Imagine that during the Cold War you are asked to lead the United States’ propaganda and diplomatic efforts. And then you are told that the resources with which you have to work are music and musicians. Which musicians and what music would you select – classical or pop performers, crooners or cornet players? And what would you ask them to do? Maybe you would just hope that, in a moment, you would wake from this bizarre dream. But this was no fantasy. It was the reality for those who worked in the State Department's Cultural Presentations programme, a world elegantly rendered in Danielle Fosler-Lussier's fascinating Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy. And while this book might seem to be of marginal or incidental interest to music scholars, it touches on issues and arguments that resonate across our field.
From 1954 to the early 1970s, the USA committed time and money to using music as a means to various diplomatic ends. This meant arranging for American musicians to travel abroad and to perform to audiences in the Soviet bloc, Vietnam, Japan, Iraq, Iceland and the Philippines, among other places. It meant arranging master classes with local musicians, it meant concerts at embassies, it meant engaging with local audiences, and it meant striking a delicate balance between aesthetic values and political interests.
Behind these initiatives was the idea that the music and its performers would convey a particular impression of US virtues and intentions, while sometimes subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) seeking to subvert the system and beliefs of the host countries. But another part of the agenda was to indicate to the populations of Eastern Europe that they were not forgotten. Here was an early example of what Joseph Nye labelled ‘soft power’, in contrast to the hard power of military might and elite diplomacy.
Just as with the other means of conducting international relations, music poses problems and creates risk. At its most obvious, the music sent overseas, intended to impress and/or to entertain, may end up offending or boring its audience. Then there was the problem of dealing with artists. You can brief and discipline professional diplomats. It is not the same with wilful and free-thinking musicians, unused to the peculiar nuances of diplomacy.
The earliest musical diplomats were classical musicians, but interestingly they were not all required to play music from the mainstream classical canon. ‘Performances of avant-garde art music’, notes Fosler-Lussier, ‘were extremely important to a small number of influential people’ (p. 24). Such music was also intended to enhance the reputation of the USA as an advanced nation, and to give form to ideas of ‘freedom’.
The avant-garde was risky because of the demands it might make on audiences. Popular music was risky in other, almost opposite, ways because ‘it could alienate intellectuals and insult anyone who knew that the United States was sending more prestigious music elsewhere’ (p. 37). Different countries had different views of jazz, for example. Some saw it as the voice of the oppressed, others as a lesser form of art, and others still as the embodiment of creative free expression. The State Department's default position, though, was that jazz fitted a democratic narrative, and was presented as such – by, for example, black and white musicians sharing a stage. Meanwhile, audiences and performers made connections between the music and the civil rights movement.
One chapter is devoted to what Fosler-Lussier calls the ‘double-edged diplomacy of popular music’ (p. 143). For the officials in Washington, the problem with pop was that it was ‘pure entertainment’, and as such it could do ‘nothing’. This concern was mitigated by the association that could be made between popular music and protest. This meant that the State Department favoured the blues – Junior Wells and Buddy Guy were presented to audiences in Africa – and folk – The Phoenix singers visited Egypt. Rock music, too, featured towards the end of the programme. Blood, Sweat and Tears played gigs in Eastern Europe – which earned the band the ire of the Yippies. This response delighted the State Department who, because they were also getting criticised by the political right, could claim that BST represented the political centre ground. Meanwhile, the music itself served to excite audiences behind the Iron Curtain, where ‘the West's popular music was both more commonly heard and more stringently forbidden than was its art music’ (p. 170).
The story told by this book is based on primary sources, and vividly captures the thinking of the government officials and diplomats in the countries that were visited. It also documents the experiences of the musicians and their audiences. For some who heard the music, this was their first ever encounter with an American; some of the musicians actively embraced their role as ambassadors.
Fosler-Lussier argues that, while the USA's ambitions might look like top-down imperialism, ‘if we look from the bottom up … we see an intensive process of negotiation and engagement’ (p. 7). While there were imperial ambitions at work, there was also a developing globalisation. The book makes this case convincingly. In doing so, it has much to say about the values and meanings to be attributed to music, and about how its performance does things (both political and social) to the world in which it circulates, and how, in turn, music's involvement with government changes it. Fosler-Lussier talks, for example, of how the State Department's use of jazz facilitated its ‘institutionalisation’ and its inclusion in the canon (p. 100). She also notes that, while it might have been supposed that popular music evoked and inspired ideas of freedom, this was not what the State Department wanted or how it evaluated its programme's success. Rather, Washington was more interested in the music's acceptance. And towards the end, Fosler-Lussier wryly notes: ‘The US embassy in Moscow routinely reported to Washington on the vicissitudes of Soviet musical judgements as if they corresponded to other political matters’ (p. 185).
