Lisa Jakelski's wide-ranging book on the cultural politics of music in Cold War Poland takes as its central focus a very specific case study: the annual Warsaw Autumn music festival. Established in 1956, this event is still running today, but Jakelski is mainly concerned with its first twelve years (she gives an overview of more recent activity in the Epilogue). The festival serves here as an idiosyncratic example of the bureaucracy surrounding music-making and the specificities of Poland's (and Warsaw's) ‘socialist ecosystem’ (4), while also providing a compelling account of Cold War cultural negotiations and the broader transnational trends that criss-crossed these years. Part of the particularity of the Polish situation stemmed from the relative freedom musicians enjoyed there in comparison to others in the Soviet Bloc. In the post-Stalin Thaw, a greater degree of national difference could be expressed within the Bloc, and Polish musicians and administrators felt able to promote avant-gardism and modernism – in the process demonstrating their cultural distance from the Soviet Union. This made the festival a unique site of cultural encounter, situated on ‘the Cold War's cultural fault line’ (3). Musicians travelled from both sides of the line to make, talk about and listen to music; for those residing in the more repressive atmosphere of the Soviet Union, the festival presented a crucial opportunity to experience the avant-garde music of the West.

The book uses the first decade or so of the festival as a way of encountering this critical period in Poland's cultural politics, just as the nation was emerging from Stalinism and the dictates of heavily state-sponsored socialist realism (with all the concerns about cultural isolationism that had unleashed). The ‘bookends’ here were significant years in their own right: 1956 saw the Polish October Revolution, which centred on Warsaw, and 1968 was of course a more global watershed. The first half of the book is primarily focused on the politics of the festival – from administrative decision-making to the pragmatics of musical performance – and the attempts to define what contemporary music meant in this context. The second half takes mobility as its theme, moving beyond the specific locale to consider the various transnational and international networks that intersected and spun off from the festival.

The individual chapters each have a focal point but show evidence of impressive archival and ethnographic work, combined with a ready deployment of the latest theoretical trends in the humanities and social sciences (mobility studies, border studies, transnationalism). The first chapter looks at the festival's opening year and proposes some initial answers to the question of what a ‘contemporary’ and ‘international’ music festival in socialist Poland meant post-Stalin (in short, lots of Stravinsky and the usual modernist figures). The second shows how the festival – at least initially – strove for neutrality in the later 1950s, creating what Jakelski calls an ‘empty frame’ (36) that could be filled with an overview of contemporary music-making from both sides of the divide. This notion of neutrality intersects neatly with broader scholarship on the aesthetic pluralism promoted in the move to de-Stalinization, as a way of demonstrating that Poland was entering the modern world and casting off impressions of backwardness. Jakelski effectively shows how this balanced and open approach filtered down into aesthetic choices and the nitty-gritty of festival planning: how in 1962, for instance, 671 minutes of music from the capitalist West was aired, versus 558 minutes from the socialist East – something that also reveals how the festival often conceived the Cold War soundscape in very black-and-white terms.

Moving beyond an explicit focus on the decision-makers of the festival administration, chapters three and four address the people who came to the festival to perform, listen, and critique. The third chapter starts with the audience's noisy response to Franco Donatoni's Per orchestra (1963) and goes on to explore more general concert hall behaviour during the festival's first decade. The fourth is focused on visitors to the festival, with sections on invited observers and on the new influx of cultural tourists; the crux is that ‘foreign guests were crucial in establishing the festival as a site of cross-border cultural mobility’ (94). The final two chapters centre on specific events. The fifth describes the fascinating encounter between the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Czech group Musica Viva Pragensis at the Warsaw Autumn in 1964; Jakelski shows that the festival's support of the post-war avant-garde cemented important cross-border relationships. The sixth documents the 1968 festival. This was to be co-sponsored by the ISCM festival, thus marking the ‘burgeoning transnationalism’ (140) of the 1960s; but the occasion instead exposed the limits of transnationalism, with the ambitious plans drastically scaled back when Poland sent troops to assist with the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Many foreign artists boycotted the festival in response, including several sections of, and ultimately the board of, the ISCM. Thus, despite its desire to become a cross-border site of cultural encounter, the Warsaw Autumn could not escape the political situation of the Eastern Bloc. Amid such heady political exigencies Jakelski brings us back down to earth by making the important point that despite the heightened political climate of the 1968 festival, the various hindrances were also in a sense ‘mundane’, with other years ‘shaped just the same by the continual interplay of constraints and possibilities’ (162).

This impressively concise book thus manages to be many things: a microhistorical portrait of Warsaw music-making, but also a larger historical narrative of post-war Poland and the culture of the Cold War. It is, however, first and foremost an institutional history. Each chapter does something slightly different and yet each returns to the cultural diplomacy at work in administrative decision-making and festival organization (what the dust-jacket description calls ‘social analysis’).Footnote ¹ In doing so, the book traces how the Warsaw Autumn undoes ‘totalitarian models that insist on unidirectional, top-down influence while also assuming a split between state and society’ (5), revealing instead a much more complex interrelationship between cultural and political figures. And yet, although the author repeatedly shows the importance of institutional structures in supporting new music, this is no standard institutional history. Partly this is due to the aesthetic objects at the centre of the enquiry, something lacking from more strictly historical institutional studies, and something that draws us away from the pragmatics of budgets, visas, and contracts. But aesthetic concerns also lead Jakelski to see through the institution in a productive way. She demonstrates that festival programming was a constant process of negotiation and mediation between modernism and socialist realism, a dichotomy Jakelski identifies as ‘simplistic’ but nonetheless central to a musical aesthetics governed by ‘the reductive binary sloganeering’ of ‘Cold War rhetoric’ (3). Such negotiations can be seen from the delicate equations of the number of minutes spent on repertoires, to the ideologically loaded question of how to represent contemporary music in Poland at this period.

