That's just disgusting, Michael, especially considering Maduro won the election fair and square. From what I've read, the checks and balances in Venezuela are much more robust than those of the USA.
Fukking anti-Maduro US puppets don’t realize it is the United States government that has destroyed their country with illegal sanctions and US and British governments stealing Venezuelan money and gold? When they claim Venezuela was destroyed from within, they are lying through their teeth!
This is a brilliant, courageous and much needed article. Music needs to transcend politics and going after musicians and composers like this is a big sign of weakness.
Good on you for bringing this to the world’s attention.
I agree that music shouldn’t be clamped down on like this.
What I do wanna know tho, is since when are we coming to the Defence of Maduro? 8 million Venezuelan refugees, despite immense oil wealth… you really think they’re gonna vote him in?
It's not a matter of coming to the defense of Maduro. It's a matter of not accepting at face value the narrative foisted upon us by the corporate media in the U.S., which supports the U.S. ruling class agenda for Venezuela, and which has sought "regime change" there for many years, despite the popularity of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, brazenly interfering with Venezuela's national sovereignty by interfering in its elections and subjecting it to crippling economic sanctions. Most of the Venezuelan populace is aware of this, and it is not too difficult to believe that a majority of voters stand with Maduro rather than the latest U.S. puppet. See, e.g., https://www.mintpressnews.com/venezuela-while-us-politicians-call-fraud-american-election-observers-endorse-results/288010/
It’s the hypocrisy of the US claiming that they try to liberate people from dictators when they actually like dictators. Did you ever hear the US talking about the people suffering from human rights abuse in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or Qatar?
Never heard of anyone in U.S. government or their mouthpiece, mainstream media, that has always pushed the agenda of evil apartheid Israel and the military industrial Congressional complex.
To be fair, if the U.S. were to send a "youth orchestra" to tour any country that the Empire doesn't like, the whole thing would be a thinly disguised cover for spying/propaganda/an opportunity to cry foul when one or more orchestra members/minders/etc. are arrested for violating local laws.
I'm a devotee of Dudamel; I love the guy, both as a person (even though I don't actually know him) but especially as a musician. But not just a musician: you should know the story of his orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. This is a group of kids, many of who come from the streets and slums of Caracas, kids who otherwise might be dead by the time they hit 20, who he took in to his orchestra--a full symphony orchestra, not some Mickey Mouse school band, taught to play an instrument and made into a real musician.
You should hear this band: high school kids, and later the same kids in their 20s, who just play the living shit out of the "classical" (bad term) repertoire. I'll give you one example, their handling of the Shostakovich 10th symphony, a wickedly difficult piece of music that they played at a London Proms concert in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKXQzs6Y5BY These kids actually play at the same level as many other world-famous professional orchestras, New York Phil., Berlin, Chicago, Vienna.
It's ironic that he's now a whipping boy because of Maduro, because Dudamel has criticized him in the past. In fact, it's why I haven't yet seen him perform: I had a chance to see him in Berkeley, right after he wrote an op-ed in the NYT criticizing Maduro. Because of that his tour to the US was cancelled. (He's slated to be the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, next year I believe.)
Free speech my ass! I hope all those assholes who are spouting that hypocritical bullshit choke on their own words.
Yes it’s absolutely repulsive to see Dudemal and that great orchestra treated that way. I don’t think I was exaggerating when I called it Soviet era propagand.
I’ve heard that performance of the 10th. Its pretty mind-blowing.
Good stuff. Thanks. Slight correction. The US actually did install general Sisi in Egypt after they helped overthrow Egypt's first democratically elected government.
Just FYI for anyone who might be in the Massachusetts Berkshires, tonight, August 8 at 8:00pm Gustavo Dudamel and the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela will be playing at Tanglewood in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.
