Music of conflict

A group of students taking the Music of Conflict course are visiting the Holocaust Centre on Friday. I will need to talk to them about the Holocaust, but what can I say that is relevant to budding musicians? What is there in my past, in my life that is meaningful. Perhaps I should talk about my mother-in-law listening the Hungarian national anthem with tears in her eyes, or my mother celebrating Horthy riding into Kassa (Kosice) on his beautiful white horse when that part of Slovakia was re-incorporated into Hungary, (white horse for an Admiral of the Fleet? but those were topsy-turvy times), or should I talk about Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, in which in the Intermezzo he introduces the theme of the Hungarian folk song, 'I set out from my beautiful country', after all these are music students. Or should I talk about patriotism? Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, said to Benyamin Netanyahu when he visited Israel, that the thing they have in common is that they are both patriots. Patriots, patriotism are dangerous, pernicious terms. No one can question Bartok's love of his country, his patriotism, but his patriotism was inclusive. It included the music, the dances of all the various ethnic minorities that lived on the land that Bartok called his homeland. The Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire defined Hungarians as people who spoke Magyar, the language of the country. This is very different from Orban's patriotism, which sees Hungary as the outpost of European Christianity, that has to build fences, create separations, the patriotism of exclusion. It dwells on the differences, "us" and "them", and if you are not one of "us" you have no share in whatever defines your nationality. So my mother and us, and all Jews, though we spoke beautiful literary Hungarian, were excluded as Jews. We were the 'them'. Once you were excluded you had no claim on patriotism, no claim on your country, no claim on your society, and finally no claim as a human being that is part of the community of the nation. Such Nazi racist ideology lead to conundrums that would be laughable were they not tragic. Modern physics was deemed Jewish science, the art of Jewish artists, musicians was considered 'degenerate'.

The music of such decidedly not Jewish musicians as Stravinsky, Hindemith and many others had the honour of being lumped in with degenerate musicians such as Mendelssohn. The example of the absurdity of this is Vom Judische Schiksal, the work of Richard Fuchs, German Jewish composer, who lived the final years of his life in New Zealand. The four movements of this large symphonic choral work  includes one movement that is a true German marching songs, another that sounds like a Lutheran chorale. Not surprisingly, the German authorities stopped the performance of this work. How could you tell that this was Jewish, not German music. Even they must have seen the absurdity of the concept of 'Jewish' music. The Soviets put other limitations on music. Good music was the Alexandrov Army Ensemble with its faux rousing folk songs on cossack dances, the degenerate music was the music of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and a long list of the foremost Russian composers, all because Stalin went to the Opera, watched Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsenks and didn't like it. At least, the thing that can be said for Hitler and Stalin is that they cared. Art mattered to them. Donald Trump caring about John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, or even Aaron Copland, is beyond imagination. I can't see Winston Peters, or for that matter John Key getting very bothered about Ross Harris, John Psathas or Gareth Farr. So talking about the Holocaust and music, perhaps even the music of conflict, I should talk about music, patriotism, inclusion and exclusion.