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Composing Workers

William G. Roy

Chapter of How To Do Politics With Art

Edited by Violaine Roussel and Anurima Banerji

Ashgate Books. 2016

In the spring of 1936, the American Music League affiliated with the American

Communist Party held a music festival in New York City.1 The party’s newspaper, The Daily

World, noted that 1500 people hundred attended two sessions where the Fur Workers Chorus,

Freiheit Gezang Ferein, the New Singers, the Daily World Chorus, and African American

baritone William Bowers performed. Classical composers Aaron Copland and Norman Cazden,

among others, contributed original compositions. According to The Daily World¸ “[t]he festival

was an encouraging triumph for the League, which proposes to inaugurate extensive and far-

reaching activities for the future—to defend musical culture against the dangers of fascism,

censorship and war, and to develop a healthy musical life in America.”2 This event was a single

moment during an extraordinary eruption of insurgent cultural creativity across virtually every

art medium that gave aesthetic form to one of the most radical movements in American history

and had permanent effects on the mainstream parts of those arts (Denning 1996). But the left-

wing musical movement, while fostering fundamental dialogue about the role of music in

1 I would like to thank Professor Richard Abel for making the archives of Unison available to me, Ashley

Gromis for assistance in analysis, and Steven Ross, Violaine Roussel and Anurima Banerji for constructive

comments. This project was initiated while a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral

Sciences at Stanford University.

2 The Daily World, “American Music League Festival,” 1936, PAGE.

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society, failed in its initial strategy of making “good” music for the masses to promoting what

they saw as the people’s own music, folk music.

The role of music in the left-wing movements of the 1930s and 1940s raises a

fundamental question about the relationship of politics and culture: How do creative

specialists—in this case composers of serious or classical music—forge a movement for the

benefit of workers, a class whose members typically share neither the knowledge nor taste for

what those specialists are skilled at creating? How can creators make politically potent creative

products if their medium of expression has no overt political content? These are the animating

questions behind this paper. During the 1930s, a broad left-wing movement in the United States

included artists, musicians, writers, poets, dramatists, dancers, and other creative specialists who

attempted to foster organizations, mobilize their colleagues, invent new forms, and make

creations on behalf of broadly defined racialism. Most of them, especially in the early movement

before a shift to folk art in the late 1930s, faced a common structural and cultural challenge. All

their training and professional success revolved around an aesthetic standard of quality formed in

an aristocratic system that eschewed common taste. Yet their movement was putatively on behalf

of the working class, many of whose members were indifferent or even hostile to refined

aesthetic standards. For musicians, there was a further challenge that the political commitments

that gave content to many artistic media found no direct expression in music, a medium without

explicit message. How were they to create political music if music had no message? Of course,

songs had lyrics, but many musicians, especially fine musicians, did not write songs.

In 1936, the left-wing Composers Collective, an affiliate of the American Music League,

initiated a journal, Unison, to mobilize members and share perspectives. A mimeographed

mixture of opinion pieces, announcements, news items, reviews, and analysis, it expressed the

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dilemma of seeking a role for composers in a movement with revolutionary aspirations and

pragmatic actions. While in principle they aspired to foment historical transformation, in

practice, their activities involved discussions of ideology, workshops on composing, and concerts

to bring people together. As revolutionaries, they were more familiar with violins than violence.

This paper explores how they sought a political strategy for musicians, specifically how they

attempted to reconcile the nature of art as they understood it with the effectiveness of reaching

the working class. The inherent tensions between these two dimensions presented the challenge.

To put it differently, they were negotiating tensions between two kinds of identity. Their

aesthetic identity was based on a commitment to “good” music. From the perspective of aesthetic

identity, the title of this paper would be read as composing workers, as in agents dedicated to

musical composition. The artists’ political identity was based on a commitment to the movement

and its goals. An emphasis on political identity shifts the valence of the paper’s title to

composing workers. It was workers that the musicians were composing for. Especially if we

stretch the meaning of “composing” to mean putting things in order, the musicians were

“composing workers” in a transitive sense.3 My paper will address the process as well as the

content of their dialogue over the role that musicians should play in the movement, essentially

how musicians do politics, based on the Unison’s discourse and content and the context of the

larger movement. Not only can the attempt to strategize be seen in the general discussion, but the

journal published interviews with leading composers asking their opinions about the political

role of composers, a very fortuitous series used as the major data source for this chapter.

3 While this chapter does not develop the theme, the Communist Party was also trying to organize musicians as

workers, proletarianized by the alienating conditions of commercialized culture. During the 1930s, nearly all

American professional musicians became unionized.

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A Relational Perspective

These questions arise out of and are examined through a relational perspective

(Emirbayer 1997, Mische 2011, Tilly 2005, Diani and McAdam 2003) or more particularly what

Charles Tilly has called relational realism (Tilly 2002). A relational perspective focuses less on

actors and their attributes than on relationships and what happens between actors. Relational

characteristics cannot be reduced to individual actors. In tune with a broad range of social

scientists, Tilly’s relational realism focuses less on the conventional units of analysis—

individuals, groups, organizations, societies, or world systems—than on relations: the clapping

of hands rather than the hands themselves (Tilly 2002). Qualities such as equality/inequality,

agreement/disagreement, power/subordination, interaction/isolation, and so forth cannot be

conceptualized or measured on one actor at a time. Economic equality for example can be

between two rich people or two poor people; political agreement can be between two liberals or

two conservatives. Knowing a person’s wealth or political orientation can never tell us whether

they are equal to or in agreement with anyone else. But relationships go beyond similar or

dissimilar attributes. Relations happen between people largely through interaction. Actors work

at relationships negotiating such relational qualities as trust, reciprocity, cooperation, or conflict.

A relational approach to politics focuses on how relational qualities such as solidarity, contest,

and consensus are created, sustained, and undermined on one hand and how those relational

qualities affect the capacity for collective action. Aesthetic relations refer to ways that shared or

differing aesthetic dispositions affect the way that actors relate to each other. Those who care

about the arts explicitly and implicitly work to interact on the same aesthetic wave length or to

erect aesthetic boundaries between each other.

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Identity mechanisms, Tilly wrote, “treat the construction, challenge, defense, and

transformation of collective answers to the questions, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Who

are they?’ as central to a wide range of political contention” (2002, xii-xiii, 2008). For Tilly,

identity was a fundamental concept for linking the micro to the macro through what he called the

“the essential identity chain: transaction, tie, network, category, and group. An identity is simply

the social experience of one of these elements coupled with public representation of that

experience” (2002, 49). Identity work goes up and down this chain. Recurrent transactions create

ties, which are structured into networks, which are reified into categories that gel into groups.

