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Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
British music-theatre works of the 1960s and early 1970s largely avoided direct engagement with contemporary political topics. Intriguing in this light is Michael Hall's recent proposition that Brecht's music theatre set the terms for younger British composers’ experiments with the genre. Brecht proved a complicated model, however, because of composers’ anxieties about music's capability to convey sociopolitical messages, and their reluctance to accord popular music a progressive function. The entanglement of Vietnam War activism and rock music forms the backdrop for analyses of two works that do address Vietnam directly: Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine and George Newson's Arena (both 1971) – both of which also pass pointed comment on different popular-music traditions. Both works highlight the difficulty in emulating Brecht's model in an era when the concept of ‘the political’ was being significantly redefined, and the cultural gap between activist cadres and the wider population was unprecedentedly visible.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 2018 The Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
I am grateful to Anthony Gilbert and George Newson for generously sharing recollections about their works. My thanks to Michael Hooper for perceptive comments on a draft of this article, and to Philip Rupprecht for joining Michael and me in a session on British music theatre at the Royal Musical Association Annual Conference 2013, which formed the starting point for this project. Thanks also to Declan Kennedy and Richard Malton at the BBC Music Library for facilitating access to the surviving performance materials for Newson's Arena. Finally, I am grateful to the journal's anonymous reviewers for helping to improve this article in a number of respects.
References
1 Mark Donnelly, ‘Sixties Britain: The Cultural Politics of Historiography’, Preserving the Sixties: Britain and the ‘Decade of Protest’, ed. Trevor Harris and Monia O'Brien Castro (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 10–32.
2 Peter Doggett, There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 166; Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (Harlow: Pearson, 2005), 144; Sylvia Ellis, quoted in Celia Hughes, Young Lives on the Left: Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 8; David Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956–1968 (London: Penguin, 1976), 305. See also Hughes, Young Lives on the Left, 1–2.
3 See Musikkulturen in der Revolte: Studien zu Rock, Avantgarde und Klassik im Umfeld von ‘1968’, ed. Beate Kutschke (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), and Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
4 Sylvia Ellis, ‘British Opposition to the Vietnam War, 1964–68’, The Insular Dream: Obsession and Resistance, ed. Kristiaan Versluys (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), 166–82 (pp. 179–80).
5 Michael Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 1960–1975 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015).
6 For example, Brecht's name is absent from the indexes to Paul Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Robson, 1982); Michael Hall, Harrison Birtwistle (London: Robson, 1984); Mike Seabrook, Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1994); Hall, Harrison Birtwistle in Recent Years (London: Robson, 1998); and Robert Adlington, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It receives a single mention in Philip Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and three fleeting mentions in David Beard, Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). As we shall see, of the leading Manchester triumvirate only Alexander Goehr had sustained involvement in the theatre of Brecht.
7 Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 60, 109.
8 Brook, quoted in Heather Wiebe, ‘Confronting Opera in the 1960s: Birtwistle's Punch and Judy’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 142 (2017), 173–204 (p. 181). On ‘rough theatre’ in Birtwistle, see Jonathan Cross, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (London: Faber, 2000), chapter 2. On Artaud, see Beard, Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre, 280–6. Wiebe notes (p. 190) that critics reviewing the first production of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy regularly referenced Artaud, apparently following remarks made by the director, Anthony Besch. Birtwistle has, however, bluntly rejected the association of Punch and Judy's violence with the rebellious era of which it was a part; see Beard, Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre, 39.
9 Virginia Anderson, ‘“1968” and the Experimental Revolution in Britain’, Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 171–87.
10 Ibid.
11 Benjamin Piekut, ‘Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 67 (2014), 769–824 (p. 801).
12 David Addison, ‘Politics, Patronage, and the State in British Avant-Garde Music, c.1959–c.1974’, Twentieth-Century British History, 27 (2016), 242–65. On the projection of this image by the BBC, see Neil Edmunds, ‘William Glock and the British Broadcasting Corporation's Music Policy, 1959–73’, Contemporary British History, 20 (2006), 233–61.
13 The most detailed account of these summer schools is to be found at Michael Hooper's blog, <https://wardourcastlesummerschool.wordpress.com/> (accessed 23 April 2018). Hooper lists David Bedford, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Brian Ferneyhough, Anthony Gilbert, Alexander Goehr, Robin Holloway, David Lumsdaine, Bayan Northcott, Michael Nyman, Roger Smalley, Michael Tippett and Hugh Wood as having been among those who attended the summer schools, with most present at both events.