Absolutely: Shostakovich's nightmare of a composer's life was entirely due to authoritarianism, NOT "leftism", although people like to argue that in the case of the Soviet Union, the authoritarianism was a direct result of the extreme "leftism" of the Bolshevik Revolution. (Which is ironic because the Bolsheviks were far from the farthest left party in 1917, but whatever.)
Well, that may be or may not be; it certainly wasn't inevitable before Joe Stalin took over as "general secretary" (i.e., dictator) after Lenin's death. I'm actually somewhat of a Trotskyist (!!!), and although we'll never know for certain, it seems very likely that things would have turned out very differently had Trotsky instead risen to the top. I doubt very much that Shostakovich and others would have been hounded nearly so aggressively had Lev Davidovitch ascended the throne.
[this comment somehow got misplaced, should have been part of another thread. Oh, well.]
I agree. People have scoffed at me for reading Marx. The argument is “look at the Soviet Union”. The truth is nothing that Marx said had anything to do with what happened in the Soviet Union.
So you've read Marx? I'm impressed. I grew up as a "red diaper baby" (father a member of the CPUSA), but I've never cracked open any Marx. I place him in the same category as Darwin and Einstein: everyone knows *about* them, but (virtually) nobody has actually read their works. Maybe someday ... should I start with Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto? (or perhaps The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte?)
I read it because I was tired of hearing what other people had said of Marx. I decided to go to the source and read for myself what Marx said. Spent a summer reading it (I’m sure I looked odd on the beach reading it) .
I read das capital. Was worth the read, if only to see what society said a person said vs. what they actually said
I don't care for Maduro, I don't know their election process. I do know that the powers that be in our current administration are involved in anti-American coalitions and encourage dullards who, without shame, deface and defile and deplatform art and artists with impunity. A true 'danger to democracy'. These are the preludes to a violent national chaos and disorder strategy if these Democrats are (re)elected.
It’s the idea of trying to punish a Venezuelan for performing a concert with a venezualan youth orchestra that I object to. The US picks and chooses its favorite dictators. It’s really hypocrisy
I'm "left", for the purposes of this discussion anyhow, and I love Dudamel and his orchestra and the music they play, which encompasses both art and artists. So there.
Go take your fake outrage to some other outlet of effluvia.
Is your outrage Genuine? Does any political group besides the Left deface art or use music venues as opportunities for political statements or terrorism? Can you think of any instance where groups or individuals besides leftists used art or music events as venues for political statements or dirty tricks or murder?
I didn’t blame this recent event on the left or the right. If you are talking about to the references to the Soviet Union, then yes, there are many on the right who have done such horrible nasty things. Franco, Pinochet (who I have written about before) come to mind, and there are many others. We don’t have to look further than US dictator installations
I did not mean this is a way of defaming the left or right. only to denounce authoritarianism. It came to mind because as a classical music lover, it reminded me of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, who constantly had his output monitored.
Very good and important article; thank you. However, a couple of points need correcting, I believe. First, it's "Carnegie," not "Carnagie." Second, the group in question is the Human Rights Foundation but you later refer to it as a "Human Rights Watch group." Human Rights Watch is a similarly biased, pro-U.S. imperialist outfit, but the two organizations are distinct.
I also question your buying into Cold War-era anti-Soviet propaganda with your story about a "Soviet composer." Is this a real account of an actual occurrence, with an actual source for this, or are you just relating a story about what many people BELIEVED would have happened to such a composer at the time? I'm no advocate of the Soviet economic or political system but I also don't buy into everything we were told about it during the Cold War, much of which was exaggerated. Repeating Cold War propaganda today does not do anything to help us achieve real progress. It plays into the hands of those who broadly condemn any Left ideas, even those that reflect a sound class analysis and the project of building a genuine democratic worker-owned and controlled economic system.
It is an actual story. Shostakovich was the composer. He wandered off of soviet themes. Then the article appeared in the newspaper. His next piece (his 5th symphony) was much more Soviet sounding. He titled it “a Soviet creative artists response to just criticism”.