Group members in turn sharpen and dampen categories that affect who interacts with whom in

networks, reinforcing or loosening ties that actors transact in. Tilly also emphasized that

identities are multiple, that each actor has many identities that are involved in a variety of

transactions, ties, networks, categories, and groups. And most importantly for the study of

contentious politics, some lend themselves to mobilization and collective action and others do

not.

A moment’s reflection suggests that this approach to relational realism fits music like a

glove. Music happens between people within a relationship between composer, performer, and

listener. Music can build boundaries or weaken them, including those that constitute the

infrastructure of modern society: class, race, and gender, among other forms of stratification

(Roy and Dowd 2010, Pachucki, Pendergrass, and Lamont 2007).

Composers, Politics, and the Public

The relationship examined here is the one between American left-wing art music composers and

their audiences in the 1930s. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, not only was the

broad progressive movement highly mobilized around cultural creativity, but the movement also

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included some of the nation’s most renowned artists, musicians, playwrights, novelists, poets,

and choreographers. Aesthetic stars such as Aaron Copland, John Dos Passos, Orson Wells,

Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Eugene O’Neill were

committed (in varying degrees) to infusing politics into their art and their art into politics

(Denning 1996, Roy 2010, Hemingway 2002, Lieberman 1995). Robbie Lieberman, in My Song

Is My Weapon,, vividly describes the richness of the subculture with its doctors, neighborhood,

dry cleaners, summer camps, reading clubs, fraternal orders, political activities, choruses, drama

clubs, co-ops, Young Pioneers, dance groups and more, concluding that for many, being a part of

this community was conformity, not rebellion (1995). Activists, many of them associated with

the American Communist Party and affiliated organizations, saw the arts as a way to reach

potential constituents and a foretaste of life after the anticipated revolution. Moreover, the depth

of the Great Depression convinced many artistic professionals that American society faced a

crisis that required radical change. At the same time, Americans participated in amateur

production across the aesthetic spectrum, many of them in groups with political affiliations.

Further fueled by New Deal subsidies, the combination arguably resulted in a politically infused

effervescence of artistic collective action unmatched before or since.

Many of the radical creative specialists sought not only to reshape the content and form

of their art but also to redefine the relationship between creators and their audiences. Musicians

were especially active and self-conscious in reconsidering the relationship between artist and

audience, though they faced a challenge found in virtually all arts, especially in music. Indeed,

perhaps in no other art was there such a gulf between the aesthetic judgment of what was

considered high quality creativity and the aesthetic tastes of average Americans. Modern music

had turned against tonality and forms that most Americans found pleasing. Twentieth-century

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“serious music” became dominated by abrasive atonality, irregular jagged rhythms, and

abnegation of melody, intentionally affirming sounds that only trained ears and highbrow taste

could appreciate. At the same time, it had become organized into institutions that valorized the

refined tastes of the elite while invidiously marginalizing that of the masses (DiMaggio 1982b, a,

Levine 1988). Politically engaged musicians felt they had to choose between “good” music and

pandering to common taste.4

At the core of politically engaged musicians in the 1930s was the American Music

League (AML), loosely affiliated with the American Communist Party. The party provided

meeting space and endorsed its leadership, while remaining indifferent to its activities. Some

participants were party members, but most were not. Though primarily a federation of musical

organizations, the League’s own unified activities included Unison: Organ of the American

Music League, which was published irregularly from 1936 to 1938. While most of the

organizations affiliated with the AML were amateur choruses, orchestras and bands, the

Composers’ Collective probably had the broadest impact. Founded as what would now be called

a consciousness-raising group, composers discussed political issues and the role that composers

could play in the movement. Considerable time was spent providing mutual feedback on work-

in-progress, addressing both the aesthetic and political dimensions of the art. Especially

significant about these composers was their deep reflection on the relationships that constituted

“musicking,” especially the relationships among composers, performers, and audience.5

4. To be sure, modern art also alienated many Americans, but by the 1930s realism had developed enough by

American artists, many of them left-leaning, that artists could create critically acclaimed art that carried political

meaning to ordinary Americans.

5 “Musicking” is a term elaborated by Edward Small to emphasize the activities of composing, performing, listening

to, talking about, dancing to, marching to, worshipping with, or doing other things with music, highlighting the

social interaction around these activities (1998).

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As these composers articulated these relationships, the salient dimensions were aesthetic

and political, leading them to problematize their aesthetic and political identities. The aesthetic

challenge was how to ensure the quality of music when engaging a constituency that many

considered inferior in terms of aesthetic preference and taste. Initially, they took for granted the

necessity of “good,” that is serious or classical,, music and were frequently flummoxed at how to

reach untutored audiences and amateur performers. We might characterize this challenge as how

to achieve aesthetic consonance, analogous to the need for frame alignment in political

mobilization.

The literature on social movement framing has focused on the extent to which activists

and potential constituents align on ideological and logical grounds.6 According to frame theory,

social movements are more likely to mobilize potential constituents when an organization’s

cognitive frames align with those of the target constituents’ (Snow et al. 1986). When

movements use culture to mobilize potential constituents, aesthetic consonance must be

established. The cultural forms that mediate between activists (including creative specialists) and

potential constituents must be aesthetically pleasing to both sides. For music, this includes genres

and categories such as serious music, jazz, popular music, or folk music, standards of what

“good” music is, shared understanding of when and where music is played or performed, and

shared tastes for harmonies, melodies, instrumentation, rhythms, and timbres. In relational terms,

aesthetics can be a bridge to bring individuals and groups together or a boundary to push them

6. Eyerman and Jamison use the term “cognitive praxis” to discuss the relationship of activists and potential

constituents though music, but as the term implies they prioritize the cognitive over the aesthetic. “Cognitive praxis

calls attention to the active creation of knowledge or consciousness in encountering the world” (Eyerman and

Jamison 1998, 22). When they speak aesthetics, they treat it as a characteristic of an art object, as in the Black

aesthetic that George Gershwin introduced into American classical music.

