>Maybe this someone also knows about the so-called Pierre Degeyter
>Club (formed sometime in the '30s I guess) for serious American composers
>with a leftist urge, such as Aaron Copland?
>From the introduction to Songs for Political Action 1926-1953 by Ronald D.
Cohen and Dale Samuelson:
"At the height of the Depression, members of the Communist Party affiliated Pierre Degeyter Club, the ideological leaders of the Workers' Music League, formed the Composers' Collective. It attracted many leading figures in American contemporary music, including Jacob Schaefer, Marc Blitzstein, Herbert Haufrecht, Lan Adomian, Henry Cowell, Earl Robinson and George Anthell. The Collective's goal was to create a substantial body of people's music that would appeal to the working classes. Although inspired by the revolutionary music of such European composers as Hanns Eisler and Elie Siegmeister and lyricist Bertolt Brecht, the collective's musical sensibilities were largely defined by dissonant, avant-garde compositions of Cowell and his followers. . .
"When Cowell brought his former teacher, Charles Seeger, into the Collective, resistance to using traditional musical forms began to fall. An ethnomusicologist as well as a composer, Seeger quickly recognized that complex, harmonically sophisticated compositions offered little appeal to the masses. . ."
Charles Seeger wrote for the Daily Worker as "Carl Sands." A later reference in the book adds Ruth Crawford Seeger and Aaron Copland to the list of members. Note that this 1932 formation predated the People's Front; i.e., it was a product of the revolutionary so-called Third Period.
The entire book bears appreciative reading, while listening to the music on ten compact discs that accompany it, although I believe the German folksinger Ernst Busch, Europe's Woody Guthrie, had a greater influence on Marxist minstrels of the thirties than Eisler or Brecht, whose enduring stamp was yet to come.
In response to an earlier question on the class content of classical music, I would recommend reading Hanns Eisler's book, whose title I have forgotten. It was published in English about 20 years ago by Seven Seas Press of Berlin GDR. Despite Eisler's profound insights into his own style of music, he dismissed rock music as decadent.
(Hanns was brother to Gerhard Eisler, victim of the McCarthy/HUAC witch-hunt, and University of Chicago professor [author of Stalin and German Communism] Ruth Fisher, the former left communist who ratted on her brothers. Despite this disgrace, Ruth Fisher was featured prominently in a 1989 GDR exhibition, 600 Years of Berlin Jewish History, as an honorable contributor to that tradition. Much as Pete Seeger [son of Charles, mentioned above] in recent issues of Sing Out! has forgiven Burl Ives and Josh White for testifying before HUAC against their fellow folk musicians, I guess. In the long run, the radical and revolutionary proletarian cultural community seems more embracing, uplifting, and forgiving than the milieu of academic Marxism. Perhaps the LBO list could benefit from more of it.)
Ken Lawrence