Manichaean…

As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.

How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).

Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.

On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.

Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).