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apart. And the work of bringing people together or building boundaries to keep them apart can

take aesthetic form. For Pierre Bourdieu, aesthetic dispositions manifested as taste situate

individuals in the status hierarchy of society, though he feels that the deep imprinting of habitus

limits the ability of individuals to improve or change their status (Bourdieu 1984). Sometimes

the aesthetic dimension of relational work and the relational dimension of aesthetic work are

implicit and unconscious, but occasionally the connection is intentional, as we see in the case of

the composers studied here. While there were frequent suggestions for composers to meet

audiences and amateur performers halfway, there was greater emphasis on educating the

untutored, preserving the artists’ role as aesthetic judges.

The political puzzle was the extent to which “political” meant overt political content that

would heighten political understanding or simply mobilizing political organizations through

musicking. As a vanguard organization, the Communist Party’s model of working toward the

revolution was raising political consciousness through propaganda, which for music meant

infusing music with political content, captured in the phrase, “My Song is My Weapon”

(Lieberman 1995). But music as such has no verbal content. It can of course, be accompanied by

lyrics, but the effect of the music and the effect of the lyrics can be mutually reinforcing,

contradictory, or unrelated depending on the content of each, the context of production or

reception, and the interpretation of listeners. And for many composers, when music did have

verbal content in songs and opera, the heavy-handed propaganda common in Communist Party

politics offended their aesthetic sensibilities. Thus many of the composers were more oriented

toward infusing music into politically overt organizations, some of which were manifestly

musical organizations, especially leftist choruses and bands. They also aspired to bring good

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music to unions, peace organizations, and other organizations in the broad progressive

movement.

Three Phases of Aesthetic Relations in American Left Wing Music

The period focused on here is the middle of three phases that the “Old Left” or

Communist Party-centered musical project passed through. The first two coincided with periods

of the Communist international (Comintern) movement; the third was more specific to the

American movement and thus more loosely connected to the political party. The Communist

Party became active in the early 1920s, led by stalwarts who hewed close to the party line. In the

late 1920s, when the party moved into the “Third Period” proclaimed by the Soviets, prescribing

that national parties prepare for the imminent revolution workers were igniting, culture was to

embody a revolutionary spirit.7 For music, this meant capturing the spirit of militancy in lyrics

and sound. The Forward to the 1934 Workers Songbook compiled by the Composers’ Collective

expressed this sentiment:

Music Penetrates Everywhere

It Carries Words With It

It Fixes Them in the Mind

It Graves Them in the Heart

(quoted in Lieberman 1995, 28)

Like the combative, truculent broad strokes and sharp angles of socialist realist art, music

was to capture the heroic spirit of the proletariat as they rose against their masters. Outside the

Soviet Union, “Third Period” music was promoted most influentially by German composer

7 The “Third Period” was the Soviet’s third period, but the first of three American periods covered in this paper.

According to Soviet ideology, the First Period was the Russian Revolution, the Second Period was one of capitalist

consolidation, and the Third Period would see economic collapse in the west and worker revolution, led by

Communist vanguard. After the rise of Hitler in Germany, the Soviets declared a new policy of “Popular Front”

characterized by alliances with moderate capitalists against the Nazi threat.

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Hanns Eisler, a pupil of avant-garde atonal composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Eisler created

German music for the masses, much of it ultra-modern, including twelve-tone scale compositions

such as "Comintern and "In Praise of Learning which were popular in European political circles.

Fleeing Hitler in 1933, he came to the U.S. where he became a hero of leftist musicians. He was

especially disdainful of vernacular forms of music such as folk songs or the parodies of popular

songs associated with the International Workers of the World (Reuss and Reuss 2000, Reuss

1971, Cohen and Samuelson 1996, Lieberman 1995). For Eisler, the relationship of composer to

performer and audience was captured in the role of the vanguard, who was to instill aesthetic and

political truth into proletariat (Bick 2001). His future co-author Theodor Adorno would later

flesh out a theory of aesthetic vanguard, famously writing that popular music enfeebled

individuals because it required no active listening, lulling them into complacency. To liberate, he

argued, music must lay bare aspects of the musical material previous repressed The revolutionary

potential of the working class could be bolstered by instilling an aesthetic consciousness that

required discipline to master. The music of Arnold Schoenberg and his ilk were best suited to

foster this, in contrast to the supposedly tepid likes of his rivals and contemporaries, prime

among them Igor Stravinsky (Adorno 2002).

When Hitler gained power in Germany, embarked on remilitarization and increasingly

threatened the Soviet Union, the Comintern proclaimed a new policy, “The People’s Front

Against Fascism and War.” Worldwide revolution became secondary to the immediate threat of

fascism, and national communist movements were to partner with non-revolutionary leftists in

defending against the fascist threat. In the United States, the party allied with New Deal liberals

to embrace the culture of the people, not just the culture of the proletariat, that is music that

people enjoyed, not music written on behalf of the proletariat. The vanguard relationship of

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composer to performer and audience was challenged both because it had clearly failed to incite

proletarian culture and because the mission had changed. So the emphasis shifted from fortifying

audiences with revolutionary music to developing an extensive subculture of musical

participation. While many associated with the Communist Party had taken part in choruses,

orchestras and other music activity, the musical leadership now focused on fostering widespread

musical involvements. It is during this second phase that Unison was published and when the

questionnaire on composers’ perceptions of their audiences, analyzed below, was taken. Unison

was filled with items about choirs, orchestras and education. While the movement successfully

nurtured a formidable amateur musical world, it was somewhat out of sync with the Popular

Front emphasis on broadly-based American culture. The foreign-language base of many amateur

choruses limited their appeal to diverse American singers and audiences. And participation

required formal music training that also limited membership.

The Communist Party-centered movement resolved the tension between the composers’

aesthetic and political identities only by redefining their aesthetic identity in the third of the three

periods discussed here, when they focused on folk music as literally “the people’s music.”

Aesthetically, folk music embodied simplicity and authenticity refined over generations.

Politically, folk music was freed from its nationalistic roots as the music of “a” people and

valorized as music of “the” people. Unlike its conservative connotation in Europe, in America it

became the music of the Left (Reuss and Reuss 2000, Filene 2000, Roy 2010, Cohen and

Samuelson 1996, Cohen 2002, Lieberman 1995). But to understand how this happened, it is

necessary to understand the Left’s earlier experience with serious or classical music, the focus of

this paper.

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The Questionnaire

In 1936, Unison editor Reuben Ablowitz organized a questionnaire about how composers

thought about their audiences, intended for members of the Composers Collective and active

composers. There is no roster of who received it, but given the number of responses and the

letters of regret in Ablowitz’s files, it appears be on the order of 30 respondents, presumably all

white males.8 We do not know exactly who first initiated the idea of the questionnaire, but it was

presented as though it grew out of discussions in the Composers Collective.