Have you read the book “testimony”? It details Shostakovich’s life. It’s a fascinating read. They also made a movie about it with Ben Kingsley
Fair enough, thank you. That story does seem believable. However, I still question the sentence: "In the Stalin era, we know that meant imprisonment, torture, death or all three." Removal from the position of conductor or being "canceled"; I have no trouble believing that. Being sent to a "reeducation camp" or the like, or even imprisonment, yes, I could see that happening then. Composers falling into line because they didn't want to experience such things? Yes, that also seems believable. But torture or death for a musical composition? I would still like to see actual evidence of this; it strikes me as hyperbole.
In his book, Shostakovich tells a story where Stalin had hired an artist to paint him. Stalin hated the painting because he thought it made him look ugly. Stalin disappeared the artist . The next artist painted Stalin as too handsome, so Stalin disappeared him for being a sycophant.
Make what you will of that. Those kinds of stories can be be true or not, but say something about the zeitgeist
Torture or death as penalty for creating the wrong art? No shit, that happened under Stalin.
Read about Shostakovich's 5th symphony, which is subtitled (not officially by the composer, but by convention) as "An artist's reply to just criticism", his apology. (Or at least to all appearances: later examination has shown it to be full of all kinds of ironies, as in most of his music, that make it pretty clear that Dmitri was "apologizing" with his tongue lodged in his cheek.)
But if he hadn't written that work, which was accepted by the regime as the kind of work worthy of a solid Soviet citizen, Shostakovich may well have been disappeared himself. His crime was his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Stalin was deeply offended by.
An assertion that it happened is not evidence. Do you have any published sources identifying an artist who was tortured or killed by the State during Stalin's time in power for "creating the wrong art"? I'm not saying that it didn't happen; I'm just not willing to accept assertions as proof.
Yes; I recently read a bio of Shostakovich which told of a good friend of his when he was still fresh out of conservatory who was a cutting-edge artist, avant garde, who was murdered by the state for his artistic transgressions. Unfortunately can't remember the guy's name. I'll do a little research and try to come up with his name, as well as the name of the biography.
OK, I at least got the name of the book: /Symphony for the city of the dead : Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad/, by M.T. Anderson. Now to find the reference to the murdered friend ...
Sorry but the west built him up as something he is not. Just like the west had tried to reconstruct the azov battalion. Navalny was not killed by Putin, either. It just made a good story
Navalnyii changed his view to suit his western sponsors. Sort of like how militants become "vetted moderate freedom fighters" once blessed with State Department money.
Marginal figure exploited by the west for anti-Russian propaganda. “Liberal”-minded folks ran to Israel in 2022. Wonder how liberal they feel now? Anti-war, human rights, peace to all slogans? Do they recite those from IDF tanks or while raping Palestinian prisoners? Or are they in Baltic republics destroying monuments and chasing old people for speaking Russian? Or wait! They must be in Canada in standing ovation for an SS “veteran”.
Propaganda that you are repeating is grotesque and sad.
That's just disgusting, Michael, especially considering Maduro won the election fair and square. From what I've read, the checks and balances in Venezuela are much more robust than those of the USA.
I'm so sick of the way the west meddles in the affairs of other countries, particularly the resource rich countries. https://www.telesurenglish.net/more-than-40-countries-recognize-the-legitimacy-of-nicolas-maduro-as-president/
Fukking anti-Maduro US puppets don’t realize it is the United States government that has destroyed their country with illegal sanctions and US and British governments stealing Venezuelan money and gold? When they claim Venezuela was destroyed from within, they are lying through their teeth!
The puppets know full well.
This is a brilliant, courageous and much needed article. Music needs to transcend politics and going after musicians and composers like this is a big sign of weakness.
Good on you for bringing this to the world’s attention.
Thank you for your kind words
I agree that music shouldn’t be clamped down on like this.
What I do wanna know tho, is since when are we coming to the Defence of Maduro? 8 million Venezuelan refugees, despite immense oil wealth… you really think they’re gonna vote him in?
