Marshall McLuhan declared in 1964 that the availability of images and sounds via electronic media had transformed humanity, allowing immediate sensory perception of faraway events and giving each individual opportunities for participatory engagement in those events.1 While McLuhan reveled in this “global embrace,” Daniel Boorstin was more cynical about its effects. Boorstin noted in 1961 that the existence of electronic media had brought into being a great number of “pseudo-events,” news events that were staged for the purpose of being reported in the media. The “pseudo-event” was characterized by the following features:
1.It does not occur spontaneously, but has been incited.
2.It happens primarily in order to be reported or reproduced.
3.Its relation to reality is ambiguous. It attracts interest precisely because the motives of the event’s planners are obscure.
4.The event acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the media highlight the event’s importance, it becomes important precisely through the attention paid to it.2
Boorstin found the roots of these practices in the quickening news cycle. He argued that throughout the history of audiovisual media, the news was marketed ever more effectively. Eventually the purveyors of news found it lucrative to create news events that aroused consumers’ appetite for more news. These events were not fictitious—they really happened—but the viewer would not comprehend their origin and would experience them as genuine rather than fabricated incidents. Boorstin believed that “the power to make a reportable event is thus the power to make experience.”3
A few years earlier, Henry Kissinger had noticed the strange power of mediation, too. As a newly minted PhD observing the diplomatic scene from his faculty position at Harvard, he found that media coverage had altered the very nature of diplomatic relations. The superpower participants were no longer negotiating only with each other: at the same time and with the same words, they were also engaged in “elaborate stage plays” in which they “address[ed] not so much each other as the world at large.”4 (As we saw in chapter 7, they also spent significant resources addressing their home publics.) Even nuclear disarmament talks had this peculiar doubleness: proposals were substantively directed to the opposing side but also formulated to win the sympathy of the watching and listening world.5 Kissinger believed that “the struggle to capture the symbols which move humanity” offered states new opportunities but also set severe limits on their freedom to negotiate. As the 1950s wore on, this phenomenon drew more and more comment. Public relations expert David Finn urged in 1959 that “our leaders must be increasingly alert to the reactions of the world press and keep in mind that they are being closely scrutinized by a vast international audience.”6
This scrutiny profoundly shaped the practice of diplomacy. U.S. leaders were indeed aware of their broader audiences, and the musical events they designed to engage the world’s peoples closely resembled Boorstin’s pseudo-events. The planning of these events encompassed not only the performances but also their reflections in the news and broadcast media. From the earliest days of the Cultural Presentations program, officials used audio recordings and films to increase the impact of each performance—and as we saw in William Strickland’s case, the act of recording music could itself be an event. Thanks to the mediation that surrounded them, the concerts also took on the quality of self-fulfilling prophecy: even musicians who were unknown in the host countries were touted in the press as great artists and greeted with acclaim as a result. While hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands witnessed each concert in person, many more knew that the concert was happening and had access to details about the musicians both before and after their visits.7 One recalls the extensive concert preparations undertaken by the U.S. embassy in Vietnam before the 1959 arrival of the Jack Teagarden Sextet, the Golden Gate Quartet, and the Little Orchestra Society. The embassy devoted considerable resources to public lectures, brochures, radio advertising, newsreels, and broadcasts, all to make the visits meaningful to Vietnamese people. We might well describe this flurry of activity using Kissinger’s formulation: it was “an elaborate stage play” intended to cultivate satisfied audiences for the concerts and positive news coverage after the fact. The practice of American musical diplomacy encompassed more than just the concerts. These performances were part of a broader transmission of ideas—about diplomacy, about the music and musicians, and about the gift of these performances from one nation to another.
The anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observed that the act of putting culture on display not only “shows” but also “does”—the choosing, presentation, and explanation of performances are all strategic interventions.8 Indeed, the planners of cultural presentations and other forms of exchange recognized that they were doing something remarkable and that new forms of mediation played a consequential role in their project. Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Charles Frankel wrote in 1966 that the United States had entered a new stage of cultural exchange that was neither accidental contact nor purposeful colonialism. Rather, the “extraordinary flow of cultural traffic” seemed an “almost automatic consequence of changes in the character of human thought and work and in the conditions of human travel and communication”—factors we would today call elements of “globalization.”9 Frankel found that the media had become essential to Americans’ understanding, making foreign places “seem more real” and fostering the impression “that we know what is going on and why in other places because we see so much and hear so much about them.”10 Boorstin likewise believed that pseudo-events “increase our illusion of grasp on the world,” making individuals feel well-informed about matters outside their direct experience.11 Whether face-to-face or through the media, the experience of contact encouraged individuals to imagine themselves in connection to others. The musicians, officials, and audiences who participated in American musical diplomacy experienced a shift in perspective that helped them imagine their places in the Cold War world.
