Wednesday (5/18) on the New York Times blog Opinionator, composer David T. Little writes, “I was 19 years old when I first heard the Kronos Quartet’s ‘Howl, U.S.A.’ The album dons as its cover Robert Mapplethorpe’s stunning portrait of a tattered, weatherworn and ever-so-slightly transparent American flag. … I became obsessed with the idea that music could change society, composing what I understood at the time to be political works. I followed my instincts, and gave little consideration to the theory behind it all. But eventually questions began to arise, both from others and myself. Some wanted to know how a piece of instrumental music could be political, or why I thought classical music was especially suited for this purpose. Others dismissed the political statements within the works as preaching to the converted, or decried the music’s alleged subjugation to a political message. Is all political music leftist, people asked, or can there be right-wing political music, too? I realized that I simply didn’t know the answers to these questions. … At a certain point, I settled upon something akin to Napoleon’s modified seventh commandment from ‘Animal Farm’: all music is political, but some music is more political than other music. The question then became: how can one effectively engage the political without negatively impacting the art?”
Posted May 20, 2011
