After the Cold War: Continuing Cultural Imperialism and Cold War Nostalgia

In the past few years we have witnessed an intriguing rise in explorations of the Cold War in American popular culture. One recent example is the TV series Pan Am (trailer below), a show about the famous airline set in the 1960s in which one of the flight attendants is a CIA spy. Another is the 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck (also below). What might these cultural products and their popularity tell us about North American attitudes to the Cold War today?

 

Abstract submission

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Week 8 - The "Democracy" of Jazz

The recording below is taken from the studio LP production of a musical called "The Real Ambassadors," which was created by Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The musical directly addresses issues of race while also exploring the history of the jazz tours, as the Brubecks and Armstrong had experienced them. Listen to the first track in the line-up on this video, titled "The Real Ambassadors." What do the words and the characteristics of the music suggest about the Brubecks' and Armstrong's attitude toward the Cold War State Department tours?

Questions for Dr. Anne Shreffler

Please post a question here for Anne Shreffler. It might concern the reading for this week or last, her work on the Cold War and music, or musicology in general.
Please post it by Monday night, so we can vote on the best five in time for Thursday. I'll be in touch about how to vote.

Week 6 - The Cold War Politics of Tonality and Serialism

George Rochberg is an American composer who made the journey from serialism to tonal music. You can read a brief biography here.

In 1972 he abandoned his previous serial style and wrote a work that engaged with the language of tonality, the Third String Quartet, featuring stylistic allusions to Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Bartók. You can listen to a recording of this quartet on the Naxos database (available via the library website: go to Naxos and search for Rochberg string quartet - this is the only one they have.)

What this video of Rochberg talking about this stylistic shift.

Listen carefully to what Rochberg has to say and the language he chooses. What do Rochberg's words reveal about the political and social implications of music-stylistic choices during the decades of the Cold War?

Week 5 - The Impact of New Media on Music in Cold War Propaganda

I encourage you to watch the film "Copland Portrait" (described in my article on Copland's cultural diplomacy activities) which you can find here. This is a USIA film and will help set you up for our presentation.

Secondly, spend some time listening to the music of Charles Ives this weekend and keep it in mind as you read the primary source article listed on the syllabus by Daryl Dayton, Music Advisor of the US Information Agency during the 1970s. (Questions below)

Here is a small sampling of Ives's works.

Charles Ives playing his own Concord Sonata, 3rd movement - "The Alcotts". (1911-15; revised 1947):

One of Ives's most well-known orchestral works is The Unanswered Question (1906). Listen out for three layers of music here: the strings represent "the Silence of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear  Nothing." The trumpet then asks "The Perennial Question of Existence" and the woodwinds seek "The Invisible Answer." Ultimately all that remains is the silence.

And finally, one of his many songs. This is "The Things Our Fathers Loved," (1905) which features his characteristic mixture of musical  nostalgia and harmonic complexity. Within this song are quotes from a number of old American songs, including "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "My Old Kentucky Home," "On the Banks of the Wabash," "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," and "In the Sweet By  and By."

Given this repertoire, which of the reasons that Dayton describes in his articles for promoting Charles Ives above all other American composers through the USIA strike you as most significant and worthy of discussion? How can we contextualize them within the USIA's broader goals? How do Dayton's goals differ from those of the Music Advisory Panel who advised the State Department during the 1950s?

Week 4 - CIA Involvement and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)

I have added two short primary sources to our OWL site, because they are too big to paste here. Please take a look at them both. They are:

1. An article by Tom Braden of the CIA published in the Saturday Evening Post after the revelations of CIA involvement in a host of private cultural organizations. (Braden on CIA expose.pdf)

2. An appendix from Wellens' book which lists the works performed at the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Paris festival in 1952. (Wellens appendix.pdf)

You need only answer one of the two sets of questions below - each refers to one of these sources.

1. Braden article: What kind of rhetoric and argumentation does Braden employ as a means to defend the secret funding of cultural organizations? What strategies does he use to appeal to the reader?

2. CCF repertoire list: What does this repertoire list tell us about the political and aesthetic message of the CCF's Paris Festival?

Week 3 - American Classical Music and Cultural Diplomacy

Please read this letter from President Eisenhower to his brother (from the Eisenhower Presidential Library) and answer questions below:

Document #1637; November 22, 1955 To Edgar Newton Eisenhower Series: EM, AWF, Administration Series: USIA The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XVI - The Presidency: The Middle Way Part VIII: Toward "statesmanship of a high order"; June 1955 to November 1955 Chapter 17: "Stern edicts" from the Doctors

