Conference Agenda

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.

In the 1930s and 1940s, both the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought ways to “modernize” China, that is, to adopt aspects of Western culture, infrastructure, and education. In 1931, Russian Jewish composer Aaron Avshalomov arrived in cosmopolitan Shanghai, and his works contributed to this modernization effort by blending Chinese timbres and other markers into the European concert tradition so that “the old Chinese music may be given a new lease on life” (Avshalomov’s words). Avshalomov’s syncretism between Chinese markers and European classical music was financially supported by the KMT and CCP at different times to formulate a “modern” Chinese identity within Western-styled music production. This paper uses Avshalomov’s little-examined Concerto in G Upon Chinese Themes and Rhythms (1936) to argue that his musical hybridity intersects, interacts with, and reflects the political and social dynamics of interwar China.

Musicologists have described how European concert music composers have used “Eastern” musical markers to indicate a sonic “Other”; these scholars have also called for modes of analysis that step out of the East-West binary (Bellman 1998, Taylor 2007, Locke 2009). Music theorists also provide models for analyzing music that mixes styles (Everett 2004, Alcalde 2022). Drawing on archival scores from the University of Maryland and Ashalomov’s personal papers, this paper first draws from established markers of Chinese exoticism in Avshalomov’s Concerto in G Upon Chinese Themes and Rhythms, which include gapped scales, bare textures, and quick ornaments (Locke, 2009). Then, I describe mixture techniques Avshalomov used in the Concerto (Alcalde, 2022) to show how Eastern-and Western-marked elements interact. Finally, I will interpret the Concerto in G as a syncretic work (Everett, 2004) that reflected the semi-colonial state of Shanghai.

The irony of a Russian composer developing the Chinese concert style was not lost on critics, one even noting that it was time for the Chinese to step in and broaden the style. Later Chinese composers like Tan Dun and Bright Sheng took up this duty, but Avshalomov, a foreigner, could compose in this hybrid style because of the political, social, and economic opportunity of interwar Shanghai.

How has symphonic music been received outside Euro-American societies? In the Chinese context, the first symphony orchestra was founded in 1907 on the basis of the Shanghai Public Band, renamed as the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra in 1922. Initially only foreigners could attend the concerts; however, after the orchestra’s conductor (1919–1942), Mario Paci, successfully pressured the colonial Shanghai Municipal Council to abandon this discriminatory policy in 1925, “Chinese accounted for over 20 percent of the audience at the indoor concerts” by “1931” (Yang 2017, 52; see also Yang 2021 and Liao 2019). Meanwhile, phonographic records provided another important avenue for the local Chinese with the economic means to listen to symphonic music.

How did those Chinese listeners perceive the symphonic music they heard? The existing literature has mainly focused on accounts of positive reception, which was mainstream among the progressive elites. The grandiose sounds of the symphony orchestra were heard by many of the Chinese music reformers, political reformers, and intellectuals as both civilizationally advanced and morally uplifting (e.g., Cheung 2015 and Tang 2017). But what about the others who listened and thought otherwise, such as someone listening to symphonic music with resistance, suspicion, and even fear?

This paper looks into precisely such a case, namely, the influential novelist and essayist Eileen Chang’s (1920-1995) description of and opinion about symphonic music as presented in her magazine article “On Music” (1944, 10–13). Her critique of symphonic music boils down to four main points: 1) that it blurs the boundary between oneself and others in such a way that individual selves risk being subsumed into a larger social collective, 2) that it is overly complicated and formulaic, 3) that its overwhelming sonic force creates discomfort among the audience, and 4) that its calculated, even conspiratorial buildup of tension and climax makes her “fear” (11). By comparatively analysing Chang’s text in relation to her contemporaries’ glorifying descriptions of symphonic music, I show how her somewhat idiosyncratic critique of the genre also amounts to a critique of the elite Chinese nationalist musical discourse, one underpinned by Eurocentric notions of musical Progress and Modernity.