These focal points of the chapters thus yield rich insights that have wide-ranging ramifications for how we might conceive our histories of the Cold War. And amid all this serious historical work are also some moments of light relief, with Jakelski casting a wry gaze on the data and discourses she encounters. It turns out, for example, that such was the cachet of knowing about Western avant-garde music in Poland at this time that it could guarantee you flirting success; ‘the erotic potential of post-war serialism’ (78) is surely one of the more unlikely sentences in recent musicology. But the broader ramifications of the book are twofold. On one level, the picture that emerges here unsettles the binaries that have tended to be endlessly rehearsed in scholarship on Cold War culture (although these have been the subject of revision for some time now). What Jakelski uncovers supports recent work showing that the division between East and West was not so much an ‘Iron Curtain’ as a ‘semi-permeable membrane’, with much evidence to suggest the influence of the East on the West (rather than the usual reverse cultural traffic).Footnote ² But on another level, providing such an intricate portrait of the Warsaw Autumn allows Jakelski to challenge the binaries that have dominated music historiography of this period in specific ways. In focusing on a local context, she makes the case for greater geographical specificity in accounts of musical modernism: putting people and pragmatism more firmly back into the history of modernist music-making, the methodology of which has often tended to mirror the abstraction and idealism of the musical subjects. Stories of serialism in the East, she rightly points out, serve to ‘remind us that individuals and groups have conceived and practiced modernism in diverse ways at various places and times, and thereby encourage us to resist the tendency to view Darmstadt as a metonym for the whole of new-music making after 1945’ (4). The geographical specificities are teased out here precisely through her focus on how contingency, exchange, and mobility create meaning. Another major intervention that Jakelski makes is in ‘festival studies’ as an area of musicological concern, showing as she does that festival culture was central to the creation and dissemination of new music in the middle third of the century – from the physical relocation of ‘people, objects, and ideas’ to the ‘vital role’ they have played in defining ‘new music’ through the circulation of discourse (1).Footnote ³ In these senses, her book can serve as a model for future studies of twentieth-century music.

Having praised the book's concision, it is perhaps unfair to suggest what else Jakelski might have covered. However, in light of the importance of geographical specificity that she attests to here, we could have heard more about the broader cultural climate of Warsaw at this time and the festival's relationship with other projects of post-war reconstruction, as well as about the cultural politics of contemporary Poland more generally. In other words, she could have given us more localism. Couching the festival within an even more detailed context would have only strengthened her central claims. Furthermore, although she is primarily focused on the administration and decision-making at the festival, she could have expanded the kinds of voices she incorporates. As noted above, although individual chapters focus on the reception of the festival, she nevertheless documents far more of the planners’ voices than those of the audiences and critics; in chapter four, for example, we still get more about the statistics of festival planning than about the views of observers and tourists.

Jakelski might also have further teased out the implications of all this for the Western context. She notes early on that ‘it remains all too easy to write Cold War Eastern Europe out of the history of twentieth-century modernism’ (3), but what she proposes also casts new light on music in Western Europe, not only revealing the influence the Soviet Bloc exerted, but also complicating East–West binaries on both sides of the divide. After all, ‘modernist’ composers in the West were also engaged in the project of ‘building a new and better society’, which Jakelski identifies as a central aim of socialist realism (3). Similarly, the ‘regulated pluralism’ she discusses was equally on display in many Western festival contexts at this time.

Teasing out more of the national context might also have enabled Jakelski to extrapolate and strengthen the larger transnational claims she makes about the cultural-political dynamics of twentieth-century music-making. The overall impression is of a scholar primarily interested in the festival as an institution and in the workings of its administration. Yet this is now and again interspersed with passages that seem to be aiming to do something quite other, that do not want to lose touch with the aesthetic objects that were of course the reason for the festival in the first place (see, e.g., the occasional turns to music analysis, such as that found on p. 80). As I mentioned, this uneasy disjuncture between institution and aesthetics is ultimately productive, and it also points to the possibilities of using studies of institutions to ground discussion of music and politics. Politics is both everywhere and nowhere here, and the material prompts us to consider where cultural politics stops and politics proper begins. Jakelski herself suggests a co-existent model: that ‘just as politics was in flux, the boundaries between politics and culture were permeable’, with the festival serving as an example of the ‘mutual entanglement among political and cultural agents’ (5); but at what point do these co-existing spheres meet? On an obvious level, Cold War politics inflects the festival discourse at every turn, and in often stark and clichéd terms. But is counting musical minutes political? Deciding which Polish composers to include on the programme? Allocating budgets? Indeed, the evident amount of energy and time devoted to festival details by the administration brings to mind Sayre's law about academic politics (why is it often so bitter? because the stakes are so low). Jakelski rightly demonstrates, however, that large-scale politics inflected the minutiae of festival planning, and that in reverse the mundanity of running a festival in fact belied much higher stakes. One gets a sense that the broader stakes of the community – Polish modernism, culture and identity – were premised on the success of the Warsaw Autumn. For anyone interested in Cold War music-making, as well as the cultural politics of twentieth-century music and the cultural stakes of soft power more generally, the book is essential reading.