Past CWMSG sessions

• Gabrielle Cornish (University of Miami), Chair
• John Kapusta (Eastman School of Music), Discussant
• Beata Boleslawska (Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences)
• Maristella Feustle (University of North Texas)
• Knar Abrahamyan (Columbia University)

Recent historical scholarship has shown that the battle between communism and capitalism was as much a spiritual contest as it was a geopolitical one. We might, as Diane Kirby has written, think of the Cold War as “a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless” (2003). Jonathan P. Herzog, for example, has argued that American politicians saw religion (and specifically Christianity) as a key component that both differentiated the United States from the Soviet Union as well as placed a special urgency on the former’s triumph over the latter (2011). At the same time, following Marx’s dictum that “religion [was] the opium of the masses,” the Soviet Union sought to replace Tsarist-era religion with state-sponsored atheism. The result, as Victoria Smolkin has demonstrated, transformed atheism into a pseudo-spiritual cosmology (2018). Present in global conflicts in Korean (e.g., Chang 2014) and Vietnam as well as de- and post-colonial change in the Middle East and Africa, spiritual identity cooperated with political alignment as a tool for both propaganda and resistance. As countries around the world grappled with both Western and Soviet colonialism, religious pluralities had to be negotiated alongside resurgent national identities.

Asking how music, sound, and spirituality were entangled in Cold War geopolitics, this panel features three twenty-minute papers that reach across North America and Eastern Europe as well as religious identities. Each paper considers the Cold War from a different geographical and spiritual perspective: Catholicism in Eastern Bloc Poland; Christianity in the United States; and Islam in the Soviet Union. Our first presenter considers the connections between Pope John Paul II, Polish anti-communist protest, and music. Connecting Catholicism to composers such as Penderecki and Panufnik, she positions religion as a lens through which critics, composers, and listeners expressed their political and personal views about the state. Our second paper takes a deep dive into the Willis Conover Collection at the University of North Texas to explore the dynamics between Christian belief and US politics as they appeared in Conover’s broadcasts to the socialist world for the Voice of America. And in our third paper, the author uses opera in Soviet Kazakhstan to explore gender, spirituality, and colonialism in Islamic music in the very final year of the Soviet empire. Taken together, these three papers (as well as a response from a respondent) ask critical questions about how Cold War geopolitics and spiritual identities manifested in music.

Co-convened with the Global East Asian Study Group

Speakers
Marysol Quevedo
Hannah Hyun Kyong Chang, University Of Sheffield
David Wilson, University Of Chicago
Hee-sun Kim, Kookmin University
Stephen Johnson, Eastman School Of Music

East and Southeast Asia were key sites of the global Cold War. Although the area tended to elude conventional mapping of Eastern and Western blocs, Cold War tensions shaped the geopolitics of the post-1945 world, not least through the two ‘hot’ wars – Korean (1950-3) and Vietnam (1955-75). These conflicts also forged epistemic structures, which mediated constructions of freedom and authoritarianism, global and local.The Global East Asian Music Research and Cold War and Music study groups convened a joint panel that represents new research on the Cold War and music in East Asia. The papers examine musical circulations and competitions that were constituted within the dynamics of the global Cold War in East Asia. They not only expand our understanding of Cold War music history but also challenge a historiography of isolation that was itself an internal part of Cold War narratives. This panel takes Cold War East Asia as a vantage point from which to rethink post-1945 era music histories. The first presenter explores the transnational exchanges that shaped one of China’s classic revolutionary ballets, The White-Haired Girl (Bai mao nü 白 毛 女 ). By delving into its transnational entanglements, the author shows how post-War East Asia was imbricated in the global Cold War, while simultaneously destabilizing the ideological blocs produced by the Cold War Three-World model. Our second presenter explores the competition between two Koreas over national authority and ideological superiority while focusing on how international stages of traditional performing arts of both Koreas became vehicles for cultural propaganda. They reveal how internal politics intertwined with global Cold War politics and defined the direction of traditional performing arts of the Korean peninsula, in opposite ways. The third presenter reconsiders the utility of the work-concept for North Korean revolutionary opera in light of the genre’s relationship with the ‘immortal classics,’ a canon of stories officially credited to Kim Il Sung. They instead consider the ‘immortal classics’ a broad, intertextual, cross-media assemblage within which revolutionary operas consolidate musical signifiers, and they suggest that this consolidating function undermines the works’ status as standalone compositions.