Dear Ed: I doubt if you think any more of Fred Waring and his orchestra than I do.¹ More than a year ago, when General Electric took him off its regular Sunday night show on television, I protested bitterly to Phil Reed, Chairman of the Board. (Incidentally, I have not looked at the television since, except when I get an occasional telegram from Fred telling me that his troupe is to be on at a particular time).
I am a little astonished to know that he is on a concert tour at this time. I heard that his troupe was showing in a Broadway theatre in New York and that he was booked solidly for the winter. I have a record that gives at least the principal pieces of that show, and I felt that he probably had a real hit.
Now as to the matter of using musicians in our propaganda work abroad. It is possible that you do not understand how ignorant most of the world is about America and how important it is to us that some of the misunderstandings be corrected. One of them involves our cultural standards and our artistic tastes. Europeans have been taught that we are a race of materialists, whose only diversions are golf, baseball, football, horse racing, and an especially brutalized brand of boxing. Our successes are described in terms of automobiles and not in terms of worthwhile cultural works of any kind. Spiritual and intellectual values are deemed to be almost non-existent in our country.
This picture of their misunderstanding is not overdrawn--in fact, in some areas we are believed to be bombastic, jingoistic, and totally devoted to the theories of force and power as the only worth while elements in the world.
For many years many of our European friends, and many lecturers and visitors from this country, have tried to correct these impressions. They have achieved some successes because travel both ways across the Atlantic and Pacific is of greater volume than it once was, but much remains to be done.
One of the ways to help is to send abroad some of our better productions in the fields of dramatics, music, painting and the like. As you know, we have interchanges among students and professors likewise, in order that there may be an increasing mutual respect in things more purely intellectual, as distinguished from the aesthetic.
The method by which this is done normally brings the government into the matter to some degree. By cooperation between some of the dramatic and musical associations, appropriate productions are selected. They go abroad exactly as does any other commercial venture in the field (I am talking completely from memory and so I am not to be held to a strict accounting if I should make some error) and their exhibitions are paid for by the audiences exactly as they would be in this country. However, because the whole affair is sometimes an expensive arrangement and the organization simply cannot make ends meet, the government comes into the picture to supplement their receipts so that there is no net loss on the ventures.
Our reports are that these things have been highly successful, and the cost to the government has, so far, been slight.
Naturally any inquiry of mine concerning the suitability of Fred Waring's organization for this kind of work will certainly produce an answer of some kind. However, whether or not his particular type of show would be especially useful in Europe, I am not competent to judge. Certainly he makes a great appeal to our patriotic impulses. His artists are versatile, and his whole show moves with a speed and snap that I particularly like.
I write you this full explanation of the whole matter so that you will understand the purposes underlying our government's participation in such ventures, and so also that you will understand that I cannot personally pick the productions of art, drama, music and so on that should be sent to different parts of the world.
Please keep this letter personal and confidential because it is just possible that my information on the whole matter may not be up to date or may be completely inaccurate.²
Give my love to Lucy and Janis and, as always, the best to yourself. As ever

¹ Edgar had visited with the orchestra leader during a Tacoma concert and had written Eisenhower that he was "disturbed about his situation." Waring was now playing one-night stands, Edgar wrote, trying to reestablish his prestige after General Electric had cancelled his contract. Waring had told the President's brother that he would like to travel through Europe as part of the State Department's foreign propaganda program, but he had received no response to his inquiries. "I am unable to understand such an expenditure by government," Edgar said, "yet if we are going to engage in that form of propaganda, I just cannot imagine anybody in the United States who would be a better emissary and interpreter of American music than Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians" (Edgar Eisenhower to Eisenhower, Nov. 18, 1955; on Eisenhower's interest in Waring see no. 420).
² After receiving a copy of this letter, Abbott Washburn, Acting Director of the United States Information Agency, would write Ann Whitman that the President's reply to his brother was "completely up-to-date and correct." The agent of the State Department in arranging for artists and musicians to go abroad, the American National Theater and Academy, had never considered Waring. Washburn would suggest that they do so, "without reference of course to any interest in this beyond our own here at USIA." He added that under the expanded Voice of America television operation, a filmed one-half hour Fred Waring television program would be aired on one hundred stations overseas (Washburn to Whitman, Dec. 16, 1955; see also Eisenhower to Washburn, Dec. 21, 1955; and Eisenhower to Edgar Eisenhower, Dec. 21, 1955). All papers are in AWF/A: USIA.

Bibliographic reference to this document:
Eisenhower, Dwight D. To Edgar Newton Eisenhower, 22 November 1955. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 1637. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1637.cfm

What do this document and your readings more generally tell us about why Eisenhower was interested in promoting classical music? What do his political reasons for using this artform tell us about music's social role more generally?

Week 2 - the Second Red Scare

One of the first major documents of the anti-Communist movement of the 1950s was Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a pamphlet issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack in 1950. 

This pamphlet listed those who worked in radio and television who had apparent links with the radical left. A 5-minute NPR story about Red Channels can be found here. The assumption on which Red Channels operated--that affiliation with organizations that had expressed radically left-wing political perspectives purports to a commitment to communism, and potentially to the Communist Party--was one that underpinned the activities of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which McCarthy chaired.

Another useful primary source which will inform your readings is the transcript of Aaron Copland's McCarthy hearing, which you can read here.

As you examine the Second Red Scare and its impact on American music this week, please contribute a paragraph or two to this blog which answers the following questions: 

Why was McCarthy concerned about left-leaning musicians and composers? In what way did he perceive music and its creators and performers to be a threat to the United States? What might his attitudes tell us about commonly held understandings about music's political reach?