss of function, the manufacture falls into disuse.

But are there no forms of decoration worthy of study? Haddon and others have always worked on “decorative art” as if it did not materially differ from fully developed reproductive art [Alfred Cort Haddon, 1855-1940, anthropologist who wrote the book, “Evolution in Art” and other works].Decoration always implies a measure of surplus labour. When a society declines, its decoration falls off (v. Flinders Petrie on Egyptian Civilisation) [W. Flinders Petrie, 1853-1942, British Egyptologist].  The present development of productive forces has swamped us with decoration of all forms, and has for the first time really distinguished it from art. How are we to regard the various forms taken? I believe in the same way as we should regard art in its earliest forms, before the process of representation had acquired independence from production. The decoration is normally flowers, animals, underlining of the basic form or grain of the article, in order to make it correspond to what is thought good of its kind, or to call forth pleasant associations, or curiosity. In other words, decoration is primitive representation, in the stage when reproduction has not yet assumed an antagonistic form over and against production.

On the other hand, in art, production is subordinated to reproduction, representation. In the first case the material must not be so far disguised as to lose, or even conceal, its useful property of being a consumable thing. In the second the material loses all semblance of the thing that it is and takes on the identity of what it represents. In the first the use is the noun, the decoration the adjective: a “tessellated pavement”; in the second the subject represented is the noun, the material the adjective: “a wax Venus”. 

The frame of a picture may greatly help its appearance when hung, by throwing it into relief and so on, but if it does not hold the picture up it is of small use. So we have a gold frame and a picture of the Last Supper. How far the forms of decoration persist and permeate art will have to be left to a later analysis, but one other question arises. Art has a definite function: representation is of social value. It enables the individual to look at something from the standpoint of society – that is to say of a class. Thus art can be very reactionary. All art has a moral, says Hegel, and this is of course true. Rhythm, common audition, mass listening and watching – are all a part of it. But decoration, what is its value? Nothing of the same sort. The transition forms exhibit everything from pleasant whimsicality to clumsy propaganda. The gaudy colours of children’s toys, the flowers on wall-paper, mural decorations in general where they do not fall under the category of art, have only the purpose of enhancing the usefulness of the object. Wallpaper is said to soothe or satisfy the eyes, which would be tired by blank plaster.  Decoration may be scarcely removed from a fine finish. It is the announcement, true or false, that the necessary time, and to spare, has been spent on the article. It is therefore capable of falling within Veblen’s category of “conspicuous waste”, especially when carried to excess by a degenerate and inartistic ruling class [Thorstein Veblen, 1857-1929, American economist and sociologist, author of “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, 1899].      

Decorative art – if we exclude ornamentations which are representative on clubs etc. – arose when pottery began to be ornamented by means of rills.

(See Flinders Petrie on basket patterns.)  Here quite a different origin is implied; first, the complete interlocking of two productive processes, the making of baskets and the throwing of pots.  Then the deliberate representation and glorification of the first stage on the second, and then the gradual neglect when, possibly, the use of these baskets no longer left a natural mark. Thus there are three stages in the development of decorative “art”. The similar development of decoration leads to its confusion with art.

The first signs of decoration appear with the handicraft production of tools by the old men of the community. The second appears with the handicraft production of pottery. Presumably a third appears with building. So with textiles. Thus we can associate decoration with handicraft production. But this is not in any way connected with “art” proper. There is here a separate category of handicraft or decorative “art” (See Eric Gill, who confuses them). The development of handicraft art, with its Persian carpets, Baroque architecture etc., is a study in itself. Take an example, to show how representation is always secondary to production: fake wallpaper in an English house. It may represent flowers or baskets or peacocks. What is its purpose? To prevent the eye being tired by blank walls – plaster being very dull and tiresome – by representing objects from the outside world more or less at random. However, such things as factories or machines are not represented there. This is the law behind the random choice. The most “restful” objects, agricultural objects, are usual. Thus there are crocuses on my curtains here in Woolwich. In a cathedral it is not usual to tapestry the walls, true, but the monotony is broken by carved columns and gargoyles. Of course I know nothing about, say, Spanish cathedrals where decoration is pushed to fantastic limits in order effectively to breed the idea of the “glory” of God and of life beyond the grave. But whatever the building, decoration has an object which is secondary … Analyse this further.

Decoration within art:  Decoration is a feature of both plastic and performing arts but is not necessarily of artistic origin (cf. Flinders Petrie’s reference to basket marks on Egyptian bricks). Even here we have transference/ representation. In architecture, music and poetry decoration should always help to reveal the nature of the thing decorated: cf. decoration in dance, decoration of a useful, real, artefact. If the first transference – of reality to artefact – gives art, decoration within art is a second one, in which one part of the artistic product stands for another, for example a turn, an appoggiatura or trill, an unnecessary word in verse, etc.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.27]

–   –  –

14. Art as the creation of ideology  

Basically, the function of art is the creation of ideology. Art in Europe as we know it came into existence first around the cave dwellers of the Dordogne. Here it is essentially, indeed rigorously, representative and realist. The naturalism then achieved has been impossible in later, class, forms of society. The function of this art was to create the comparatively slender ideological superstructure required by the primitive hunting society, to put a premium upon the accurate observation of animals, which was of vital practical importance in entrapping them, and to build up a social consciousness based upon that mode of life. The absence of classes explains the absence of falsification.

Class art extended beyond this by far. It developed a new technical basis in slave society, new industries, crafts etc., but while it extended the basis of art, bringing into existence pottery, writing, literature etc., it brought about the split between Science and Art, and by the means primarily of religion began a conscious or unconscious falsification of social consciousness in the interests of the ruling class, which has persisted ever since.

With the feudal period came further technical innovations – new forms of falsification. With bourgeois society, the same. Only while art has the function of building the new ideology at these different stages is it progressive. But with socialism and communism art enters a new phase. With these historical advances the new ideology is for the first time being built consciously. A social superstructure is being erected; it is not allowed to grow spontaneously. Thus Soviet writers etc. claim to be “builders of souls”.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.26]

–   –  –

15. The analysis of art: art as a leisure function

The analysis of art begins not with the “social content”, the thing represented, but with the article or performance produced by the artistic labour. The essential fact to be grasped is that representation can only begin after production has stopped. In this sense art is a leisure function. The concentration of this function in certain individuals in class society does not alter this function. Nor does the fact that these individuals belong to the normally productive classes and perform their services to the rulers in return for a share of the surplus product extracted from the rest of their class. Their services here are merely paid in full.

What is needed therefore is an historical account of artistic production in all the main phases of society. This should include a survey of the technical level reached, the artistic instruments and the materials available. These correspond to the productive forces. The development of these does not correspond evenly to the development of productive forces in general, but it does correspond to the average. The inventions made will be related to the division of artistic labour. The production of Renaissance art, for example, provides instances of invention made by the workmen. Similarly, not the composer but the performer is in the 18th and 19th centuries responsible for improvements of musical instruments, technical innovations, the full utilisation of which may wait many years (The development of Watt’s steam engine is an analogous case). 

The division of labour in each epoch is of the most vital importance and is the key to understanding the nature of art forms. These are essentially, within each sphere of artistic production, expressions of different divisions of labour in artistic performance. Over time the form of the representation becomes more and more the province of one man, thus giving rise to the special crafts of composer, poet, sculptor and so on. The composition becomes a form of mental labour, as opposed to the manual labour of conductors, executants, performers, painters etc.  The composer’s crafts require above all knowledge of the technical possibilities, the division of labour, and of course of the particular craft of composition. This is paralleled by a draughtsman who must know something of the strength of materials and the division of labour amongst workmen, as well as his own peculiar craft of designing and drawing. 

Thus there is inherent in the production of art the contradiction between mental and manual labour. This is conveniently forgotten by bourgeois writers. It is also forgotten by “left” critics, who place the artist in the forefront and spend all their time studying his ideological connections. For example, what of the complaint that “the artist has no place in bourgeois society.” If the composer has no place, neither has the performer. If the writer is hard hit, so is the reader who gets no time or is too tired to read. If the sculptor, then also the moulder and caster. If the dramatist, then too the actor and producer. 

The lengthening of the hours of labour of the masses has in the main restricted artistic consumption to the rentier class. To the capitalist, consumption of this kind represents a failure to accumulate. This is of course frequently understood, for example by Elie Siegmeister [American composer, educator and author, 1909-1991].  But whatever is the artist’s position in society, he still has nominal freedom to select any subject he wishes for representation. The circumstance that he has to suit his public arises from his dependent position as a producer, and not from any necessity in the object represented. Hence the possibility at all times of a revolutionary art at different phases of social development. In revolutionary art, to begin with, the existing level of technique, the existing craft of the composer, is taken over lock, stock and barrel and used to represent the new developments arising in society, the aspirations, life, appearance and interests of the new rising social class. 

But artistic production continues to function on the basis of the old society. We here reach the object of representation – the creation of ideology. By externalising their own lives the people are enabled to see themselves as a whole. Each great work of art is thus a work of social integration; hence of social criticism. But this does not affect the conditions under which it is produced, though its production may be attended by great difficulties. The first stage – the mental labour of the composer – only requires that he should be alive and well and not otherwise occupied. Thus the existing conditions of production tend to hamper the representation of new social issues. There is a contradiction between the object and the image, in which the image is the revolutionary factor. This relative freedom of the image as expressing society as a whole, whereas the existing conditions of production essentially hinge on the ownership of the means of production, gives rise to the conception of “artistic freedom”. The artist is above classes because there is nothing in the nature of his material to prevent its representing one class or another. There is an apparent freedom of choice – as there is in the choice of the labourer confronted with wages in return for the sale of his labour power.

The craft of the composer is that of planning the performance. Admittedly this is a very highly skilled craft. But there is less mystery about it then is often supposed. Many composers are but indifferent craftsmen, like many designers. To be a great designer requires more than a mastery of the existing technique; it requires above all an acute and broad understanding of social needs. The same applies to the composer. He must know the world. Otherwise he will represent what is not worth representing. On the other hand he must have skill or he will not represent at all. In his person is therefore expressed the twofold nature of art. But what is his skill? That of arranging human actions in order to get a preconceived result. His craft is the use of the technique of composition.  Both relate to production – the first as physical, the second as mental effort. For example, the musician must know how to use counterpoint, harmony, etc. He must also know the prevailing noises utilised in music and how to produce them and in what proportions. He can then proceed to represent the things of his choice. The more he is hampered in drama, the more he will resort to symphony, on the supposition of course that he writes to represent revolutionary movements. And likewise the more will he be obliged to create a “musical language” in which certain explicit forms become the symbols of certain implicit representations.

As before, we see that content is expressed as form. Symphony is the limit of this. Thus certain effects of speech, rhythm, tone and so on are intended to convey certain actions with which they can be imagined to be accompanied. The performance is again, as with the book that is read, partly in the imagination of the audience. A particular analysis of musical form as the expression of social content will be required under another heading, as this does not belong so much to material as to image.

Works of art are known by the names of their composers. These select the things to be represented. The ideology of these composers arises from the same source as the conditions of artistic production but in a different way – that is by way of the general ideology of the classes represented on the historical stage at that particular time.

Some Notes:

• The Artist:  The artist is not represented in his own works. He nowhere figures in them. They are, however, catalogued under his name as well as their titles, as more than one artist may choose to depict the same thing; but no two will use identical instruments of production, identical division of labour etc.; and if so, there will be no identical ideologies to fix the form of the image.

• Representation of what?:  I say of human activity. It would be better perhaps to say social activity [a view amended to “social purpose” twenty years later, in 1960; see Note 12 above]. But what of the carving of animals?  I answer that the carving of animals in Mousterian caves [i.e. carved by Neanderthals and early humans] represented what the hunter saw: animals in all kinds of positions. The genesis of artistic symbolism lies here. Since the whole must be represented in the part, the part becomes the symbol of the whole.  But the modern pictures of horses – racehorses all ready to be mounted by sleek gentry with fatuous faces either in or out of the picture – these represent quite a different form of social activity. Likewise do the horses of the Egyptians and so on. It is not any great change in the biology of the horse that is in question; it is simply the part played by that animal in the social life of the time. 

But what of the carving of a beetle or other curious animal? Its representation might have as its object the representation of an object of magical powers – a crucifix, for example, is such a representation. On the other hand, it may be the representation of sheer curiosity or other social tendency which assumes interest in such things. If it is made, say, of gold and gems it may merely serve as a symbol of the wealth of the owner and it then ceases to be art. Likewise a careful picture of the stormy sky is not art, except by a stretch of the imagination. But an inaccurate sketch done with the intention of giving an impression on an astronomer or sailor would be art. A landscape is essentially the reproduction of a certain social attitude to scenery; that is to say, a picture of Scafell might well today include the hiker. It also expresses the hatred of the town. Industrial capitalism is the heyday of country landscapes. This is a second form of symbolism.

• Music develops late: The reason is that it is not until the productive forces are very highly developed that social life can be expressed in music. The early songs of the Greeks expressed very little. Folk songs merely accompany words which convey the meaning. Instruments can do very little. On the other hand, drama and sculpture may at that time be capable of astonishing flights. Now, given the immense technical advances of the era of capitalism, it becomes possible to represent those same things in music as were readily expressed in other materials all along. So music appears as a bourgeois art, has a quick summer and suffers the fate of all arts under capitalism – production for a constantly narrowing market, that is to say, for the consumption of the ruling class; or representation according to ruling class ideology for working class consumption – either financial or intellectual impoverishment. This apart from fascism and the crisis of capitalism, war, etc.

• The two forms of bourgeois art:  In feudal days the production of art for the nobility arose out of its production for the people. The same man worked first for one, then for the other. Under capitalism that is not so, as the means of production are in the hands of the bourgeoisie and separated from the workers who sell their labour power. Just as there is caviar for the bourgeoisie and jellied-eels for the workers, so the artistic goods are divided according as they are intended for bourgeois or for proletarian consumption. In feudal days there was court art and popular art. Now there is minority and majority art. But different cycles of production operate in each case.