Part One: Innovation and Collaboration at CLAEM

• Antares Boyle (Portland State University), Moderator
• Eduardo Herrera (Rutgers University)
• Noel Torres-Rivera (Graduate Center, CUNY)

Part Two: Recording Technologies and Cold War Cultural Consciousness

• Martha Sprigge (University of California, Santa Barbara), Moderator
• George Adams (University of Chicago)
• Ryan Gourley (University of California, Berkeley)

Part Three: Response and Discussion

• Gabrielle Cornish (University of Miami)
• Jennifer Iverson (University of Chicago)

Recent scholarship in music studies has demonstrated the central roles that technology and mediation played in shaping musical practices since 1945, as well as our understanding of these practices during the Cold War and its aftermath. This alternative-format panel is a joint session of the Cold War and Music Study Group of the AMS and the Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group of the SMT. It features paired lightning talks from music scholars across sub-disciplines, who engage with these topics across different geographic regions and cultural-political contexts. Together, the panelists will offer new perspectives on, and prompt dialogue about, analyzing the role of mediation and technology in musical life during the Cold War.

In the first pair of talks, titled “Innovation and Collaboration at CLAEM,” Eduardo Herrera and Noel Torres-Rivera discuss creative practices at the Electronic Music Laboratory at the Centro Latinoamerican de Altos Estudios Musicales in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Herrera provides an overview of the studio’s cultural politics, while Torres-Rivera offers an analysis of a work realized at this studio: Rafael Aponte-Ledée’s Presagio de Pájaros Muertos (1966). The second pair of papers focus on the circulation of musical objects and ideologies in the Cold War United States. Ryan Gourley focuses on the politics of record circulation, analyzing American record labels run by Russian expatriates. He draws attention to how music and musicians from the USSR became participants in discourses of U.S. internationalism during the Cold War. George Adams offers an analysis of Maryanne Amacher’s City Links (1967–), arguing that the logistical and theoretical difficulties of Amacher’s work can be understood as expressions of a developing American cultural consciousness during the Cold War era. Following the paired lightning talks Gabrielle Cornish and Jennifer Iverson will offer reflections from the disciplines of musicology and music theory, respectively, and open up a discussion with panelists and audience members.

The relationship between gender and Cold War politics has been an engaging area of recent research in disciplines that overlap with musicology, and an area the Cold War and Music Study Group has not directly addressed before. In this alternative format panel, we consider musical texts and practices that raise questions about gender and identity as they relate to Cold War music and politics. Panelists will each introduce and contextualize a short musical anchor document related to the topic. They will then provide time for the audience to engage with the materials through listening, watching, reading, performance, and discussion.

Each anchor document takes us to a different region, explores a different genre and mode of musical production, and foregrounds a series of questions about the relationship between gender, race, class, disability, and age. Trevor Nelson considers how British composer Alan Bush used girlhood to promote acceptance of post-imperial migrant communities in his little performed music drama The Spell Unbound (1953). He uses an excerpt from the Act I finale to raise larger questions about how “girlhood”—a cultural and historical construct encompassing local ideals of gender, youth, and appropriate decorum—was used in promoting and describing Cold War power shifts and new forms of national identity. Hye-jung Park focuses on the voice of Mabel Williams in an excerpt from a sound recording of the transnational anti-racist radio program, “Radio Free Dixie” (1961), from the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. She suggests that the Cold War not only shaped the ways that African Americans reimagined Black internationalism, but that these reconfigurations were informed by gender as well. Lisa Cooper-Vest introduces us to the Polish film Matka Joanna od aniołów (Mother Joanna of the Angels, 1961), directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, which adapts the history of a French demon-possessed, physically disabled nun. Cooper-Vest’s excerpts demonstrate how women’s voices became indices of their irrationality, and she uses this film to pose questions about how we can think critically about the ways that women and their suffering were used in the mid-to-late twentieth century as a metaphor for internal (political, racial, religious, class) threats that must be contained. Finally, John Kapusta examines Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations (1971-2) through the lens of Cold War gender politics, which will include a performance of “Teach Yourself to Fly.” Kapusta reframes Oliveros’s celebrated feminist works through the lens of Cold War–era cultural politics. Moreover, because Sonic Meditations remain popular works in the classroom, he asks how such a reframing can or should inform how we use these works in our pedagogy. By focusing on gender for this year’s session, we hope to draw the study group’s attention to different subjects, but also propose different modes of inquiry for researching and teaching musical practices of the Cold War era.

Kevin Bartig, chair (Michigan State University)
Philip Gentry (University of Delaware)
Eduardo Herrera (Rutgers University)
Chérie Rivers Ndaliko (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Cold War institutions and ideologies spurred some of the most agitated documentary, political, and experimental filmmaking of the late twentieth century. This discussion offers the opportunity for collective engagement with the global nature and limitations of some of these radical projects through a contextualized screening of film excerpts in which music and sound are conceived of as doing revolutionary work. These films make up the first hour of the evening panel, with an open discussion to follow, chaired by Kevin Bartig.

