Shepard Fairey
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One of the best known musicians this century to have encountered the ultimate form of censorship—state-sanctioned murder—was the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara. Politically infused popular song (nueva canci�I>) emerged in Argentina in 1962, but soon became a potent force in the liberation movements then sweeping South America. It even found echoes in a Spain still laboring under the Franco dictatorship.
But it was in Chile, thanks to Jara and others such as Violeta Parra, that it reached its peak; nueva canci�I> played a key role in the campaign that led to the election of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, who, after the election, appeared surrounded by musicians with a banner proclaiming, "There can be no revolution without songs." For Jara, "the authentic revolutionary should be behind the guitar, so that the guitar becomes an instrument of struggle, so that it can also shoot like a gun." His songs were in trouble before Allende was elected, and it is hardly surprising that when the democratic government was violently overthrown, Jara should have been one of the earliest victims of the brutal, US-backed dictatorship that succeeded it. Indeed, nueva canci�I> was so identified with Popular Unity that Gen. Augusto Pinochet's regime banned as subversive even the traditional instruments on which it was played as well as the works of all musicians associated with it. It was made an offense even to mention Jara's name.
Nor was the explicitly political persecution of musicians confined to Chile. Wherever the military was in power in the 1960s and 1970s, in Europe as in Latin America, popular resistance through music was stamped on. The Brazilian military coup of 1964 ushered in 20 years of military rule and, with it, strict censorship of broadcast music—and especially of musica popular brasileira. Numerous musicians during that period spent time in exile, including Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, and Caetano Veloso. The 1967 military coup in Greece led to the imprisonment and torture of internationally known singer Mikis Theodorakis. Eventually he was released as a result of international pressure and went into exile; other, less well known musicians were not so fortunate. In Turkey, where the army still pulls the strings behind the civilian government, the Kurdish language is illegal, Kurdish music is banned from the airwaves, and its singers, like Sivan Perwer and Temo, live in exile.
The most obvious example of musical censorship on the African continent was for many years the apartheid regime in South Africa. But there are others. Fela Kuti encountered difficulties with almost every Nigerian government after independence; before it fell in 1991, the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia drove many musicians into exile with "a censorship as pedantic as it was bureaucratic"; in Zaire, one of the greats of Congolese/Zairean music, Franco Luambo Makiadi, the leader of OK Jazz, was jailed on a number of occasions and had several records banned by the Mobutu regime, even though he was a crucial part of its authenticit鼯I> program.
In Islam too, despite the magnificent musical traditions of many Muslim countries, music and fundamentalism are all too often unhappy bedfellows. In Sudan under the National Islamic Front government, in Afghanistan of the Taliban, in Algeria where singers have been a target of Islamists and government alike, silence has fallen.
But there is little doubt that the most thoroughgoing and systematic attacks on music this century have been in the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1953, and in the Third Reich. Although these were by no means confined to classical music and composers, the latter bore the brunt of the attacks, and it is for this reason, maybe, that they have received more substantial critical attention than popular music.
In Stalin's USSR, the chief enemy was modernism, or "formalism" as it was usually known. From 1932, the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which had been developing for some time, became the party line. In 1934 the newly formed Composers' Union stated:
The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright, and beautiful. This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength. Socialist Realism demands an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art, against the subservience and servility towards modern bourgeois culture. (Quoted in Boris Schwarz's 'Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia 1917-1970')
But it was not until 1936 and the premiere of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District that the storm broke in the form of an unsigned—though allegedly by Stalin himself—article in Pravda signaling a drastic intensification of the campaign against "formalism" in all the arts. The opera was hastily withdrawn and, along with Shostakovich's recently completed but unperformed Fourth Symphony, silenced for a quarter of a century.
At the end of World War II, there was a further tightening of ideological and artistic control. Music's turn for the flame-thrower came in January 1948 when Andrei Zhdanov, chairing the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers in Moscow, identified "formalism" with "decadent western influences" and "bourgeois cultural decay." In a resolution published the following month, the party's Central Committee attacked the leading composers of the day—Miaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Shebalin, Popov, and Khachaturian—and defined "formalism" as "the cult of atonality, dissonance, and disharmony" and "confused, neuro-pathological combinations that transform music into cacophony, into a chaotic conglomeration of sounds." It dismissed everything by these composers as "alien to the Soviet people" with devastating consequences for them all. In some cases, it undoubtedly contributed to their premature deaths. The contagion spread into other countries under Soviet domination, restricting the careers of composers such as Witold Lutoslawski in Poland and Gyorgi Ligeti in Hungary.