The concerts offered by the State Department’s Cultural Presentations program were understood foremost as real-time musical performances before live audiences. Department officials argued that the immediacy and appeal of live musical performance cultivated positive feelings about the United States. But, as in the Vietnamese example, these concerts were surrounded by a rush of other activities that helped determine their meanings. PAOs and CAOs in America’s diplomatic posts around the world ensured the publication of press releases informing audiences about the importance and quality of the performers. Offering free tickets to members of target audiences boosted attendance, and parties for local dignitaries and visiting musicians attracted the social elite. Foreign Service officers went to great lengths to get the public’s attention, as when the consulate general in Hong Kong sponsored a contest for the best translation of Marian Anderson’s autobiography into Chinese before her appearances there.12
In addition to the mediation that set the scene for live music-making, State Department–sponsored musical performances were also designed for broadcast. As a matter of policy, the department encouraged transmission of its concerts over government-owned and commercial networks abroad.13 Sometimes the concerts were broadcast live or recorded as they happened. More often, the musicians would make a scheduled stop at a radio or television studio where they would record a portion of their program for later use. The broadcasts were framed in the press as events of great significance for both countries, and they reminded audiences of the State Department’s gift after the musicians’ departure. When the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, appeared in San Salvador, they played the Salvadoran national anthem, moving some of the audience to tears. The Salvadoran National Radio then announced its intention to use the American orchestra’s rendition of the anthem at the opening and closing of each day’s broadcast.14 The idea of reaching so many people encouraged both President Eisenhower’s security staff and the program’s planners to pursue media strategies vigorously. At an October 1958 meeting of the Operations Coordinating Board, the board called the Asian tours of Marian Anderson and the Symphony of the Air “outstanding successes which were multiplied through reproductions.”15 According to State Department records, literally millions of viewers and listeners had access to the performances of U.S. musical diplomats over the air.
Not only did broadcasts and recordings attract people to later live performances, but they also had a separate function, reaching larger audiences within the host country through repetition and cultivating a sense of celebrity and familiarity for the musicians. The USIA occasionally filmed events from musicians’ tours or used news footage of them in documentaries to be shown in U.S. Information Centers, emphasizing their gracious ambassadorship and their artistic excellence. Sometimes American musicians made live television appearances in the host countries. For example, Zelma George, who toured in 1959 as an expert on Negro spirituals, appeared on a popular Finnish television show. There she talked about spirituals and led the studio audience in participatory singing—a welcome novelty on Finnish television.16 During the Golden Gate Quartet’s trip to Burma that same year, the accommodation of local preferences encouraged the broader use of sound recordings. Although the recording sent from Washington to introduce the quartet before the tour was poorly received because it contained only spirituals, the tape of the Burmese concert was better adapted to Burmese tastes. The new recording included popular songs and folk songs, with audience applause, and it was a great success on the radio. The Burma Broadcasting System even aired the music more frequently than it had originally agreed to do. Recordings of those performances were also distributed to Burmese schools and other local organizations, serving as a souvenir of the live performances and a separate medium of engagement with foreign publics.17 Even when musical diplomacy was conducted through the media, the message was far from uniform: U.S. officials negotiated local and national media markets and carefully tailored the form and content of American musicians’ performances to please particular audiences.18
Boorstin’s provocative choice of the term pseudo- for the engineered news event might seem to imply that he thought these events were somehow not real. But his exploration of the pseudo-event is more complex than that and thus more useful for my purposes. Boorstin distinguished the pseudo-event from propaganda in the narrower, negative sense of the term. He called propaganda an “appealing falsehood” designed to inflame emotions; by contrast, the pseudo-event seemed to thrive on people’s “honest desire to be informed.” Unlike propaganda, Boorstin wrote, pseudo-events do not make up the witnesses’ minds for them; rather, they “move people indirectly, by providing the ‘factual’ basis on which they are supposed to make up their minds.”19 (This principle resonates with Edward R. Murrow’s project of broadcasting evidence to help television viewers form intelligent opinions.) The apparently informational quality of pseudo-events allowed diplomats to present a seemingly neutral portrayal of American life even while they used the events to convey particular ideas about the United States.
From the beginning of U.S. involvement in cultural relations, State Department officials were careful to maintain this distinction. Founded in 1939, the new Division of Cultural Relations was intended for “genuine cultural relations. It is not a propaganda agency, in the popular sense of the term which carries with it implications of penetration, imposition and unilateralism.”20 Even the more overtly propagandistic USIA maintained some distinctions of this kind. As Thomas Sorensen, who worked for the USIA during the 1960s, has explained it, “We did not lie, or distort the news, or subvert the media, but neither were we disinterested.”21 The presentation of an edited version of reality through the media allowed the U.S. government to wield enormous influence while claiming objectivity and truthfulness.22
We might recall, for example, the tours of African American jazz musicians to developing nations in Asia and Africa. The appearance of African Americans on behalf of the U.S. government offered audiences abroad observable facts and personal accounts on which to base their opinions of U.S. race relations. So far as we can ascertain, none of these conversations was formally scripted in advance, nor were any false assertions made. There was no overt attempt to persuade. Yet the overall effect was extremely persuasive, perhaps more so than the direct claims about African American progress that were distributed in USIS pamphlets. The musicians’ appearance was an implicit endorsement, giving the impression by association that the musicians approved of the policies and actions of the U.S. government.23 Boorstin was troubled by the artificial quality of these happenings, that people could in effect create and disseminate a particular version of reality in the guise of news. But he also acknowledged that this effect was not exactly a deception: “Our problem is the harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs.”24
The phenomenon Boorstin described is now so much a part of our everyday reality that we barely notice it.25 The production of representations is a mainstay of our political activity and our social lives. We constantly make choices about how to convey our own ideas and those of others in a variety of media, and we are accustomed to interpreting the implications of how a message is presented.26 Yet it is useful to remember that in the 1950s and 1960s, when television was still a marvel, many observers had the disconcerting feeling that reality itself was being destabilized by the new medium. One might be shown images of news events that seemed true but weren’t; one might be manipulated on the basis of those images to make choices; there was always more to the story than one could perceive. Similar uncertainties pervaded the entire enterprise of musical diplomacy. The representation of nations through the arts was an emerging form of expressive culture that took advantage of and even helped to create a novel system for mediating ideas on an international scale.