To orient the audience as viewers and to offer theoretical talking points, each panelist will introduce their curated selection over the course of five minutes before presenting 15-20 minutes of film. Philip Gentry takes us into Shirley Clarke’s experiments with abstract sound, dance, and the transformation of the American urban life with selections from her Bridges-Go-Round (1958) and The Connection (1961). Eduardo Herrera sets the stage for a deep dive into Fernando “Pino” Solanas’s monumental critique of neo-colonialism in Latin America in his monumental documentary film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968). Chérie Rivers Ndaliko unpacks the influence of Soviet film training on revolutionary African film through an exploration of the historical erasures that drive Raoul Peck’s creative sound work in Lumumba: La mort du prophète (1990).

Musics—diegetic and electronic, ambient and confrontational—cut across the films’ critical engagement with imperialism, capitalism, and the global order. Music and sound, too, are crucial to the cinematic intimacies, localities, and specificities upon which the filmmakers insist. We hope the conversation these films will stimulate across the audience will challenge some of the tropes of Cold War cultural geography within music studies by underscoring, for example, links between Africa and the Soviet Union, Latin American responses to United States urban development projects, and an ethos of internationalism that is disengaged from the nuclear standoff of geopolitical superpowers.

Nicholas Tochka (University of Melbourne), Chair and respondent
Masha Kowell (Loyola Marymount University)
Ian MacMillen (Oberlin College)
Marysol Quevedo (University of Miami)
Peter Schmelz (Arizona State University)
Anne Searcy (University of Miami)
Kira Thurman (University of Michigan)
Rachel Tollett (City Colleges of Chicago / Northwestern University)

This interdisciplinary panel brings together scholars in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and art history to explore the broad question: Whither “the Cold War” as a meaningful analytical lens for scholars of music today? Two broad concerns with time and space motivate this question. Must a Cold War music studies be bound to works and figures from the historical period that coincides with “the Cold War?” And how has privileging “the Cold War” as a temporal or geographic lens shaped contemporary scholarship on music?

During the first two hours of the session, two pairs of speakers will make short presentations related to recently completed research on Cold War topics, with each pair followed by remarks from a discussant and then open discussion. Our respondent then begins the third hour with a short statement contextualizing the historiographical challenges posed by the study of Cold War music within the larger field of Cold War studies before moderating a broader discussion with speakers and audience members.

The panel’s opening hour asks, “When is the Cold War?” Questioning standard periodizations of the Cold War and its musics in two senses, panelists examine continuities in musical aesthetics, ideology, and encounters across the major political upheavals that have long bookended histories of the Cold War, while challenging the primacy of “events” for situating the Cold War and its musics in time. Ian MacMillen and Masha Kowell first examine jazz in Soviet animated films as a target/device of ideological critique and the motivator of Disney-inspired and modernist aesthetics across the sometimes overstated “changes” (post-World War II ideological pronouncements and Khrushchev’s ascent) of the long 1950s. They argue that American swing and bebop recordings’ intermedial convergences with animation, film-scoring, noise, and the voice both afforded an experimental openness during the years of strictest control and also serve now to illuminate periods of epoch-bridging aesthetic stability that are not readily apparent through unimedial, Cold War musicological methods. Rachel Tollett then interrogates the presence of American popular music in Soviet screen culture throughout the Cold War, real and imagined. She focuses on how sustained use of such music creates conversations across periods. Her work theorizes the Cold War as heard in the musical conflicts of Soviet screen cultures and reveals intertextuality and convergence both historical and contemporary. War, cold or otherwise, suggests multi-temporal mental geographies for understanding political, national musical discourse between Russia and the United States. Discussant Peter Schmelz then responds and facilitates discussion with the audience.

The panel’s second hour asks, “Where is the Cold War?” Proposing that the lens of the Cold War necessitates an inherently transnational approach, panelists caution against re-inscribing nationality as a category and regarding conflict as the only way to look at the globe. Anne Searcy first speaks about the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1962 tour of the United States. During this tour, American audiences sought to find their own artistic values on display in the Bolshoi’s performances, resulting in spectacular misreadings of the Soviet works. Such misunderstandings were common in the Soviet-American exchanges and speak to the difficulties of cross-cultural communication. Following this presentation, Quevedo discusses musical exchange between the United States and Cuba that opened in the wake of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro’s 2014 announcement of a new era in U.S.-Cuba relations. Recent news coverage from both countries shows that the U.S. and Cuban press still engage with Cold War strategies of self-presentation even after almost three decades since the so-called end of the Cold War. These strategies perpetuate East/West and communist/capitalist polarities, as well as myths and misconceptions of a Cuba frozen in time, contradicting the blurred geographic and temporal boundaries now recognized by Cold War scholars. Together these two papers show how using the Cold War as a methodological framework allows music scholars to examine music through an international lens. Discussant Kira Thurman then responds and facilitates discussion with the audience.