It's not a matter of coming to the defense of Maduro. It's a matter of not accepting at face value the narrative foisted upon us by the corporate media in the U.S., which supports the U.S. ruling class agenda for Venezuela, and which has sought "regime change" there for many years, despite the popularity of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, brazenly interfering with Venezuela's national sovereignty by interfering in its elections and subjecting it to crippling economic sanctions. Most of the Venezuelan populace is aware of this, and it is not too difficult to believe that a majority of voters stand with Maduro rather than the latest U.S. puppet. See, e.g., https://www.mintpressnews.com/venezuela-while-us-politicians-call-fraud-american-election-observers-endorse-results/288010/
It’s the hypocrisy of the US claiming that they try to liberate people from dictators when they actually like dictators. Did you ever hear the US talking about the people suffering from human rights abuse in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or Qatar?
No, because we like the dictators there
Never heard of anyone in U.S. government or their mouthpiece, mainstream media, that has always pushed the agenda of evil apartheid Israel and the military industrial Congressional complex.
Yes indeed. This article is a little dated -- I regret that I have not yet gotten around to writing a sequel -- but it still supports your point: https://truthout.org/articles/us-provides-military-assistance-to-73-percent-of-world-s-dictatorships/
To be fair, if the U.S. were to send a "youth orchestra" to tour any country that the Empire doesn't like, the whole thing would be a thinly disguised cover for spying/propaganda/an opportunity to cry foul when one or more orchestra members/minders/etc. are arrested for violating local laws.
That’s probably true. Everything is an excuse for pushing propaganda
What disgusting political horseshit this is.
I'm a devotee of Dudamel; I love the guy, both as a person (even though I don't actually know him) but especially as a musician. But not just a musician: you should know the story of his orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. This is a group of kids, many of who come from the streets and slums of Caracas, kids who otherwise might be dead by the time they hit 20, who he took in to his orchestra--a full symphony orchestra, not some Mickey Mouse school band, taught to play an instrument and made into a real musician.
You should hear this band: high school kids, and later the same kids in their 20s, who just play the living shit out of the "classical" (bad term) repertoire. I'll give you one example, their handling of the Shostakovich 10th symphony, a wickedly difficult piece of music that they played at a London Proms concert in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKXQzs6Y5BY These kids actually play at the same level as many other world-famous professional orchestras, New York Phil., Berlin, Chicago, Vienna.
It's ironic that he's now a whipping boy because of Maduro, because Dudamel has criticized him in the past. In fact, it's why I haven't yet seen him perform: I had a chance to see him in Berkeley, right after he wrote an op-ed in the NYT criticizing Maduro. Because of that his tour to the US was cancelled. (He's slated to be the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, next year I believe.)
Free speech my ass! I hope all those assholes who are spouting that hypocritical bullshit choke on their own words.
(Here's another, earlier video of him with the Bolivar youth orch., playing some great Latin American dance music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkeIcuSC4A0)
Yes it’s absolutely repulsive to see Dudemal and that great orchestra treated that way. I don’t think I was exaggerating when I called it Soviet era propagand.
I’ve heard that performance of the 10th. Its pretty mind-blowing.
Thanks for posting this
Good stuff. Thanks. Slight correction. The US actually did install general Sisi in Egypt after they helped overthrow Egypt's first democratically elected government.
Just FYI for anyone who might be in the Massachusetts Berkshires, tonight, August 8 at 8:00pm Gustavo Dudamel and the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela will be playing at Tanglewood in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.
I wish I could have seen that. I heard the one in NYC was absolutely amazing - in spite of all the disingenuous negativity that was spewed at Dudamel
Absolutely: Shostakovich's nightmare of a composer's life was entirely due to authoritarianism, NOT "leftism", although people like to argue that in the case of the Soviet Union, the authoritarianism was a direct result of the extreme "leftism" of the Bolshevik Revolution. (Which is ironic because the Bolsheviks were far from the farthest left party in 1917, but whatever.)