Let us look more closely now at the “people working honestly and industriously” to create musical diplomacy. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has observed, whenever people are put on display, they are doing several kinds of work at once: they can serve as both the specimen who is exhibited and as the museum docent who explains the exhibit.27 In the case of America’s Cold War cultural diplomacy, the musicians toured in order to make music, as themselves—but they also appeared as an expensive gift from one country to another, as spokespersons for America’s goodwill, and as examples of particular ideas (musical freedom, racial equality). By their presence they enacted a variety of ideas about America, allowing the audience to appraise them as representatives of their ethnic groups, of a generic idea of “artistic excellence,” or of the United States in the abstract. American visitors were “onstage” even in their offstage moments. Their manners, appearance, and interactions would be open to view, interpreted as evidence about America by eyewitnesses and in the press. The complexity of the musicians’ role shares the pseudo-event’s destabilizing synthetic quality—yet the musicians do not typically describe their experiences as ambiguous or unsettling. Participants in cultural diplomacy usually tell of it as a vitally important activity, a highlight of their lives and careers.
The musicians’ visits formed real relationships. Marvin Keenze, who toured with the Westminster Choir in 1956, has returned to Japan twenty-one times since his initial visit with the choir: he became involved in the International Congress of Voice Teachers and has valued international work throughout his career. Matthiew Ruggiero, bassoonist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players, corresponded with people he met in Latin America and Japan. The tour created for him a lifelong network of colleagues around the world.28 Even in the Soviet Union, where conversation was typically constrained by the supervising authorities, music lovers and musicians sought out the American visitors after concerts to talk about performance technique and make friendly conversation about the music.29 When the University of Illinois Jazz Band visited Tashkent, Yalta, and Krasnodar, they met many Soviet students who had never before spoken to an American. Three Soviet Jews sought out the band in Tashkent, asking whether there were Jews in the band. They were delighted to meet the nineteen-year-old Jewish tuba player: “it was evident that for the three young Soviet Jews this was a great thrill—to talk with Americans, American musicians, a Jew from the outside world.”30
The sympathies cultivated in this way were both personal and geopolitical. American musicians witnessed segregation in South Africa, poverty throughout rural Latin America, and the constraints of Soviet life. Many reported that after their tours they understood the world better and read the newspaper with greater sympathy.31 One musician told me that after returning to the United States he “constantly thought about these places.” A member of the Claremont String Quartet, Marc Gottlieb, recalls that a woman he met in New Zealand took him on an excursion to see a local waterfall. Although he has had no contact with her since, he remembers her hospitality warmly, noting that an experience like this “reverberates through a life.”32 Indeed, when earthquakes shook New Zealand in 2010 and 2011, decades after Gottlieb’s visit, he found that he felt intensely for the people there. Likewise, the saxophonist Richard Kleinfeldt recalls having tea and conversation with Iranian students, one of whom felt emboldened to reveal his identity as a Christian to the visiting Americans.33 Kleinfeldt responded with great emotion to the Iranian revolution of 1978–79. He remembered the people he had met on tour and was concerned for them. Some of the American musicians came to believe in cultural diplomacy so much that they made it a career. Kleinfeldt went to work for the Voice of America. Ron Post, who played in the University of Michigan Jazz Band, entered the Foreign Service after his tour. So did Lee Irwin, who toured the Soviet Union and Romania with the Oberlin College Choir.34
Some musicians came to see themselves as ambassadors with a significant role to play in international relations. They typically believed they were serving the United States as a whole, not just its government. When they look back on their tours, musicians invariably comment on the importance of doing one’s part for international understanding. Even today, many identify themselves as active participants in world politics, with their tours as a starting point. The University of Michigan Jazz Band’s 1965 tour of Latin America and the Caribbean offers an unusually dramatic illustration. After playing three successful concerts in the Dominican Republic, the band’s stay was cut short by revolution: members witnessed gunfire at close range and were evacuated by the U.S. military. The students in the band wondered whether the State Department had known that revolution was brewing before making the last-minute decision to send them to Santo Domingo.35 They were truly part of the story, for President Johnson later justified his decision to send in the U.S. Marine Corps and occupy the Dominican Republic by citing the need to protect American citizens on the island.36 As the band members talk about the revolution today, they convey a sense of mystery and drama in being part of an event of worldwide political importance.37
Audiences and musicians from the host countries also willingly adopted roles in the “stage play” of musical diplomacy. We might recall the numerous instances in which musicians joined together in jam sessions so that players and audiences alike were drawn into active participation. The common understanding of state-sponsored concerts as expensive gifts from the United States to the host country implied that the recipients were part of the diplomatic story as well. Susan Migden Socolow, who was assistant CAO at the U.S. embassy in Paraguay, recalls that when musicians visited the secondary cities or towns, far from U.S. embassies or major cities, they met people who seldom saw foreign visitors. In rural places people were surprised and grateful that anyone had come at all. This effort allowed eyewitnesses to feel flattered that the embassy, and by extension the United States, was present and attending to them.38 Socolow reports that the effects of this work were significant and possibly long-lasting; she continued to receive favorable comments for months after the end of the tour.39 The metaphor of the concert as a gift from one country to another, like the metaphor of playing together, placed U.S. musicians and the people they met into relationship with one another and encouraged people in the host country to imagine themselves as connected with both the United States itself and its ambassadors. Yet the gift could also inspire feelings of insecurity, as when listeners questioned their own expertise or asked the American performers to rate the quality of their audiences. Whether flattered or insecure, whether skeptical or enraptured—all of these responses enacted a social relationship, a bond between performers and listeners.
