Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Cold War Music Study Group

Recent historical scholarship has shown that the battle between communism and capitalism was as much a spiritual contest as it was a geopolitical one. We might, as Diane Kirby has written, think of the Cold War as “a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless” (2003). Jonathan P. Herzog, for example, has argued that American politicians saw religion (and specifically Christianity) as a key component that both differentiated the United States from the Soviet Union as well as placed a special urgency on the former’s triumph over the latter (2011). At the same time, following Marx’s dictum that “religion [was] the opium of the masses,” the Soviet Union sought to replace Tsarist-era religion with state-sponsored atheism. The result, as Victoria Smolkin has demonstrated, transformed atheism into a pseudo-spiritual cosmology (2018). Present in global conflicts in Korean (e.g., Chang 2014) and Vietnam as well as de- and post-colonial change in the Middle East and Africa, spiritual identity cooperated with political alignment as a tool for both propaganda and resistance. As countries around the world grappled with both Western and Soviet colonialism, religious pluralities had to be negotiated alongside resurgent national identities.

Asking how music, sound, and spirituality were entangled in Cold War geopolitics, this panel features three twenty-minute papers that reach across North America and Eastern Europe as well as religious identities. Each paper considers the Cold War from a different geographical and spiritual perspective: Catholicism in Eastern Bloc Poland; Christianity in the United States; and Islam in the Soviet Union. Our first presenter considers the connections between Pope John Paul II, Polish anti-communist protest, and music. Connecting Catholicism to composers such as Penderecki and Panufnik, she positions religion as a lens through which critics, composers, and listeners expressed their political and personal views about the state. Our second paper takes a deep dive into the Willis Conover Collection at the University of North Texas to explore the dynamics between Christian belief and US politics as they appeared in Conover's broadcasts to the socialist world for the Voice of America. And in our third paper, the author uses opera in Soviet Kazakhstan to explore gender, spirituality, and colonialism in Islamic music in the very final year of the Soviet empire. Taken together, these three papers (as well as a response from a respondent) ask critical questions about how Cold War geopolitics and spiritual identities manifested in music.

In 1978, Krakow’s Archbishop Karol Wojtyła was elected to papacy and became Pope John Paul II. In 1980, the Solidarity trade union led by Lech Wałęsa began strikes at the Gdansk shipyard. A great hope for change and liberating political rules in the country was awakened in Polish society. Composers to a large extent became their exponents, joining their fellow citizens in protesting against oppressive communist authority. The Catholic Church, which had been perceived as the strongest opposition force since the beginning of communism, under the leadership of the Polish Pope significantly strengthened its role as a defender of freedom and opposition to communist authority. The election of the Polish Pope also became an inspiration for composers resulting in an increased interest in works of a religious nature. In the 1980s, during the period of Solidarity and the martial law imposed by the government in December 1981, writing works of religious expression was in many cases a gesture of not merely artistic but also political nature.

In my paper, I present this period in Polish music in the context of its relationship to the political situation in the country. In the difficult decade between 1978 and 1987, which with no hesitation can be called a time of hope and despair, many extremely important compositions were produced. From works dedicated to the John Paul II, as Henryk Mikołaj Górecki's Beatus Vir and Totus Tuus, Roman Palester’s Te Deum, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Te Deum, or Augustyn Bloch’s Anenaiki to the significant symphonies of the 1980s, such as Andrzej Panufnik’s Sinfonia Votiva, Penderecki’s Symphony No. 2 or Krzysztof Meyer’s Symphony No. 6 “Polish”, and the most emblematic work of the time: Penderecki’s Polish Requiem – the music testifies to the strong connection between religion and politics. What did these works mean for their creators, how were they received by audiences, critics, and the authorities? How significant was this “religious awakening” for the compositional style of the composers and their position in the musical world of the time? In my paper I will attempt to discuss these questions, focusing on selected musical examples.