• Art for bourgeois consumption: This represents the bourgeoisie exploiting the workers; cynical or sentimental; intellectual or snobbishly emotional; with a great parade of “culture”. In fact its range is becoming more and more restricted. The bourgeoisie grows pessimistic. It flagellates itself. Some of its members go over to the workers, or try to placate them, for example W.H. Auden etc. [British-American poet 1907-73].  The restriction of subjects represented illustrates the intellectual poverty and narrowness of outlook of the bourgeoisie. But since they are people of jaded appetite, its form is most laboriously virtuoso. Far more work goes into the modification of materials than is required to represent the object: thus formal virtuosity decorates baseness of content.

• Art for working class consumption:  The two forms pass into one another, as the two classes do still to some degree via the salariat and small producers. Here there is no motive for technical virtuosity. On the contrary, as little labour as possible must be expended in providing for the consumption of the workers. Gaudiness and cheapness are the two watchwords. As for the content, it represents a ruling class that is there for ever and a working class which does not resist.

 [Book 1, 1940 note, p.170]

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16. Artistic symbolism

In dealing with the activity represented, this will be a most important subject. It will explain a number of false appearances. Take the forms of symbolism:

• First form: The part appears for the whole – for example, a couple of men for an army, the head of the dead man for the corpse, a bust for a body, a couple for a full fare.

• Second form: The singular appears for the plural, the individual for the class. The form of allegory.

•  Third form: The thing or person for the idea – as Julius Caesar for the bourgeoisie.  Historical transposition and so on. Work this out.

The circumstance that the objects represented appear very frequently in symbolic form – quite apart from the fact that the choice of symbol is ideological – is something else that obscures the fact that something real is represented, and obscures the twofold nature of the artistic product, making  it appear a creature of materials (art for art’s sake) or of ideas (mechanism and idealism).

One contradictory result of this is that the artist can represent himself. He can of course depict his own face in the mirror. He cannot represent himself as artist, but only as an external object, without the use of symbolism. Whether this self-representation as artist is real or illusory will need to be worked out. Strictly speaking it is artistic activity which cannot be represented (See Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs).

[Book 1,1940s note, p.185]

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17. Art and the division of labour 

To say that art has been immensely influenced by the differentiation of human labour since pre-historic times, is merely to draw attention to one aspect of the determination of artistic development by the growth of the productive forces, since these have until now grown by means of increased differentiation of labour. But the aspect is a very important one, because pre-capitalist division of labour was progressive for art. With capitalism the division of labour ceased to be progressive. Then under socialism the division of labour is itself gradually abolished.  

On the general question, insofar as division of labour applies to the origin of art, it is surely possible to refer art to the period of primitive communism, based on undifferentiated communal labour. There is a suggestion in Lucien Henry (Les Origines de la Religion, 1936) that the language of gestures preceded, and took the place of, the language of voice. This was in the first stage of human evolution. He also suggests the origins of the dance at the same period. Rutland Boughton thinks speech was differentiated from the howl. Putting all together we have the primitive form of human expression corresponding to the primitive needs of human cooperation. Perhaps Boughton’s howl might be called vocalism! 

Howl, Gesture, Dance – each as forms of primitive expression. 

At this period ideology could be described as non-existent. Hence art is non-existent. Expression does not become art until it serves the purpose of creating ideology. For ideology to appear it is not necessary to have classes;  but there must be language, there must be division of labour, in its most rudimentary form at least. This means of course that contradictions are developing in the womb of primitive society.

The highest stage obtainable in primitive society is the development of a single undifferentiated art form:

Folk-song                               Howl

Folk-drama      With words       Gesture  

Folk-dance                              Dance

and from this all the individual art forms are developed by differentiation.

Primitive art leads to Folk song, which leads to Solo music, then to Instrumental music and then to Orchestral music;                  

Primitive art leads to Folk-drama, which leads on to Narrative, then to Theatre, and then to Opera;  

Primitive art leads to dance, which leads on to Sculpture, Painting and Ballet, and then to Poetry and to Prose, the novel, the essay etc..

[In the original Notebooks the above connections are denoted by arrows and lines.]

I make the above scheme only in order to bring out another point. The differentiation of the arts was never complete. Just as the division into mental and physical labour cannot go beyond a certain point without making labour itself quite impossible, so the differentiation of the arts can never be complete without making art impossible. A “pure” art-form is a pure fantasy. This seems obvious enough, but it is very important, because when as today art is divorced from the masses, we have “art for art’s sake” as the expression of the utmost division of labour, alongside commercial art. In the first we get novels without drama, poetry without rhythm (dance), music without drama (atonality) and a hundred and one complex and contradictory forms, which all arise from bourgeois society where the division of labour is carried to its highest and most contradictory stage. And we get learned critics (even M.Julien Benda) declaring that the introduction of social content into art is “Trahison” (La Trahison des Clercs, 1927), and Spengler, Flinders Petrie et al declaring that the admixture of pure art forms is a sign of the drying up of the cultural stream!  What an inversion! The drying up of the stream of inspiration is in fact due to the undue separation, the division of labour – all deriving from that central separation of mental from physical labour – and the attempts of dissatisfied artists to break through this naturally take the form of “mixing” art forms. 

Wagner falls in for these gentlemen’s disapproval. It may be that attempts to break down the separation of the arts were failures. That is because the economic basis did not exist. Eclecticism was the keynote of these attempts, degenerating into dilettantism. But when the socialist revolution begins to remove these artificial barriers, then there will undoubtedly be a merging of the arts, but on a new, higher level. 

Primitive (undifferentiated) art as thesis; class (differentiated) art as antithesis; socialist (realist) art as synthesis.

To explain the above word “realist”:  In the first stage the function of art was to promote primitive cooperation. With the advancing division of mental and physical labour, the function became also one of co-ordinating the contradictory types of labour – that is to say, overcoming the antagonisms. With the coming of classes the ideology of cooperation becomes divided.

Co-operation implies (a) An ideology of submission to the ruling class; (b) An ideology of revolt against the ruling class

The first (a) is dominant. The second is nothing but a vestige. The economic dominance of the ruling class means that art is always class art. Cooperation in equal labour becomes cooperation in dictated labour. But within dictation there lives on the contradictory remnant of the original cooperation – and this breaks forth again in full vigour with the advent of the modern working class movement.

Another way of putting it is that beyond a certain stage of development of the productive forces co-operation becomes antagonistic. Thus art becomes class ideological. To secure the complex co-operation of bourgeois society, an inconceivably complex ideology is required, contradictory to the last degree. But socialist co-operation is conscious, not antagonistic – hence socialist art is realist. It is more complex than bourgeois art. It is richer in content, but with the reduction of the working day, the freeing of human faculties, above all the liberation of the masses, at last these lay the basis for an all-embracing conscious human art. Art then ceases to be ideological – under a future communist society.  (Work this out in greater detail.)

The idea that all modern art-forms have developed from primitive expression, with the function of securing cooperation; that in all the arts there are the vestiges of all the other arts – sculpture as congealed drama, painting also –  is extremely important. 

Expression becomes art when the division of mental and physical labour begins. That is art differentiates from expression. Art remains after the division has gone, but as realist art.

[Book 1,1940s note, p. 81] 

–   –   –

18. All Representation Is not art 

There is this difference between art and science: that art represents only the overt human relations of a thing, whereas science represents also – it writes books, makes descriptions, draws diagrams, takes photographs etc. – but only as a part of an entirely different process, that of mastering Nature. Thus science is interested in the relations which would subsist supposing no human beings were present, in order that these same human beings may stand in a practical relation to the phenomena concerned. Through objectivism, through abstracting the human element, this same human element attains the knowledge of necessity, that is to say freedom. Science is thus everywhere linked to the state of the productive forces.

But reproduction is a different matter. Science bears a similar relation to production as artistic criticism to art. The first deals with representation as subordinate to production. The second is concerned with reproduction – one productive forces, the other productive relations.

[Book 2,1940s note, p.26]

–   –  –

19. Science and art 

Thinking is done by words. Idealism – once called realism as opposed to nominalism – is a function of words. A word can communicate more emotion than the thing it represents! Speech differentiates out the noteworthy, the communicable, the non-instinctive part of human experience. It is essential to science; yet it is all based on metaphor.  The aesthetic basis of scientific thought! Yet art can be more materialist than science

Is a scientific record art? No, it represents mainly the productive forces, the technical basis of development, whereas art is concerned with the productive relations, the ideological side. Science is always progressive – at least in the abstract.  Art may be very reactionary. 

The difference between art and science? Each is a representation. For example, of my notes in the hospital, one may say that it is “a record of his thoughts”. (1) I record his thoughts only as a means of representing his life at a crisis, while he is unaware of the significance of that crisis. (2) A record is in itself a representation. The more perfect the record, the more it brings out the essential and the more it is clear in all respects, the better the representation. Representation is more than perception. Perception requires an object, a thing, and an eye to see it. Representation requires a person to make the representation and then an observer, drawing on his memory, knowledge and experience.

A representation of what? Is a scientific record art? No, it represents mainly the productive forces. Art deals with productive relations. Science is always progressive, at least in the abstract, in principle. Art on the other hand may be very reactionary.  The dialectics of this is important.

[Book 2, 1980s note, p.112]

–   –   –

20. Artistic Epochs 

Martin Bernal in Black Athena (p.296) mentions Marx as referring to artistic development as “out of all proportion to the general development of society”, especially as regards its material.

1. Bernal disputes the supremacy of Greece, so it is not exceptional;

2. Artistic production does not run parallel with material production, as its purpose is the changing of consciousness;

3. But, I suggest, there is the demand for and urge to produce great art at times when communities are forging a new consciousness (cf. George Thomson on Aeschylus).

[Book 2, 1987 note, p.140]  

• –   – 

21. The weakness of bourgeois art 

Although the means of production were developed enormously following the bourgeois revolution, once the pre-requisites for building capitalism exist, art declines rapidly in comparison with the period when bourgeois society is a mere embryo within feudal relations. This is due to the fact that with the development of capitalism comes division of labour, which makes accurate representation of socially significant things very difficult. The writer no longer meets his audience, actors, directors, orchestra, painters etc. When the artists themselves are in different social classes, this is worse. The bourgeoisie preserve their hold over the whole process in the person of a director or manager. Anarchy of production is fatal to artistic representation. The result is anarchy of representation.

Now under socialism, with a planned economy, the abolition of the division of labour in the old sense, and the destruction of classes, these weaknesses will no longer cling to artistic production. And furthermore, the development of leisure will increase it quantitatively

[Book 2,1940s note, p.40]

–   –   –

22. The varying influence of the bourgeoisie on various arts 

“The role of the bourgeoisie in the process of cultural creation has been greatly exaggerated, especially in literature, but more so still in painting where the bourgeoisie has always been the employer and therefore the lawgiver”. (Gorky)

Where does music stand? The feudal baron in Germany is the typical consumer of music; also the Church.  For the bourgeoisie the opera is such to some extent. Was Beethoven’s only opera too revolutionary for the bourgeoisie of his time? One needs to study the content of Italian and German opera from this viewpoint. The effect of the bourgeoisie on music was more complex and indirect than on painting and literature. Thus arises the possibility of claiming music as not possessing social content. But the negative aspects of bourgeois influence cannot be denied.

[Book 1, 1940s note, p.21]

–   –   –

23. A general point re art and socialism 

Before an indigenous socialist art can arise there will be a period in which the people absorb the culture of the past and assimilate it.  Just as the proletariat summarises in its self-destruction all preceding society, so its art must very thoroughly assimilate the progressive elements in all previous art. In this sense some of us doing artistic work today are ahead of our time – insofar as that assimilation is possible before the economic conditions for its general fulfilment have natured. For example, we have Marx and Engels say, “The superstructure here interrupts itself”; in other words it is ahead of economics.

–   –   –

24. The early beginnings of art 

• Lucian Henry, Les Origines de la Religion: “It is only in the following epoch (ie. the post-Montanian) called the Aurignacian, that the custom of cremating the dead appears.   At the same time a veritable industry of stone-working comes into being and the first manifestations of art emerge” (p.97) [Ed. The original French text is used in the quotation].

• I spoke a few pages back [i.e. in Book 1 of the three notebooks] about the origin of art forms from undifferentiated art-labour. If would be better to say that independent development of various forms of art from labour is possible. Thus sculpture may arise as congealed drama, as decoration of useful objects (e.g. fresco), as direct representation, as the creation of magical objects etc.  What appears to us as related art-forms may have had extremely different origins in time and derivation. This is because labour precedes art. 

• “The Australians, before setting out to hunt kangaroos, dance religiously round an image or design representing this process.” (p.99)

Here is seen clearly enough the function of art as coordinating social effort. This might bear a relation to the basic contradiction of savage society:  production as individual, appropriation as communal. This already has thrown Australian society into a state of chronic crisis, for that continent has, I believe, nowhere achieved slave society. (Incidentally, perhaps the transition from savage to slave society is possible only under certain geographical conditions. In transmontane Europe clan society evolved directly into feudalism under the influence of the already established feudalism of Byzantium.)

In order to secure common productive effort against the individualising pressure of the means of production, ideology is required – rudimentary ideology no doubt. Thus this dance, this art, is reactionary. It aims at maintaining the productive relation (One needs to be careful here, however. Consult Morgan and Engels.) If the dance round the representation took place after the catching of the kangaroo, its relation to common appropriation would be clear. Question: Do they then dance round the kangaroo?

• Apparently however collective appropriation is achieved under clan society by division of labour among clans, each of which has its own sacred animal, being covered by a taboo. A clan may not appropriate the fruits of its own labour, but may appropriate the produce of other clans. This except at certain ritual feasts of a magical, religious character. 

[Book 1,1940s note, p.90]

–   –   –

25. Ideology In Ancient Society 

(v. Lucien Henry, Les Origines de la Religion, 1936)

• The first stage of mankind is food-gathering

• The second stage is hunting. Here the means of production are held individually, but appropriation takes place in common. The patriarchal family hunts its own clan animal, following differentiation according to age and sex. The clan which hunts an animal may not eat it. Others may. Finally an elaborate machinery appears:  appropriation in common is achieved by directly expropriating the individual producer while allowing him his share of what others have produced (cf. exogamous marriage). The ideological reflection of this is totemism.  One’s own clan animal is taboo. 

But further division of labour, the development of hunting, leading        to a multiplication of totems reflecting the growth of the production forces, leads to still greater individualisation of production. Only a part of the individual product is now disposed of socially. Private property begins. 