The questionnaire is important not only as an informant on the views of those who

answered it but also as an indicator of how these musicians were doing politics. Inevitably the

question of audience would have arisen both in terms of the audience of particular pieces and

audiences in general.

The questionnaire contained only four open-ended questions, which some answered

tersely, while others elaborated on at length. The questions were:

1. Do you write with a definite audience in mind?

2. Is it important that you know the reaction of your audience to your music?

3. How do you visualize the ideal relation between a composer and his [sic] audience?

4. What can you as a composer suggest as a means for achieving this ideal relation?

The questions also reveal idealist assumptions about how relations are constructed.

Although it begins asking whether the composers write with a definite audience in mind, it builds

8 The questionnaire’s organizers aspired to sample all serious American composers. Those sharing political

sympathies may have disproportionately responded and may have elaborated their answers more fully. Ablowitz’s

files include follow-up letters and regrets. Some of both suggest that they were strangers to Ablowitz. There are also

letters from mutual third parties in which Ablowitz is seeking the addresses of composers.

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up to questions about the ideal relation and how such an ideal would be achieved. This implies

that the ideal would come first and dictate actions to achieve it rather than cobbling together a

vision of the relationship between composer and audience through the practical experience of

interacting with audiences. In fact, there is no question about how composers have actually

interacted with audiences, only what they have in mind, what they know about their audiences,

and how they visualize the ideal relationship.

The core impulse behind the questionnaire problematizes a relationship that composers

typically take for granted—the relationship between artist and audience, highlighting the social

nature of an activity conventionally treated as a relationship between an individual and an

abstract aesthetic standard. Traditional “pure” music was imagined as “pure” from social

relations, an aspiring or actual genius reaching for an ineffable truth recognized only by gifted

arbiters. Though composers did, of course, heed audience reaction, it was seen as a compromise

to true artistic achievement and was rarely discussed explicitly. So the fact that composers were

collectively reflecting on the relationship of composer to audience was a radical act made doubly

radical by the fact that it was under the auspices of a left-wing organization committed political

revolution.

It is also significant that the constituency here was composers rather than leaders or

members of the many American Music League chorus, band, and music school affiliates. The

Composers Collective was only one of the AML’s constituencies, but one of the more active

(Dunaway 1980, Dunaway 1979). We can surmise that the choice to focus on composers

reflected a vanguard consciousness that movement building worked from top to bottom and an

organizational reality that the composers had been more active. Implicit in the vanguard

consciousness is a relational aspect that those at the top have to consciously construct their

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relationship with the lower levels. The composers were adopting the role of the vanguard in their

relationship to listeners, who were treated as the role of the proletariat. There is no evidence that

the organization ever considered a survey of listeners to learn how presumed workers listened to

music or took music to heart. The composers had varying degrees of exposure to Marxist

thinking but few would have required much persuasion to assume the role of musical vanguard.

We see here that the questions permit answers that take the vanguard relationship for granted,

that composers decide what that relationship will be and expect their creative products to be

consumed by audiences, or that a more egalitarian relationship is imagined in which composers

feel accountable to audiences and learn from them. The vanguard relationship, however, was

mediated by the tensions of aesthetic and political identity, as elaborated below.

Aesthetic Identity

Aesthetic identity refers to how individual or collective actors relate to other actors

around issues of taste, beauty and the transcendent value of cultural objects. Aesthetic sensibility

involves not just a relationship between the individual and cultural objects, but also relationships

between people. Judgments of sublime or crass, refined or vulgar, beautiful or ugly, artistic or

prosaic are applied to people as well as objects. They can be a consequential dimension of “who

we are” and “who they are.” The identity in aesthetic identity involves the situation of the

individual or collective actors in relationship to other actors, often by boundary work creating,

reinforcing, or weakening boundaries (Roy 2002). Actors not only relate to each other in terms

of whether they are inside or outside boundaries, including aesthetic boundaries; they

unconsciously and consciously work to reinforce or change boundaries, broadening or narrowing

“who we are,” distancing or bridging “who they are.”

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The boundaries shaped by aesthetic identity can also structure other aspects of relations

for those within or across such boundaries. These boundaries delineate not only shared standards

of taste or beauty, but also shared salience of aesthetic judgment. The more people share a sense

of how important aesthetic judgment is relative to other dimensions of judgment, the more likely

they are to share a sense of “we.” A shared sense of aesthetic identity, a shared sense of “we,”

the more easily non-aesthetic communication can flow, and the likely the opportunity for

influence. It is plausible that a shared aesthetic identity even fosters greater trust because of the

implicit sense of similarity and shared tastes. Thus cultural creators are more likely to feel

accountable to those with whom they share aesthetic identity. Such accountability becomes

especially significant when the aesthetic sensibility is seen as hierarchical, a matter of “good” vs.

unrefined taste.

Questions in the Unison survey about how composers imagined their relationship with

their audience inevitably evoked reflections on aesthetic identity. Clearly aesthetic identity was

highly salient to them. As composers of serious music, taste was distinctly hierarchical, with

“good” music not only preferable but essential. It is evident from their responses that their own

worth was measured by where on that scale their music fell. Their implicit answer to the broad

question (not posed on the questionnaire) “Who Are We?” would be “We are composers of good

music.” In contrast they imagined their audiences’ tastes to fall on the lower end of that aesthetic

scale. The homology between aesthetic taste and social class was not just incidental but had been

activity constructed in American culture over the previous half century when symphony

orchestras and their concert halls, schools of music, and activists of “good taste” ploughed a

trough between highbrow and lowbrow culture. What seemed to make their relationship with

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their audience different from conventional non-politicized composers was the degree of

responsibility they felt for “raising” the taste of common folks.

The answers to the questionnaire revealed a spectrum of how relational or social the

composers imagined their relationship to their audiences. At one end were composers who

treated composers and audiences as people bound by a social relationship in which both bore

some responsibility for achieving aesthetic consonance. Most fell toward this end.

Only a few talked about their audiences in non-relational ways. Composer and novelist

Paul Bowles, for example, wrote “I am a composer and as such find it to my interest to have as

few ideas about music as possible.” In other words, he is eschewing any relationality, and

probably any politics, in his aesthetics. He composed according to abstract, ethereal, non-social

standards, leaving it up to his audience to independently appreciate the same aesthetic standards.