14 Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 252.
15 Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 16–17; Hall is quoting from his interview with Gilbert.
16 Anthony Gilbert, quoted in <https://wardourcastlesummerschool.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/gilbert-and-lumsdaine> (accessed 23 April 2018).
17 David Drew, ‘Why Must Arden Die?’, The Music of Alexander Goehr, ed. Bayan Northcott (London: Schott, 1980), 32–9 (pp. 33–4).
18 It is counterpointed by a parallel interest in the work of Sergei Eisenstein, whose writings and montage techniques formed the basis for the cantatas The Deluge (1958) and Sutter's Gold (1961); see Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 148–61.
19 Jürgen Schebera, ‘Hanns Eisler, Walter Goehr and Alexander Goehr: The Long Road to the Deutsche Symphonie in London, January 1962’, Eisler in England: Proceedings of the International Hanns Eisler Conference, London 2010, ed. Oliver Dahin and Erik Levi (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2014), 107–15 (p. 110).
20 Ibid.
21 Paul Griffiths, ‘“ … es ist nicht wie es war … ”: The Music of Alexander Goehr’, Alexander Goehr: ‘Fings ain't wot they used t'be’, ed. Werner Grünzweig, Archive zur Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, 13 (Hofheim: Wolke, 2012), 15–90 (p. 64). There are more details on Goehr's Mermaid Theatre work at <http://www.fcqv.org/Goehr/Stageworks.htm> (accessed 23 April 2018).
22 Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 7. Conditional credence had earlier been given to Brecht as a model for British opera by Tippett, who cited the 1956 London productions of the Berliner Ensemble as an important stimulus for King Priam (1956–62). Tippett could not, however, accept Brecht's insistence that the audience distance itself emotionally from the characters. See Tippett, ‘The Resonance of Troy: Essays and Commentaries on King Priam’, Music of the Angels: Essays and Sketchbooks, ed. Meirion Bowen (London: Eulenberg, 1980), 222–34 (pp. 222–3), and Ian Kemp, Tippett: The Composer and his Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 357–8.
23 Margaret Eddershaw, Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances (London: Routledge, 1996), 4.
24 Ibid., 55–6.
25 Janelle G. Reinelt, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 7.
26 Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context 1956–1965 (London: Routledge, 1995), 156.
27 Nora Alter, Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 48.
28 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 1968), 80.
29 An example would be the first production by the CAST theatre company in 1966, John D. Muggins Is Dead, which ‘explored the links […] between the capitalist system and mass murder’; Bill McDonnell, ‘CAST’, British Theatre Companies 1965–1979: CAST, The People Show, Portable Theatre, Pip Simmons Theatre Group, Welfare State International, 7:84 Theatre Companies, ed. John Bull (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017), 121–46 (p. 124).
30 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964).
31 Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 143.
32 Stephen Hinton, Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 180–2. The revised Brecht text (without music) was entitled Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis. Gilbert's recollection thus confuses the title of the two versions; the music-theatre work is properly named simply Lehrstück.
33 Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 29.
34 On the difficulty of a narrow definition of the Lehrstück genre, see Hinton, Weill's Musical Theater, chapter 7, and Calico, Brecht at the Opera, chapter 1.
35 Alexander Goehr, ‘Manchester Years’, Finding the Key: Selected Writings of Alexander Goehr, ed. Derrick Puffett (London: Faber, 1998), 27–41 (p. 29).
36 For an account of Fried's political work, see Gregory Divers, The Image and Influence of America in German Poetry since 1965 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), chapter 5. Goehr also set Fried's poetry in the song cycle Warngedichte (‘Poems of Warning’, 1966–7), at the heart of which are five poems from Fried's landmark collection und Vietnam und. Vietnam was also the focus of a third Goehr–Fried collaboration, the protest song ‘King Herod's Carol’, written for a 1966 rally in Trafalgar Square; see Griffiths, ‘“ … es ist nicht wie es war … ”’, 65.
37 Goehr, quoted in Drew, ‘Why Must Arden Die?’, 32.
38 Goehr, quoted in a 1967 BBC documentary on Arden Must Die, available online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnHtvz-moD0> (accessed 23 April 2018).