• The third stage is barbarism:  Agriculture and stock-raising appear. Private family industry contradicts the common ownership of the land. Lucien Henry suggests that totemism may have possibly assisted the domestication of animals. However, he seems to think in general that all ideology is necessarily reactionary at this stage, having in mind chiefly religion, with which he is specially concerned. 

We need to look for progressive ideology reflecting new forces of production, the domestication of animals, agriculture and the increasing individualisation of labour.

[Book 2,1940s note, p.38]

–   –   –

26. Religion and art 

The relation of these two needs working out.

First, we can see the common origin in the totemistic festival. The function is that of holding together and organising the weak totemic commune in the face of overpowering natural difficulties. A part of the labour-time of society is directed to unproductive ends; but those ends are beneficial in that a higher social cohesion and coordination of effort is achieved. At the same time the world is represented in a grotesquely distorted form based on the current conceptions of its nature. In this sense, science precedes art. We will call this stage fetishistic drama.

Human power over animals, not being the power of the human individuals, but arising from cooperation, is regarded as residing in the animals, and then –  a step nearer home – in representations of animals. That is to say that the act of representation becomes charged with the peculiar virtue which arises from social organisation; but this is explained along fetishistic lines in early primitive communist society.

Second, a differentiation takes place between performances intended to coordinate social effort along the lines of changing productive forces, and “services” that are intended to bring about social productivity by magical means. The first, art, stimulates the masses to action; the second teaches them to leave all to the gods, ancestors etc., i.e. the rulers who are gradually coming into being in late primitive communism.

Third, religion cannot replace art, but it swallows it up and uses it for its own purposes. The representation of earth is subordinated to the representation of heaven. Art comes to represents kings, priests etc. within the framework of religion, Gods, hocus-pocus etc., in feudalism 

Fourth, with a popular revolution, art frees itself and exists alongside religion because the new ruling class, while revolutionary in relation to the old rulers, is reactionary to the masses – in slavery, capitalism (cf. Athens, Italy).

So art rises and falls in inverse relation to religion. The rising class uses art as an attempt to represent the world in its way. The old ruling class use religion in order to prevent any change in the mode of representation. This has happened many times. Hence the conception that art is “profane”, leading to the banning of performances etc. However, an exception is puritanism. At certain epochs, therefore, art has been progressive. It is amphoteric [a chemical term referring to a molecule that can act as both an acid and a base]. Religion on the other hand is always reactionary. Hence Plato keeps priests but abolishes artists. On the other hand, religion has always been willing to buy over art provided it will confine itself to representing objects which do not glaringly contradict the church’s view of things. The first priests seized the communal art just as they seized the common land and herds, to use for their own purposes. The rulers expropriated the people economically; the priests expropriated them ideologically.

Again, note that the artist operating for the priest was in the position of a workman, belonging to an inferior class – hence with an antagonistic outlook.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.70]

–   –   –

27. Drama: Stanislavsky on the art of acting

Drama

Starting from a quite non-Marxist standpoint, Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre developed a system of acting which in many respects accords with Marxist views.

Below are quotations from his book, “An Actor Prepares”, which illustrate points in my theory of art. The heading and arrangement are mine. It should be emphasised that he appears to reach his conclusions from the purely aesthetic side. He is concerned with making acting effective, at playing as drama should be played. His keynote becomes the creation of the perfect illusion, which retains its credibility by the fictive “if”. Art must represent life. This admitted, he cannot help seeing a host of contradictions which are the product of class society, but he appears to believe that correct performance can be taught; that is to say, that it is mere error and the continual propagation of error, and not contradictions inherent in the present organisation of artistic activity, which hamper universal good playing.

The Function of Art:  [The passages quoted by Greaves below are probably from “My Life in Art” by Konstantin S. Stanislavsky,1863-1938, Theatre producer and theorist of acting.]

p.26 et seq: The aim of an actor ‘s life-work is described as the “supreme objective”, the “effect he intends to have on the public”, his social purpose.

Page 307. “Imagine some ideal artist who has decided to devote himself to a single, large purpose in life; to elevate and entertain the public by a high form of art; to expose the hidden, spiritual beauties in the writings of poetic geniuses …  His whole life will be consecrated to his high cultural mission.”

(Note that he does not explain what benefit this will be to the public – this is the theory of art as entertainment; showing the limitations of his outlook as a whole, due to his specialisation as a theatre director.)

Ibid: “Another type of artist may use his personal success to convey his own ideas and feelings to the masses. Great people may have a variety of high purposes” (Note the eclecticism which here allows “great people” a variety of high purposes).

The Performance

On more specialised issues Stanislavsky is far clearer. Take for example the single performance. Naturally as a theatre man he sees the performance as the essence of the art. Also he sees each performance as a separate work of art, based on the same circumstances of production. Hence he opposes the technical skill which reduces playing to mechanical repetition.

“The ‘art of representation’ is a mechanical form of acting in which living the part is a mere preparatory to perfecting a stereotyped form which, with the aid of highly trained muscles, is thereafter produced mechanically every time. …  In our art you must live the part every moment you are playing it and every time. Each time it is recreated, it must be lived afresh and incarnated afresh – not as in the mere externalisation of emotions.” (P.18) He shows the connection of this type of acting with various false theories.

In addition, however, he sees the performance as a cooperative effort in which the design is made by the author, the production arranged by the director, who employs painters etc. for that purpose, and the actors as a whole. The result is the production of something which influences the audience indirectly. The actor therefore is not an isolated agent.

The aim which the performance subserves is the “super-objective” of the action.

P. 301: “Consequently what we need is a ‘super-objective’ which is in harmony with the intentions of the playwright and at the same time arouses a response in the soul of the actors. That means that we must search for it not only in the play but also in the actors themselves.”  And he Illustrates the “through the line of action” of a play thus: 

–    –    –    –    (super-objective)

–  /    \    /   \  –   /  –    (super-objective)

–    –    –    –  /  – / – (super-objective)

The second and third diagrams illustrate cases where the component parts, the immediate objectives, do not contribute towards the attainment of the final objective. Hence if all deviate in one direction, there arises a “tendency”. He condemns tendencies. “An old classic can seldom be given a modern meaning without violence.” That is to say, the author’s design is to be adhered to. Even so, in the event of a great analogy arising between the terms of the classic and the conditions of the modern world, the tendency becomes absorbed in the super-objective, and should never be in opposition to it (This would mean putting a modern meaning on only part of the play, and destroying the performance).

Giving examples of super-objectives, he says (p.271) “Dostoevsky was impelled to write The Brothers Karamazov by his life-long search for God. Tolstoy spent all his life struggling for self-perfection. Anton Chekhov wrestled with the triviality of bourgeois life.” (Note the form in which these objectives are cast.) 

On the production he says (p.179-181, not verbatim) how a good director makes suitable efforts to help the artist find the right mood and circumstances. But when the director, as often, makes a splendid set-up, not for the inner needs of the play, “because his mistake leads the actors in the wrong direction and sets up barriers between themselves and their parts … Instead of attracting the attention of the actors towards the stage, it will repel them and throw them into the power of the audience behind the footlights.” For example, imagine a beautiful set designed by some artist highly gifted …“A complete illusion from the auditorium, but useless on the stage” because it is made from the painter’s point of view. It has no dimensions; the stage requires depth.

Finally, Stanislavsky speaks of the need for the actors to be in relation to one another in the roles they are playing – that is to say, to cooperate in the production of the performance, and not to play as individuals to the audience.

The contradiction between performance and audience

This is a cardinal point in my theory [See Book 1, pp. 162 et seq: The Interpenetration of content and form, subject matter and material].

Once having admitted the cooperative nature of the performance, Stanislavsky cannot escape the logical conclusion that the audience is the enemy of the performance. This is the form of the basic contradiction of art. Hence the above was quoted: “Throw him into the power of the audience behind the footlights.” If the performance is faulty the actor’s attention will stray to the audience. He will begin to lose his role. The audience is the embodiment of the actor when he is not acting – as a man. 

Hence the objectives which are permissible are: (p. 118) 

1. They must all be on one side of the footlights; they must be directed towards the other actors and not towards the spectators.;
2. They should be personal and yet analogous to those of the person you are portraying;
3. They must be creative and artistic because their function should be to fulfil the main purpose of our art – to create the life of a human soul and render it in artistic form.;
4. They should be real, live and human, not dead, conventional or theatrical;
5. They should be truthful so that you yourself, the actors playing with you, and the audience, can believe in them;
6. They should have the quality of attracting you and moving you;
7. They must be clear-cut and typical of the role you are playing. No vagueness … They should be distinctly woven into the fabric of your part;
8. They should have value and content, to correspond to the inner body of your part. There must not be shallow, or skim along the surface;
9. They must be active to push your role ahead.

P.160: “Not every truth can be transferred on to the stage. What we see there is truth transformed into a poetical equivalent by creative imagination.” (This in protest against the excessive naturalism of a death scene.)

 P.129: “Truth on the stage is whatever we can believe in with sincerity, whether in ourselves or our colleagues.”

P.143: Kastyn is criticised for not continuing to play his part while off the stage. “If you are unaccustomed to playing for yourself while off the stage, at least confine your thoughts to what the person you are portraying would be doing if he were placed in analogous circumstances. This will help to keep you in the part.”

 P.120: “Forget about the public. Think about yourself. If you are interested the public will follow you.”

P.198: In soliloquies special devices are necessary to avoid speaking to the audience. This is similar in intention to the numerous exercises designed to keep the attention on the stage and not allow it to stray to the audience.

P.196. “Yet an actor is only human. When he comes on the stage it is only natural that he should bring with him his everyday thoughts, personal feelings, reflections and realities. If he does this, the line of his own personal humdrum life is not interrupted. He will not give himself up wholly to his part unless it carries him away. When it does he becomes completely identified with it and is transformed. But the moment he becomes distracted and falls under the sway of his own personal life, he will be transported across the footlights into the audience or beyond the walls of the theatre.”

P.28: “There, that shows where the very worst kind of acting starts; when you were preparing for the exhibition performance, you approached your role from the point of view of impressing the spectators.” (To Kastyn)  

“The bad part was that you flirted with the audience and did not play Katherine. You showed us your little hands, your little feet, your whole person, because it could be seen better on the stage.” 

(Note: Stanislavsky completely accepts the separation of actor from audience. He proposes to push it to its limits. He does not suggest that the inclusion of the audience in the representation could at any time strengthen the “illusion” or add realism to the representation. Actually these conceptions are the logic of bourgeois art. The fact that the performance is for the audience is expressed in the most antagonistic form.)

Art as representation

Stanislavsky regards art as representation, and believes that this condition is only fulfilled when the actor and the audience are completely severed. Thus representation is even more vital. He does not believe in participation, as it breaks representation. Now when the audience has other lives than its own represented to it, it naturally cannot participate. This is normal in class society, where workers are called upon to represent the lives of their rulers.

P.14: “You may play well or you may play badly. The important thing is to play truly,” wrote Schepkin to his pupil Shimski. “To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent; to think, strive, feel, and act in accordance with your role … we call that living the part.”

At another place he complains of the lack of stage directions given by dramatists. This makes clear that the need for “living the part” arises when “living the part” is not easy. It is not easy because the division of labour has separated actor and dramatist, and thus made it necessary for the actor to bridge the gap mentally.

 P.21: “You should first assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position and external appearance. Moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations. All this work on your material will help you to permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this, you will have no art.”

“The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of the inner life of a human spirit and its expression in artistic form.”

P. 205: “Most actors before each performance put on costumes and make-up so that their external appearance will approximate that of the character they are to play. But they forget the most important part, which is inner preparation.” 

To achieve all this, concentration of attention is the key. “Evidently, the magnet of the audience is more powerful than the tragedy happening right here on the stage. “

“In order to get away from the auditorium you must be interested in something on the stage.” 

“An actor must have a point of attention and this point of attention must not be in the auditorium.”

“Proper relaxation of muscles can only be achieved on the basis of complete mental justification of the action that is taking place.”

Stanislavsky disagrees with Coquelin, who solves the problems of representation, and the audience, in a rather different way, Coquelin says, i.e. Coquelin the elder, [ie. Benoit-Constant Coquelin, 1841-1909; Jean-Paul Coquelin, 1924-2001, both leading French actors]: “The actor creates his model in his imagination and then, just as does the painter, he takes away features of it and transfers it, not on to the canvas, but on to himself.” (Art as creation). He sees Tartuffe’s costume and puts it on. He notices his gait and imitates it . . . “

Coquelin: “The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold towards the object of his acting, but his art must be perfection.”

Coquelin: “Art is not real life, nor is it even its reflection. Art is in itself a creation. It creates its own life, beautiful in its abstraction, beyond the limits of time and space.”

Stanislavsky: “Artists of the Coquelin school say the theatre is a conversation, and the stage is too poor in resources to create the illusion of real life. Therefore the theatre should not avoid conventions.” Form before content. Nevertheless, says Stanislavsky, “this representing of the part” is art as “it follows our process in part.”

In Chapter 4, when a student has the exercise of imagining himself an oak tree, he gave the oak tree a human interest by pretending it was used as a look-out near a feudal castle.

The position of Stanislavsky

Without having the material to hand, which is presumably to be found in “My Life in Art”, his technical ideas seem to me to correspond to the most advanced school of critical realism. Thus in fact he accepts without protest the antagonism between the audience and the performer and pushes this division to its logical conclusion. The form of bourgeois plays is of course such as to assume this division. To be played properly this division must be as complete as possible. But the matter must be properly dealt with when I have cleared up the question of the origin of this antagonism.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.41]

–   –   –

28. Language  

Speech as an activity of the human body … Language as the form of speech…Its origin is in human co-operation … Representation of the action of part of the body in the action of specialised organs. These do no work, and thus represent work … The greater mutability of primitive languages … There is no speech without a form … Recorded speech is a repository of the superstructure, but speech itself is not of the superstructure …  Need for a general theory of communication via conditioned reflexes. Communication as anterior to speech … The different categories of communication. Writing as not part of the superstructure, but as a special use of the existing organisation of society

[Book 2, 1960s note, recopied from 1955 note]

–   –   –

29. Romanticism and utopian socialism 

First, a quotation from Alick West [British literary critic, 1895-1972; See V.N. Paananen, British Marxist Criticism, Routledge, New York, 2000]:

“Not only do they make society, of which literature is the expression, into an abstraction; a further conflict is set up by their individualism. For individualism is inherent in the 18th century thought to which the romantics were driven back by their inability to identify themselves with the workers. And this tradition of individualism was intensified by the fact that, believing in revolutionary change but unable to believe in the workers, the romantics had no steady course of social action, and thus seemed to themselves to be outcasts in society. Hence romanticism continually stresses the social character of literature, but contradicts itself by making the individual exiled from society its typical hero.”