As a member of the writer Gertrude Stein’s circle in Paris and a roommate of composer Aaron

Copland in Tangier, it is likely that Bowles frequently conversed about music with people who

had many ideas about the art form. So the aversion to ideas about music was more of a stance

taken without reflection of all its implications than an actual description. Wallingford Riegger, a

modernist composer who made frequent use of the twelve-tone system, similarly falls at the end

of the spectrum with the least consideration of audience, writing that he seldom has an audience

in mind while composing. The relevant criteria of a piece of music are whether it is performed

well and often. While one might have surmised that Riegger’s indifference to audiences was

related to his avant-garde embrace of atonalism, predominantly tonal composers could be equally

dismissive. Composer and New York Herald Tribune critic Virgil Thomson responded to the

questionnaire: “Neither audience-reaction nor popularity-with-a-Public is of any value to the

composer as criticism. It is good for his morale, however, to know that the music works when it

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does.” He was more interested in the intensity of audience reaction than the direction in which it

went.9

None of the other composers who responded to interviews were as oriented toward the

market. But most who responded to the questionnaire thought of their audiences in relational

terms and connected their own aesthetic identity to an implicit social relationship with their

audience. And more than that, they answered in strategic terms line with their mission to guide

and educate. Henry Cowell, the second most renowned composer in the group after Aaron

Copland, imagined the relationship between composer and audience as an interaction in which

they were mutually seeking aesthetic refinement. In response to the question about whether he

considered his audiences when he composed, he responded tersely, “Yes; that is audiences, not

singular but plural.” One might have expected that Cowell—as a founding member of the

Composers’ Collective, where there had been much conversation about composers and

audiences—would have shared more detail about his views. The social content of the

relationship for Cowell was more explicit in the reciprocity he expected between composer and

audience, a stance probably reinforced in the Collective. He explicitly bridged the relationship

between composer and audience, advocating that the composer put him or herself into the role of

the audience in listening to his or her own work, asserting the radical notion that composers and

audiences could hear with more or less the same ears. Thus he attributed to audiences the

capacity to be vitally creative. Just as he proposed the composer listen as an audience member,

9 The Wikipedia entry about Thomson described his views on music as radical in their insistence on reducing the

rarefied aesthetics of music to market activity. Thomson even went so far as to claim that the style a piece was

written in could be most effectively understood as a consequence of its income source. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Thomson (December 12, 2015).

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he advocated that the audience listen as a composer “to take hold of the performed work as

though it were his own.” If the composer and audience member played this role, “there need be

no barrier.” While admirable in its goal, this formula seems very hypothetical. But though the

relationship between composer and audience was social, music itself was treated as “pure” rather

than social. What the audience member could offer the composer was feedback on how to

improve the music, a fundamentally aesthetic pursuit, part of the creative process. What the

composer offered the listener was “works of lasting human value” implicitly outside social

relations and history.

At the more social end of the spectrum, Communist Party member Henry Leland Clarke,

writing under the pseudonym Jonathan Franklin, found it inconceivable that one could not define

the audience. “Who ever heard of writing a letter and putting it in the mailbox in a blank

envelope? Of course a piece of music, like a letter, must be addressed to somebody.” While

Clarke may have been orienting his answer to his comrades who wrote the questionnaire,

especially since he was a party member, it is significant for the level of assertion—the claim that

any other answer would be unthinkable—and the fact that others did actually offer other

answers. Virgil Thompson, who was instrumental in the development of the “American Sound”

in classical music which incorporated vernacular music in tonal rendition, similarly seemed to

take it for granted that there was only one answer: “Yes.”

Most of those who expressed there was a large aesthetic gap between composers and

audiences advocated bridging the gap, presumably as a matter of political principle. There is very

little of what we might now characterize as a Bourdieuian sense of distinction by which cultured

20

people shunned the uncultivated.10 Rather, composers of good music were seen as having a

political responsibility to their audience to enhance their tastes. For example, Norman Cazden,

though sounding like a traditional elitist when talking about taste, hoped to “attain sufficient

intelligibility of idiom to reach all those who wait on line to buy 25¢ tickets to the Stadium

concerts.” Though clearly situating himself as superior to the masses, he felt that the best service

the movement could provide for ordinary people was to educate them about contemporary music.

That did not mean conventional formal music appreciation courses, which he thought typically

creates more disinterest than enlightenment. Rather it meant “that the audience be taught, not

simply romantically and attractively informed.” He further advocated more equal standing

between audience and composers and repudiated the awe with which composers were sometimes

held, but still regarded the composers in the position of teacher and the audience in the position

of students. So he suggested that composers organize serious classes at the Downtown Music

School in New York, an affiliate of the AML.

A few composers defined their relationship to audiences entirely in non-aesthetic terms.

Avant-garde-turned-Hollywood composer George Antheil aspired to reach as large an audience

as possible. He saw his relationship with the audience in social terms, based on actual

interaction: “If a composer not only writes for a specific audience but grows up with it, studies,

attempts to educate it and impart to it his own courage, he will most certainly find that no more

ideal relationship could possibly exist.” American born, Antheil had been a highly avant-garde

10 Violaine Roussel has pointed out that educating the uncultivated is not necessarily contradictory to have a sense of

distinction, and the quotes you give express this sense on the part of composers often, I feel. Also, Bourdieu

develops the idea that the political field is structured in homologous ways to the whole social space and the left-wing

is “dominated amongst the dominants” which is why they have a “taste” for (or an affinity with) the socially

underprivileged groups that they represent politically (personal communication).

21

composer in Europe where his works once provoked so much clamoring in the concert that the

police were called in. With the rise of Hitler he returned to the U. S., settling in Hollywood,

where he wrote the responses to this questionnaire.11 Even though these composers wrote in a

variety of forms, including art music, for the stage, even Hollywood, the only aesthetic discussed

was classical, avant-garde or high art. But the composers all aspired to achieve aesthetic

consonance with ordinary people. Their boundary work was one of bridging the relationships

inside an arena that was predominantly political rather than aesthetic, an arena they aspired to

redefine into a shared aesthetic identity. Many of them wanted to solidify a shared aesthetic

identity and become accountable to their audiences, but for most their own aesthetic identity

trumped the other identities that might have made that possible. Atypical in their view that fine

art was not just for refined people and for the explicit relational work they undertook with their

music, as a group they had few clues about how to bridge the aesthetic gap between themselves

and the people they hoped to enlighten.