Although all live music-making uses the power of these social bonds, musical diplomacy added political intrigue and the unpredictability of engaging with audiences in their own environments. Audiences sometimes had considerable power to establish relationships with the visitors on their own terms. Ron Post, a member of the University of Michigan Jazz Band, recalled an explicitly political experience in Caracas, where the Michigan band’s concert at the university had been cancelled because of a strike by Communist students.40 Post told the story:
As I wended my way down the seemingly endless, dark streets of a residential area, a very middle-class area, there was some jazz coming out of a house, and it sounded like it was live, so I went up to the house and said, “I’m with the U of M jazz band, and I’m a bit lost and trying to find my hotel.” They were practicing for a jazz festival; they invited me in and pretty soon whisked me off to a jazz club in the city. We heard musicians there, and they were very good. They said, “we’re having a concert at the University on Sunday, why don’t you come?” And I thought that was a little strange because we were supposed to have played at the university, but they had had protests, so they wouldn’t allow us to play there. But they invited me, so I invited a couple of the other band members and we went to the University of Caracas for the jazz festival. I was seated with the president of the jazz and drama club, who got up at intermission and gave a harangue against America and the American jazz band. It was really something—they were protesting us but they had invited us to this thing. But it was all good feeling, you know, and we got along with them fine. I leaned over to the guy next to me and said “What’s going on?” He said “Well, this is sort of the political aspect of the thing, but don’t pay attention, it’s just what we do.” It was quite an experience.
Post continued his reminiscences:
Then the next day, of course, I invited them to our concert which had been moved from the university that Sunday to a bowl outside the city. So many people came to the concert that we had to actually go out [on the stage] to play rock ’n’ roll for a while, because people were still streaming in and the people who’d been there for a long time started clapping, asking us to perform. . . . There were about 8,000 people at that concert and it was just a fantastic experience—you get inspired from something like that, so we played really well, they loved us, and there were all the guys from the jazz and drama club, which I later learned was the Communist front of the university. We had a great time with them again.41
Post insisted that the visiting band members weren’t made to feel uncomfortable: “it was so matter of fact, although the speech was given with a good deal of vigor as I remember it. They certainly weren’t angry at us. They treated us very well.”42 The Venezuelan students related to the Michigan Jazz Band in several ways at once. On one hand, they used the band’s presence to attract attention to their own political agenda, criticizing the United States and its representatives. On the other hand, they also enjoyed the company of the American student musicians as peers, establishing social relations that were recalled warmly some forty years after the fact. They distinguished between the music’s appeal and the political motivations of the government that sent the music, accepting the former and assessing the latter more skeptically. The interest of each student group in the other was surely heightened by the fact that there seemed to be more happening—on both sides—than first met the eye.
Even people in the United States were given roles to play. Although U.S. law prohibited American officials from broadcasting U.S. propaganda within its own borders, the American news and entertainment media conveyed details of the Cultural Presentations tours. As we saw in chapter 4, for instance, Edward R. Murrow’s coverage of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson as ambassadors harmonized perfectly with the strategies of U.S. government propagandists. It presented factual information but not in a disinterested fashion. Bringing African American artists and their Asian and African interlocutors into America’s living rooms allowed viewers a strangely intimate and poignant contact with peoples abroad. (Recall the Protestant women’s groups who responded to the Anderson broadcast by organizing further study of international issues.) Murrow’s international vignettes offered more than the charm of the unfamiliar: they gave Americans a reason to feel good about their country’s actions abroad.43 The results of musicians’ diplomatic excursions also circulated widely in the United States as sound recordings: Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Impressions of Eurasia; Randy Weston’s African Cookbook; Herbie Mann’s African Suite and Brazil, Bossa Nova and Blue; the Paul Winter Sextet’s Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova; Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, Latin American Suite, and Afro-Eurasian Eclipse; and many others. These recordings reinforced for ordinary Americans the idea that international engagement could enrich their own lives.44 The mixed reception of folk and rock groups after their tours suggests that U.S. audiences considered seriously the political implications of musical ambassadorship.