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 116.
42 Alexander Goehr and Stanley Sadie, ‘Naboth's Vineyard’, Musical Times (July 1968), 625–6.
43 Writing at the time of the première, Michael Nyman noted that Goehr intended a connection with the German industrialist Alfried Krupp, who collaborated with the Nazis and was allowed to retain his business empire after the war; see Michael Nyman, ‘Alexander Goehr's Naboth's Vineyard’ (1968), Michael Nyman: Collected Writings, ed. Pwyll ap Siôn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 36–8. Nowhere is this connection made explicit in the piece itself, however.
44 See Nyman, ‘Alexander Goehr's Naboth's Vineyard’; Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 117–23.
45 Calico writes on the gap between theory and practice in this regard; see Brecht at the Opera, 32–4, 41–2.
46 Brecht, ‘On the Use of Music in Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. Willett, 84–90 (pp. 90, 87).
47 Kim Kowalke, ‘Brecht and Music: Theory and Practice’, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 218–34 (p. 224).
48 Ibid., 220.
49 Brecht, ‘On the Use of Music in Epic Theatre’, 88.
50 Kowalke, ‘Brecht and Music’, 221.
51 Michael Burden, ‘A Foxtrot to the Crucifixion’, Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies, ed. Richard McGregor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 51–65 (pp. 64–5).
52 On this element of Punch and Judy, see Nyman, ‘Harrison Birtwistle's “Punch and Judy”’, Michael Nyman, ed. ap Siôn, 38–41 (p. 41).
53 Hugh Greene speaking in 1962, quoted in Addison, ‘Politics, Patronage, and the State’, 260.
54 Hugh Wilford, ‘Britain in Between’, The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 23–43 (p. 36).
55 Addison, ‘Politics, Patronage, and the State’, 261.
56 There were, however, important generational differences between composers on these questions, as I will discuss in the final section of this article.
57 ‘Maintaining Quality of Radio’, The Times, 23 January 1970, quoted in Addison, ‘Politics, Patronage, and the State’, 263.
58 Stephen Walsh, ‘“Time Off” and “The Scene Machine”’, Musical Times (February 1972), 137–9 (p. 137). Following its German première, the work was presented 11 months later at London's Sadlers Wells, in a different production by the New Opera Company. Gilbert recalls his disappointment at the predominantly adult audience that attended the London production (email to the author, 3 August 2013).
59 This is the term used for the revised song in MacBeth's libretto; George MacBeth, The Scene-Machine: A Message for the Times (London: Schott, 1971), 36.
60 Gilbert, email to the author, 13 June 2017.
61 See Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 31–2.
62 George MacBeth, ‘Anthony Gilbert's “The Scene-Machine”’, The Listener (2 March 1972), 284–5.
63 As noted in James Helme Sutcliffe, ‘Gilbert's “The Scene Machine”’, Opera (October 1971), 877–9 (p. 877).
64 Bayan Northcott, ‘Double Bill’, Music and Musicians (June 1972), 56. Additional detail on the work's libretto and staging is provided in Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 192–8.
65 Gilbert, quoted in Walsh, ‘“Time Off” and “The Scene Machine”’, 137.
66 Gilbert, email to the author, 13 June 2017.
67 Andrew Digby, ‘An Interview with Anthony Gilbert’, Music Matters: News and Views of the RNCM, 25 (summer 1990), 3–5.
68 Sutcliffe, ‘Gilbert's “The Scene Machine”’, 878.
69 Gilbert, email to the author, 3 August 2013.
70 See Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, 180–1.
71 James E. Perone, Music of the Counterculture Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 43. On the absence of direct reference to political subjects in British rock, see Jeremy Tranmer, ‘The Radical Left and Popular Music in the 1960s’, Preserving the Sixties, ed. Harris and O'Brien Castro, 90–104 (pp. 92–3).
72 Allan F. Moore, Rock Music: The Primary Text (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993), 64–5.
73 Hughes, Young Lives on the Left, 93–4. As one of her interviewees remarked, ‘politics was about friendships and music’ (p. 94).
74 Holger Nehring, ‘Great Britain’, 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–77, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 125–36 (p. 130); Hughes, Young Lives on the Left, 1.
