Conference Agenda

This paper argues that U.S. music diplomacy during the Cold War operated not only through performances and cultural exchange, but through print as a long-term system of cultural ordering, normalizing musical hierarchies through repetition, selection, and exclusion rather than overt political instruction. Focusing on the Chinese-language magazine World Today, published by the United States Information Service (USIS) in Hong Kong, it examines how music functioned less as sound or performance practice than as a printable, repeatable, and widely circulating form of cultural authority.
First issued in 1952 and discontinued in 1980, World Today produced 598 issues and circulated across Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. Its scale and longevity overlapped closely with the geography of the “Free World,” making it a crucial resource for analyzing how cultural hierarchies were normalized over time.
Drawing on close readings of selected issues, recurring publication formats, and circulation patterns, the paper shows that, by around 1970, Western classical music dominated the magazine’s musical coverage. This repertoire was embedded within narratives of abstraction, science, modernity, freedom, and progress, while popular and rock music appeared only rarely and were often framed as overly entertaining or lacking seriousness. Rather than operating as direct propaganda, World Today functioned as a print-based mechanism of cultural ordering whose power lay in accumulation and circulation. By transforming music into portable cultural “knowledge,” the magazine legitimized American orchestral culture and enabled readers to imagine themselves within a global cultural order—even in the absence of sound or performance.

This paper argues that the 1961 Tokyo World Music Festival functioned as a key site where Cold War geopolitics reshaped Japan’s musical environment by reinforcing Western musical dominance under the guise of international exchange. Co-hosted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and the Society for International Cultural Exchange, the festival included twenty concerts and five days of conferences, bringing nine performing groups and some thirty composers, conductors, and critics from outside Japan.
Drawing on discourses published in Japanese music journals, this paper first demonstrates that the festival provoked intense controversy in Japan. Rather than framing debates solely in terms of the East–West Cold War divide, critics recast the event as a conflict between working-class interests and ruling economic elites, leading to divisions among Japanese composers, critics, and scholars.
Second, the paper analyzes the imbalance in programming and representation. Sixteen of the twenty concerts were devoted to Western music, especially contemporary compositions, while only four featured non-Western repertoires (Thai, Indian, and Japanese), mostly within classical traditions. Likewise, conference themes centered on Western music and musical institutions. This asymmetry exposed an orientalist hierarchy—“modern Euro-America” versus “old Asia”—shared not only by Western organizers but also by Japanese advocates of Western art music.
Finally, the paper examines shifts in the reception of American orchestras in Japan. Although Japanese audiences had long privileged European orchestral models, the visits of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1960 and the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein at the 1961 festival elevated the status of an “American style” of orchestral performance.
Taken together, these developments show that the Tokyo festival was not simply an international music event, but a moment in which Cold War cultural architects restructured musical authority and hierarchy within Japan.

This paper argues that Cold War musical exchange between the United States and Korea in the 1960s emerged not solely from U.S.-driven cultural initiatives, but from interactions between trans-Pacific academic infrastructures and Korean aspirations for modernization and international recognition. Focusing on encounters between American musicologists and composers and Korean traditional music (gugak), it examines how these exchanges reshaped musical authority in Korea.

During the 1960s, American composers and ethnomusicologists visited Korea, composed works for traditional Korean instruments, delivered lectures, and produced recordings and documentation of gugak. At the same time, having established modern institutions, the Korean music community sought greater participation in international academic networks, largely through U.S. connections. These visits were widely perceived in Korea as validating the artistic value of gugak and signaling its entry into a modern, globally recognized framework.

Situating these encounters within the cultural Cold War, this paper shows how they were enabled by broader institutional developments in the United States. Asian Studies expanded under Cold War political imperatives, supported by foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Asia Foundation. The parallel institutional growth of ethnomusicology intensified research on Asian music, aligning scholarly interests with U.S. geopolitical strategy.

By tracing the individuals who mediated these trans-Pacific exchanges, the paper demonstrates that Cold War musical exchange was not simply a projection of American cultural power. Rather, it connected U.S. institutional agendas with Korean efforts to redefine gugak as both traditional and modern through growing academic infrastructures. These encounters reconfigured the cultural authority of Korean music, positioning it within a global order shaped by the Cold War.