• Crisis and Criticism, p. 24

This paragraph is well thought out. West has in mind principally Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth, all Englishmen. To get a better understanding it is necessary to say that these were Englishmen. They were therefore living in a developed bourgeois society where the industrial bourgeoisie is dominant. The terrific destruction of human individuality strikes them, as it struck Engels at first, as an imposition on society as a whole. But Engels could see the proletariat as the liberator of all classes – later laying less stress on this (See his preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845).  The bourgeois “monad” – this is what they fought against: the division of labour, the dissolution of qualities in exchange value. Hence their penchant for utopias, their pantisocracies, their visits to France. What was their attitude to Ireland?; that is a test! 

But in France the bourgeoisie was coming to power. It was trying to swing all classes behind it by means of representing itself as the nation. It was the epitome of the nation, concentrating in itself all other class interests bar the feudal interest. Hence there was another reason why the English romantics could only see the French Revolution as a bourgeois one which would emancipate other classes at the same time. Thus they found England contradicting France. The proof of the need for an English bourgeois revolution also lay in the English anti-Jacobin wars and the religious compromise between Whig and Tory under the constitutional monarchy. Thus England did not appear to have the most advanced form of government. The political struggle was fought out in France in its classic form. Thus I think I am right in saying that we have:  French materialism before 1789 and English romanticism along with it; then French romanticism along with 1848.

So there is some basis for saying that romanticism arises only when the appearance of the proletariat proves that the bourgeois period has its limits. The same applies to Utopian Socialism. That comes from the failure of the bourgeoisie to carry out the role of liberator of all sections of society. Thus its first form is to persuade it to carry out its demagogic promises, to upbraid it for its callous treatment of the proletariat who fought for it.  Hence its reactionary nature as its only sanction is to undo the bourgeois revolution – the alliance with Tories, peasant “communism”, Narodniki etc. The utopian critics of capitalism are essentially petty-bourgeois. Hence the “idealism” and “individualism” that Alick West sees. The “individual exiled from society” is the petty-bourgeois in danger of expropriation by the big bourgeoisie, as well as the creator of luxury products robbed of his buyers by the intellectual and physical impoverishment of the masses, who in turn are robbed of the capacity for appreciation by the division of labour.

But the central fact is still an inability to go in with the working class, which is in practice still not strong enough to make an effective challenge. When it is, we get William Morris and Zola – and romanticism gives place to critical realism. 

Now what of Germany? We need only read Marx for the political theorists. The advent of the workers scared the bourgeoisie from making any real attempt, and again I suspect romanticism is based on the rebellions of 1848. In music we have Wagner following Schubert and Schumann. I do not regard Beethoven as romantic at all. Of this more later.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.6]

–  –  –

30. Poetic drama: poetry and prose 

Should drama be written in poetry or prose?  Today the opinion is widely held that poetic drama is out of date, that the poetic form merely assists the memory of the actors, that it is a kind of mechanical aid. Of course quite a desultory look at Shakespeare shows that poetry is used for circumstances of higher significance than prose. The speeches of higher significance are so in the main because they help forward the main development of the drama, but above all they are the speeches of members of the ruling class. As members of the ruling class they represent the dominant ideology and can therefore be regarded as the expression of society as a whole. The ideological form with which Shakespeare presents social problems is obviously very complex, but that the lower orders do not speak poetry is clear enough. But without the unpoetic comments of the lower orders the significance of the major struggles would be entirely lost. Those critics who regard vulgar scenes as interpolations for the benefit of the multitude are fools. 

Now this is the point. If poetry is to express the socially significant – not of course the significant from a revolutionary point of view – that is to say, what appears socially significant to the ideological writer, that is to say the ideology of the ruling class or classes, then when the proletariat is in power drama ought to be poetic. This is the opposite conclusion to that usually given. 

I believe the difference between poetry and prose to rest precisely in this: that the rhythm which is fundamental to poetry is the relic of a choral element. The introduction of rhythm, the expression of ideas in such a way as to call forth choral associations, however remote from the surface, is sufficient to place the seal of social importance on what is said. This also explains why, historically, poetry precedes prose. It is only in bourgeois society that social expression is completely subjected to individual expression. 

Now all previous writers, for example the romantics, have felt the need when approaching the problem of poetry in this way, to extend the meaning of “poetry” and the “poet” to include the philosopher and even the scientist. We have here merely the idealised figure of those who extend the means of production, whether of physical or mental production – in short the bourgeois intelligentsia. But the point is that the bourgeoisie, having made production social, has also made prose social – though the means of writing it is in so few hands. Poetry, expressing the communal cooperation in labour, is now the province of the individual. Prose, at first expressing the individual commodity producer, sharply divided into bourgeoisie and proletariat, has become by the terrific progress of technique the vehicle of expression of the most vital facts of modern life, science, technology, politics, etc. – with which the masses can in no way enter into common human relations. Hence the contradiction between poetry and prose. The social form expresses the individual content; the individual form comes to express the social content.

After the social revolution there will be both prose and poetry. But when production and appropriation are both social, when the contradiction between mental and physical labour has gone, so prose will inevitably grow more poetic in quality, and poetry will grow correspondingly freer and wider in scope. The ultimate form of literary expression is therefore poetry, not prose. 

Note: To us poetry seems difficult to write, so that only a few extremely gifted people can produce it. But in a form of society in which the reduction of the working day has made infinitely higher educational standards possible, then poetry would be a quite natural form of expression, even for speech and conversation. 

[Book 1, 1940s note, p.112]

–   –  –

31. Bourgeois and proletarian poetry compared

The writings of poets like Byron, Shelley and Keats were influenced largely by the progress of the bourgeois revolution on the continent of Europe, and not so much by contemporary English politics; although this is partly so. The romantic style represents precisely the form of the bourgeois revolution, which begins with éclat and goes from rapture to rupture under the influence of ideas that in no way correspond to the actual economic and political changes involved. The creation of this ideology is in part the work of theorists, and in part that of novelists, musicians etc. And since the political events cannot be painted in their true colours but under pseudonyms and allegories of all kinds, it appears as if these writers were not concerned with politics at all. Besides, the inevitable idealist accompaniment of bourgeois materialism glosses over the vulgar commercialism and makes it appear as having arisen from the “spirit” of the age, and not the latter from the need to cloak the former and dress it up for the better deception of the people. However, the major political ideas are in fact dealt with in the most comprehensive way, but under their ideological form: for example “Manfred”, “Prometheus Unbound”, or the writings of the German Romantics.

Now present-day English proletarian literature has partly escaped from the bourgeois ideological form, but has not yet established itself, as far as poetry is concerned, because it has not yet learned to tackle the major political issues. It has not been able to use poetry in the building up of a communist world outlook. There is no Faust – not even in his new form, Dimitrov [Bulgarian communist leader who challenged Nazi leader Hermann Goring at the Reichstag fire trial]. Until proletarian poetry reconciles itself with the contents of Marxist theory, it will never produce a major work, because major activity involves the theory of communism. But contrary to the bourgeois position, where the theory is put before the fact and the ideology gives the impression of non-political writing, in this case the very scientific clarity of the Marxist conception of history and the university makes it appear that poetry can have nothing to do with it, that it does not require poetic expression. But those poets who think in this way are applying the conceptions of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and in this case they do not apply. Poetry today must tackle major problems theoretically.

[Book 1,1940s note, p. 28]

–  –  –

32. Schiller and Goethe: poetry and prose 

Originally Iphigenia was in prose. The poetic version made later disappointed Goethe’s friends, whose “back to nature” leanings, fashionable at the time, led them to disapprove of verse. G.H. Lewes says [George Henry Lewes, 1817-1878, English philosopher and critic, married to the novelist George Eliot] : “Verse is not more unnatural than song¹ ; song is to speech what poetry is to prose² ; It expresses a different mental condition³ ; Impassioned prose approaches poetry in the rhythmic impulse of its movements⁴; as impassioned speech in its various cadences also approaches the intonations of music⁵;  under great emotional excitement the Arabs give their language a recognisable metre and almost talk poetry⁶. But prose never is poetry, or is so only for a moment; nor is speech song⁷.”

These ideas are very interesting. “Verse is not more unnatural than song.”¹ It would be necessary to show the historical stages by which song, at first natural, became “unnatural”, i.e. artificial. This would be a very important study. Man’s direct relation to his environment, that is to say his means of production and his production relations, are natural. The reproduction of his activity in another form, because it is in no way obligatory as far as the productive forces are concerned, is “artificial” in this sense. Song first accompanies, then appears separate from, the labour process. This takes place when the organisation of human production becomes the affair of a separate class. The same fate awaited poetry.

So we get: speech/sound … as allied to the productive process; and prose, poetry and music … as “reproduced” activity

So Point No.2 above is not correct.  Point No.3 gives the explanation of the mistake, in the subjectivist reason given. Art does not differ from work in its relation to production, but in the kind of thing it expresses. Thus the emotional content is supposed to give rise to the poetic form – a well-known romantic thesis, I believe. This is contrary to my view that the poetic form is the modern representative of the rhythm of action in common, and that the social content of its subject matter, its social appeal, is what matters. You cannot talk poetry to a cat, however excited you may be. 

Point 7: That prose never is poetry, shows that Lewes appreciates that there is still a barrier of which he has not indicated the nature. It is simply the opposition of production to representation. Once all art has become representation – once art exists as a separate category – it is forgotten that work gives rise to the undeveloped forms of art almost uninterruptedly, capitalist labour excepted.

If the romantics had had their way they would have objected to all art – had they been clear enough. For once representation is allowed, a thing by its nature artificial, then representation in one material or another involves that that material is put to an unwonted use, an “unproductive” use, and the criterion becomes not whether the product is natural or artificial, but whether the representation has so modified the material as to correspond to the real. This is the dialectical relationship between form and content. 

Lewes quote Schiller: “I have never been so palpably convinced as in my present occupation how closely in poetry substance and form are connected. Since I have begun to transform my prosaic language into a poetic rhythmical one, I find myself under a totally different jurisdiction. Even many notions which in the prosaic execution seemed to me to be perfectly in place, I can no longer use; they were merely good for the common domestic understanding whose organ prose seems to be*;but verse absolutely demands reference to the imagination, and thus I was obliged to become poetical in many of my notions.”

The passage, italicised in Lewes with the asterisk, is a little difficult to follow. Is Kantian philosophy for example written in prose for the common domestic understanding? If I remember aright, with nothing by me to refer to, the Swiss psychologist Jung makes a comparison of Goethe and Schiller in which he speaks of Schiller’s thoughts being idealist (“introvert”) and because of this idealist trend in his thought, he is forced to deal with practical matters without too much thought, “intuitively” as Jung will have it. Perhaps he means prose in literature. But again a novel in verse would be difficult –  I must find out why – but not because it would demand only domestic understanding. I am inclined to think that the novel represents so fully that it does not need verse. But this must be worked out. Then verse demands reference to imagination. Oddly enough, verse requires a peculiar compound of the essential and the concrete. To make the essential concrete seems the task of verse. This is probably what Schiller means.

Finally, Lewes gives an example of how the necessities of verse improved, by making more concrete, a passage from “Iphigenia”, and suggests that much could be deduced from the comparison of the prosaic and poetic versions.  

[Book 2, December 1940 note, p.21]

–   –   –

33. Faust: German, English and French versions

Just as there are three great bourgeois revolutions, in Germany, England and France, so there are three great ideological representations of the negative, destructive, revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie, decrying all that has hitherto been regarded as right, and in its introduction of wicked relationships – commodity production – proving capable of giving such impetus to the expression of the productive forces as to appear gifted with, or sold to, supernatural powers. 

The first Faust legend is in Germany. It has a popular origin, in part at least, and the original Faust is represented as a “strolling scholar”, that is to say a declassed element arising out of the disintegration of feudal society – one of the feudal intelligentsia who went over to the bourgeoisie – and since he is attacked by Lutherans, presumably one like the Levellers of England, or at least one who would carry the bourgeois revolution to completion. Thus in the failure and compromise of the German Reformation, the bourgeois revolution appears to the German bourgeoisie as its own pact with the devil. But the development of the bourgeoisie in Germany is too low for a consciousness even of this elementary ideological fact – that is to say, the state of a class instead of a few odds and ends coming out of the wreck of feudalism. So there is no German Faust drama – merely a few mystery plays and Punch and Judy shows. The starving out of the first bourgeois revolution was a terrible disaster for Germany, although from a world-historical point of view it was a necessity connected with the expansion of world production to the Americas.

Hence the second Faust is an English Faust – Marlowe’s. It is written in 1589 and is like the original an exhortation “only to wonder at unlawful things”. The English bourgeoisie is growing stronger. It is getting increasingly good terms from the feudal aristocracy. Faust is now not so disreputable. And Marlowe’s Faust never has the public effect of Shakespeare’s drama, which corresponds better to the balance of class forces. Faust is the legend of a defeated bourgeoisie, in which the bourgeoisie looks at itself through feudal spectacles and longs for its own sweet villainy.  A successful bourgeoisie needs Milton, not Marlowe. So magic has grown more respectable.

The third Faust is the French Faust, of Goethe – a German Faust again, but under the influence of the great upheavals, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, Napoleon and so forth. France could not sport an indigenous Faust. But Goethe’s Faust is a great philosopher, a humanist, and the practise of magic has now become perfectly respectable. Faust is cleared in a purely philosophic sense. His crimes are philosophical crimes. He has become sublimated, elevated from a strolling mischief-maker into a man toying with “the spirit that denies” – i.e. revolution. But already the hollowness of bourgeois revolution is making itself apparent. At the end of the first part Goethe leaves Faust alive – and finally when he kills him he sends him to Heaven. The second part is thoroughly idealistic. So we get Faust going through four stages, beginning as a mystery play and ending as a fantasia: Punch and Judy show, History, Tragedy, Fantasia.

