Conference Agenda

Belting is a style of singing characterized by a piercing vocal sound, especially in the upper range. Sometimes called the “Broadway belt,” the style is widely regarded as a quintessential feature of the US musical theater tradition. Most historians assume that “belting” originated early on in Broadway history with singers like Ethel Merman (1908–1984). Merman was a star of Broadway’s mid-century “Golden Age.” Today, she is often called one of the first “belters,” a style, we are told, she developed in the 1930s. In fact, however, the terms “belt” and “belting” were not coined until the 1950s. Before then, theatrical performers like Merman were often described, in overtly racist language, as “coon shouters.” It was only in the Cold War era, in other words, that Broadway got its now famous “belt.”

In this paper, I argue that the modern "Broadway belt” must be understood as a Cold War phenomenon. When it first emerged, I show, the “belt” style embodied important cultural values in 1950s America: autonomy, indomitability, and racial tolerance. This latter value, I suggest, in part explains the shift in terminology from “shout” to “belt.” I support this argument by drawing on a range of primary sources, including recorded performances, Broadway scores, and contemporary journalistic accounts. I focus on the figure of Ethel Merman, who quickly became known as a “belter” in the 1950s and even used the term to describe herself.

I conclude that the “belter” ultimately became a fixture of the Broadway tradition not because “belting” had always been tradition, as has often been assumed, but because in the 1950s, urban, white Americans looked for heroes with values to see them through the era’s many crises, from threats of violence from abroad to racial unrest at home. In the autonomous, indomitable, and tolerant “belter,” first embodied by stars like Merman, they found one.

This research sheds new light on the origins of a fundamental feature of the US musical theater tradition. More broadly, it reveals a previously unexplored way in which musicians used music to express aspects of national identity, including race, in the postwar era.

Hungary’s Roma musicians have long traveled, not as vagabonds but as cosmopolitan touring artists with a home base in Hungary. During the Cold War, Roma musicians played a key role in Hungarian cultural diplomacy, as touring artists from the United States and the Soviet Union have also done (see Tomoff 2015, 2018; Fosler-Lussier 2015; Katz 2019; Philips 2020). One of the most interesting contexts in which they could travel was in the orchestras of professional folk ensembles. This presentation focuses on one important ensemble of the state-socialist period, the Rajkó Ensemble, which served as the “Gypsy Orchestra” of the Communist Youth League Central Arts Ensemble. Ensembles like the Rajkó offer a window the complexities of how these minority musicians were used as a national symbol during the Cold War. In the context of international cultural exchanges, particularly the World Youth Festivals in which they were often featured, they played an important role in celebrating socialist youth and acting as musical ambassadors for socialist Hungary and for the Communist Youth League that sponsored their ensemble. At the same time they were a key element of an entertainment supply chain that brought in income for the country. Their performances benefited not only the Hungarian state but also themselves as individuals. Documents, press coverage, and interviews with former members of the Rajkó reveal the contradictions in the group’s representation and reception at home and abroad. First-hand accounts show how members of this idealized socialist ensemble not only represented their country as cultural diplomats but also turned their travels into a capitalist opportunity.

On 1 February 1956, Marcel Landowski’s opera Le Fou was premiered at the Grand Théâtre in Nancy, France. The libretto, penned by the composer, introduces us to Peter Bel, a scientist living in a besieged city who invents a novel weapon capable of destroying the city’s attackers, but is unwilling to hand it over to his compatriots out of fear for the consequences of its inevitable proliferation. No one in the audience there, nor anyone attending the subsequent performances in several other French cities including at Paris’s iconic Théâtre des Champs Élysées the following year, would have been oblivious to the way the opera’s themes resonated with the atmosphere of nuclear foreboding that pervaded life in the age of the Cold War in full suicidal bloom, even if its author denied having been inspired by nuclear weapons (the libretto having been written before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Indeed, a critic in Le Monde averred that its ‘subject […] might have seemed incredibly fanciful before the awful tragedy of Hiroshima.’

And yet Le Fou reveals asperities with the main line of Cold War policy in the nuclear age, despite Landowski being an establishment composer if ever there was one. While decrying the carnage scientific progress can facilitate, Le Fou showcased the trappings of technological progress: the ethereal electronic sound of the Ondes Martenot occupies a prominent place, and it makes novel use of pre-recorded tape broadcast stereophonically into the hall. In his 1956 treatise The Obsolescence of Humanity, the philosopher Günther Anders developed the concept of a ‘Promethean gap’ with respect to the atomic age, in which humans have at once the means for total destruction and the inability to imagine the consquences of their actions. Peter Bel’s last words in the opera, ‘Est-ce moquerie de vous dire l’inévitable ignorance ?’ seem to cry out from the depths of that gap. This paper studies the way the reception of Le Fou, launched as it was into the a critical stage of the Cold War, reflects a historically-specific form of nuclear anxiety.