In light of these experiences of connectedness, Boorstin’s idea about the artifice of the created news event merits further examination. Boorstin wrote that “news events become dramatic performances in which ‘men in the news’ simply act out more or less well their prepared script.” He believed that this “performance” aspect was evidence of shallowness, of the unreality of the entire project.45 Yet when we look closely at the experience of cultural diplomacy, we see that none of these participants was simply reading a script provided by the U.S. government. Far from understanding their task as playacting, many participants adopted wholeheartedly the roles they were assigned in a way that became a life highlight for many and for some an aspect of their identity ever after. Even in cases where U.S. officials tried to shape the message in advance, many of the musicians and the people they met experienced musical diplomacy not as “propaganda” in a pejorative sense but as vivid musical and human connection. Of course, that sensation, too, may have been an effect of the program’s design, purposefully nurtured, yet not quite false. Certainly the state had an interest in maintaining good feelings, which were necessary for continued recruitment of musicians and connection with audiences.46
That a Cold War nation-state assumed the authority to create and assign roles to individual people is not surprising. Indeed, this subtle ability to recruit individuals to the state’s purposes appears to be a defining feature of a “superpower.” Historians have demonstrated that individual citizens often foster international cooperation that serves their own interests rather than those of the state.47 Nevertheless, the evidence of U.S. musical presentations suggests that these seemingly nonpolitical interactions could also be choreographed by the state, even if the participants themselves felt they had chosen their roles freely. Nonstate actors participated in the government’s program for a variety of reasons, yet their behavior and that of people they met abroad was profoundly shaped by the roles into which they were recruited. Here we see the political made personal, a means of infusing lives with impetus to participate in a political project.48 The pragmatic and ideological purposes of the state had become so much a part of American society that they could be taken for granted as a framework for citizens’ participation in society.49 Boorstin’s idea that “the power to make a reportable event is . . . the power to make experience” rings true.50
Yet it would be an error to regard the State Department’s mobilization of the arts as a solely top-down phenomenon. The crucial mediator between the state’s power and individuals’ participation was a far-reaching set of social conventions governing musical and diplomatic performance. Musical diplomacy relied on these conventions to elicit the desired behavior from performers, audiences, and observers. A concert by a visiting artist called on customs that were already well cultivated in much of the world—hospitality, the acknowledgment of unusual talent, the desire to reveal oneself as an educated listener. Widely respected conventions of concertgoing cued audiences to anticipate enjoyment and required that musicians do their best to please. The relationship between host and guest meant that the Americans would try to be gracious, and their hosts would welcome them warmly. Framing the visits as a form of diplomacy ensured that the American musicians and the people they met would see themselves as representatives of their respective nations. Within these conventional paradigms, everyone had considerable freedom to choose their own words and actions. As performing musicians, the Americans who toured were well-practiced in the social conventions that made music-making powerful, and they decided how to enact those conventions on the spot. Indeed, the American musicians deployed these paradigms for purposes they valued: Marian Anderson discussed civil and human rights; John Finley Williamson supported Christian choirs; and Addiss and Crofut respectfully studied others’ folk songs. Musical diplomacy was an emergent practice that joined citizens’ values closely with the state’s power in a mutually reinforcing way. Through the shared, normative experience of music-making, musicians and audiences were invited to participate not explicitly in politics but rather in a sociability, overtly sponsored by the state, that felt like more than politics.
Thus, soft power may not reside in the attractiveness of cultural products, or the transmission of a particular message, as Joseph Nye would have it.51 In the case of U.S. musical diplomacy soft power meant assigning people roles to play that were irresistible, or at least rewarding enough to adopt. Charles Ellison, who directed the Cultural Presentations program in the 1960s, observed that a major virtue of exchange programs was that they allowed citizens to “play a part in our foreign relations.”52 It is clear that this lesson was taken to heart by administrators, for it was stated in stronger terms in the following decade. In testimony before the House Committee on International Relations, former assistant secretary of state John Richardson explained that not only could the U.S. government improve the functioning of the mass media throughout the world, but it could also place sensitive, qualified people at critical points within global “communication flows” to strengthen relationships between institutions and societies.53 In other words the personal element of building connections was as important as the medium for doing so.
