Music Divided explores how political pressures affected musical life
on both sides of the iron curtain during the early years of the cold
war. In this groundbreaking study, Danielle Fosler-Lussier illuminates
the pervasive political anxieties of the day through particular
attention to artistic, music-theoretical, and propagandistic responses
to the music of Hungary's most renowned twentieth-century composer, Béla
Bartók. She shows how a tense period of political transition plagued
Bartók's music and imperiled those who took a stand on its aesthetic
value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating investigation of
Bartók's reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that Western
composers, too, formulated their ideas about musical style under the
influence of ever-escalating cold war tensions.
Music Divided surveys Bartók's role in provoking negative reactions to
"accessible" music from Pierre Boulez, Hermann Scherchen, and Theodor
Adorno. It considers Bartók's influence on the youthful compositions and
thinking of Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it outlines
Bartók's legacy in the music of the Hungarian composers András Mihály,
Ferenc Szabó, and Endre Szervánszky. These details reveal the impact of
local and international politics on the selection of music for concert
and radio programs, on composers' choices about musical style, on
government radio propaganda about music, on the development of socialist
realism, and on the use of modernism as an instrument of political
action.
