Conference Agenda

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, a thriving discourse has emerged within music studies concerning the role of music in the conflict’s cultural battlegrounds. Many scholars have documented the musical cultural diplomacy initiatives staged by, with, or within the United States, and recent research (Fosler-Lussier, 2014; Herrera, 2020; Searcy, 2020) has demonstrated the multiplicity of perspectives and institutions of power that shaped these transnational exchanges. This increased focus on pluralism in studies of Cold War musical diplomacy demonstrates that there are many historical actors, musical repertoires, and organizations whose impact on the geopolitical conflict has yet to be uncovered.

Our panel contributes to this rethinking of music and the Cold War by showcasing the multi-faceted ways that the musical culture of the United States was received and interpreted abroad during the conflict. We utilize unconsidered archival sources to highlight three cultural exchanges involving the United States ranging from the beginnings of the Cold War through détente and the end of the conflict in the early 1990s. Working chronologically, we begin with an investigation of the Spanish music critic Antonio Fernández-Cid’s 1958 book on music in the United States, which negotiates the divergent cultural goals of the project’s funding by both the State Department and a foundation dedicated to Spanish-American relations. Our second paper takes the University of Michigan Symphony Band’s 1961 State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union as a case study to consider how wind bands contributed to American cultural diplomacy through a versatile blend of popular and classical repertoire. We conclude by examining Jane Fonda’s 1990 visit to the Soviet Union to promote her physical fitness broadcasts and, by extension, an “Ideal American Body” that expressed a capitalist individualism in opposition to Soviet conceptions of the body. These investigations highlight several overlooked figures and musical practices that were intended to spread American culture and ideology abroad, and, furthermore, our panelists foreground individual agency and the impact of non-governmental organizations on musical diplomacy initiatives. Accordingly, our panel adds new voices and perspectives to existing narratives on the United States’ cultural exchange during the Cold War.

In 1957, the Spanish music critic Antonio Fernández-Cid visited the United States through the State Department’s Foreign Leader program––a Cold War cultural diplomacy initiative designed to promote American ideals by bringing international experts to the country. After returning home, Fernández-Cid received funding from the State Department to publish his book La música en los Estados Unidos, which contains recollections of everything from jazz to the music of Aaron Copland. These essays repeatedly compare traditional musics from Spain and the United States, and, furthermore, Fernández-Cid equates the struggle of musicians from both countries to overcome musical stereotypes. Such a fraternal positioning of the two nations is intriguing given that Fernández-Cid received travel funding from the Del Amo Foundation, which was a transatlantic organization dedicated to strengthening ties between Spain and the United States. This hitherto unexplored philanthropic underwriting of Fernández-Cid’s visit demonstrates that both public and private entities were stakeholders in the project, and, even more, the Del Amo Foundation’s focus on reciprocal relations suggests that philanthropic patronage might have motivated Fernández-Cid’s linkages of American and Spanish music.

This paper takes Fernández-Cid’s musical connections between Spain and the United States as a focal point for investigating the critic’s negotiation of governmental and philanthropic cultural diplomacy projects within his book. I focus on Fernández-Cid’s implicit and explicit references to Spanish music during his discussions of jazz and American tonalist composers, and I contextualize these comparisons with archival records from the Del Amo Foundation and examples from the critic’s publications before and after his travels. From this evidence, I argue that Fernández-Cid linked Spanish and American music to meet the goals of his patrons in the State Department and the Del Amo Foundation by simultaneously evangelizing American music abroad and positing a musical kinship between Spain and the United States. Accordingly, my investigation rethinks government-centered narratives of Cold War cultural diplomacy by foregrounding Fernández-Cid’s agency as he navigated multiple audiences for his work. Moreover, this paper highlights the overlooked role of philanthropic institutions within exchange projects that were ostensibly under the domain of governmental organizations.

In 1961, the University of Michigan Symphony Band embarked upon the longest U.S. State Department sponsored tour in history. The 94 musicians traveled throughout the Soviet Union, Middle East, and Eastern Europe playing 71 concerts in 30 cities from February to June. With this tour as the basis, this paper inserts wind bands of the concert tradition into the discourse of Cold War musical diplomacy. While symphony orchestras, ballet troupes, and jazz ensembles are well represented in the scholarly literature on Cold War musical diplomacy, wind bands have been largely excluded. I argue that wind bands perform a unique diplomatic function distinct from other ensembles because of their appeal to non-elite audiences and their ability to perform outside and in large venues, both of which broadened their diplomatic reach. At a time of increased commissioning of original compositions for the wind band medium, the tour served U.S. band directors’ goal of legitimizing wind bands on a global stage. The band also served the State Department goal of reaching broader audiences. Audiences were struck by the timbre achieved by the band in playing both familiar favorites as well as the novelty of the new repertoire in a medium that emphasized commonality across cultural boundaries.

Reconstructed from archival materials, I examine the first concert on the tour from the perspective of both the musicians and the audiences in the Soviet Union. On one side, students logged their thoughts in diaries and letters and later recounted the events in interviews. On the other side of the exchange, members of the audience at the Moscow concert were interviewed about this event and historical newspapers show how the concert was received. To contextualize this encounter, I draw on Marié Abe’s idea of “imaginative empathy”–the way sound can attune to listeners’ sentiments in public space–to ask how sound affected relationships (musical, cultural, and historical) between the band and their audience. The University of Michigan Symphony Band’s tour illuminates the flexible role of wind bands with their varied repertoire to serve the differing goals of institutions of power involved in the Cold War era.

In October of 1990, actress and fitness celebrity Jane Fonda visited the USSR to promote her series of workout tapes being broadcasted on Soviet airwaves. To celebrate this event, Fonda jogged around the Kremlin with hundreds of Russian women and girls. News reports from the occasion write that during the jog, a military band from the Soviet Union played the national march of the United States: John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Further, Fonda proclaimed that she was bringing “running, walking, and physical exercise with love from the women of America” to the USSR. The incongruity of this statement within the context of late-Soviet life is highly apparent, as physical fitness within the Soviet Union had been solidified through Marxist-Leninist constructions of the “New Soviet Person” since the 1920s (Gerovitch 2007, Cornish 2019). However, Fonda’s statement underpins a critical ideological understanding present in the United States since the late 1940s: that US American forms of physical fitness were, in fact, distinct from Soviet forms through the promotion of capitalist tenets over socialist principles.

This paper examines the construction of aerobic exercise at the end of the 20th century as a uniquely neoliberal phenomenon in the US American imaginary. Drawing on archival documents, personal correspondence, and visual media sources, I argue that aerobic exercise in the United States was used to affirm ideas of American exceptionalism and state-making during the Cold War. By encouraging hypercapitalist tenets such as entrepreneurship, consumerism, and self-bettering of the individual over the communal, the US fashioned an “ideal American body” antithetical to Soviet bodies, which privileged ideas of individual betterment in the pursuit of a communal utopian socialism. Further, I problematize the stance of the “ideal American body” in the US American imaginary by identifying the social tensions inherent in the country during the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 80s. Constructing media histories of aerobic exercise aims a critical lens at US Cold War subjectivity and national identity solidification, specifically an identity that would shift from American exceptionalism to triumphism by the beginning of the 1990s.