That musical diplomacy was understood as artistic exchange, not political exchange, mattered a great deal to its participants. The prevalent public discourse about the arts during this time mandated a separation between art and propaganda. This viewpoint, articulated by musicians and critics alike, was grounded in abhorrence of Nazi propaganda and an older belief that engagement with music is elevating and worthwhile.54 The professional musicians and critics on the State Department’s Music Advisory Panels shared this perspective. As educated Americans, many department officials and Foreign Service officers did, too. Thus, it was possible to deny any direct connection between cultural and educational exchange programs and geopolitics.55 Of course, the musical diplomats themselves also held strong beliefs about the intrinsic value of their art. Many musicians who would not willingly have signed on as supporters of the U.S. government’s policies were happy to share their art abroad. They brought to the project an understanding that their performances were valuable in and of themselves, and they were excited to use government support to stimulate interest in their music or further their own careers. By choosing musical ambassadors who believed that art was more important than politics, the State Department supported the attractive idea that cultural diplomacy was separate from practical political concerns. Ironically, this widely held belief afforded musical diplomacy its political power.
Among the officials who planned cultural diplomacy events and the diplomats who made them happen, the question of whether the arts were being presented “for their own sake” or used as a propaganda tool was argued repeatedly and never resolved. The State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations, founded on a principle of “mutual understanding,” was separate from the propaganda initiatives of the Office of War Information and its successor agencies, the International Information Administration and the USIA. In 1951 the Bureau of the Budget entered the debate, claiming that “culture for culture’s sake has no place in the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Program”: the only proper diplomatic use of the arts was to win respect and thereby “inspire cooperation with us in world affairs.”56 In practice, however, these opposing ideas did not paralyze the program; rather, the contradiction was necessary to its function. The idea that art remained pure and apolitical allowed musicians and audiences to buy into their roles without much reservation, and the idea that art was entirely in the state’s service allowed politicians to play the required role of cold warriors, investing resources in effective propaganda. Only the cooperation of a variety of actors with heterogeneous aims made the program flourish. The officials who directed the Cultural Presentations program balanced these agendas well enough to keep the program funded and functioning throughout the 1950s and 1960s.57
This assortment of purposes demands an unusually open definition of propaganda, one that allows for many kinds of involvement, many kinds of meaning-making. Extending Kissinger’s thinking about the “stage play” of diplomacy, the historian Kenneth Osgood defines propaganda as “words and deeds used for their impact on the perceptions and attitudes of others.” Osgood points out the false dichotomy between propaganda and truth: the actions of states can have practical consequences even if they also are meant as gestures that change observers’ thinking. In the same way, U.S. musical diplomacy conveyed something substantive about the relationship U.S. officials desired to establish with foreign citizens—it represented real financial investments and real human partnerships. At the same time, it was also intended strategically to convey impressions and beliefs to live and broadcast audiences.58 What was difficult for Boorstin to see, but evident to us as we look back, is that once the mediation of ideas is part of the landscape, authentic behavior is no longer separable from behavior meant to convey a message to a broad audience.59 A given performance can serve both political and artistic aims. That observable events might have many motives behind them is a key feature of the enterprise of musical diplomacy, heightening the excitement and interest of everyone involved.
The feelings of connectedness and the movement of people and music encouraged individuals to imagine themselves as connected to one another within a “global” order. In some ways musical diplomacy can be understood as an international variant of Benedict Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community.” Anderson argues that the existence of newspapers encouraged individuals to build common language and concerns, thereby coming to understand themselves as part of a nation.60 Cultural diplomacy relies on a similar trick of mediation, providing people in many places with shared information and experiences—but even as it reinforces linguistic and national borders by showing what is characteristic of a nation, it also crosses those borders by inviting broader participation. The form of globalization we see in cultural diplomacy is not primarily about mobility or even direct communication but about altering local contexts and changing the frame of reference in which people think about themselves and others.61 For most of the history of the Cultural Presentations program a majority of the tours took place in the developing world and the Communist Bloc, areas where people felt little or no connection to the United States. The gift of musical diplomacy from one country to another constructed a peculiar social world—not only on a personal scale but also on a large scale, spanning vast distances. As Assistant Secretary of State John Richardson Jr. explained in 1971, the purpose of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Relations was “building knowledge and relationships among people who count all the way from community to national levels in this and other countries.”62
Neither live concerts nor print nor broadcasts began this process. Although we tend to think of media as the cause of cultural “flows” in the age of globalization, we often forget to consider how the channels that enable those flows were created. The media were not a neutral tool: these channels of communication were established or expanded for specific political ends.63 Public servants and media executives alike understood their work in this way: they described their geopolitical situation in terms we now commonly use to describe globalization. David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America, explained in a 1957 speech: “We live in a world so shrunken that political and social explosions anywhere produce instant and frequently serious tremors everywhere.”64 A State Department report on cultural diplomacy cited the “great flow and counterflow of persons across continents and oceans and national boundaries,” undertaken for mutual benefit.65 Such descriptions were not disinterested; rather, they were authored by Cold War strategists who wanted to ensure victory for America or for the “free world.” In 1963 Walter Laves envisioned the building of a “genuine world community” as the central task for the defeat of Communism. This task would require pervasive outreach, recruiting people to this all-encompassing project through every possible means. In Laves’s vision this effort would create “a world in which the fate of every country is deeply interrelated with that of every other, and in which the possibility of genuinely independent action by any nation has almost totally disappeared.”66 The perceived political necessity of building “a genuine world community” drove the establishment and use of media that would support substantive relationships across international borders.
