# The Political Implications of Abstraction and Modernism



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

In the late 1930's, many distinguished composers arrived in America from war-torn Europe, to escape the censorship and suppression of their art. This large influx of composers is what established serialism in America.

Ernst Krenek, one of those disenfranchised composers, said that one reason he was attracted to serialism was that it seemed antithetical to Nazism, and became an expression of his protest.

It is well known that totalitarian governments hate and suppress serialism and 'modern' abstract art. That's because abstraction (Schoenberg was an Expressionist) reflects the inner experience of the artist, and thus does not reflect the outward reality of whatever social, political, and ideological environment it springs from, except in cases where it is sarcastic and critical of such milieus, as with George Grosz' cartoon-like art.

Thus, abstraction itself is in inherent opposition to outward powers which might try to control it. It is the expression of the individual, in the absence of any ideological purpose. It is inherently apolitical, in that it celebrates the individual.

Serialism arose in contrast to tonality, which had been the official language of music for centuries, representing through its notation and scores the aspirations and concerns of an elite ruling class, evolving out of Church power, then kings, royalty and an emerging bourgeois class. Haydn and Mozart wrote their _divertissiments_ for the amusement of royal families who funded them. The music embodies the progressive and elitist aims of this ruling class, and tonality was the sensual, resonant language which was used to convey this.

As Nationalism began to reach its peak in the nineteenth century, with Wagner, Strauss, Brahms, and others, *Arnold Schoenberg *yearned to be a part of this, and moved to Vienna, where he struggled to become a part of the great Viennese tradition in music. As *Mahler* before him found out, this was not to be; this was an elitist, exclusionary club which was almost impossible to gain membership in, despite the great works which arose out of this attempt: Mahler's symphonies, his _Song of the Earth_, Schoenberg's _Pelleas_ and _Transfigured Night_, and his _Gurrelieder.

_Although many here might disagree, I feel that Schoenberg adopted his 12-tone system out of *more *than reasons arising out of musical concerns; meaning the chromaticism which had emerged, and which had resulted in an unstable and insecure musical syntax, on the verge of developing itself into chromatic chaos, an environment which he sought to bring order to. He also said at one time that he wanted serialism to 'reassert German musical hegemony,' which is ironic, as he was forced to leave Germany as World War II broke out.

No, I think Schoenberg had seen what happened to Mahler, and grew somewhat bitter; and he retreated into Expressionism and his 12-tone method, which served his individual artistic vision, and only paid lip-service, by continued use of familiar forms like waltzes and traditional forms, to the Germanic tradition which had molded him. Go with what you know.

This withdrawal into the 'abstraction' of serial music allowed Schoenberg to create a music which supported and expressed no outward ideology or nationalistic tradition, but only the inner experience of its creator. Serialism became its own ideology.

The repercussions of WWII resonated well into the 1950s, when a new generation emerged and expanded on the methods and aesthetic of Schoenberg and Webern. The bombast of nationalism had almost destroyed Europe, and these new composers were disillusioned with all such notions of nationalism and state power; and the spectre of the hydrogen bomb still loomed. Thus serialism was the perfect vehicle; it had no traditional baggage of nationalism and was subject to no ideology other than its own.

Thus, although Schoenberg and the serial composers who followed acted out of artist concerns, with no *overt *political considerations or motivations other than general post WWII trauma, their retreat into the inner realm of abstraction, and into a receding, hermetic world of self-generating forms free of tradition, had political implications all the same, because of the inherent inner, individualistic nature of abstraction freed from tradition and nationalism.​


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