Political Identity

Political identity refers to how individual or collective actors relate to other actors around

issues linked to political institutions—most notably states, parties, social movements, and

government policies. For the economically or socially privileged, political identity is typically

invoked on behalf of other people’s interests. If self-interests are involved, political identity is

typically based on long-term interests vested in broad social change. In the context of the Unison

11 For more, please see the website about George Antheil at: http://www.antheil.org/george.html (December 12,

2015).

22

survey, political identity answered the question “Who are we?” in the extent to which the

composers saw music contributing to revolutionary change. The question “Who are they?”

involved two facets. The manifest one characterized audiences as workers. The more implicit

definition was that audience members were politically committed activists—the composers’

actual constituency, but one they rarely described in their responses.

Just as a major dimension of aesthetic identity spanned the hierarchical relationship

between refined and banal taste, political identity spanned a hierarchical dimension between

leaders and followers. The leadership was accorded the legitimacy to speak on behalf of and

represent to the broader society for those who shared political identity. Followers were expected

to exercise deference to leaders on political issues. But often the leadership was not necessarily

from the same social strata as those purportedly benefitting from political actions, especially in

vanguard organizations where leaders acted on behalf of groups that they did not necessarily

belong to themselves. Conversely, there may have been a symbolic hierarchy based on the

degree to which people embody the “we-ness” in a political identity, especially when the

political identity was defined in terms of a group. So members of a given ethnicity in culturally-

based groups, women in gender-based groups, or workers in class-based groups carried political

and often moral authority and commanded deference that may or may not have aligned with

formal leadership. The Communist-inspired movements of the 1930s were unusually hierarchical

in formal leadership, with an explicit vanguard that claimed to act on behalf of workers, who

embodied the “we-ness” around which the movement built its political identity. So those active

in the movement had to define their relationship to workers to be part of those included in “Who

we are.” The composers were thus in a peculiar position, high in the aesthetic hierarchy but

marginal in the political, complicating the boundary work. Vanguardism permits a relationship in

23

which leaders can speak for but not necessarily of the constituency. The Composers’ Collective

was trying to build a bridge between the musician’s aesthetic identity and political identity by

inventing what it meant to be a “we” of politically committed composers.

While some of the composers imagined their audience aesthetically in terms of listeners

who could appreciate their music, others declared that they composed for workers. But we

cannot assume that those who imagined their audiences in purely aesthetic terms lacked any

political identity. For political identity was the most salient factor in affiliating with the AML

and Composers’ Collective. One did not participate in organizations known to be affiliated with

the Communist movement (even before red-baiting thoroughly stigmatized it) without some sort

of political commitment. Though the respondents to the Unison survey varied in the extent to

which they adopted overtly aesthetic or political, language, it is safe to assume that they all knew

AML’s politics, and to some degree supported them. For example, Norman Cazden framed his

relationship to the audience totally in aesthetic terms, but later sent Unison editor Reuben

Ablowitz a note regretting that his poor health prevented more active participation in the AML.

“But you can definitely count on me as a supporter, and I can only wish you every success.” He

was clearly more political than his answers to this questionnaire reveal. An investigation by the

House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 precipitated a 16-year hiatus from any

academic position, during which Cazden taught piano and did research on folk music.12

Some respondents defined their audiences in the same terms as AML publications did,

though we don’t know if they shaped the AML or were persuaded by them. Elie Siegmeister, like

the AML as a whole, identified his audience as “workers and their allies; students, professional,

12 See http://www.normancazden.com/biography/ (January 4, 2016).

24

some middle class people; in general all those who are interested in this kind of music.” There is

a certain ambiguity in this response about whether he was reaching out to workers and other

listed constituencies, or to people interested in his kind of music, as though they were

unproblematically the same. To the extent that they might have been different, he wrote that “the

ideal relation of the composer and his audience should be one in which the audience make very

real and definite demands upon the composer, which the composer strives to fulfill. Composition

should be the act of satisfying some real human need. It should be, as it unfortunately is not to-

day, social work of the highest order.” Henry Leland Clarke, writing as Jonathan Franklin,

similarly defined his audience in political terms: “the Americans who work for a living.” He

sensed that they were hungry for music “which will help them in their struggle for decency and

peace and freedom.”13 Like Siegmeister, after defining audience in terms of social class, Clarke

brought the aesthetic and political together, distinguishing between writing for entertainment and

“music to impart ideas and courage.” Ideas, as in ideologies, and courage are fundamentally

political more than aesthetic. But since both are imparted in the music itself, the orientation is

aesthetic. The political experience is entirely within the music. But the important point is not

whether the orientation is aesthetic or political, but the fact that it is purely neither.

Most of the identity work involving responsibilities that composers have to audiences is

thought out in political more than aesthetic terms. Henry Leland Clarke’s exposure to Marxism is

reflected in his answer about how composers reach audiences: “The composer should give to his

audience according to its needs” – a statement directly echoing the famous Communist dictum of

“to each according to his needs” – implying that composers have an ability that listeners don't, a

13 It's unclear whether he means they are eager for the music that will help them in their struggle or that all music

will help them in their struggle, and they are eager for that. There is no comma after “music,” implying the latter.

25

notion that is not necessarily unrealistic in fact, but significant in being the primary framing of

the relationship. Clarke rebutted the notion that doing so would compromise the quality of

creativity, affirming that the act of giving to the audience according to their needs would help

develop the composers’ “social and esthetic quality.” Presumably, “social” here means its

political effectiveness and “esthetic” refers to the purely musical dimension.

For Elie Siegmeister, “the composer should be teacher, prophet, dramatist, entertainer all

rolled into one. This naturally pre-supposes at certain times a strong obligation on the part of the

audience to raise its demands to the highest level.” What is important here for the relationship of

aesthetic identity and political identity is the way that Siegmeister glided from one to the other.