75 Ronald Muldoon, ‘Subculture: The Street-Fighting Popgroup’, Black Dwarf, 13/6 (15 October 1968). This article concerned the single release of ‘Revolution’, with its infamous call to ‘count me out’; the significantly different ‘Revolution 1’ which appeared later in the year on the White Album featured an ambiguous rewrite of this line: ‘Count me out … in’. Most issues of Black Dwarf have been made available online at <https://redmolerising.wordpress.com/black-dwarf/> (accessed 23 April 2018).
76 The ins and outs of these encounters have been frequently recounted, with varying emphases: see, for instance, Peter Wicke, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 108–11; Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, 197–201; Tranmer, ‘The Radical Left and Popular Music’; and Neil Nehring, ‘Sir Michael and the Origin and Reception of “Street Fighting Man”’, Rock Music Studies, 2/1 (2015), 61–72. Student radicals’ interest in Jagger was sharpened by his brief appearance at the first of the large VSC rallies in March 1968.
77 John Hoyland, ‘An Open Letter to John Lennon’, Black Dwarf, 13/7 (27 October 1968), 6.
78 Gilbert, email to the author, 3 August 2013.
79 Jagger's flirtation with the revolutionary attitude, for instance, did not last beyond the end of the decade: in 1969 he told a student journalist that he had no interest in politics because ‘if you get really involved with politics, you get fucked up’; quoted in Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, 263.
80 Red Head, ‘Reviews’ (of the Beatles’ Abbey Road and the Kinks’ Class Society), Black Dwarf, 14/24 (26 October to 15 November 1969), 7; Laurie Limn, ‘The Great Groupie Hoax’, Black Dwarf, 14/17 (16 May 1969), 5.
81 Richard Neville, Play Power (London: Paladin, 1970), 82.
82 John Platoff, ‘John Lennon, “Revolution”, and the Politics of Musical Reception’, Journal of Musicology, 22 (2005), 241–67 (p. 250).
83 Wicke, Rock Music, 103.
84 Quoted in Platoff, ‘John Lennon, “Revolution”’, 249.
85 Quoted ibid., 257.
86 Ellis, ‘British Opposition to the Vietnam War’, 176.
87 Donnelly, Sixties Britain, 149.
88 Hughes, Young Lives on the Left, 124, 131.
89 Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 6, 2.
90 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?’, Brecht on Theatre, ed. Willett, 69–77; Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, ibid., 33–42 (p. 33).
91 Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 36.
92 Quoted in Anne Ubersfield, ‘The Pleasure of the Spectator’, Modern Drama, 25 (1982), 127–39 (p. 138 n. 2).
93 Brecht: ‘“Popular” means intelligible to the broad masses, taking over their own forms of expression and enriching them / adopting, consolidating and correcting their standpoint / representing the most progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership: thus intelligible to other sections too / linking with tradition and carrying it further / handing on the achievements of the section now leading to the section of the people that is struggling for the lead.’ ‘The Popular and the Realistic’, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. Willett, 107–15 (p. 108).
94 On this, see Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003), chapter 4, and Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, Introduction.
95 Barry J. Faulk, British Rock Modernism, 1967–1977: The Story of Music Hall in Rock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 2.
96 Gilbert recalls taking Gerd Albrecht, the intendant of the Kassel Staatstheater, to a late-night performance by the Modern Jazz Quartet at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club following their first discussions of the commission of The Scene-Machine in 1968 (email to the author, 13 June 2017).
97 George Newson, programme note for Arena, BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concert, 6 September 1971, 5–6 (p. 5). The phrase ‘the games people play’ had gained currency following the publication of Eric Berne's best-selling book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships in 1964, which in turn inspired Joe South's 1969 hit song ‘The Games People Play’.
98 George Newson, quoted in abridged broadcast of the Roundhouse performance of Arena, in Music on Two: Counterpoint, BBC television programme, 26 September 1971. My thanks to the BFI National Archive for making it possible for me to view a copy of this broadcast.
99 George Newson, interview with the author, 2 August 2016. Michael Hall focuses upon music hall as the work's primary model, but Newson relates that his primary point of reference was music hall's 1960s descendant, the variety show. Hall, British Music Theatre, 184–5.
