A friend of a friend II

... for me a Webern bagatelle is much more subversive and politically significant than all those requiems, cantatas and oratorios dedicated to the Holocaust, to 9/11 or to oppression in the Third World using depressive clusters, aggressive noises, threatening percussion orgies and sad nostalgic quotations.
HELMUT LACHENMANN,
"Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic: An Interview with Helmut Lachenmann", Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010, p.341.
____________________________

Back in 2011 I already voiced my contempt for mediocre composers who desperately try to mask the stale musical odor of their compositions with nauseatingly 'topical' titles, dedications, and program notes.  Little man that I am, I was certainly gratified to discover a similar attitude expressed by a composer whose music I greatly admire.

Not that I think it makes much sense to attribute, as Lachenmann does, "political significance" to (non-vocal) art music, if only because the relations between art music and politics have nothing to do with intrinsically musical values.  After all, in Nazi Germany the radical, cerebral Webern had the same 'political significance' as the jazzy Krenek, the derivative Shostakovich, and the bourgeois Mendelssohn, while in Stalin's USSR the 'political significance' of Webern's music was no different from that of Rachmaninov's sappy traditionalism and Stravinsky's acidic modernism (all were banned).  And in today's America all art music has the same 'political significance' - which is to say none whatsoever - since neither the government nor the people give a fuck about about it (except for a relatively very small number of 'faggots', 'weirdos' and 'eggheads' like myself).

But then a good many musicologists these days do not hesitate to interpret ordered pitch structures as expressing homosexuality, misogyny, racism, imperialism, schizophrenia, and more, which tells me that my sober perspective on music is unlikely to prevail because, if it were, a lot of tenured charlatans would be left with nothing to write about the subject of their alleged expertise.  So I better be careful about pushing my view too far.  I would rather piss off a bunch of drunk bikers at a roadside saloon than a crowd of tenured charlatans.  With the former you may end up with a few broken ribs, a missing tooth or two, and perhaps a serious concussion.  A few weeks of convalescence after reconstructive surgery and you'll be back to normal (or nearly normal) life.  With the latter, however, you will be hounded like a moose by a pack of hungry wolves until you collapse from exhaustion and bleed to death from having numerous chunks of flesh torn from your body.
 
As a precaution, then, I leave open the possibility that I have missed something in Webern's Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op.9, something which reveals the political significance of these miniatures to more attentive and experienced listeners like Lachenmann.  Here is one performance of these pieces, recorded live by Radio Netherlands at a concert given by the Matangi String Quartet at the Amsterdam's Concertgebouw in November 2016.  If you can hear the political significance of this composition, I will be grateful if you let me know what it is and where exactly I can find its expression in this music.