Although he defined who the audience was in very political terms, he analyzed the relationship

itself in aesthetic terms. What he owed to his audience and what they owed to him was aesthetic,

not political; a matter of good taste, not of political fidelity. Still there was another level of

political reasoning in that Siegmeister treated the relationship between composer and audience as

a matter of mutual responsibility more than authoritative teaching. In contrast to others who

characterized the relation of composer to audience as education, enlightenment, or solidarity, he

proposed a relationship of mutual obligation. Rather than assume that aesthetic quality is

something that composers bring to the table or that audiences are expected to master, for

Siegmeister quality seemed to grow out of the social relationship. Composers were advised to

learn from audiences and audiences to demand quality from the composers. And for the

audiences’ part, their role was characterized in terms of their will or assertiveness, not their

responsibility to learn. To be sure, the composer's role was characterized as teacher, prophet,

dramatist and entertainer, but he emphasized that this “naturally presupposes” a strong obligation

on the part of the audience: “It is a great audience as much if not more than a great composer

26

which makes for good music; our audiences must know how to make their reactions and

demands more vocal and coherent.” Unlike other composers who framed the ability of

audiences to give feedback in terms of formal training as listeners, he stated that the audience

should learn about music from participating in choirs or bands to understand artistic techniques

and creations. This would make the relationship between composer and audience more of a

partnership.

As a core member of the Composers’ Collective, Siegmeister did some of the most

explicit boundary work seeking to bridge the gap between composers and workers, advocating

that composers fortify a shared political identity. “The composer must come closer to the lives,

and vital interests and problems of the majority of his fellow-Americans, particularly productive

workers.” George Anthiel expressed a similar sentiment. “If a composer not only writes for a

specific audience but grows up with it, studies it, attempts to educate it and impart to it his own

courage, he will most certainly find that no more ideal relationship could possibly exist.” These

passages display a consciousness that the musical relationship is intimately bound up in the

social relationship, with the implication that the social relationship underlies the musical

relationship. Thus in the composers’ responses, music was not treated as “pure,” as disembodied

above society. Moreover, the listener was defined in terms of a social category–workers–rather

than an aesthetic category, such as those who could appreciate the music. The social relationship

of composer and audience then could rise to the meaning, or at least the goal, of the music, that

is, “portraying these lives and problems in music in such a manner as to throw light on them.”

Shared aesthetic identity in music was claimed to have the potential to solidify a shared political

identity. Though Siegmeister’s “lives and problems” are manifestly social, one can assume that

27

portraying them required an aesthetic dimension, the aesthetic of social realism found in

literature of the same period.

Most of the other respondents had defined their relationship with the audience in either

political or aesthetic terms, hoping to narrow either the political or aesthetic gap. It was rare to

find a composer admit that he would compromise aesthetic quality for political goals. Instead

they tended to deny that there was a problem. The tension was there but could be challenged. But

some asserted that the tension was not inevitable, often with an implicit after-the-revolution

assumption. Marc Blitzstein, composer of the historic The Cradle Will Rock and an intellectual

leader of the AML, challenged the underlying assumptions of the questions posed, asserting that

composing with a radical consciousness would transcend the political/aesthetic tension. He

refused to accept the tension between politics and aesthetics, asserting that his orientation was

toward proletarian society and revolution, but qualifying (without elaboration) that while

composing, his concentration was totally upon the “thing at hand.” George Antheil, like

Blitzstein, had written an explicitly political opera, No For an Answer, and also explicitly

challenged the incompatibility of aesthetics and politics. Presumably they adopted that stance

more because of their politics than because of their aesthetics. Blitzstein was more explicitly

political, defining his audience in political terms. Antheil used very little overt political language.

When framing the relationship between composer and audience in egalitarian language,

the reasoning would be presumably more political than aesthetic. Henry Cowell wrote that the

ideal is for “(a) every Composer to be able to be a member of the audience in listening to his own

work, judging whether he has succeeded in saying anything significant just as impersonally as

though his was the work of another; (b) for every member of the audience to be as vitally

creative in his response as the Composer in his offering, and for each member to feel free to take

28

hold of the performed work as though it were his own and make suggestions for its alteration and

improvement. Thus there need be no barrier between Composer and auditor if the Composer

listens and the auditor creates.” From this perspective the relationship between composer and

listener was not only egalitarian in political terms but reciprocal in aesthetic terms. Cowell thus

anticipated more recent “reception” theory and the idea of audience as “creative” agent which

bridges the conventional gap between creators and consumers of cultural works (Holub 2013).

Unless one had a politically motivated faith that audience members were aesthetically qualified

to substantially help a composer improve his or her music, he or she might compromise the

music’s quality. Or without the political faith that their audiences were aesthetically qualified to

judge music, composers needed the political commitment to compromise for the sake of a better

world. Cowell wrote that “Composers must give up their ‘high hat’ attitude that they are giving

the auditors an inspired message, a message from up high to those down low. Auditors must give

up their ‘of-course-I'm-not-musical-and-could-never-understand-it-but-I-like-it’ attitude, and

learn to help do their own share of Creating by giving composers that comradely participation in

his efforts, without which he will fail to produce works of lasting human value.” It was thus

their comradely participation, their shared political identity, which fortified their shared aesthetic

identity.

A few composers had vague prescriptive references for how to progress politically.

Siegmeister had the most explicit prescriptions, addressing music’s purported political and utopic

functions. “I feel it part of my function to hasten, through musical means, the arrival of a social

order which permits such a relation. Music is one of the greatest educational forces we know.”

But it is not clear how music educates or how it might bring about a new social order. The clue

seems to be in what music affects, penetrating “not only our minds, but in our blood.” He

29

challenged composers to come out into the open, standing with the workers. How standing with

the workers affects the music, whether workers are to be among the listening audience, or just

who the beneficiaries are is unclear.

We don’t know yet what sort of political consciousness the composers in the AML and

Composers’ Collective brought to these organizations, and whether and how much they became

more political through their involvement. One of the conclusions from the study of music in

collective action is that the kinds of identity that lend themselves to mobilization and collective

action are not always obvious or predictable. In particular the internal identities within the world

of doing music intersect with non-musical identities through identity work that can successfully

politicize or depoliticize a wide variety of identities (Polletta and Japser 2001). Politically

engaged musicians must juggle aesthetic identities and political identities in a social context that

penalizes unifying them (Roussel 2007).

Nonetheless, it is clear that these organizations crystallized and gave form to a radical

reconsideration of the composers’ relationship to their aesthetic and political identities. As it

turned out, their audience did develop, but it was not the working class in general as much as the

political subculture that supported the composers for their politics as much as for their music.

These were the politically engaged and culturally sophisticated communities of large cities that

self-identified as leftist, attended plays, concerts, and art exhibits, read criticism and fiction, and

sent their children to radical summer camps. That was probably the population from which the

1500 attendees of the American Music League Festival were drawn.