The state coordinated the effort, but the work was not the state’s alone: by the end of the 1950s the investment of private U.S. institutions in educational exchange and other international programs had surpassed that of the U.S. government.67 Public and private actors built systems of moving ideas and people to serve the nation-state’s interests as well as their own, and they also created the roles for which individual people volunteered.68 If transforming individuals and institutions into willing contributors was central to the Cold War effort, then musical diplomacy was a valuable tool for that transformation, granting Americans warm feelings about their participation and gratifying audiences by fulfilling their own musical ambitions or their desire to connect. The sense of pride in a common artistic cause might even be felt as a (perhaps illusory) sense of common political cause.
Of course, the use of music to serve a state’s interests long predates the Cold War. Works of music and theater paid for by the great European powers had for centuries represented the dominance of monarchs, cultivated prestige among peers, or served as a gift to mark or strengthen alliances.69 Likewise, the use of the arts for state propaganda was also in place well before the Cold War: one well-known case was the Nazis’ radio and concert propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s. The elements that distinguished Cold War cultural diplomacy from earlier or wartime efforts were, first, the two superpowers’ aggressive recruitment of political and economic allies as a global project and, second, the growing importance of mediated representation. During the Cold War, state officials and individual citizens increasingly defined their places in the world in terms of national independence and international alliances. Composers had long been exploring ideas about nationhood through music, but Cold War pressures created the sense of a global order within which the nation’s cultural and political contribution had to be defined. A “cultural presentation” was recognized as an important intervention: a way for the nation to take its place within the global order and to reveal itself as producer of its own image.70 The development of this sensibility of representation coincided closely with the postwar development of the United Nations as a paradigm for a world-system. In this new paradigm, self-determining nation-states on the U.S. model became a norm for thinking about international relationships.71 In the era of decolonization and Cold War competition between Communist and capitalist systems, each nation was called on to show others a legible identity and to clearly state its alliances—or, in the case of nonaligned countries, refusal of alliance.
Musical diplomacy helped to make this paradigm seem real to peoples around the world through a kind of metonymy: the “culture” presented by each state functioned as a claim for the validity of that state and the capabilities of its people.72 Many nations, having been addressed in this way, also chose to speak, articulating their own agendas.73 This period saw a worldwide proliferation of musical diplomacy—sponsored not only by a few powers but increasingly by many other countries as well, reaching not only elites but also vast populations.74 The founding of numerous state folk ensembles in the Soviet-occupied East Bloc in the 1950s and the establishment of the U.S. Cultural Presentations program in 1954 were soon followed by the creation of national ballet and musical ensembles in Asia and Africa.75 Many of these new ensembles were designed specifically to represent their nations to the world’s other peoples, just as the State Department’s histories of jazz and the Tamburitzans’ panorama of folkloric styles aimed to explain America through examples of Americana. The symbolic relationship between music and nation was selective and ambiguous: individuals were called on to stand for their states, and state officials chose particular elements of culture to stand for entire populations, leaving others out of the picture.76
As we saw in these cases and others, any selection of a particular kind of music is an intervention that changes relationships. The establishment of jazz as “America’s classical music” made its point abroad but also changed the status of the music at home. The Tamburitzans’ contentious choice of rock and their respectful adoption of Slavic musical works were their own doing, but these choices also served as a form of signaling on the part of the state, by which diverse aspects of American identity were made apparent to others. The nation-states that adopted similar practices of cultural diplomacy made similarly contested choices about what art would represent them. Even if their specific artistic choices engaged only ambivalently with Western or Euro-American models, their participation in the practice of national representation—based as it was on the Western principle of the nation-state—took place largely on Western terms. The process of imputing national meaning to art did not take place solely on the “production” side: the people who witnessed these representations were also empowered to appraise the ideas and images that were on offer, giving or withholding admiration according to their own criteria. In the world the Cold War made, everyone is an actor, everyone a critic.
Oddly, this treatment of music, in which every country selects (or re-creates) its favored styles for presentation abroad, both transformed the chosen musical practices and lessened the differences among them. They all began to be framed in similar ways for consumption by the world’s publics. (This “one world, many flavors” approach also recalls the treatment of national minority cultures within the Soviet empire.)77 The availability of media changed the scene by giving every nation a visible platform within the gallery of nation-states (though not all were equally visible), and cultural diplomacy changed the scene by emphasizing the selection and framing of heritage as a strategy for defining the nation’s profile. This combination of media and identity strategies is now more commonly known as nation-branding or place-branding.78 Like Kissinger’s “stage play” of diplomacy, at once aimed at the state’s negotiators and the world audience, cultural diplomacy could seek to please its audiences as artistic performance while also establishing a national brand that could have multiple political uses.
