The Cold War Music Study Group (CWMSG) is organizing a panel submission for the 2024 Annual Meeting of the AMS in Chicago on the topic of music, sound, and the environment in the Cold War. Recent turns in both music studies and history have considered the role played by non-human animals, nature, and global ecologies in geopolitical and ideological struggles during the Cold War. Over the course of the twentieth century, wars both cold and hot were entangled with the “Anthropocene”: an era in which human agency has caused lasting changes to the global environment (Crutzen 2002; Sykes 2019). Whether through nuclear testing, arctic exploration, oil extractivism, or environmental cooperation, Cold War powers both big and small refigured their relationship(s) to the earth and its occupants. And music and sound, too, were there along the way, as musicians, composers, and artists sought to grapple with the impact of climate change and environmental activism.
Asking how music, sound, and environment(s) were entangled in these Cold War geopolitics, we invite proposals for roughly fifteen-minute papers that address this topic from a variety of perspectives from across music studies. Submissions might address some of the following topics:
– Nuclear testing and/or atomic energy programs in music and sound
– Extractive capitalism and socialism in Europe, the United States, the USSR, and the non-aligned world or global south
– Global environmentalism movements across borders
– Exploration and utopianism
– Music, politics, and non-human animals and/or plants
– Infrastructure development and its impact on the environment (e.g., irrigation and the Aral Sea; the Hoover Dam)
– Narratives counter to prototypical state-led initiatives that consider individual actors and relationships
If interested, please submit an abstract of no more than 350 words and title to Gabrielle Cornish (gcornish@wisc.edu) no later than March 5, 2024. We especially encourage junior scholars, scholars historically marginalized within the academy, contingent faculty, and those working outside of academia to apply. If you might be interested in serving as a respondent or chair, please also email Gabrielle Cornish by the above deadline.