Writ­ing in this past Thursday’s issue of The New York Times (Feb­ru­ary 4^th), Michael Kim­mel­man com­pares the Euro­pean tour on which the gov­ern­ment of Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad sent the Tehran Sym­phony Orches­tra to sim­i­lar tours on which the for­mer Soviet Union would send its own world-class per­form­ers, such Svi­atoslav Richter.[1. Inter­est­ingly, the piece has two dif­fer­ent titles: “A Swiss Con­cert For an Audi­ence Back in Tehran” is the print ver­sion; the online ver­sion reads, “The Sour Notes of Iran’s Art Diplo­macy.”] The con­certs these per­form­ers gave served both to dis­tract West­ern audi­ences from the dis­si­dents the Soviet gov­ern­ment was exil­ing to the gulags and to force those audi­ences into “the moral com­pro­mise [that] attend­ing such pro­pa­ganda events” would require. Given that the Iran­ian symphony’s tour took place “around the time the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment exe­cuted two more polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, charg­ing nine oth­ers with wag­ing war against God, a cap­i­tal offense,“[1. And some of them are likely to be exe­cuted as well, as the gov­ern­ment in Iran gears up to intim­i­date the oppo­si­tion fur­ther in the days before Feb­ru­ary 11^th, the anniver­sary of the found­ing of the Islamic Repub­lic.] it is likely that the Islamic Repub­lic was try­ing to imple­ment a sim­i­lar strat­egy. Indeed, the title of the music the orches­tra per­formed, “Peace and Friend­ship Sym­phony,” by Majid Entezami, would seem to make that strat­egy explicit. Kim­mel­man, how­ever, does not have kind words for the music, call­ing it “a four-movement jere­miad of mar­tial bom­bast and almost unfath­omable incom­pe­tence and silli­ness, orig­i­nally per­formed, accord­ing to Tehran Times, last Feb­ru­ary in Iran to cel­e­brate the 30^th anniver­sary of the rev­o­lu­tion [and] reti­tled for this occasion.”

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s arti­cle, though, was not what he had to say about the sim­i­lar­i­ties between what Tehran was try­ing to do last month and what Moscow did dur­ing the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The dif­fer­ence now isn’t just that the Tehran orches­tra play­ing a pathetic Peace and Friend­ship Sym­phony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels play­ing Beethoven’s Emperor con­certo. More fun­da­men­tally, it’s that a tour by an anointed sym­phony orches­tra from the other side barely reg­is­ters in the West­ern polit­i­cal con­scious­ness. In an Inter­net age when everyone’s sup­pos­edly savvy to crude pro­pa­ganda, the pre­sump­tion seems to be that the Iran­ian tour doesn’t even rise to the thresh­old of newsworthiness.

But this pre­sump­tion is a result of what the Amer­i­can musi­col­o­gist Richard Taruskin calls a com­mon fal­lacy. The fal­lacy, he has writ­ten, con­sists in turn­ing “a blind eye on the morally or polit­i­cally dubi­ous aspects of seri­ous music,” as if “the only legit­i­mate object of praise or cen­sure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blame­less,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for granted when it comes to pop­u­lar cul­ture, crit­i­ciz­ing Avatar, for exam­ple, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving peo­ple of color or the writ­ers of a show like Bat­tle Star Galac­tica for how they write rape into the show’s nar­ra­tive; but it is good to be reminded that no art, not even clas­si­cal music, is with­out polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance, that it too can be used as pro­pa­ganda, to rein­force, or to sub­vert, the sta­tus quo.

In the con­clu­sion to his review, Kim­mel­man quotes an Iran­ian busi­ness­man liv­ing in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “see­ing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, how­ever, that his heart “goes out to the musi­cians. They’re vic­tims like the rest of us.“