From: Michael Roberts (michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 25 2003 - 08:25:42 EDT
Unless we have suffered under a tyranny we cannot criticise Shostakovich. I was in Apartheid South Africa for a time where it was difficult to speak out and with pressure to keep quiet.
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: Iain Strachan
To: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: Creativity, genius and the science/faith interface
> The point I'm trying to make is perhaps an extrapolation of what
> D.M. Thomas
> said above; that creative geniuses are maybe put there in order to
> tell the
> truth.
This gets us into aesthetic theory. Music communicates something, but I do not know how it can be truth.
Shostakovich once told the poet Yevtushenko that "God will forgive me, because I don't lie in music, only in words".
Reference is at http://www.gregsandow.com/shos13.htm . The 13th Symphony contains a setting of Yevtushenko's poem "Babiy Yar", a vehement protest against anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. That seems to tell the truth to me; and it got the symphony banned after one performance.
I grant that Shotakovich reacted bravely. Given extreme pressure, a man either battles back or lies down in surrender. How is either a reflection of redemption? Jesus unflinchingly went to the cross. Shostakovich covertly inserted that which some people thought was subversive into his music. What is the ratio? Or are they incommensurable? I, at least, do not see a real similarity.
Actually Shostakovich wasn't anything like as brave as, for example Solzhenitsyn, who was openly critical of the regime and got exiled for it. Shostakovich put his name to any amount of soviet propaganda articles that were ghost-written for him, just to get them off his back. He did cave in and join the Communist party (then wept bitterly to his friend Glickman over it). You don't seem to have acknowledged my little qualifier that it was a reflection __albeit a dim one__. It is in the aspect of suffering over what one has created that I was making the comparison, not as being a reflection of redemption (though it may well happen that an apt poem or piece of music may bring someone in extreme distress back from the brink of despair and bring them to the understanding that someone else understands what they are going through).
Creative artists suffer in one way or another for their creativity, just as our Creator suffered immeasurably more over His creation. The "ratio" as you put it is immeasurably greater, but the pattern is the same. Furthermore, it seems to me that the Bible is full of pre-echoes of the supreme sacrifice on the Cross. Try comparing the language in Job Ch 18 with that of Isaiah 53, and you will see a remarkable similarity; several expressions repeated as to other peoples' reaction to another's suffering. Yet Job was not Christ; the ratio was a vast one. Yet it's interesting to note that at the end of the book that it is through the prayers of Job that his false comforters get forgiven. If the Bible can be full of echoes of Christ, why cannot life today also reflect these things?
Iain.
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