Music making is a social achievement. Its technical skills are reproduced and disseminated through communities of musicians, its instruments are products of industry, and its performance routinely involves coordinated, collaborative effort. While a guitar or piano is often a musician’s own, the means of musical production far exceed the bounds of personal property. Music depends on its institutions: its libraries, conservatories, production companies, labels, and venues. Much depends on whether these are in private or public hands. For this reason, the question of socialism is especially salient in music.
It is hardly utopian to insist that a musically prosperous society offer its members the opportunity to participate in classical and vernacular music in civic choirs, orchestras, bands, and musical theater ensembles. Anyone with talent and inclination should count on society’s resources to foster specialized performance and composition skills. The wealth of our musical knowledge, historical and theoretical, ought continuously to expand through research and be made widely accessible through public education and media. Socialist planning could build large-scale musical infrastructure in the form of festivals, competitions, and conservatories, and thereby expand the proportion of our musical means owned collectively.
The indispensable foundation for any such system is music literacy. Socialists today should aim to make it universal.
This goal is not new. In their evangelical zeal, early modern Protestant movements often prioritized the reading of music. Shape note singing in the United States continues to embody this spirit. In the 1840s — the same decade that saw Karl Marx pen his anthropological manuscripts and Heinrich Heine the first proletarian lyric — the English Congregationalist minister John Curwen began an effective and consequential music literacy campaign aimed at the then emerging class of propertyless wage workers.
Singing has attended…
Auteur: Stephan Hammel