100 Hall's paraphrase of Gilbert's Wardour intervention; ibid., 16. For a more detailed description of Arena's six movements, see ibid., 184–9.
101 Newson, programme note, 5; Newson, quoted in abridged broadcast of the Roundhouse performance of Arena.
102 Newson, quoted in abridged broadcast of the Roundhouse performance of Arena.
103 Caroline Hoefferle, British Student Activism in the Long Sixties (New York: Routledge, 2012), 191.
104 Newson, programme note, 6; Graham Collier, Cleo and John: A Biography of the Dankworths (London: Quartet Books, 1976), 152.
105 Newson, quoted in abridged broadcast of the Roundhouse performance of Arena.
106 Newson, programme note, 6.
107 Quoted from the original performance materials for Newson's Arena, housed at the BBC Music Library, BBC Archives, Perivale, London.
108 Newson did not attend either Wardour Castle Summer School, but he was on friendly terms with many of the key figures from those meetings, including Birtwistle, Gilbert and Wood (interview with the author, 2 August 2016).
109 They are so termed in the original BBC copy of the text, kept with the performance materials for Newson's Arena housed at the BBC Music Library.
110 An additional movement, archived with the original performing materials at the BBC Music Library but omitted in the Roundhouse performance, more fully integrates the music-hall flavour into the composition. It comprises a sequence of jokes united by their extremely broad sexual innuendo, rudely illustrated by Manning, the King's Singers and members of the orchestra, and delivered by the narrator in variety-show styles variously labelled as ‘Max Millerish’, ‘Ken Dodderish’ and ‘Frankie Howerdish’. Newson recalls that the movement was a response to the banning in 1971 of The Little Red School Book, a book for children that mounted a provocative attack on establishment morals through a relentless focus on sex, drugs and the inequities of the school system. Newson, interview with the author, 2 August 2016.
111 Ibid.
112 Verses 2, 3 and 4 from ‘Black Magnificat’, movement 2 of Arena.
113 Newson, quoted in abridged broadcast of the Roundhouse performance of Arena. As in The Scene-Machine, in this analysis Newson appears to recognize no distinction between ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ musicians, regarding both as susceptible to the ‘self-magnification’ of celebrity stardom.
114 Faulk, British Rock Modernism, 5.
115 Dave Laing, ‘Music Hall and the Commercialization of English Popular Music’, Britpop and the English Music Tradition, ed. Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 11–26 (p. 21).
116 In fact, this was a romanticized view: music hall had been a highly commercialized and profit-making enterprise since the late nineteenth century.
117 Faulk, British Rock Modernism, 88. This concern persisted into the early 1970s: see Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, 441–6.
118 Faulk, British Rock Modernism, 85.
119 Ibid., 77.
120 In interview, Newson accepted the comparison with the interest of the Beatles in music hall, on the basis that ‘they came, not from the same background as me, but something similar in Liverpool. So those kind of roots that you grow up in, they can make a strong impact on you. I'm sure it's the same thing.’ Interview with the author, 2 August 2016.
121 Donnelly, Sixties Britain, 151ff.
122 Ibid., 157.
123 Faulk, British Rock Modernism, 90; Donnelly, Sixties Britain, 168.
124 Donnelly, Sixties Britain, 157.
125 Hilary Rose and Chris Downes, ‘Why Did the Dockers Strike?’, Black Dwarf, 13/3 (19 July 1968), 3.
126 Unnamed correspondent, ‘Letters’, Black Dwarf, 14/14 (28 March 1969), 8.
127 Jagger, in Barry Miles, ‘Jagger (Miles)’, International Times, 31 (17 May 1968), available online at <http://www.internationaltimes.it/archive/index.php?year=1968&volume=IT-Volume-1&issue=31> (accessed 23 April 2018).
128 The performance materials stored at the BBC Music Library reveal that a part for the compère was drafted after section 4, but not incorporated into the score for performance.
129 Fredric Jameson characterized the brusque directness of the Lehrstücke as ‘a kind of Brechtian minimalism’; see Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 60.