[Book1, 1940 note, p. 117]

–   –   –

34. Anthony and Cleopatra – an interpretation

  This is probably Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The key to its ideological significance lies in the character of Caesar.  Caesar is: 

• Young, 
• Successful ,
• Lucky,
• Keeps faith, according to his lights. He offers Anthony parts of his conquests. 
• He is a realist. He refuses Anthony’s ridiculous quixotic offer of single combat.
• Mercenary. He compliments Cleopatra on her artfulness in concealing part of her property.
• He is hypocritical. He destroys Lepidus because he “has become too cruel”.

Here we have the character of the rising bourgeoisie (See Henry VIII!). 

Now look at Anthony:

• He is old. His key features – he is undoubtedly a greater man; 
• His successes are all past – he is unlucky; 
• He breaks faith chivalrously;
• He is full of all kinds of romantic notions. He displays alternate courage and cowardice. He wastes time; he boozes and fucks. 
• He is generous, as to Enobarbus;
• He is absolutely without hypocrisy, is plain in his dealings. He is a man whose ideas are out of joint with the problems he is called on to solve. He loses his judgement.

What is this but the character of the effete feudal aristocracy?

The Triumvirate:  

Anthony – the Aristocracy;  

Caesar – the State;  

Lepidus – the Church.

I say State as a compromise position between bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and that the drama uses its influence first against one, then against the other party. But for the State you can read the bourgeoisie. 

Shakespeare ‘s Roman plays are full of the deepest social significance.

[Book 1940 note, p.121]

–   –   

35. Lenin on Tolstoy

“To identify the name of this great writer with the revolution which he obviously did not understand, and from which he obviously stood apart, may seem at first glance strange, ‘artificial’. But active in the revolution are many elements that do not understand it. Likewise writing about it… And a really great writer could not help reflecting at least some of the essential aspects of the revolution.”

Note (1) the materialist approach – tracing Tolstoyism to social phenomena.

Analysis of the contradictions of Tolstoy: the glaring nature of the contradictions. “On the one hand, we have the gifted writer who is not only capable of drawing an incomparable picture of Russian life but is also able to produce first-class world literature.  On the other hand, we have the landowner wearing the martyr’s crown in the name of Christ.”

On the one hand severe protest against social lies and hypocrisies.  On the other the “exhausted hysterical money-mongering Russian intellectual.” On the one hand, ruthless exposures. On the other fanatical “non-resistance to evil”, the advocacy of a corrupted religion.

 Note (2) the dialectical method

         Tolstoyan ideology

                A mirror

Realism                 Idealist landowner

Criticism                Self-abasing individualism

Exposure               Religious humbug

                   Reality

          Agrarian revolution

But these contradictions reflect the actual development of the Russian Revolution.

“Tolstoy is great as the expression of those ideas and moods which arose among the millions of the Russian peasantry with the advance of the bourgeois revolution in Russia.”

“Tolstoy is original because his views, harmful as a whole, express in their totality precisely the distinguishing characteristics of our revolution, viz.:  a peasant-bourgeois revolution.

Thus we see reflected:

                   The Peasant-Bourgeois Revolution 

Anti-Church                                                         Patriarchal religiosity

Land reform                                                        Petitions to the Tsar etc.                                                                    

Community of free and equal small peasants          Irresolution         

Power with the Government                                   Leading to defeat

Thus Tolstoy reflects the causes of its defeat.

[Book 1, 1940s note, p.93]

–   –  –

36. On Henry Moore

It would be mistaken to reflect pejoratively on the technical skill of Henry Moore or, for example, Matisse and others. Possibly his technical skill, like his instruments, is the best in history. The question is, what does he show? Men and women? Yes. Any symbol which can be taken as representing a man or woman artistically is one, even two scratches. But what are they? They are bowed down by their own weight, whereas Greek sculptures are buoyed up with their energy. They are men and women in general, de-personalised by their own productive forces. In other words, exactly what capitalism has produced today.

[Book 2, 1960s note, p.99]  

–  –  –  

37. Listening as labour 

The young people today put the radio on and then do nothing else. I have seen Paul Gilhooley [Connolly Association organiser in the early 1980s] play Beethoven – which he does not to the smallest degree understand – as a background, and play one movement without the others. Now listening is work. The work of the composer becomes reality in performance. The changes that have been wrought in the writer thanks to composition only communicate themselves to the listener as the search for the total understanding that will reveal the structure. For this a thing must be heard again and again if there is enough in it. Now is there something in the fact that the listening “work” is not really regarded as work?  Go further into this.

[Book 2, 1981 note, p.111]  

–   –   –

38. A “biological” theory of music  

The theory that music is derived from the “primitive cry” as opposed to speech, is unsound. A cry is a signal, just as speech is a signal of a second order. A cry is therefore incapable of giving rise to representation by direct development. The human animal has preserved the cry along with speech, and the question arises how far is music derived from the vocal organs and how far from the material objects of labour. I would hazard a guess that the rhythm of labour was needed in order to discipline and control the vocal organs which, speech apart, had previously uttered only cries. 

[Book 2, 1961 note, p.102] 

–   –   –

39. Work songs 

Rutland Boughton in, I think, The Reality of Music states how musical meaning is derived from the work which it accompanies. This must be the basis. When I read this book in 1934 I did not grasp this and I doubt if anybody else did, or spotted its significance. [Rutland Boughton (1878-1960) was an English composer, mainly of operas and choral works, the best known being his opera The Immortal Hour. This has the distinction of  an unbroken record for the longest run of any English Romantic opera, with 216 consecutive performances. Boughton composed a series of operas based on the Arthurian cycle. He wrote extensively on music and musical theory in his books, Bach The Master, 1930, The Nature of Music, 1930, and  The Reality of Music, 1934.  His work became unfashionable after he joined the CPGB in the mid-1920s. The same thing happened with his colleague Alan Bush.  Boughton left the CPGB over the Russian intervention in Hungary in 1956. He was the first to initiate musical events at Glastonbury.] 

Stage 1: Music accompanies action.

Stage 2: Music accompanies the representation of action.  Thus dance is the movement of work without the object of work.

Stage 3: Music is incorporated in ritual  

 I must read Boughton again.

[Book 2, Jan.1984 note, p.125] 

 –   –   –  

40. Classicizing

Charles Rosen uses this term to classify the practice of composing after classical models – e.g. Beethoven’s early concerti (up to No.3) which are based on Mozart; likewise Schubert in G minor, plus much early work by Dussel, Hummel and Cherubini [Charles Rosen, 1927-2012, American pianist and writer, wrote an influential book on “The Classical Style” in 1971, dealing with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.]

What of Ferdinand Ries and George Onslow? [ Ries,1784-1838, was a German composer and friend of Beethoven. Onslow,1784-1853, was a French composer].  This would seem the same but that the basis is Beethoven, and since the unifying principle has not been understood – how could it be? – the effect is romantic, architecturally, but the idiom is of the Beethoven second period. However, having no scores I cannot be sure of this. The quartet in F minor by G. Onslow certainly places the tonic in control.

[Book 2, 1980s note, p.137]

 –  – –

41. Music and dance

The key to music: The fact that music is in reality the negation of the dance requires investigating further. Here are one or two considerations which illustrate it:

1. The actual origin in the division of labour. The players are a specialised part of the performance who “accompany” the dancers by making a rhythmic noise. This is the germ and “cell” of music. 

• The correct response to music is dancing. How at concerts good music makes people want to nod, or conduct, or beat time.

• The gradual elaboration of pitch and its encroachment on rhythm as a feature of musical history.

The content of music is probably closer connected to its rhythm than to its pitch. This criterion may help to unravel the question of the content of music. Its content has suffered two transformations, as action, as rhythm and as sound

Possibly discord and concord express in music contradiction and stability, motion and rest, parallel with positions of the human body in dancing – those which are an unstable equilibrium and those which are stable. Hence the need to end with harmony rather than discord.

The expression of contradiction in music is discord; or rather, it is an important expression. Resolution – the passage from discord to harmony – is the motion of the human body from the unstable to the stable position.

The mediaeval church was opposed to discord – hence plain song.

The final close must be emphasised by a more decisive concord, leading to a more stable equilibrium. This is achieved by (1) a purer concord (octavos), (2) repetition, (3) the use of a greater than usual discord immediately beforehand. Thus a flattened mediant emphasises the concordance of the following major third – the Picardy third also. Now the dancers completely immobilise themselves. Then repeat the closing movement and make a wider than usual gesture before finishing.

 [Book 2, 1940s note, p.73 and p.75]

–   –   –

 42. Games

These differ very little from the other forms I have discussed. But at the beginning of a game nobody knows who will win. The game is a contest. It represents directly the struggle, the competition, between men. It thus arises with competition, possibly with commodity production – see into this. In art, however, the performance is ideally the same each time.  Gradually art grows more strengthened. Games always retain their content. Thus:

                      Primitive ritual

            Games                   Religion – modes of artistic differentiation

Modern dancing: A modern dance in which men and women dance in pairs to jazz tunes, is just as much an art form, in many respects the most complete today, as the performance of Aeschylus’s tragedies in ancient Greece

–   –   –

43. On someone learning the piano by ear 

I was greatly struck by an ambulance driver who had taught himself to play the piano by ear. He told me that he only used the black notes and two of the white ones. He thought he stayed in the key of E. But he was unable to modulate except into related keys, even then often missing out entirely the leading note on the newly flattened sub-dominant. It turned out he was playing in the key of F#. I asked him why he had not learned C first. He said that recently since it had been pointed out to him he had tried and had been progressing, but found it difficult. He was also trying “the key next to C”. He did not even know he was playing in any key. He thought he was “using the black notes”. He could not say how he came to start that way, but said his playing seemed to lack variety owing to the pitch never varying.

Now this shows the unity of opposites, if anything ever did. The most exceptional case is the most striking!

Now in teaching a child you show him how to fix the position of C by reference to the two black notes. Black notes are all those which do not occur in the scale of C. But it is one of the triumphs of equal tempering that F#, related to C by no natural relation whatever – being a pure approximation to the sixth dominant (3/2)⁶C reduced by three octaves (3⁶/2⁹) C is true to A#, C#and the other “black notes”, just as much as C is to E and G and the white ones. Now F# is the extreme case (C# is all nonsense, in reality it is Db) – not C# as is taught to children. Now nothing distinguishes the white note but its relation to the black note. So our friend could not find the normal natural relation, but instead found its antagonistic form, in the equally tempered F#relation.

But this inverted approach hid the entire mechanism from him. The real base of the diatonic scale is its unequal relationships between consecutive notes. And the tonic is fixed by the varying relative position in regard to the smaller interval – in the major mode the tonic falls above one semitone and a fourth below its counterpart in the other semitone. 

In the progressive modulation into related keys the maintenance of the relative positions of the tonic and the semitone intervals is the key question. This is clear if you begin with C, in which this relation is in its “natural” form. That C is fixed arbitrarily does not matter. The complete indeterminacy of the scale as a whole demands an arbitrariness in the fixed point of reference. Its pitch is inessential. Its practical relation, that whatever its pitch, it is the practical basis of a natural diatonic scale, is the point. But since our friend began with F#, the collection of “leavings”, he could not grasp this. There seemed no regularity, but pure arbitrariness to him. That the natural scale has seven notes means that there are five accidentals. When these are equally tempered they require two “accidentals” included. Thus the real relation 7 + 5 = 12 is hidden by 5 + 2 = 7. 

From 7 + 5 = 12 we deduce the number of sharps in the most remote key =  ⁷⁺⁵/ ₂ = 6. But from 5 + 2 = 7 we can learn nothing about the natural scale and its progressive modulations. Hence he had not even reached Db. The notes seemed arbitrary to him. And so F# seemed to him the key-point, the basis of all reference on the piano. 

This all shows that the question of equal tempering and the development of the diatonic scale into the chromatic scale is important. We might even schematise like this:

Diatonics – Catholicism – The monetary system – Equal tempering. 

Chromatics – Protestantism – The credit system.

And the chromatic scale is essentially a modified form of the diatonic scale and can never escape from the laws of the diatonic (natural) scale. The making of a mechanical stringed instrument which would be true at all pitches was a most epoch-making event in musical technique, making possible modulations into remote keys – one of the bases of romanticism.

[Book 2, November 1940, p.10]

–   –   –

44. Capitalist forms in musical production: orchestra and choir 

The modern orchestra is capitalistic in its form. The conductor is a small capitalist, or better a foreman. A highly complex form of cooperation exists. Time is strictly regulated. The players are paid.  The BBC, or society, puts up the hall, undertakes printing, advertising etc., and the players use only their instruments and not the means of performing. What is created by the capitalist is the means of bringing them together, the basis of cooperation. The same applies to workmen who own their own tools. In the one case it is the concert hall; in the other the workshop or the building job.

The productivity of musical labour has risen immensely with the invention of the gramophone and above all the radio. This has led to the monopolisation of music by the BBC and the like. The unemployment among musicians is due to this. Rationalisation (doubling) has followed. Advertisement and “starring” follow this. The correspondence is complete when organisation and socialism develop among musicians. The composer remains in an equivocal position, comparable to a research chemist or theorist. The conductor is like an engineer. The false social relations vitiate composition as they do chemistry. The division of labour divorces the composer from social life and collaboration with the players. The same is true, though less, of a chemist. Schools and cults arise.

Now in choral production this is less so. Here capitalist forms have failed to dominate exclusively, for to do so would be to destroy choralism altogether. Ninety percent of choral work is done in the amateur societies of Wales, Lancashire and Scotland. A huge choral work requires a huge chorus. They cannot be paid – rather will not be paid, as the power of singing is too widespread a skill. The industrial reserve army is almost infinite. The work is done voluntarily. Nominally the choral societies are the entrepreneurs, like cooperative societies; but really the owners of the halls win. And from this it is clear enough that while capitalism remains, choral works can never be anything but restricted. They do not broadcast well. They are rehearsed by people who are not full-time. They require infinite pains in preparation – hence the need of great expense for rehearsal rooms etc. The Liverpool Welsh Choral Union usually lost money … Also the case with the Post Office Choral Union and the Chester Philharmonic … The amalgamation of the old Cymrie with the Welsh, the growing tendency to combine choruses also, restricting them to a picked “semi-professional” but unpaid few. But under socialism this form would flourish, as the capitalist form would not conflict with the highly social content.

