Bresnick in Prague, 1970

In an NY Times article, composer Martin Bresnick offers a fascinating account of his encounter with the great Italian Marxist modernist, Luigi Nono, at a music conference in Prague, 1970. Nono's scathing critique of Bresnick's work expresses a mentality common to many composers who struggled with musical aesthetics in the wake of the Second World War—and is, more generally, suggestive of a certain stance characteristic of the Cold War Left. Finding a productive way out of this ideological abyss was the great challenge of composers of Bresnick's generation. Bresnick, with whom I've had the pleasure of working on a couple occasions and who is always a great story-teller, remembers,

He said that my score contained many obvious faults: a failure of the music to critique the representational mode of the film; the improper use of tonal or modal materials in an atonal setting, which would lead irrevocably to a regression in critical music thinking and make the music aesthetically and historically irrelevant; and finally, after a long list of other errors, my reliance on a song of the rural peasantry rather than the industrial proletariat could not possibly be progressive because, as Marx had so clearly pointed out, the peasantry could not be revolutionary: they do not form a class; they are shapeless, just as “potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.”