Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy by Fosler-Lussier Danielle

Author:Fosler-Lussier, Danielle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520284135
Publisher: University of California Press

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Music, Media, and Cultural Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union

Musical exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union were perhaps the most visible acts of cultural diplomacy of the era, capturing the imagination of audiences, musicians, and publics around the world. These exchanges took place in an environment of suspicion and skepticism. What Americans knew of the Soviets, and vice versa, was both limited and extreme, with demonizing portrayals proliferating on both sides. The Soviet state’s crackdowns on writers, composers, and other intellectuals were widely covered in the American press. Likewise, Soviet media made it known that the United States was a debauched, immoral society.1 Music was highly valued in both places: lacking verbal content, it appeared to stand apart from politics in a way that literature did not. Of course, it did not stand apart from politics. Rather, it provided a significant avenue for continuing diplomatic and personal contact between the peoples of the two superpowers. Both government-funded and privately sponsored musical exchanges were covered extensively in the print and broadcast media and soon thereafter in countless memoirs. These mediated contacts dramatized international relations concretely and meaningfully for the listening public.2

U.S.-Soviet cultural diplomacy programs have been interpreted in sharply contrasting ways. Many Western histories frame American cultural diplomacy as a form of infiltration in which Western culture undermined the Soviet Union, hastening the Cold War’s end.3 Some commentators even attribute the fall of Communism to the subversive influence of American culture, particularly rock music.4 In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where some kinds of music were suppressed by the state, the appeal of the forbidden did affect musical choices.5 Yet in practice U.S. cultural diplomacy brought to the USSR only performers whom Soviet authorities chose to allow into the country and genres of music that were already accessible there in some form. Official U.S.-Soviet musical exchanges were neither covert nor illegal, and the Soviet musical scene was changing far more through Soviet agency than through any artistic exchanges (let alone infiltrations) from the West.6 In the conversations about cultural diplomacy that took place during the Cold War, the idea of infiltration served particular purposes—but it does not accurately describe the music or the politics of cultural diplomacy. A second prevalent explanation of U.S.-Soviet cultural diplomacy focuses on “mutual understanding” and peaceful purposes.7 This model, too, fails to describe the practice of musical diplomacy. Although in-person meetings were important, they were typically too fleeting and constrained to bring about anything like a deep understanding of the other’s perspective. And, as we will see, musicians’ tours provided opportunities for rancorous competition as well as peaceful exchange.

Since neither the “infiltration” story nor the “understanding” story rings true, we must examine the evidence more closely to see how musical diplomacy was practiced and what it meant. In this chapter I argue that U.S.-Soviet musical diplomacy was an important symbolic ritual that enabled both superpowers to claim victories within a “safe” arena that would not lead to military escalation. At the same time, the practice of U.

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