Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:04am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
China and the West | |
    | |
Leonard Bernstein’s Failed China Initiative and the Neoliberal Turn in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy University of Western Ontario Once Cold War America’s cultural ambassador, the late-career Leonard Bernstein emerged as a Reagan critic, trading State Department funding for corporate sponsorship. Longing to end the Cold War with symphonic spectacles, the maestro conducted Ode to Freedom as the Berlin Wall crumbled, yet his parallel attempt, through the decade-long cooperation with Chou Wen-chung’s Center for US-China Arts Exchange (CUSCAE), to establish a “floating conservatory”—Tanglewood in China—failed due to transpacific misalignments. Tracing this initiative from Beijing’s invitation (1980) through the Hiroshima Peace Concert (1985) to the 1988 meeting, I uncover the erased transpacific dimension of Bernstein’s role as “celebrator-in-chief” of Cold War’s end (Laird, 2018). This paper argues that the fundamental incompatibility between Bernstein’s neoliberalised musical universalism and Beijing’s reform austerity rendered the failure of Bernstein’s China initiative inevitable. The 1988 meeting between Bernstein’s Amberson, Chou’s CUSCAE and PRC cadres reveals colossal gaps between American commercial subterfuge, Japan’s “mécénat” model of corporate sponsorship, and China’s stringent precarities amid shock-therapy marketization. Ironically, this fundamental incompatibility both propelled and capsized his China initiative, while facilitating his pivot to the Pacific Music Festival in Japan due to bifurcated politico-economic realities in the two Asian giants, with Japan appeasing a protectionist Reagan and China undergoing a volatile transition from Maoism to neoliberalism. Triangulating archives from Beijing, Sapporo, Columbia University and the Library of Congress, this paper interrogates the understudied Bernstein’s final decade of cultural diplomacy, challenging existing “lost decade” narratives shaping current understanding of Bernstein’s 1980s (Botstein, 1983). Far from mere self-indulgence, Bernstein transformed from a “frustrated activist” to a corporate-funded, global pioneer in the neoliberal turn of cultural diplomacy (Ansari, 2018). Moreover, his failure transforms current understanding of cultural diplomacy after State Department budgets declined in the 1970s: corporate sponsorship dictated transpacific finances, but Cold War political powers still reigned supreme with ideology and firepower (Fosler-Lussier, 2015). At the neoliberal dawn, Bernstein’s failed China initiative illustrates how Cold War cultural diplomacy’s architects shifted from governments to multinational corporations—including Bernstein’s own. Despite end-of-Cold War optimism, Bernstein’s failure reveals how the Cold War divide ultimately decimated privatised cultural diplomacy across the Pacific. | |