Broadcast records in the Willis Conover Collection at the University of North Texas Music Library show that, on average, a six-week delay separated the completion of Willis Conover’s programs and their airing on the Voice of America. While the delays inherent in distributing programs on tape presented obvious challenges for breaking news or experiencing events in the moment, Conover occasionally presented recordings of events where their enduring significance overrode the limitations on immediate access, such as jazz festivals and major concerts.

Such events also included the funerals of Louis Armstrong in 1971, and of Duke Ellington in 1974, though the latter was not broadcast until 1975. Conover’s Jazz Hour presented these funerals as they happened, with all of their religious content. As with Conover’s approach to presenting music, the broadcasts did not tell listeners what to think of what they were hearing, but simply made it available. Indeed, the mere accessibility of such content was a transgressive act in defiance of regimes that marginalized, suppressed, or purged religious belief and expression in their societies.

These funerals contained frank expressions of religious belief, demonstrating freedom of religion in action. Broadcasting the events in unedited reinforced the fact that they were not embellished or selectively cropped out of context for propaganda. The programs containing the funerals are preserved in the collections of the UNT Music Library (Ellington) and the Louis Armstrong House Museum (Armstrong), and include scriptural readings, major prayers of the Christian tradition (the Apostles’ Creed and the Our Father), invocations by clergy of multiple denominations, hymns, and in the case of Ellington, his own religious works.

As noted earlier, those who tuned in were free to do what they wished with this content, but one may surmise the seeds that broadcasters hoped to plant in the thoughts of their listeners: above all, a look at freedom of belief and expression in American society. This presentation will include highlights from these digitized broadcasts, look at available documentation within archival collections, and situate the content in the larger context of religious programming on the Voice of America.

Amidst the Cold-War arms race and cultural and scientific rivalry, the Soviet state sponsored two major projects of environmental colonialism in the Kazakh Republic: the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (1949 to 1991) and the Baikonur Space Station (established in 1955). In official narratives these projects figured as affirmations of the USSR’s superiority. To many Kazakhs, however, they represented the state’s continued neglect of Kazakh wellbeing that previously manifested through the mass famine, caused by collectivization, and the anti-religious campaign. Spiritual and anti-nuclear struggles figure prominently in the last Soviet Kazakh opera—Gaziza Zhubanova’s Burannyi Yedygei (1991), completed in October, 1991, on the eve of Kazakhstan’s secession from the USSR. Based on Chingiz Aitmatov’s I dol’she veka dlitsia den’ (1980), the opera foregrounds the indigenous struggle against erasure of collective memory and Sufi practices. Zhubanova amplifies the collision between modernity and oppressed spirituality by intertwining references to the dire environmental and human impact of nuclear testing.

Analyzing the archival manuscript of the opera—which to this day was neither published nor performed—this paper argues that Burannyi Yedygei presents a culmination of Zhubanova’s long-term decolonial resistance to Soviet suppression of collective memory, cultural assimilation, and spiritual erasure. My analysis demonstrates Zhubanova’s breakaway from the officially sanctioned folk-based Kazakh national musical language as featured in earlier operas by composers like Yevgeny Brusilovsky and Akhmet Zhubanov (her father). Furthermore, I show that by using modernist compositional techniques, such as hyperdissonance, excessive deployment of percussion instruments, and emphasis of the female voice, Zhubanova resisted old ornamentalist tropes to contest political subordination and spiritual erasure. For example, the recurring lullaby leitmotif of Naiman-Ana—a white bird that personifies the spirit of a deceased mother—functions as a mnemonic chant to reinscribe cultural memory. Ultimately, through my examination of Burannyi Yedygei, I seek to contribute to the renewed interest in the impact of Soviet antireligious policies in the republics that practiced various forms of Islam prior to Sovietization. I contend that Cold-War politics in Soviet “peripheries,” amplified environmental, military, economic, and antireligious oppression that produced either spiritually or physically dead subjects.