Respondent Nicholas Tochka opens the third hour with a short statement. Asking how different methodological paradigms in musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies have constituted “Cold War music” as an object for inquiry, Tochka suggests a renewed focus on reflexivity in Cold War music studies today. The hour concludes with a moderated discussion between audience members and panelists.

The panel will prioritize discussion between panelists and the audience, with speakers working from several shared perspectives to emphasize questions of methodology. Rather than locating Cold War music strictly in time, as commencing with the end of World War II in 1945 and ending symbolically with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, speakers find continuities across this period. And extending recent musicological work that has challenged the nation-state as a privileged space for understanding the Cold War, speakers approach the geography of Cold War music as defined by a distinct set of overlapping global processes. In doing so, the panel explores the tension between top-down versus bottom-up perspectives, while also broadening Cold War music.

Alison Furlong (Ohio State University), Chair
Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang (Ewha Womans University)
Brian Locke (Western Illinois University)
Lisa Cooper Vest (University of Southern California)
Joy H. Calico (Vanderbilt University)
Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Ohio State University)

Sometimes we mistake the music we teach, or the narrative we tell about music’s development, for the music that really existed. In this alternative-format session we will become acquainted with twentieth-century music that falls well outside today’s performance, listening, and teaching canons. As we learn about this music, we will consider whether this music might allow us to rethink our canons and the stories we tell about twentieth-century music. During the first two hours of the session, each of our four presenters will briefly introduce a repertory of “lost music” from the Cold War era (10 min.) and play selections from that repertory (10–15 min.) There will be a brief period for questions after each presentation (5–10 min.). The emphasis will be on familiarizing us with music we have not heard before. Our presenters will introduce us to lost musics from a wide variety of Cold War contexts. Brian Locke will discuss the disappearance of Czech swing music, which was popular during the Nazi occupation. This music’s practitioners went into Western exile during the late 1940s and ’50s, their music ideologically incompatible with the Communist regime. Locke will play examples by Jirí Traxler (1912–2011) and Kamil Behounek (1916–83), two of the leading wartime songwriters of swing: both turned away from the genre when faced with postwar exile. Locke will explore the transformations of the “hot accordionist” Behounek—who led a polka band in West Germany—and the pianist Traxler, who composed as an amateur in Canada. Despite four decades of silence, tunes such as Behounek’s “My Calendar” and Traxler’s “Crazy Day” have regained a foothold in Czech popular consciousness since the fall of Communism. Lisa Cooper Vest will introduce us to Polish composers who were marginalized because, for various reasons, they found themselves working outside the esteemed and institutionally powerful Polish avant-garde. Boguslaw Schäffer, Witold Rudziński, and Zygmunt Mycielski were all influential in Polish musical life, and they all composed prolifically in the post-Stalin period, but their stylistic and aesthetic affiliations precluded their easy assimilation into the aesthetic narratives that were being constructed in the early years of Polish avant-gardism. By playing excerpts of Schäffer’s monosonata (1959) and Non-stop (1960), Rudziński’s Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys (1962), and Mycielski’s Symphony no. 2 (1960–61), Vest proposes to recoup the complicated sound-world of postwar Polish musical production. A presentation by Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang will feature a live performance and discussion of music by Sun Nam Kim (1917–86). Kim was a leading composer of Western art music in Korea in the 1940s, when the South-North border was beginning to be enforced. He was an admired figure among Seoul’s avant-garde composers, but his political and stylistic affiliations foreclosed further activities in South and North Korea. He was unwelcome in South Korea due to his communist leanings, but after his Northern exile he was rejected in North Korea as too “cosmopolitan.” The presentation will focus on two songs for tenor and piano (“Mountain Flower” and “Iron Foundry”) and excerpts of a piano concerto that survives only in an arrangement for two pianos. An examination of Sun Nam Kim’s trajectory demonstrates why musical modernism and avant-gardism have been so precarious in South Korea’s national memory in the post-Korean War period. Joy H. Calico addresses mid-century opera in the United States, where Cold War narratives have celebrated the U.S. avant-garde as a counterpoint to socialist realist tenets; this narrative, however, has resulted in the devaluation—and even total loss— of critically acclaimed, popular diatonic opera from the same period. In the 1950s such works were frequently honored with the Pulitzer Prize, a fact that undermines conventional wisdom about the Prize as the reward for Cold War American serialism. Calico will offer examples from the Pulitzer-Prize winning operas Giants in the Earth by Douglas Moore (1951) and The Saint of Bleecker Street by Carlo Menotti (1955). The third hour will be spent in a broader conversation, facilitated by discussant Danielle Fosler-Lussier, about the canon of twentieth-century music and the place of these “lost” repertories within it. What factors can we discern in the “disappearance” of this music? Is this music worth studying, performing, or otherwise reviving? How does this music change the story we tell about twentieth-century music? By hearing and discussing these forgotten repertories, we hope to stimulate a conversation that will help us write more astute, more complete histories of mid-twentieth-century music.

