Do You Want Any Angst with that Shake?
(no, but give me the malaise on the side)
I just got back from a cheery evening at the Symphony: all Shostakovich program. If there’s any single musical figure who captures the essence of 20th century anxiety in its full depressing depth and languor, it’s Dmitri Shostakovich (and, in fairness, as an artist living and working in Stalin’s Russia, he had more to be anxious about than most). Even his light and lilting pieces are shot through with an undercurrent of tension and dread. Think of him as the anti-Lawrence Welk: a master of uneasy listening.
In Shostakovich’s music, you will find all the great problems that troubled the worriers of the era: fears of urban alienation and loss of tradition; fears of mechanization and the dehumanizing power of machines; dread of the all-knowing, all powerful state; horror at the ways that the darkest impulses of human nature manifest themselves despite all the material progress made by western society. It’s Shostakovich’s genius to allow us to see these harrowing dilemmas in all their subtlety and nuance – not to mention scale – through the medium of music. A full night of it is enough to put the problems of our own time in an interesting perspective.
It may seem a bit premature to characterize the last century as so much different from our own, since officially we’re only three years into the current one. But the fact is, the 20th century has been over in all but numeric terms for a dozen or fifteen years – say, since 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. It was the unique conceit of the so-called modern era – largely coincident with the 20th century – that human behavior could be subsumed and subordinated according to essentially metaphysical ideals: the State, the Volk, the Revolution, the Party. Making perverse human behavior conform to meticulous theory was the obsession of the age, and, like trying to solve a puzzle whose pieces just won’t fit together, the problem generated a great deal of anxiety. Even those who were not themselves ideologues were to some extent infected with it. The demise of European Communism was not just the demise of one particular political ideology, but the demise of ideology in toto as a motivating historical force.
Some, like Francis Fukuyama, have chosen to view this as the “end of history,” at least in the Hegelian/Marxist sense of history as a perpetual struggle between irreconcilable social forces. Obviously, “history” in the sense of a series of world events continues to unfold. But in the post-modern era, we’ve lost confidence that our modes of analysis are capable of informing those events with any kind of transcendent meaning, much less overall coherence. While our problems and challenges are just as grave now as they were during the Modern era, today’s actors are much more likely to view ideology not as binding principles that identify them with a clearly-defined historical cause, but as a shifting set of justifications for essentially self-interested and ahistorical actions.
Listening to the music of Shostakovich – dense with the earnest anxiety of Modern man – I could not help feeling some nostalgia for the intellectual accoutrements of the 20th century, which are fast fading from view. The certitudes of ideology enabled a kind of ambition and confidence which no longer seem possible today. While the twin terrors of Communism and Fascism serve as stern warnings of the dark consequences of this kind of thinking, we are also left with artifacts whose very conception would seem impossible today. The moment of High Modernism – brilliantly captured in David Gelertner’s 1939: The Lost World of the Fair and in Woody Allen’s affectionate cinematic reminiscence Radio Days – was a time of amazing optimism and unparalleled achievement. All the tensions generated by the big questions of the Modern Age found an outlet in art, music, literature, architecture, and philosophy that was not only audacious but also exquisitely crafted to reflect an awareness of the historical forces which brought it forth (even if its ultimate goal was to reject that history).
The rejection of history in our own era, by contrast, seems less the product of deliberate strategy and more the result of lazy carelessness. We forget because it’s too much trouble to remember, and besides, it doesn’t matter anyway. The turbulent anxieties of the 20th century therefore give way to fits of fleeting nervousness and knee-jerk reactions uninformed by the wisdom of history. Problems come and go, described in terms whose real meanings have been lost, while actors like our cartoon-character President scramble for cover beneath the tattered remains of ideological principles. Absent the weight of precedent that haunted the Moderns, we are perhaps freer to indulge in activities closer to our true natures than those circumscribed by the rigid ideologies of the past. The price of this freedom, however, is the inexorable loss of the profound, the serious, the meaningful – elements embodied with such majesty in the work of artists like Shostakovich.
9:40:24 AM 
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