We have seen that U.S. cultural presentations had far-reaching effects. Were they also effective in the narrower sense of furthering the state’s interests? The answer depends on which objectives are in view and what threshold of success one sets for a program that always had a modest budget. As an American embassy official in Moscow noted in 1958, cultural presentations were no panacea: the political and ideological disagreements that shaped international relations would not be erased by a concert or two. Yet the official also acknowledged that, for U.S. diplomats in the Soviet Union, exchanges of persons were at that time “the only formally arranged means of breaking down the barriers to communication.”79
The overwhelming consensus among American ambassadors was that cultural diplomacy was effective. When the State Department surveyed them, many cited the opening of channels of communication. The examples they gave reveal that time and again, the embassies used people’s engagement in musical activities for other, nonmusical purposes. Sometimes these purposes were tangible. The embassy in Nigeria explained that the presence of performing artists typically led to better connections between the embassy and the community: “For example, the visit of the de Paur chorus to Ibadan led to contacts with leaders in the local battalion which in turn led to a weekly USIS program of speakers and movies supplied to the battalion. This was a significant new opportunity for us.” The U.S. ambassador in Zambia reported that a concert created persistent warm feelings on the part of important political figures: “The Phoenix Singers made such a favorable impression in their public appearances that they were invited to give a special, private performance at a closed conclave of top Zambian Government officials headed by President Kaunda himself. Recollection of that occasion with any of these officials today tends almost invariably to relax the situation quite noticeably.”80
Often the results were hard to specify, yet most of the embassies reported that these channels of communication were important. Ron Post, who toured as a musician before joining the Foreign Service, explained that cultural diplomacy “changes the valence” of relations, putting into place the open, friendly attitudes that are necessary for people to “at least consider what our policies are.”81 Music introduced positive feelings into a public arena fraught with conflict. It not only brought people to the State Department’s events, but it also allowed people abroad and at home to feel good about investing in international relationships. On many levels, then, it appears that musical diplomacy mattered as the United States tried to forge a “genuine world community.”
Apart from this kind of attitude change, we do see hints of other concrete outcomes in the reception of some tours. The case of William Strickland’s Asian and European tours demonstrates that the U.S. government used music to give communities access to expertise that would enhance their local, national, or regional prestige. When Edward R. Murrow was appointed director of the USIA, he acknowledged that effectiveness in this narrower sense was hard to measure: “no computer clicks, no cash register rings when a man changes his mind.”82 Yet changing minds—persuading people to accept policies or ideologies—was not the main purpose of the Cultural Presentations program as it was carried out by its practitioners in the field. Rather, their work consistently privileged the human connections that were made possible by musical performance and conversation about music.
The evaluation of cultural diplomacy’s effectiveness has been complicated by the assumptions of those who have sought to revitalize the practice in the years since 11 September 2001. A large body of recent writing defines a “new public diplomacy,” and most of the authors assert that what is needed today differs dramatically from Cold War cultural diplomacy. Historians Giles Scott-Smith and Martijn Mos have identified three ways in which the new public diplomacy differs from previous models of cultural diplomacy:
(1)the importance of non-state actors alongside and outside of inter-state relations has increased;
(2)the practice of public diplomacy abroad is intimately and necessarily linked to the practice of public affairs at home; and
(3)it is not so much geared towards the management of information for the purpose of convincing others to adopt another point of view, but towards an engagement with other constituencies with an aim of establishing a dialogue on the grounds of mutual interest or concern.83
Yet this list highlights elements that already characterized the musical diplomacy of the 1950s. Even as people have sought to bring cultural diplomacy back to the forefront of international relations in the present, they have also obscured what it was in the past.
It is understandable that today’s observer, looking back, might imagine Cold War cultural diplomacy as a state-oriented, “top-down” practice and believe that today’s networked approaches are different.84 After all, the notion that the United States could win the war of ideas by communicating its values abroad was propagated widely, both by the press in the United States and in the State Department’s requests for funding sent to Congress.85 The intermingling of the USIA with the State Department in the operations of the Cultural Presentations program further complicates the picture, for USIA officials were charged with developing detailed country plans that did enumerate specific messages to be brought across to the public in each place: for example, “America is culturally diverse and it has modern and traditional music”; “African Americans have access to education”; “Americans respect many religions.”86 In practice, though, musical presentations conveyed the relevant messages only implicitly. As Boorstin’s model suggests, the chosen messages came across in the form of evidence offered to audiences rather than conclusions drawn for them—and we have seen that audiences chose for themselves which conclusions to draw. Although USIA officials gladly reported on the successful delivery of their messages, many believed that the benefits of cultural presentations were more social and relational than propagandistic. By emphasizing human relations, two-way communication, and depictions of America’s complexity, the advocates of “the new public diplomacy” describe something very like the practice of musical diplomacy in the 1950s. Although Cold War cultural diplomacy sometimes made effective propaganda, the channels of communication it built were its most important legacy.87
In a time when states were committing every resource possible to sway distant populations to choose one ideological system over another, or to make a case for their own nationhood, music proved a very attractive resource. Offerings of musical diplomacy altered the contexts in which individuals imagined themselves, allowing them to feel social and musical connections with people from other lands. Even though political pressures helped to stimulate the building of the media channels that supported Cold War musical diplomacy, we cannot assume that the music was simply a superficial reflection of an underlying political reality. Rather, the practice of musical diplomacy, at once fabricated and genuine, helped to create the personal experiences and the global sensibilities of the Cold War era.