After Unison

At the time Unison was published, a reader could reasonably be optimistic about the

future of a progressive musical world in which some of America’s best composers of serious art

30

music redefined the relationship between composer and audience. Though embryonic and hardly

coherent, must less widely shared, the Composers’ Collective program was taking the first steps

toward revolutionizing the art world of music. But the movement was stillborn, never fully alive.

Whether the failure was structurally inevitable or floundered on the shoals of poor strategy or

feeble wills is a topic beyond the scope of this paper. But the movement did feed into two kinds

of success. First, many but by no means all of the composers redefined their aesthetic identity by

abandoning or radically revising their aesthetic standards, shifting from modernist art music to

folk music, making music less the responsibility of composers and surrendering left-wing music

to the “Peoples Songs” movement. A few of the composers such as Elie Siegmeister and Norman

Cazden became active contributors to the project of collecting and promoting folk music across

the country. Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson embraced American folk themes in their fine

music but abandoned overt political activism. Most of the composers surveyed here soon lost any

connection to musical activism, retreating into professional careers, as a younger generation led

by Charles Seeger’s son Pete, Alan Lomax, his sister Bess Lomax Hawes, and Irwin Silber, Josh

White and Lee Hays revitalized left-wing musicking under the auspices of People’s Songs, Inc.

Second, in conjunction with the folk-song movement, the Left sustained the vital progressive

subculture centered in but not confined to New York, at least until mid-century, when Cold War

repression emaciated the Left and a new generation allied with the New Left embraced the

radical culture of the 1960s (which owed more to the Old Left than usually acknowledged). The

progressive subculture was manifestly a political movement, but clearly permeated by a strong

aesthetic identity expressed through literature, drama, dance, and of course, music.

31

Conclusion

The biggest puzzle of American leftist culture during the 1930s, especially in music, is

how the Left was able to create such a rich, active, effervescent subculture with so little

connection to most Americans, especially the workers they understood as their constituency.

That is, how do we explain the concomitant vitality and insularity of leftist culture? My analysis

is not factually different from prevailing accounts that emphasize the aesthetic gap between

activists and constituents (Denning 1996, Roy 2010, Hemingway 2002, Lieberman 1995).

Michael Denning’s authoritative history of left-wing culture in the 1930s similarly focuses on the

relationship of culture and politics, arguing that the participants in the cultural front were

theorizing as well as enacting a novel relationship of culture to politics (Denning 1996). The

contribution here is that the way that musicians construct and enact their various identities offers

a more generalizable analysis of how art does politics. The composers who participated in the

Composers’ Collective and AML were asking the right questions in surveying themselves about

their relationships with their audiences. Few politically engaged artists were as reflective. But the

ideas around identity revealed in their answers reflected wishful thinking about the aesthetic and

political relations with the audience. Perhaps their experience within the insular world of left-

wing culture blinkered their image of the working class audiences outside. The idea of a critical

mass of aesthetically sophisticated workers, constructed as part of their political identities and

worldviews, were more mythic than real. Rather than realistically face the challenges presented

by the aesthetic gap between themselves and most workers, the composers either claimed that it

didn't exist, hoped that education would bridge it, or ultimately let their aesthetic identity trump

any political identity.

32

There is one major limitation to the relational analysis presented here. The relationship is

presented from only one side. We have little evidence on how the various audiences understood

their aesthetic and political relations with composers. We do know that there was an enthusiastic

politically committed audience inside the vibrant left-wing subculture (Lieberman 1995, Reuss

and Reuss 2000). We can surmise that those who participated in the many concerts, choruses,

bands, camps, and schools affiliated with the AML would have shared the linkage between

aesthetic and political identity. But it is clear that the composers’ aspirations extended beyond

the leftist subculture to audiences, especially workers, more generally. And it is clear that the

movement embodied in the Composers Collective and the AML was short-lived, a brilliant

cultural flash that sent reverberations thereafter, but increasingly faint ones. American composers

continued to have a left-of-center core of activists including Roy Harris, Leonard Bernstein and

John Adams, most of them influenced by Composers Collective member Aaron Copland.

The most general conclusion from this analysis is that social relations among people are

multiplex and that the consonance or dissonance among different dimensions shapes not only the

overall relationship of those involved but also each dimension separately. The tension between

the relations defined by aesthetic identity and political identity—the answers to the questions

“Who are we?” and “Who are they?”— could not be resolved within the terms initially set by the

Composers’ Collective. Gathering with an organization defined most fundamentally in political

terms, an organization affiliated with the American Communist Party, composers sought to

redefine aesthetic relations with audiences in a radical way, redefining the boundary between

composer and audience. This worked within the boundaries of the progressive movement as

activists flocked to political and musical events where the leftist composers’ music was played,

solidifying an enduring subculture of radical high culture. But the composers could not broaden

33

the boundary of progressive culture without a fundamental aesthetic realignment, with fine music

retreating into conventional settings while folk music was embraced as the music of the Left. The

turn to folk music redrew the aesthetic boundaries as those wedded to fine music disengaged

while vernacular musicians entered the fold. The politics that these new musicians brought to

leftist music broadened the political boundaries at the same time, as “Who we are politically”

included the audiences of Woody Guthrie and Kentucky miner-singer Aunt Molly Jackson, and

the like.

Thus the boundary work at the intersection of different dimensions of relations affects

each of those dimensions. In this case the composers’ boundary work at the intersection of

aesthetic and political dimensions influenced both. The very act of making the boundary between

composer and audience revealed the boundary as an obvious object of human agency rather than

fact built into the nature of reality. That such an inquiry was conducted under the auspices of a

left-wing movement politicized the relationship and pushed composer and audience together.

Composers answered the question “Who are we?” as (to paraphrase), “We are composers who

write with a conscious consideration of audiences, knowing that our music can foster greater

social awareness and that we are accountable to them. We can liberate, not just exalt.” Similarly,

the composers’ political identity changed in relationship to their music. They learned that music

had political meaning not just in the words or lyrics, but that music could help build a political

movement. While their aesthetic identities were politicized, their political identities were

aestheticized.

Finally, this case study has shown how what is manifestly an unsuccessful movement in

the short term can nevertheless have positive long-term consequences. Even though the impulse

to write serious art music for the working class was short-lived, the American Left became

34

imbued with music, though of a different sort, piloted by some of the leaders of the Composers

Collective. And the broader progressive culture continued to inspire and enrich its members and

beyond.

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