Well, that may be or may not be; it certainly wasn't inevitable before Joe Stalin took over as "general secretary" (i.e., dictator) after Lenin's death. I'm actually somewhat of a Trotskyist (!!!), and although we'll never know for certain, it seems very likely that things would have turned out very differently had Trotsky instead risen to the top. I doubt very much that Shostakovich and others would have been hounded nearly so aggressively had Lev Davidovitch ascended the throne.
[this comment somehow got misplaced, should have been part of another thread. Oh, well.]
I agree. People have scoffed at me for reading Marx. The argument is “look at the Soviet Union”. The truth is nothing that Marx said had anything to do with what happened in the Soviet Union.
So you've read Marx? I'm impressed. I grew up as a "red diaper baby" (father a member of the CPUSA), but I've never cracked open any Marx. I place him in the same category as Darwin and Einstein: everyone knows *about* them, but (virtually) nobody has actually read their works. Maybe someday ... should I start with Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto? (or perhaps The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte?)
I read it because I was tired of hearing what other people had said of Marx. I decided to go to the source and read for myself what Marx said. Spent a summer reading it (I’m sure I looked odd on the beach reading it) .
I read das capital. Was worth the read, if only to see what society said a person said vs. what they actually said
AmeriKKKa is its own worst enemy
I don't care for Maduro, I don't know their election process. I do know that the powers that be in our current administration are involved in anti-American coalitions and encourage dullards who, without shame, deface and defile and deplatform art and artists with impunity. A true 'danger to democracy'. These are the preludes to a violent national chaos and disorder strategy if these Democrats are (re)elected.
It’s the idea of trying to punish a Venezuelan for performing a concert with a venezualan youth orchestra that I object to. The US picks and chooses its favorite dictators. It’s really hypocrisy
The Left hates art and artists. Including music and musicians. Think cultural Marxists. Think French Mobocracy.
Bullshit. Fucking bullshit.
I'm "left", for the purposes of this discussion anyhow, and I love Dudamel and his orchestra and the music they play, which encompasses both art and artists. So there.
Go take your fake outrage to some other outlet of effluvia.
Is your outrage Genuine? Does any political group besides the Left deface art or use music venues as opportunities for political statements or terrorism? Can you think of any instance where groups or individuals besides leftists used art or music events as venues for political statements or dirty tricks or murder?
I didn’t blame this recent event on the left or the right. If you are talking about to the references to the Soviet Union, then yes, there are many on the right who have done such horrible nasty things. Franco, Pinochet (who I have written about before) come to mind, and there are many others. We don’t have to look further than US dictator installations
I did not mean this is a way of defaming the left or right. only to denounce authoritarianism. It came to mind because as a classical music lover, it reminded me of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, who constantly had his output monitored.
I know you didn't.
I absolutely take every opportunity to point out that the Left, in the USA and and England are uncivilized.
Carry on, sir.
Very good and important article; thank you. However, a couple of points need correcting, I believe. First, it's "Carnegie," not "Carnagie." Second, the group in question is the Human Rights Foundation but you later refer to it as a "Human Rights Watch group." Human Rights Watch is a similarly biased, pro-U.S. imperialist outfit, but the two organizations are distinct.
I also question your buying into Cold War-era anti-Soviet propaganda with your story about a "Soviet composer." Is this a real account of an actual occurrence, with an actual source for this, or are you just relating a story about what many people BELIEVED would have happened to such a composer at the time? I'm no advocate of the Soviet economic or political system but I also don't buy into everything we were told about it during the Cold War, much of which was exaggerated. Repeating Cold War propaganda today does not do anything to help us achieve real progress. It plays into the hands of those who broadly condemn any Left ideas, even those that reflect a sound class analysis and the project of building a genuine democratic worker-owned and controlled economic system.
I realized the mistake as soon as i published.
