Theories on socialist realism and socialist music culture in the 1960s in Hungary

Abstract

In the 1960s, the quantity of publications on aesthetics of music significantly increased in Hungary. The variability of the subjects, the approaches and the opinions are result of an explicit ideological reordering based on the consequently articulated politics of anti-Stalinism. By the mid-sixties the economic founding and sustainability of socialism and its optimized operation became the crucial problem for the power, hence the importance of natural and social sciences increased in the public discourses. The arts were no longer treated as mere illustrations of the political power and its intentions. I focus on the main contributions to aesthetics of music of the so-called creative Marxism written by three internationally acknowledged Hungarian scholars of this period: Jozsef Ujfalussy, Denes Zoltai and Janos Marothy. Selected texts are analized from theoretical points of view and interpreted in the context of the Hungarian cultural policy and the national and international career of their authors as well.