Elaine Kelly (University of Edinburgh), Chair
Ewelina Boczkowska (Youngstown State University)
Martha Sprigge (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Peter Kupfer (Southern Methodist University)
Ulrike Präger (Boston University)

Discussions of nostalgia in the context of the Cold War tend to recall the term’s origins as a debilitating medical diagnosis. Be it in the hankering for lost worlds that followed the Second World War or the Ostalgie that supposedly swept the former Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, Cold War nostalgia is associated with a fear of progress and a reluctance to overcome the past. Yet nostalgic constructs of the past are rarely straightforward. Nostalgia can serve variously to mediate disjunctions between past and present, to negotiate identity, and as a vehicle of ambivalence and irony.

This panel seeks to reconsider how nostalgia has functioned in Cold War and post-Cold War musical cultures. Taking as its starting point Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), the panel will comprise of four ten-minute position papers, following which the discussion will be opened to the audience. Ewelina Boczkowska will explore the role that restorative nostalgia played in legitimizing communism in post-war Poland. Focusing on portrayals of Chopin in films produced between 1944 and 1949, she will demonstrate how the composer was harnessed to compensate for collective loss and how the “public” narratives at play tapped into the nostalgic yearnings of an oppressed nation trying to rebuild itself.  Martha Sprigge will explore the affinities between expressions of nostalgia in post-war and post-socialist East Germany. Looking at the annual commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Vladimir Lenin, a festival that was revived in the GDR from Weimar Germany and continues today, she will discuss how its musical rituals have evolved as a vehicle for reflective nostalgia. Peter Kupfer will explore how the conflicts inherent in post-socialist nostalgia are manifest in Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov’s films Burnt by the Sun (1994) and The Barber of Siberia (1998). Boym has described the films as prime examples of restorative nostalgia; they serve to revitalize a sense of national pride, offering idealized visions of the Russian past. Yet, the films were also conceived for Western consumption and are situated firmly in contemporary film culture. Kupfer will examine how the tensions of this juxtaposition of past and present emerge in the use of music in both films. Finally Ulrike Präger will look at the phenomenon of nostalgia travel among German civilians who were expelled from the Bohemian lands in the wake of World War 2. For migrants returning as tourists to the East, the disjunctions between nostalgic constructs and the geographical realities of their homelands are profound. Präger argues that the musical practices and repertoires of these homelands have provided a way of mediating this divide, functioning both to allow travelers to connect the (staged) present with their memories of the past, and providing a “sounded home” that exists independently of their places of origin.

While the session is open to all, the position papers will be distributed in advance to Study Group members. The session will conclude with an informal networking event.

Peter Schmelz (Washington University in St. Louis), Chair
Alison Furlong (Ohio State University)
Trever Hagen (University of Exeter)
Christoph Hust (Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Leipzig)
Johanna Frances Yunker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Andrea Bohlman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University)

The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 was one of the most visible symbols of the Cold War’s end. In the popular imagination its destruction continues to function as shorthand for processes of political, economic, social, and cultural transformation. But what was the lasting impact of these changes for musical life? The twenty-fifth anniversary of 1989 is an ideal time to critically reassess the legacies of that year. This session will open a wide-ranging discussion of the late Cold War and its aftermath. We will approach this topic from two directions. Focusing on Central Europe, the panelists’ individual presentations will closely examine specific examples of music-making in societies in transition. We will also step back from these case studies to explore collaboratively, in formal responses and group discussion, the extent to which Central European transformations were paradigmatic, the degree to which 1989 marks a historical turning point, and the implications of 1989 for the music historiography of the Cold War. The session features four short presentations, two formal responses, and moderated discussion periods. The first two presentations will consider the impact of German reunification on art music composition and music institutions in the former GDR. Johanna Frances Yunker will discuss how Ruth Zechlin worked through her complex feelings about East Germany in the opera Die Reise (1990), in which the relationship between a daughter and her father serves as a metaphor for the relationships between German citizens and their nation’s past. Christoph Hust will draw on archival evidence and oral history in his exploration of how the Deutscher Verlag für Musik, a key player in the music publishing network of the GDR, adapted to new political, scholarly, and economic contexts after 1989. The second pair of presentations will discuss the use of media and popular music to engage in political action both before and after 1989. Alison Furlong will present a case study of Radio Glasnost (1987–89), a collaboration between current and former East and West Germans that was broadcast via the private West Berlin station Radio 100; she argues that the programs constituted a form of “citizen propaganda” that countered the official narratives of the GDR’s state-run media. Trever Hagen will use the recent activities of the anti-establishment rock group The Plastic People of the Universe to launch his consideration of how the socialist past continues to inform possibilities for musically mediated political action in the present-day Czech Republic. Joy Calico will respond to the first pair of presentations, and Andrea Bohlman will respond to the second; each will draw out the larger themes that will become the basis of group discussions moderated by Peter Schmelz.