Yes we were fed non stop propaganda during the Cold War. Nothing has changed. Everyone is a dictator, or if they are really adamant, Hitler.
Fortunately the true motives are not hard to see
It is an actual story. Shostakovich was the composer. He wandered off of soviet themes. Then the article appeared in the newspaper. His next piece (his 5th symphony) was much more Soviet sounding. He titled it “a Soviet creative artists response to just criticism”.
Have you read the book “testimony”? It details Shostakovich’s life. It’s a fascinating read. They also made a movie about it with Ben Kingsley
Fair enough, thank you. That story does seem believable. However, I still question the sentence: "In the Stalin era, we know that meant imprisonment, torture, death or all three." Removal from the position of conductor or being "canceled"; I have no trouble believing that. Being sent to a "reeducation camp" or the like, or even imprisonment, yes, I could see that happening then. Composers falling into line because they didn't want to experience such things? Yes, that also seems believable. But torture or death for a musical composition? I would still like to see actual evidence of this; it strikes me as hyperbole.
In his book, Shostakovich tells a story where Stalin had hired an artist to paint him. Stalin hated the painting because he thought it made him look ugly. Stalin disappeared the artist . The next artist painted Stalin as too handsome, so Stalin disappeared him for being a sycophant.
Make what you will of that. Those kinds of stories can be be true or not, but say something about the zeitgeist
Torture or death as penalty for creating the wrong art? No shit, that happened under Stalin.
Read about Shostakovich's 5th symphony, which is subtitled (not officially by the composer, but by convention) as "An artist's reply to just criticism", his apology. (Or at least to all appearances: later examination has shown it to be full of all kinds of ironies, as in most of his music, that make it pretty clear that Dmitri was "apologizing" with his tongue lodged in his cheek.)
But if he hadn't written that work, which was accepted by the regime as the kind of work worthy of a solid Soviet citizen, Shostakovich may well have been disappeared himself. His crime was his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Stalin was deeply offended by.
There was lady Mcbeth but other works as well. I believe he was in the doghouse many times. I think lady mcbeth pushed the envelope for its time.
His 10th is an absolute masterpiece.
An assertion that it happened is not evidence. Do you have any published sources identifying an artist who was tortured or killed by the State during Stalin's time in power for "creating the wrong art"? I'm not saying that it didn't happen; I'm just not willing to accept assertions as proof.
Yes; I recently read a bio of Shostakovich which told of a good friend of his when he was still fresh out of conservatory who was a cutting-edge artist, avant garde, who was murdered by the state for his artistic transgressions. Unfortunately can't remember the guy's name. I'll do a little research and try to come up with his name, as well as the name of the biography.
Skepticism good.
OK, I at least got the name of the book: /Symphony for the city of the dead : Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad/, by M.T. Anderson. Now to find the reference to the murdered friend ...
https://open.substack.com/pub/mfeldman/p/alexei-navalny-the-hero-that-never?r=1fwqi&utm_medium=ios
Sorry but the west built him up as something he is not. Just like the west had tried to reconstruct the azov battalion. Navalny was not killed by Putin, either. It just made a good story
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-believes-putin-probably-didnt-order-navalny-be-killed-wsj-2024-04-27/
Yeah, right. Killed by Putin. You are a shameless tool of the Evil Empire in Washington.
Navalnyii changed his view to suit his western sponsors. Sort of like how militants become "vetted moderate freedom fighters" once blessed with State Department money.
Marginal figure exploited by the west for anti-Russian propaganda. “Liberal”-minded folks ran to Israel in 2022. Wonder how liberal they feel now? Anti-war, human rights, peace to all slogans? Do they recite those from IDF tanks or while raping Palestinian prisoners? Or are they in Baltic republics destroying monuments and chasing old people for speaking Russian? Or wait! They must be in Canada in standing ovation for an SS “veteran”.
Propaganda that you are repeating is grotesque and sad.