Too Much Sax and Violins on Stage Leading to Social Peril?

I’d like to expound on the presence of violence in classical and contemporary music and on whether that presence suggests that we (i.e. the American art music community) are complicit in the mass-media promotion of socially problematic behavior.

Written By

Colin Holter

Let’s talk about social responsibility in music—not aesthetic responsibility, not responsibility to a historical dialectic or to artistic integrity, but genuine social responsibility. I’d like to expound specifically on the presence of violence in classical and contemporary music and on whether that presence suggests that we (i.e. the American art music community) are complicit in the mass-media promotion of socially problematic behavior. (If you have a meeting or something you need to get to and don’t have time to read this whole column, the answer is “no.”)

For the purpose of this discussion, let’s restrict ourselves to opera, because opera (unlike, for example, chamber music) occasionally involves stabbings. Rigoletto and Tosca,—two of my absolute favorite operas—glamorize high body counts and attempted rape; seduction, at the very least. And I haven’t even mentioned Cavalleria Rusticana, I Pagliacci, or (God help us) Powder Her Face.

Is a particularly explicit staging of Tosca, one that trades on the “shabby little shocker”‘s sensational appeal, a socially irresponsible endeavor? What about Rigoletto, which has less sex but better voice-leading? At what point does a pillar of the repertoire garner a parental discretion warning? How many degenerate aristocrats have to chase a young woman around a chaise lounge for Focus on the Family to include a topical note in its next mailing?

What if all the opera company directors in America were abducted by the operatives of a shadowy modernist cabal and replaced by new music supporters, and I were commissioned to write an opera myself? Would it be irresponsible of me to incorporate lots of beheadings and explosions? What if the opera were about current events —would that ameliorate the situation, or make it worse?

The fundamental fallacy in these questions is that children—i.e., the impressionable people with whose heads we don’t want to mess—do not, by and large, like opera. Similarly, I’m reasonably sure that one could program a radio show featuring buckets of foley gore without having to worry about maladjusting the little ones huddled around the family wireless. Furthermore, I would submit that one of the highest compliments a composer of new music can be paid is that his work is truly disturbing to an audience of adults, of people who are not afraid to look under their beds at night. In this context, I think it’s safe to say that staged violence is ham-handed and tasteless at worst and only genuinely irresponsible when presented to the young, who seldom go to the opera anyway unless their parents make them.

And if nobody gets hurt or killed on stage during your pieces… well then, you really have nothing to worry about.