Danielle Fosler-Lussier, The Ohio State University
Eduardo Herrera, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Carol Hess, University of California, Davis (Respondent)
Lisa Jakelski, Eastman School of Music (Organizer)
Marysol Quevedo, Indiana University
Ryan Skinner, The Ohio State University
Susan Thomas, University of Georgia (Moderator)

Musicological scholarship about the Cold War has revealed music’s importance as a tool of cultural diplomacy. Most studies to date, however, have focused on Europe and the United States, overlooking the ramifications of the Cold War in the Global South. This three-hour, alternative-format session seeks to nuance existing views of Cold War cultural diplomacy by investigating exchange and other forms of interaction situated in the Global South from the 1950s into the 1970s. The panelists’ individual contributions will closely examine instances of African, Latin American, and Asian encounters with music and musicians elsewhere in the world. Their work will launch a collective discussion of issues that are at the core of our subfield: how music has been used to exercise soft power; how competing individual, state, and corporate interests have shaped musical life; and how the composition and performance of music has been used to establish borders, as well as to cross them.

The session features four short presentations, two formal responses, and moderated discussion periods. After introductory remarks by Thomas, Fosler-Lussier and Herrera will explore the roles of state and non-state actors in North-South cultural diplomacy. Focusing on the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Presentations program, Fosler-Lussier considers the symbolic and practical value that U.S. government officials and audiences in Asia, Africa, and Latin America assigned to performances of Euro-American classical music. Herrera examines the Rockefeller Foundation’s impact on the founding and early history of Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center and the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. The panel’s second half will investigate local musical life and cross-border encounters during periods of political and social change. Skinner uses the early career of Panka Dembelé, a pivotal figure in the development of Malian music culture during the 1950s and 1960s, to discuss late and post-colonial Cold War politics in (and out of) West Africa. Quevedo surveys musical interaction both before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution; she demonstrates how political alliances, first with the US and later with Eastern Europe, impacted cultural exchanges and Cuban composers’ individual styles. Hess will respond to each pair of presentations, drawing out the larger themes that will become the basis of group discussions moderated by Thomas.

Lisa Jakelski (Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester), Chair
Liudmila Kovnatskaya (Saint Petersburg Conservatory), “Self-censorship during the Cold War and Beyond: Experience of Self-Knowledge through Memoirs and Diaries by Prof. Mikhail Druskin”
Lóránt Péteri (Liszt Academy of Music), “Hungarian Musicology under State Socialism: Institutions, Informal Networks, Scholarly Projects, and Ideologies”

Joshua Pilzer, University of Toronto, Chair
Jennifer Abraham Cramer, LSU Williams Center for Oral History
Jonathan Yaeger, Indiana University
Amy Wlodarski, Dickinson College, Respondent
Nicholas Tochka, Stony Brook University
Laura Silverberg, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Organizer
Jeffers Engelhardt, Amherst College, Respondent

Despite a shared interest in Cold War studies, musicologists and ethnomusicologists have traditionally approached their subject matter with different methodological strategies. Consequently, there has been relatively little interaction between ethnomusicologists and musicologists studying the Cold War. Yet regardless of one’s disciplinary affiliation, scholars of the Cold War face similar challenges: How does one study a crisis-ridden period colored by political stereotypes, government oppression, censorship, and police surveillance? How might one move beyond official portrayals to uncover real lived experiences? How does one approach a historical period that continues to project a profound influence on many lives today? For both musicologists and ethnomusicologists, oral history has provided a critical means of addressing these challenges.

