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Schoenberg was not a Nazi sympathiser, in any sense. His antipathy towards
the Nazis was clear from the 1920s onwards. He was involved with some
Marxist organisations in his youth (I don't know the details of which), but
turned into a relatively mainstream conservative in later life. During WW1
he was something of a patriot, but that doesn't make him a Nazi.
There are many ways in which music can be considered to have a political
dimension, with or without text. Music-making is a social phenomenon, which
interacts with a wide range of expectations and pre-existing ideologies. If
that isn't political, I don't know what is. Plato went into quite some
detail about which types of harmonies would or wouldn't be allowed in his
Republic. There was plenty of discontent amongst the Papal authorities
during the Renaissance with respect to the extent to which music was
becoming ornate, melismatic, etc., such as enabled it to obtain a degree of
abstraction, and thus not be wholly in the service of the sacred message.
The Zhdanov doctrine of the late-1940s explicitly denounced various Soviet
composers (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khatchaturian), for 'formalism', for
pursuing formal musical directions which couldn't be wholly explained in
terms of the glorification of Stalinist-style communism. And so on and so
forth - there are many many more examples.
It would be simplistic to see music's political meaning as an intrinsic and
immutable property of 'works', as various works have encountered changing
hermeneutical readings in different times and places. But music is about
more than just works, it is a whole field of social practice, which deserves
to be analysed as much as any other such field.
Solidarity,
Ian
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