Another thing that follows bears on the gradually outmoding of choral by instrumental music as the bourgeoisie developed. This was due:

1. To improvements of instrumental technique; but these were in turn due in the first place to,
2. The contradiction between the non-popular productive relations of music and the popular nature of choral music. The choral music must rest on a wide popular culture, a wide mass tradition. But this conflicts with full-time attention, or large part-time attention, in wage-slave society. Hence the substitution of instrumentalists (professional) for singers (unpaid). The same process has applied to amateur football and cricket.

[Book1,1940s note, p.58] 

–   –   –

45. Extemporisation and composition in music

The popularity and widespread practice of extemporisation in classical music is well known. The present decadence of the art is also well known. A relation between high level of composition and customary extemporisation is therefore probable. New virtuosities were created in improvisation on the piano – by Beethoven – before being used in sonatas and concerti. The piano and the organ were the instruments of improvisation, the fantasia (fugue or fugato) the musical forms. The organ prelude as a church item, the “voluntary”, gives the origin of the form, subsequent to the making of free variations on well-known themes – as to contrapuntal mass singing of well-known folk songs … Improvisation by virtuosi as a decadent form of mass improvisation. 

Improvisation is like conversation or a lecture. Speech conveys meaning, sends over the content as an unfinished product, challenging immediate criticism by reply; it is only intended for the public who are present. Writing involves production for a wider circle – posterity maybe – when society is sufficiently complex to require generalising and the permanent record of experience. But in the main, writing appears as literary expression when the market is developing and practises and ideas are becoming widespread through the agency of merchant capital. Literature is therefore a product of wider social relations than conversation or Aristotelian discussion (the peripatetic method) . . .  Julian Benda’s “classes” as a specialised section of the middle class. 

In the same way mass singing in harmony gives way to organised singing in churches. Improvisation by specialised individuals remains, as talk between specialists remains. Contests of skill remain or even develop between virtuosi on feudal lines, but composition meant for the wider public takes over. In composition the artist musters all his specialised talents. In virtue of specialisation they become much vaster and architectonic, while at the same time being cut off from the masses, to which return is frequently attempted, as in literature.  

The writer composes to inform or amuse, or lead, or affect feelings for a wide public according to historical factors.

The composer composes to make permanent and available to a wide public a group of ideas which are concise and systematic – amusing, leading, emotional, whatever. Under the bourgeoisie the book, the composition, become for both the object in view, the concrete reality that can be sold. Hence the decline in improvisation, and indeed of conversation.

In improvisation plagiarism is regarded as no sin. In composition it was not so until the bourgeois period.  It must be proved that that the composer has put work into his product. Hence modern folk-music “arrangers” use fantastic harmonies which tickle the bourgeois ears without being difficult to think of. The stock devices are not enough or need to be disguised. The people who make money out of “arranging” things are much worse. Even virtuosi like Kreisler are inveterate “arrangers”. The composition would always serve as a nucleus for improvisation – at least before the romantic period when it became the immortal product of individual genius, understandably complex or amorphous in form. After Schubert this became almost impossible. Mumbo-jumbo made its entry into the sphere of art, and it has never been got out.

[Book 1, 1940s note, p. 22]

–   –   –

46. “Programme Music” reconsidered 

 In the light of my analysis of artistic production, the significance of programme music can be re-assessed.

Take the activity represented: This is of a strictly limited kind. Say it represents a bee – the basis being the noise a bee makes. So what is represented is primarily noise. Now a bee is of very limited significance in human activity. Secondly, unless it makes other noises besides that of a bee, it will altogether fail to attract attention, except as a nuisance. Say the artist adds to this the representation of a wedding. This naturally becomes a human wedding. So we have a human wedding and the noise of a bee – a great artistic conception. The more accurate the representation of a bee’s wedding becomes, the less interesting from a social standpoint. Such a representation has therefore a “mechanical” quality. Art can be regarded as passing into mimicry, but it is distinct from it. Take the very accurate picture of a bee – a scientific, not an artistic feat. But would there be a picture of a bee’s wedding? No. In other words, two things have happened. 

• Bees have been credited with weddings. 
• Weddings have been given a universal biological significance.

A bee’s wedding would be an absurdity at any time when marriage was regarded as a transient form – indeed when the subjection of women was not a fact.

And yet the absurd idea of a bee’s wedding can be better expressed in music than in other material. Now what is the matter with the notion of a bee’s wedding? Nothing, but its lack of all social significance in the first instance, and its reactionary significance as soon as it is examined beneath the surface.

Take Saint-Saens and his farmyard. The same applies. This is musical small talk. Since the farmyard evokes no social feeling in the modern townsman, its corporeal presence is all that he can grasp. That such should be considered desirable illustrates the desire to get back to peasant society, but this desire is not expressed at all by the music. All that is done is to bring along noises which remind anybody but a countryman of a farmyard and the job is done.

Beethoven’s 6th Symphony is a different proposition. It is concerned frankly with the impressions in the country and the reactions of the living people to a storm, their religious thanksgiving – Beethoven never leaves the sphere of representation of human things. The cuckoo and the quail come in at the end of the movement; they are set in the whole environment previously described. Indeed you could easily, as I did as a boy, hear the symphony and recognise its “pastoral” character without being aware that the quail was represented, or indeed the cuckoo either!

Now where, then, is the distinction? I would say this:-

The bee’s wedding sets out to express – that is to press music into the form of – an ideological conception. The social meaning is entirely unconscious. The fact that the audience is titillated suffices. The audience likes the idea of the bees also having their weddings. It makes human weddings so imposing in comparison. And so Mendelssohn provides them with a buzz from bees, and a tinkle from a wedding. Here is the bees’ wedding.

Now compare his wedding march. This is not the same. Here the social significance of a wedding is consciously expressed. What that significance is, is not the matter. Whether he correctly appreciates it, is not the matter. The noise of cups, the other paraphernalia – the coughing of people – are not included because the march is to unify the social consciousness to a concentration on the one significant event. 

Now Beethoven’s 6th Symphony is in the second category. The intention to express human significance is there. It is not there in the case of the farmyard; it is achieved unconsciously. But music in its long evolution developed as the peculiar mode of expression of human feelings and reactions, moods and impressions – the origin from the cry is the basis of this – and now the very increase of technique of power of expression gives music the power to express by instruments the mimicries which in its earliest days were the highest achievements of the musical human voice! To schematize:

1.  Programme music represents in music the sounds of things plus other sounds standing for the social relations of those things, the latter being unconscious;  
2. General music represents in music the social relations of things, and thereby the things, the object being consciously a representation of human life.

The former is a mechanical process, the latter a dialectical one. 

[Book 2, begun on Woolwich 1940, p.1]

–   –   –

47. The social content of “programme music” 

Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony…Scene by the brook …The peasant gathering.. The storm …The thanksgiving…This and the joke of the last part …Wellington’s Vittoria.

Compare this with Saint-Saens, with his zoo, aquarium, aviary. Or Debussy and his titles. The very giving of titles shows what has happened. Where titles are not given, Beethoven assumes revolutionary meaning; where given, it is “Death of a Great Man”, “Coriolan”, “Egmont”, plans for Faust. The subjects agitating men’s minds were the problems of the French Revolution etc. – in ideological form, it is true. But later the titles given reflect the literary ideas of the day: symbolism, surrealism, parasitism. Verdi deals with great themes, but less insistently. Wagner is also great of course, but the fear of the working class is rising – either they fear or they pander to bourgeois fear. Beethoven’s 6th is a piece of pure romanticism – the nature cult.  The bourgeois State was “mature”. Perhaps music develops as follows. 

1. Religious mode of expression: Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart; 
2. Revolutionary content: Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Chopin;
3. Disillusioned romanticism: Lizt, Saint-Saens, Dvorak

(counter revolutionary?); 

              4. Art for art’s sake:  the moderns.

Of course, the music of the bourgeois democratic revolution and of national unity begins to dominate the European stage after Beethoven; for example: 

Italy                     Verdi

Germany               Wagner

              France (1840s)     Berlioz

              Ireland                  Stanford, Ireland

              Norway                 Grieg

              Finland                  Sibelius

              Spain                    Albéniz

              Poland                   ?

and so on.  But all this suffers one disadvantage – fear of the plain straight talk of the workers; fear of simple bold strokes; lack of passion for fear that it might excite passion amongst the proletariat; the desire to keep emotion, and the revolution, amongst the middle class; to be not understood by the herd. Note that it was not that the capitalist rejected the artist; rather the petty bourgeois artist rejected the proletariat. 

[Book 1,1940s note, p.15]

–   –   –

48. Public Performance

Haydn’s Op.76 quartet was said to be influenced by the need for public performance in London. There were different techniques then for family playing. This was true also where the piano was used, as one instrument might be missing. This made possible professionalism, taking technique beyond amateur capability.  Today modern music is too difficult for the mass of people to understand, because it is completely out of touch with anything they could conceivably play or. Hence pop music, using popular forms in a state of extreme degeneracy.

[Book 2, 1981 note, p.107]

–   –   –

49. On occasional composition 

The occasional composition appears as a monstrosity today. Our critics declare it to contradict the eternal principles of art. It is not to be taken seriously. It is like the poem of a poet laureate during the decay of society. Of course this is nonsense. The occasional piece, like the occasional chair, or the occasional pair of boots, is a product of society at a stage where commodity production is poorly developed. When there is no great geographical division of labour, the man who needs a chair makes it himself. Only later does he have the confidence to launch his chairs out on the world market, unaware as he is if any of the bottoms are going to sit in them. In the same way until there is a universal market, works of art are not distributable readily. That is to say, they are “occasional”. 

[Book 1,1940s note, p. 57] 

–   –  

50. Polyphony and homophony 

That these two forms succeeded one another, existing for a time side by side, is established. The meaning of each is harder to determine. We can take it that polyphony was both feudal and popular. It was frowned upon by the church, which favoured homophony, strictly interpreted. But it arose from the needs of the human voice. Each voice was that of an individual craftsman, owning his own means of production and singing the whole time. If others co-operated they co-operated as distinct and independent craftsman, weaving their craft in with his, but as I say, independent of him. The Church in opposition to this taught the collectivism of the monastery and the subordination of all human effort to one over-riding purpose. The division of labour in the village or town had its counterpart in highly divided and constantly increasing parts – the Church would have only four. Here the productive forces break through and leave their mark on the productive relations, as it were, in this reflection, which ideological life is.

Thus the free development of the individual small craftsman cooperating with his fellows within the framework of a fixed community in which everyone knew his place, was mirrored in polyphony – the descant, the free harmonising, and so on. The feudal relations in which this developed were expressed in the unchanging ponderous beats of homophony.

That homophony was the basically feudal form is clear enough. Polyphony grew within it as a movement of the masses. But this does not mean capitalism is the precondition for polyphony, though at first sight this might seem likely – free competition. The advancing technique of popular polyphony came up against the contradictions inherent in the diatonic scale – which were finally resolved in equal tempering. The four voices, soprano, alto, tenor, bass, gave rise to the basis of the fugue. Church music became polyphonic with Protestantism. The use of instruments increasingly widened the range and made equal tempering a necessity. And at the same time the breakup of feudal forms in industry and the differentiation of crafts with the beginnings of capitalism, were reflected in a growing subordination of the three lower voices to the upper one – of all instruments to the first violin. The violin concerto is thus the most bourgeois form of music. The new forms of industry based on direct cooperation thus gave rise to the final form: harmony.This could not reach full development until the establishment of the equally tempered scale. The first deed of the bourgeoisie was therefore to split up the unity of the Church into sects, opinions, and ultimately into the warring atoms of Leibnitz. Its second act – its first act as such – was to subordinate the many to the few. Thus arise polyphony and harmony. The two forms, polyphony and harmony, exist side by side ever afterwards, interpenetrating whenever a composer tackles the most important questions facing humanity: the relation of men to forces of their own making. Thus Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner.

This conclusion wants developing and testing along these lines:

•  Polyphony pre-supposes harmony; (b) Harmony pre-supposes counterpoint. 

The two are opposed to homophony. 

This is important, as it makes the difference between Bach and, say, Haydn one of degree only. Both are aspects of the bourgeois process. To say that polyphony had the upper hand when merchant capital and small handicraft industry held sway and the development of musical forms was low, and that harmony was the first consideration at a later stage when a larger scale of work could be contemplated as a whole, and division of labour was further advanced, is only to state the movement of the contradiction. 

(1) Polyphony = Anarchy of production

(2) Harmony = The power of the bourgeoisie.

The break-up of harmony by extension of its limits within the chromatic scale. Actually harmony requires the chromatic scale, and polyphony the diatonic!

 (3) The use made of harmony and polyphony by Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner needs to be studied. This will not give all that one might expect of it, as the question is complex and individual cases may contradict the whole. 

 (4)The actual music of the Reformation, showing how it was both polyphony and harmony, and the relation between them. 

 (5)Bach, to show that polyphony is not strict, and that there never was such a thing as strict polyphony, just as there was never a period of capitalist expansion without its accompanying destruction. 

 (6)The course of Italian music, and the explanation of the prevalence of harmony even in Bach’s day, is thus a different form of development. 

     Music is not international.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.14]

–   –   –

51. The Bach family and German opera 

“Every year at the Wartburg saw assembled the members of that numerous family which, driven from Hungary in the early period of reform, had settled in Saxony and had given, besides the great J.S. Bach, many noble musicians to the world. Too numerous to gain a livelihood in one city, the Bachs agreed to meet every year at the Wartburg. This custom, which continued till the close of the 18th century, not only presented the singular spectacle of one family consisting of no less than 120 musicians, but was also the occasion of musical entertainments such as were never heard before. They began by religious hymns sung in chorus; they then then took for their theme some popular song, comic or licentious, varying it by the improvisations of four, five or six parts. These improvisations were termed quo-libets and are considered by many writers to have been the origin of German opera.”