Sponsored by the AMS Cold War and Music Study Group, this session will bring together ethnomusicologists and musicologists to discuss the role of oral history in Cold War research. Long considered the domain of ethnomusicologists, oral history has been embraced by a growing number of musicologists seeking to go beyond published and archival sources. Yet conducting interviews with actors in Cold War music history is a process rife with theoretical, practical, interpretative, and ethical concerns. This three-hour session of alternative format will be divided into two parts, each consisting of two short papers, a response, and moderated discussion. Papers will be made available online in advance of the meeting. Joshua Pilzer will serve as session chair and moderator.

The session’s first half will focus on oral testimony and trauma. Jennifer Abraham Cramer will present on the role of oral history research in the documentation of traumatic events. In the process, she will discuss special considerations regarding training and preparation and describe how the interview process can affect those who have witnessed or lived through crises. Jonathan Yaeger will draw from his research on the surveillance of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra by the East German Stasi (secret police) to examine the challenges of using secret police files, many of which contain informant testimony with slanderous details. As memories of the Stasi continue to haunt many Germans to this day, Yaeger will also describe the complexities of interviewing former secret police informants and their victims. Amy Wlodarski will serve as respondent.

The second half will examine the interplay between oral and documentary sources. Drawing from his archival and ethnographic research on popular song in Albania since 1945, Nicholas Tochka will describe how contemporary interviews about pre-1989 musical events sometimes contradict the archival record, and he will argue for an approach that embraces the incommensurability of ethnographic and archival methods. Such an approach, moreover, begs a deeper examination of the location of our interlocutors and ourselves within historically situated economies of Cold War knowledge production. Laura Silverberg will discuss the historiographical complexities of working with recent oral testimony, pre-1989 texts, and post-1989 writings by East and West German musicologists, who were simultaneously witnesses to and scholars of postwar musical developments. Jeffers Engelhardt will provide a response.

Kevin Bartig, Michigan State University
Michael Beckerman, New York University (respondent)
Andrea F. Bohlman, Harvard University
Lynn Hooker, Indiana University (moderator)
Lisa Jakelski, Eastman School of Music
Kevin C. Karnes, Emory University

Just one year after Allied victory in World War II, Winston Churchill coined one of the most enduring metaphors of the Cold War: the Iron Curtain. But now, two decades after that curtain was sundered by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the very notion of “Eastern Europe” is losing cultural currency on both sides of the former divide. Accordingly, musicologists have started to look beyond the official institutions and feted musicians of the once “Great Powers” to explore the vital–yet formerly hidden–diversity of music-making and cultural expression in the Soviet bloc. This work has prompted the reconsideration of an array of questions central to our discipline: the relationship between the national, the regional, and the local in musical expression and cultural discourse; the place of minority cultures and musics in republican politics, imperial institutions, and the global marketplace; and the response of musicians to rapid and radical social, political, and economic change.

This three-hour, alternative-format session approaches these questions from two directions. The panelists’ individual presentations look closely at specific examples of music-making in the former Soviet bloc that do not figure in traditional narratives of Cold-War, Eastern European music history. We also step back from these local perspectives to explore collaboratively, in responses and discussion periods, the continued viability of the transnational field of Cold-War studies as a means of placing and explaining local experience within a meaningful global context.

The session features four short presentations, two formal responses, and moderated discussion periods. After introductory remarks by Hooker, Bartig and Jakelski will examine the roles played by festivals of contemporary music in cultural diplomacy and regional integration. Bartig explores ways in which the Zagreb Biennale, funded jointly by the USA and USSR, reflected Yugoslavia’s Cold-War policy of nonalignment. Jakelski positions Poland’s Warsaw Autumn Festival as a site of transnational expression, manifested in its promotion of Lithuanian music during the 1980s. Karnes examines Latvian musicians’ efforts to collect and memorialize Jewish folk musics in the wake of the Holocaust in the Baltic republics. And Bohlman considers an example of Soviet musical influence outside of institutional mandate, arguing that Soviet popular song provided political songwriters in Solidarity-era Poland with creative models and inspiration for their own, distinctly anti-Soviet political singing. Beckerman will respond, reflecting upon these local cases from a transnational perspective, and moving from individual presentations to group discussions moderated by Hooker.

Laura Silverberg, A-R Editions, Organizer
Lee Bidgood, University of Virginia
Elaine Kelly, Edinburgh University
Heather Wiebe, University of Virginia
Hon-Lun Yang, Hong Kong Baptist University
Marcus Zagorski, University College, Cork

Nearly two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The passing of time has enabled musicologists to approach the Cold War with increasing critical distance, and recent publications and conference presentations offer more nuanced perspectives on the relationship between musical, social, and political developments after the Second World War. Yet Cold War prejudices still risk coloring scholarly investigations into the music of this era.