130 Raymond Fearn, Italian Opera since 1945 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1997), 61–2.
131 Newson, interview with the author, 2 August 2016.
132 For details on the production of Intolleranza 1960, see Andrea Santini, ‘Multiplicity – Fragmentation – Simultaneity: Sound-Space as a Conveyor of Meaning, and Theatrical Roots in Luigi Nono's Early Spatial Practice’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 137 (2012), 71–106; Angela Ida De Benedictis, ‘The Dramaturgical and Compositional Genesis of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960’, Twentieth-Century Music, 9 (2013), 101–41; and Harriet Boyd-Bennett, ‘Modernist Mise-en-scène: Luigi Nono and the Politics of Staging’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 140 (2015), 225–35.
133 Piscator was invited by Nono to collaborate on Intolleranza 1960 but declined; see De Benedictis, ‘The Dramaturgical and Compositional Genesis’, 123–4.
134 Newson, interview with the author, 2 August 2016.
135 David Osmond-Smith, ‘Introduction’, Berio's Sequenzas: Essays on Performance, Composition and Analysis, ed. Janet K. Halfyard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–8 (pp. 3–4). Newson recalls that he did not know Intolleranza 1960 but strongly admired the combination of spoken text and music found in Sinfonia (interview with the author, 2 August 2016).
136 Graham Holderness, ‘Schaustück and Lehrstück: Erwin Piscator and the Politics of Theatre’, The Politics of Theatre and Drama, ed. Holderness (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 1992), 99–119 (pp. 114–18). For a related critique, see Jon Erickson, ‘The Body as the Object of Modern Performance’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 5 (1990), 231–43 (pp. 233–4).
137 Berio's later dismissiveness regarding Brecht's interest in audience participation, which promised (in his view) only ‘that the role of the music would inevitably be degraded to a dilettantish and mindless collective bawling’, seems indicative of this attitude. Luciano Berio, in ‘Eco in ascolto: Luciano Berio Interviewed by Umberto Eco’, Contemporary Music Review, 5 (1989), 1–8 (p. 6).
138 A comparable exercise is Hans Werner Henze's We Come to the River (1975), whose critical analysis of military brutality is delivered by a panoply of spatially distributed ensembles, simultaneous stage action, dozens of solo parts (many of which double roles) and a mobile percussionist roving around an arsenal of percussion instruments. Henze remarked: ‘All possibilities that were at our disposal, all knowledge and skill, indeed every virtuosity, served to create serious drama, music drama, whose every note and sentence is political, and which radically takes art at its word, and aims to take it a step further towards social truth and relevance.’ Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953–81, trans. Peter Labanyi (London: Faber, 1982), 240.
139 Peter Maxwell Davies, ‘How Pop and Television Damage Our Culture’, The Guardian (25 April 2005), available online at <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/apr/25/1> (accessed 23 April 2018). Similar comments were offered at greater length in Peter Maxwell Davies, ‘A Case for Classical Music, Old and New’, The Guardian (10 April 2007), available online at <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/apr/10/classicalmusicandopera.comment> (accessed 23 April 2018).
140 Harrison Birtwistle speaking at the Ivor Novello song-writing awards, quoted in Tom Robinson, ‘A Knight Errant at the Ivors’, The Guardian (26 May 2006), available online at <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/26/post116> (accessed 10 July 2018).
141 Newson, interview with the author, 2 August 2016.
142 Kemp, Tippett, 402.
143 Tim Souster, quoted in Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 365; John Tavener, The Music of Silence: A Composer's Testament (London: Faber, 1999), 19. On Souster, see Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, chapter 7.
144 Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 411. David Matthews (b. 1943) recounts the formative experience of rock 'n’ roll in his essay ‘The Rehabilitation of the Vernacular’, Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 240–51 (pp. 249–50).
145 Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 395.
146 David Bedford and Cornelius Cardew, ‘A Conversation’, Musical Times (March 1966), 198–202 (p. 202).
147 On this point, see Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 381–5.
148 John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life Unfinished (Matching Tye: Copula, 2008), 212.
149 Hanns Eisler, A Rebel in Music: Selected Writings, ed. Manfred Grabs (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 70, 38, 60.
150 Alexander Goehr, ‘Musical Ideas and Ideas about Music’, Finding the Key, ed. Puffett, 142–56 (p. 153).
151 See the comparable stance taken in the Dutch political music-theatre piece Reconstructie (1969). Robert Adlington, ‘“A Sort of Guerrilla”: Che at the Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19 (2007), 167–93.
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