•  G.H. Lewes, Life of Goethe, pp.198-9 

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.20]

–   –  –

52. Beaumarchais, Mozart, Beethoven 

Previous to 1789 musicians and artists could express their antagonism to the feudal regime only by repeating in their own country the work of the French encyclopaedists and comedians. Thus the “Marriage of Figaro” was translated into German, Italian and, in 1789, even into Slovene. Beaumarchais was somewhat freely dealt with [French playwright of the Enlightenment, 1732-1799, author of Figaro]. His criticism was indirect and slightly milder. But Mozart follows very closely the original text – but excludes the soliloquy of Figaro, which is anyway unsuitable for opera, possibly as too revolutionary. However, at this time Emperor Joseph II was in power and pushing forward certain reforms, agrarian in particular. The way Mozart was himself treated as a lackey in the feudal household where he belonged, explains well enough his choice of “Figaro”.

But after 1789 the living revolution was already in progress. “At present all my hopes are founded on Paris,” declared Mozart, who saw the hated feudal aristocracy overthrown in one country of Europe. This historic event introduced a new period – the period of the great symphonies and the Requiem. That Mozart would have rivalled Beethoven had he lived is proved by his responding to the new circumstances of 1789. But it was left to Beethoven to write the revolutionary music. Fidelio replaces Figaro. In Fidelio the revolution is accomplished; in Figaro it rests at criticising and humiliating the Court. Figaro is propaganda, Fidelio is action. 

But what can be said of Rossini? By this time Beaumarchais had become either innocuous or reactionary. Follow this up.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.96]

–   –   –

53. On Beethoven’ Grosse Fuge, Op.133 

The characteristic is that the themes of this fugue are in such violent contradiction with one another that it is a wonder that there is any fugue at all. There is, among others, the Hymn to Joy theme. The early counterpoint of Beethoven seemed unreal. The natural – primitive? –  counterpoint of communal society, in which all parts were equal, gave place to homophony in the first, “progressive” bourgeoisification of art. The orchestra or players became employees, the soloist or conductor the boss. Note that bourgeois England exerted influence on feudal Germany by means of wars, trade penetration, the export of taste, the market etc. – and all harking back to polyphony seemed (a) unnecessary and (b) unreal. Perhaps the growing realisation that, from the point of view of the artist, capitalism was a backward step led to the desire to hark back – as in Mozart’s late work.

All Beethoven’s life was when the parts of the fugue were antagonistic. The homophony began to develop antagonisms – the soloist against the accompaniment, the conductor against the orchestra and so on. The problem of evolving techniques to do the expression of this became progressively less easily solved. To make unity and yet express reality: nobody after Beethoven was successful in this. The three periods of Beethoven express his striving after resolving this problem – and the extreme is reached when his technique is able to express the terrific antagonisms rending society.  This took place when he had given up hope of marrying (above him) and at dealing fairly with his publishers.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.11]

–   –   –

54. Napoleon’s undeserved reputation 

The poor development of the bourgeoisie of Central and South-East Europe explains the fact that even after 1799 Napoleon could still be regarded as representing the revolutionary people of France. In order to gain power, says Engels in “Historical Materialism”, the bourgeoisie is compelled to carry its revolution further then it desires. After that oscillations take place until the new equilibrium is fixed. The bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous class. Napoleon, representing the big bourgeoisie, was still the representative of the bourgeois revolution and the enemy of feudal reaction. The bigger bourgeoisie and the princes embourgeoisés of Italy etc., anxious to secure what they could in the way of concessions from the feudality, were willing to enter into relations with Napoleon. And as for the rest they could not understand the negative development of the French counter-revolution at a time when the masses had not even understood the significance of the revolution except in the most general way.

Thus in 1804-11, during the Serbian war of liberation, the Serbs called upon Napoleon, who abandoned them. They also called on Austria, with even less result. The fact that, having secured power, the bourgeoisie wanted no more high talk of liberty was not obvious.

Hence that in 1805 Beethoven should dedicate his Third Symphony to Napoleon is not surprising. News from France had been suppressed for years. The Serbian revolution had just broken out. You had not to be an extremist to be a “Jacobin”. Besides, in many ways Napoleon appealed to the German middle class as being moderate. Along these lines we should be able to explain why it was not until 1805, sixteen years after the French Revolution started, that Beethoven launched out on his “new style”. Perhaps also the decline which followed it from then on illustrates the gradual sapping of the basis of liberty in Austria, until we get the thoroughly reactionary “wars of liberation”. 

What a name for the British-Habsburg coalition against bourgeois France for the breaking of French economic power and the maintenance of feudalism on the continent – leaving English capital its monopoly. The growth of British manufacturing during this period is eloquent of the true meaning of those wars. So there was only one “Fidelio”. And then in the last period of his life, when Rossini was the popular musician, Beethoven resigned himself to writing “for the future”.

[Book 1, 1940s note, p. 98]

–   –  

55. Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony

The reason for the freshness of the storm was that the ravages of nature made on Beethoven’s mind but a small impression compared with the ravages of man. A storm of nature is not after all a reason for great disquiet, except to shepherds and suchlike. It is obviously unreal, and for the city dweller going into the country it is merely an episode.

If a storm had to be treated at all it would have to be done in another way. It would have to be fugal or polyphonic, and dealt with as a prepared unity, not prepared by a holiday when it symbolises nothing and is merely a passing nuisance cutting short the peasant revels; whereas the Congress of Vienna was to ruin the peasants.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.14]

56. The secularisation of religious ceremony: Beethoven’s Mass in D 

The “current Mass” is a form of the secularisation of religious ceremony under the influence of the bourgeois revolution. Hence the attempt to introduce new meaning into old forms. All religious ceremonies are artistic performances, even to the singing of hymns in a church. A concert and a church service are not so far removed. The differentiation by which the clergy alone performed was established long before secularisation began. Whereas the roots of the religious performance were in the need of the ruling class to create the submissive outlook in the people, the secular performances, despite frequently having a religious form, arose from the people’s self-representation of themselves and their experience. It was natural that there should be the attempt at one time to destroy popular culture, especially of a revolutionary kind; at another time to incorporate it in the old form. Hence the gradual modification of religious performances under the influence of bourgeois ideology, leading to a point where they are blown out of the church into the concert hall. This, a process beginning with the Reformation, makes possible an entirely new development in which the contradiction between religious form and secular content – esoteric form, exoteric content – continues (cf. Bartoli’s “Missa Profana”). In the end we get a black Mass.

To test this cf. Beethoven’s Mass in C with the Mass in D. In 1823 there had been a strengthening of reaction; the symphony no longer proclaimed the revolution or the national struggle.  Words had to be introduced into it to define its conclusion. The Mass in D, composed simultaneously with Op.125, attempts to fit possibly even more revolutionary content into the traditional form. This is the cause of the profound inner strain in the Mass in D; here there is no peace for the faithful. The quartet is subordinated to the chorus, which dominates the performance. The use of drums and brass, interruptions, short fugues uncompleted, imitations of the religious performance etc.  – all indicate the same, while the Dona Nobis Pacem is a defiant call for peace as the drums die away. If “Freude” stands for “Freiheit”, then in the two great Beethoven works we have the demand of the people: peace and freedom.

Two things requiring investigation are:  

(1) The Reformation and the secularisation of religious performances: for example, the Mass leading to the Concert Mass, leading to the Concert, leading to the Cantata.

(2) The class background of Beethoven’s apogee – the Archduke Charles; his propaganda for rousing the masses; the possibility that the Court adopted chromatic fashions; the Masses were all the rage in fact.  Hence Beethoven was able to produce music of democratic tendency with the full cooperation of Court circles.

[Book 2, 1940s note, p.77]

–   –   –

The performance tonight certainly did not present it as an “atheist’s Mass” – not till the Dona Pacem. In this, in spite of all “refinement”, the prayer became a threat, and bourgeois democracy broke through the ancient form. The first Dona Pacem is unaccompanied by the chorus. But later the masses acquire trumpets and drums. The question is like that of Paradise Lost – the bourgeois content injected into the ancient form demanded by reactionary society – in contrast to the free democratic form of Egmont and the Eroica. This somewhat devotional performance is useful as correcting any tendency to read into the Mass in D more revolutionary content than there is in it. But tonight there was great play with Crucifixus, but little with Pacem or Hominibus Voluntatem. The thing was broadcast by the BBC and was therefore, I suppose, an “official rendering”, with extraordinarily affected female soloists – a pity, although of course the singing energy of the whole thing caught them up, as well as the competent chorus.

 [Book 2, Note on performance heard on 22 Feb.1961, p.101]

–   –   –

Here was a spirited classical performance of the Mass in D conducted by Klemperer. Buried in the score I did not watch much. It would be possible to illustrate my theory on the energetics of music from this work – volume, pitch and tempo as elements of energy output.  These accompany definite words.  But why “high” (“coelum”) is high in pitch?; low in altitude = low in pitch.  Except that holding a thing high consumes energy; therefore “high” (consuming energy) is “high” (potential energy).

[Book 2, Note on performance heard on 19 Oct.1961, p.103]

–   –   –

57. Instrumentalism and vocalism in Beethoven 

The difficulty experienced by Beethoven in deciding when to introduce the voices in the Ninth Symphony is due to the contradiction between the chorus and the orchestra. This is a form of the contradiction between social production forces and capitalist relations – the “organising” of “performances”, the presence of a critical audience etc. Capitalism has greatly extended the scale of music, and not a little by the “introduction of machinery”, leading to a greater and greater instrumental performance.

The voice takes two revenges. It becomes first the soloist, then the virtuoso. In the same way the instrumental virtuoso – really a solo voice – completes the process. The division of labour creates new forms, songs, quartets etc. The second revenge is in the nature of the instrumentalism. The voice as the organ of the people expresses popular feeling. Whatever it says is in words. Its meaning is obvious. Meaningless words are not considered desirable even by the most ardent supporters of “art for art’s sake”. The expression of social feeling is a necessity. But for more than one reason the instrument is at a premium, the voice at a loss. Hence the need to express the voice in the instrument. The voice here takes its revenge. It invents the saxophone and the “vox humana” – sometimes known as “tremolo”. The poor diapason becomes subtly transformed by slow degrees. The much-feared vocalism reasserts itself. After Beethoven we get the “Symphonie fantastique” and new brassy instruments adorn the orchestra. Effects multiply, and as the social content determines the voice, so when the voice blows raspberries, so the instruments of Messrs Stravinsky etc. blow farts.

It is to be noted that vocalism is not to be found in Haydn’s symphonies. He wrote his Mass “In tempore belli” instead. Beethoven’s Third Symphony is vocal – the third movement. The later ones are all to some degree; the Ninth actually so. Note Alan Morton’s point that in the “Hymn to Joy” the key intended word is not “Freude” but “Freiheit”, and the whole thing becomes intelligible [Prof. Alan G. Morton, historian of botany, Greaves’s oldest friend]. Beethoven has only one opera, only one choral fantasia, one choral symphony – but innumerable Freiheit themes, from the song “Seufzer eines ungeliebten” onward.

[Book 1,1940s note, p.62]

–   –   –

58. On the sonata in Ab, Opus 110, by Beethoven

An analysis of this sonata yields interesting confirmation of the political basis of Beethoven’s development: The quiet, unearthly development of the first few bars, rising upwards and still further upwards, the syncopation, the expression of desire unconnected with material considerations, divorced from reality, the frequent alterations of major and minor, the latter negating the former.

The second movement is a revolutionary theme – but is still more sharply the negation of the dance, transposing into the minor with a loss of vitality. This shaking of the head is very striking.

The recitative connecting the second and third movements is a harking back to movement one, but is so long and well developed that it is clear that it derives from the church music of the Reformation. Also it is intended to have words, and consequently the following fugue has words. Perhaps it is stretching a point to say that those words are, “Ein feste burg ist unser Gott.” But the rock-like confidence of this theme leaves no doubt as to its meaning. It is straight from Luther. And its strictly logical, classical development also allows no doubt.

But then there is a further recitative. These words are not so confident at all. And after ten chords – I don’t know yet what they mean – the Lutheran theme is inverted.  The Reformation is reversed. The people’s movement has produced the people’s slavery. The utter hopelessness of the inverted fugue must impress everybody who hears it. Again there is no doubt, nothing is in the slightest ambiguous. And finally, as if with a great effort, the fugue – this time no fugue but crowded out with full chords double forte – is restored in its original Lutheran form, its upward form, and imposes itself stormily upon the other, which inches the motion of the music away from the downward path and concludes triumphantly with the revolution victorious over the counter-revolution.

[Book 1,1938-39 note, p.45]

The above was written in approximately 1938-39 after hearing Opus 110 in a café in Epsom in 1937. At first I only felt it was familiar and did not know what it was, but later found out, I think by chance, after buying a gramophone record. It was definitely during the Wimbledon period. I have little to add to it.

[Note added to the above on 13 Jan.1981]

–   –   –

59. The late Beethoven

This is not romantic music. But is it classical? It is and it is not. The classical sonata form holds in the 9^th Symphony. But what about the piano sonatas and last quartets?  Think about this. In a sense the Op. 110 is more classical. But how express it? Throwing out the inessentials of the sonata form and retaining the essentials? In Op. 111 the opening diminished fourth is resolved as a perfect fourth in the second movement. The distinct movements are thus incorporated into a super-sonata form. The discordant passages need not be resolved in the one movement. So the sonata form dissolves in little to reappear on a greater scale. Is this the means by which large social, political, historical events are represented musically? Music achieves its own drama, not just accompanying drama.

[Book 2, 1980s note, p.131]

–   –   –

Beethoven lived in three worlds, the feudal, the revolutionary and the bourgeois (1770-1789, 1789-1814, 1814-1827). Hence the three “periods” (1790-1805, 1805-1823, 1823-1826). But between periods II and III there was a long and painful transition. The Mass in D and the D Minor Symphony show this – it had begun in his piano music earlier still. The explosive resolutions may relate to doubt and faith. The three last sonatas were composed simultaneously with the Mass and the last symphony. There are important thematic relations. 

[There follow in the original notebook passages written in musical notation for the Adeste Fideles, the Credo, the Fugue Op.110, the Variations Op.109, the Variations Op.111 and the first movement of the 9^th Symphony]

The second movement of the 9^th Symphony is the same – the dominant is set against the tonic. In the major context, faith; in the minor context, as in the cancrizans of Op. 110, the loss of it. In Opus 109 it resolves as peace. In Op. 110 and Op.111 the climax then resolves in victory; in the Mass in the “Vitam Venturi” fugue; in the 9^th Symphony by voices, by bringing in the masses. I wonder if it is known which parts of these works were composed at which time. (I thought I had spelled out the interpretation of Op.110, Beethoven’s most revealing work: the opening rising to the upper tonic via the upper dominant in search of faith … The negation and reassertion in the 2^nd (minor)… Then further searching…Then the clock strikes, “Ein feste burg ist unser Gott.” Then this is negated in cancrizans. And it is finally reasserted in total victory at the upper tonic.) 