The assembled panelists will discuss a web of themes relating to music historiography and the Cold War. In particular, this session will consider constructions of the past that emerged after 1945, present-day musicological narratives of the Cold War, and competing conceptions of the musical canon. Panelists will draw from their own research to address the following questions: How did composers and musicians conceive of their musical past, and how did they position their own activities within these carefully constructed historical trajectories? How have authoritarian regimes defined and appropriated the musical heritage? What processes enabled certain musical works to be accepted as part of a musical canon during the Cold War? Finally, what are effective strategies for studying the music of authoritarian regimes, where access to information is carefully controlled?

The research of the assembled panelists reflects diverse geographic regions, methodologies (from archival research to participant observation), and musical genres. Marcus Zagorski (“Historical Narrative and Aesthetic Judgment: Serial and Post-serial Music in West Germany”) will examine how composers active in West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s believed that the techniques with which they worked were prescribed by history rather than subjectively chosen. His paper cites examples of this conception of history and outlines its effects upon aesthetic judgments in the period. Elaine Kelly (“Conceptions of Canons in a Post-Cold War Climate: Interpreting Narratives of the Past in the GDR”) will explore the limitations of assessing East German music according to aesthetic criteria shaped by the hegemonic “Western” canon. In the process, she will suggest alternative means of interpreting narratives o the past in Cold War and post-Cold War contexts. Heather Wiebe (“Britain’s Cold War”) will examine how some of the Cold War’s most pressing issues were addressed in a specifically British context. Focusing on Britten’s treatment of themes of communication and freedom, as posed against the forces of both capitalism and totalitarianism, she suggests that the particularity of British cultural responses to postwar modernity complicates familiar dichotomies of populist and avant-garde, East and West. Lee Bidgood (“Czech Bluegrass Music, Ethnography, and the Liminal Presence of the Past”) will examine how three generations of Czech bluegrass musicians active both during and after the Cold War conceived of their music in terms of an imagined “American” past. Drawing from her research experience in the People’s Republic of China, Hon-Lung Yang (“Researching Music in the People’s Republic of China”) will reflect on the contemporary challenges of studying music of an authoritarian regime, dealing with government censorship, and confronting the socialist worldview ingrained in Chinese historiography.

Peter Schmelz (Washington University in St. Louis), moderator
Emily Abrams Ansari (University of Western Ontario)
Ryan Dohoney (Columbia University)
Carol Hess (Michigan State University)
Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Ohio State University)

The processes of cultural globalization are generally taken to include music’s transmission to distant places via migration, war, or cultural diplomacy; the alteration or suppression of local musical practices through interaction with non-local ones; and the effects of technological mediation, such as broadcasting or recording, on musical practices. During the cold war these factors were all in play because of the worldwide interaction of national cultures and political allegiances; yet the cold war and cultural globalization are rarely considered together.
In this panel we will consider the cold war as a global conflict, and potentially a culturally globalizing one, by examining the ways in which cold war politics caused music to be pushed or pulled into places far from its point of origin, or to be transformed by political relationships spanning vast distances. Throughout our discussion, we will seek both to gather specific evidence from panelists and audience participants and to weigh how this evidence affects our general understanding of the cold war’s impact on music-making.

Our panel therefore seeks to answer the following questions:

1. What relationships, if any, do you find between the international political activities of the cold war and the processes of cultural globalization?
2. What specific evidence from your own research shapes your view?
3. What implications does this evidence have for our scholarly work as we seek to understand the music of this era?

Four panelists will use these questions as a springboard for brief (15 minute) presentations, focused on their own research. Emily Abrams Ansari argues that the international cultural diplomacy activities of the United States government gave a small group of American composers the means to shape how American music would be presented to foreign audiences, and thereby also offered them unprecedented authority over the musical scene at home. Ryan Dohoney reads Morton Feldman’s and Frank O’Hara’s borrowings from the Soviet author Boris Pasternak as a strategic positioning of the New York Schools of music and art outside of the limiting binary of the Soviet/American axis. Carol Hess demonstrates that the cold war political relations between the United States and Latin America were musically formative in both places through consideration of three revealing moments: the critical reaction to the 1967 premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s opera Bomarzo in the U.S.; Aaron Copland’s anti-modernist representation of Latin America in the Three Latin American Sketches; and the “nationalism” of Nueva Canción Chilena. Lastly, through a case study of the University of Michigan Jazz Band’s 1965 tour in Latin America, Danielle Fosler-Lussier suggests that the connections created through cultural diplomacy enabled musicians and audiences to re-imagine themselves as participants in global cultural and political relations; these connections influenced not only the recipient countries, but also the American scene to which the touring musicians returned.