[Book 2, 1984 note, p.127] 

–   –  –

60. Rossini and the post-Beethovians 

Here we have an illustration of the independent movement of form (material) and content (the social activity represented). Rossini inherited all the technical devices of Beethoven’s day. But his music is in no way similar. His design is not materially different from Mozart’s, despite his technical posteriority. This is because he went on expressing precisely the same things as the other opera writers, for example Mozart. His Figaro has not the same revolutionary vigour.

But on the other hand Berlioz, Schubert, Schumann and Wagner aimed at developing the content which Beethoven first broached. They therefore introduced new factors of design, in addition to merely making use of the modern and more varied material made available. 

[Book 1,1940s note, p.189]

–   –   –

61. Mahler’s Symphony No.2 

On first hearing this is full of incredible ingenuities – partly seeking after effect for effect’s sake; but it is real music with a solid historically founded core.

1.The proliferation of effects – cymbals, bells, triangle, offstage brass etc. This corresponds to the high level of productive forces, giving composers great technical range; but this has nothing to do with the content of the work.

2.The content is basically reactionary. For all his vast productive forces the bourgeois, having atomised society, is tortured by the prospect of personal extinction. Mahler invokes resurrection without Christ (Note the words from Klopstock): Life after death through love. This is a continuous poetic absurdity, popping up all the time and not meaning, as its only sensible meaning would be, through “breed that braves him when he takes us hence”. 

3.Note the romantic character of his “programme”. Even if repudiated later, it is palpably correct. The lack of dynamism – repeated silences and meanderings due to the absence of any popularurge. The bourgeoisie has lost faith in its social mission. 

[Book 2,1960 note, p.98]

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62. On the virtuoso Clara Butt  

[Dame Clara Butt, 1872-1936, English contralto for whom Elgar composed with her powerful voice in mind] 

Her greatest successes:The Keys of Heaven; Land of Hope and Glory – which she induced Elgar, the imperialist composer, to adapt from his Pomp and Circumstance –The Lost Chord, and Abide with Me.

She sells a particularly fine piece of artistic material, her voice. This includes her acquired skill in the use of it. Her fame rests on the obscurity of countless others whose voices were potentially undeveloped. But to the bourgeois virtuoso the material is everything, the object represented nothing. So she participates in the execution of performances designed as sheer imperialist propaganda – that is, representing Imperialism as what it is not: puritanism, chauvinism, escapism, religion; altogether a grand bouquet. She is successful however because she fully approves of this representation – really misrepresentation – of imperialism. She can carry through the final stages of the production of art because she as much expresses the social content as the composer or the manager of the hall. All share in the box-office receipts; all do well out of the exploitation of the fiddlers, clerks etc.

Here we have proof of the cooperative nature of artistic production. 

Representers: Sullivan, Elgar, Butt

Represented: The feelings of the bourgeoisie.

There is no antagonism between the composer and the executant here! The composer’s plan, Butt executes. All work in harmony. The contradiction lies (a) in the subject matter itself, which bears a contradictory form, and (b) In the fact that the content is a lie. Harmony = Lie.

[Book 1,1940s. note, p.187]

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63: Comments on art and literature from Table Talk: Insight, Ideas, Politics

Art creates new consciousness; it does not provide new knowledge. That is for science to do, which for the man who comprehends both is far superior to art.

*

All the greatest art avoids the personal or seems to; it avoids the first person and reveals through indirection.

 *

The essence of art is the unexpected.

*

It is a mediocre work, neither an old thing well said, nor a new thing said badly. 

*

If I had not to spend half my time selling newspapers round the Irish districts I would like to write a work on aesthetics. My advantage would be that of approaching the subject as a natural scientist. No one else in the Marxist tradition has done that.  But you would need maximum quiet for it. I worked out for myself the basis of aesthetics as far back as 1940. Roscoe Clark did the same and although I knew him, we discovered it independently[Roscoe Clark was a medical doctor in Birmingham].  It is the conditioned reflex. The basis for comprehending the finest art is to be found in the study of Pavlov’s dogs.  You know how in Pavlov something is associated with another, so that the stimulus which excites the response can be transferred to something else that has no necessary connection with it. So it is with the symbol in art, where one thing can stand for another quite unconnected with it.  Hence the association between things and symbols that is quite fundamental to art.

*

The basic principle of artistic creation is first to develop material in the tonic mode, then intrude other material in the dominant, and then resolve the latter material in the tonic.  It is a dialectical movement, seen in its purest form in the sonata, but to be found in all art.

*

Literary art is a form of showmanship, the need to capture the attention of the reader. That is the difference between a book and a thesis. The former is written for a public, the latter for a university professor, to whom it is important to demonstrate all the books one has read. History too is an art. In my book on Liam Mellows I deliberately heightened the contrast between the events before Mellows’s death, when his fortunes seemed to be improving, in order to make more vivid the contrast with his death sentence and execution.  That would be quite impermissible in a thesis, where all facts are equally important, so that the overall result is formless.

*

Try to write for the mass of people, not for academics. Most academic books are written for academics, which is why few people read them.

*

She asked did T.S .Eliot influence my verses. Academics think that writers write out of what others have written before them, not out of a desire to speak for themselves.

*

Modern life is so complex that only words, as used in prose, are adequate to express it. That is probably one of the reasons for the decline of the traditional art forms such as painting, sculpture and music.  Even poetry finds the task too difficult, so there is left only prose.

*

Literary questions can only be treated by someone with scientific pretensions on the basis that content precedes form and that until what is vital in content is unravelled, any discussion of form is supererogatory. 

*

The reason why the 1917 period, the Russian revolution and all that, did not result in an efflorescence of popular art, is that capitalism had destroyed folk culture, which still survived in the 18^th century following the French Revolution. This applies particularly to music.

*                                                                

Good satire is impossible nowadays; there are just too many things to satirise. And then there are the libel laws. What would be needed to do justice to the monstrousness of today – the pens of Swift, Voltaire and Shaw combined?

*

There is nothing so mad that people will not do it. All the time you find that life imitates art.

*

Do you not think that I am steeped in tradition? I am a believer in the classic style above all, in music especially, and in literature and writing.  The older one gets the more one appreciates how the classic style encompasses all others and includes them, although in youth I grant that one may think quite differently. 

*

Of course all good writers see themselves as custodians of language, influencing and transmitting a tradition. Accuracy of language and precision of style are essential virtues for any scientific writer.

*

When I was younger I thought that I might be a novelist. I even wrote plays and a musical. I must make sure they are well and truly burned before I shuffle off this mortal coil.  I am glad I did not become a novelist. This is not the age of the novel. Things change too rapidly and society is too unstable, except perhaps in America, where capitalist society is most stable and where novels of epic dimension are still possible.

*

I refuse to read anything if it is boringly written or has grammatical mistakes.  If someone cannot write or spell properly it is not worth paying attention to anything else they claim to do, for they have not paid attention to the most basic skills. 

*

Books after all are essentially for entertainment, and that is as true of history and politics as of romantic fiction.

*

I do not read novels for the sake of character studies. I have seen too many characters in my time to think that I will learn anything new from novels. I read them to see if they give a good picture of the times and the way people conducted themselves in the period being described, so that one can say at the end,“That is how it was”.

*

People do not appreciate how hard it is to write a book, at least one worth reading.

*

The secret of all good writing lies in large part in the use of one-syllable words.

*

I am noting the decline in correct English on the BBC News. I have a little book in which I mark down the mistakes I hear. When they come round to abolishing the Third Programme I will have the basis of a letter to the Times. (1968)

*

I never thought too much of lyrical poetry. It is mostly about feelings rather than ideas. Feelings!  What they don’t appreciate is that everyone’s feelings are the same, or more or less so. It is their ideas are different. Nothing new can be said at this stage about feelings.

*

Mine is public poetry. Private poetry is of small interest to others. All the private things have been said too often before. The nearest thing to mine might be the poetry of Thomas Hood [1799-1845, English poet and satirist]. 

*

In youth one can produce the poetry of inspiration, with the lyricism of Swinburne or the early Shelley. But really great work is not based on inspiration but on method. That requires vast skill and experience and gives us the greatest poets, like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake and Yeats. These four are undoubtedly the greatest in English, and Yeats is the greatest twentieth century poet. They do not write in negatives, but in the grand positives.

*

Novel-writing is not something I could do, but with poetry it is different.  Did you know that Yeats always wrote out the scheme of a poem in prose first.  It shows that content dominates over form. 

*

I have not written verse for a long time, but it may be a case of a long gap in time between the old methods and some grand new project. (1966)

*

What I like as I get older is what I call objective poetry. I have shown you some of my juvenilia, which typically are dominated by “I”. When a man is old he is not interested in “I”. I believe iambic tetrameter, not pentameter, is the fundamental metre of English poetry and I always give my own opinions in that.  I do not think much of poetry for poetry’s sake. So much modern stuff is poets contemplating their poetic navels. Who gives a damn about feelings that are peculiar to oneself?  What is interesting are the feelings one has in common with others.   I would make no apologies for writing what I call anti-imperialist poetry. Perhaps it might influence someone. My poem The Mountbatten Award for instance: I was struck by the irony of it.  Mountbatten  was quite progressive. He had spoken out against nuclear war, in a speech they had all suppressed.  That he should be bumped off as a minor side-effect of a conflict in a country that he loved! [Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1900-79, former Viceroy of India and Chief of the British Defence Staff; assassinated by the IRA off Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo]  (1981)

*

The stanzas that I wrote on the lady who said I was not an “academic” contain libel, I am sure, so that I would not publish it.  It is really my private little joke, but I do not mind various parties getting to know that it exists, so that the lady in question may perhaps hear of it, but would be prevented by the nature of the case from making her interest known.  The last two verses, you say, are too explicit, but they contain the whole point, if the thing is to be clear to the ordinary man in the pub. Remember it is villainy, not art.

*

Yeats’s later poems, lyrical in form but astringently intellectual in content, surely make him the greatest poet in English of the century. 

*

An old man’s poetry is like dry verse.

*

The secret of literary style is to write so that when read, one’s words can only be spoken in one way, with the emphasis falling exactly where one wants it.

*

The great art of using English is the art of juxtaposition of the Latin and the Saxon word, the abstract and the concrete as they so often are, while remembering that the Saxon is dominant.

*

I take trouble with words. I sometimes spend an hour on a particular word. There is a floating participle somewhere in my Connolly book. That is why it takes me so long to write my immortal works.

*

I like the clear strong prose of Engels, where he takes pretentious ideas by the scruff of the neck and wrings the life out of them.

*

I like the research more than the writing, although I like the writing too.  It is good to feel able to form words well into shape, to be able to appreciate the taste of a sentence. 

*

That is wooden academic writing, full of “buts”, “ands” and “neverthelesses”, to disguise its lack of grasp of a subject.  You cannot get away with that in a science or mathematics paper. The lack of integrity of the middle class shows itself even in its antithetical style.

*

Paper will take anything that is written on it. It is so easy when engaging in polemics by letter to let one’s prose run away with one.  Face to face with an opponent one can expect interruptions from the first assertion one makes. But when writing no one interrupts; you can cap one strong assertion with another even stronger, until you have demolished your enemy to your own satisfaction.  When I was young my pen was always running away with me like that and I wrote lots of things I should never have written. 

*

The more they computerise and automate printing the more unsatisfactory the final product becomes.  When things were set by hand the author could always make last-minute changes and step into the printing process several times along the way.  Now when words are set by what I call “unidentified flying objects”, you get Heaven knows what result. Several things I corrected in the final proofs of my Sean O’Casey manuscript appear uncorrected in the published text.

*

The Irish genius is inclined to action, I think. At least it seems so in its successful literary forms, the drama and short-story, where an action predominates. I think that one needs a stable, long-established and self-confident society to encourage the more contemplative forms of literature.

*

One of the pithiest headlines ever written – in an American paper naturally – about the rape of a washerwoman: “Nut screws washer and bolts”! 

*

These people who are obsessed with attacking us, the so-called “British and Irish Communist Group”  – who incidentally  are neither British nor Irish nor much of a group – sit down in the British Museum and read Marx and Lenin for a few weeks and they then affect the “grand style”. They do not allow for a moment that someone who has spent years on a subject may have something worthwhile to say. They do not realise that one can only assume the grand style after years, as old Professor Pirani used to say. He was sixty-seven and could use it just occasionally [Marcello Von Pirani,1880-1968, German scientist in Britain during World War 2 whom Greaves knew when working as a research chemist in British industry].  (1965)

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64. Comments on music from Table Talk: Insight, Ideas, Politics

Music is a limited art. I doubt if there will be any further major improvements in it. The most that can be done is to go over what has already been discovered.  It is a bit like chemistry, where there are no big discoveries to be made. Literature is different. The novel, for example, will express changing social reality as long as there is a reality to express.

*

Individualism over-accelerated the development of music; its natural history has been telescoped. A few centuries should have been taken to digest Mozart before moving on to Beethoven. The musical development since the early 19th century should have been spread over a thousand years.

*

I took him to a concert in Liverpool, to improve his knowledge of music.  It was Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart.  They were in the wrong order of course. Haydn, the believer, should have been first, then Mozart the deist and then Beethoven the atheist, the greatest of them all.

*

Haydn’s was the apotheosis of popular music. No one could fail to understand it.

*

It is only in recent years that I have appreciated the sadness of Mozart’s music. When one is young one thinks it full of gaiety and sparkle. Later one understands that there is something quite different there. 

*

Mozart’s music is the most extravert of all, with nothing morbid or introspective about it.

*

European music reflects centuries of European conditioning to hysteria. It is deeply emotional music and very complex, unlike the cerebral music of India and China. 

*

Opera has been absolutely central to the development of music.

*

Germany’s composers were all anti-Establishment: the only progressive tradition of a benighted nation.

*

I find the “Londonderry Air” to be absolute torture.

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