Introduction

Instruments of Diplomacy

Sitting in the American embassy in Phnom Penh, Edmund Kellogg was overwhelmed and frustrated. As the interim chargé d’affaires for the embassy, he was responsible for reporting on the success of U.S. government–sponsored concerts in Cambodia. Unfortunately, there was little success to report. The embassy had had to cancel two of the three musical groups that were supposed to appear in Cambodia in the 1958–59 season, and recent American musical performances there had been unsuccessful. Half the audience for the harmonica player John Sebastian left the hall within the first few minutes of the concert, although the rest applauded enthusiastically. The same was true for the Westminster Choir. The piano provided for Marian Anderson’s performance was terribly out of tune, and although the audience appreciated “the force of her personality,” they disliked her operatic repertoire. When the Benny Goodman jazz band visited, the Cambodian sponsor made no arrangements for a piano or a sound system, leaving the band without essential equipment. A local newspaper called Goodman’s music “the gobbling of turkeys.” Kellogg had cancelled the scheduled performances of the Golden Gate Quartet, a singing group specializing in popular songs and gospel numbers, because when he played a recording of the quartet for the Cambodian minister of public instruction, the minister asked, “Do you have anybody who can sing in Cambodian?” Of course, if the education minister wasn’t willing to listen, the public would have been even less receptive. As Kellogg described the scene, Cambodians routinely received musicians from the United States, the Soviet bloc, and elsewhere, but they didn’t like most of what they heard. Kellogg viewed Cambodia as strategically important, and he hoped the State Department would keep trying to reach people there—but he desperately wanted the department to recognize the difficulty of pleasing Cambodian audiences with American music.1

Kellogg and hundreds of people like him worked in America’s diplomatic posts—its embassies and consulates around the world. Among their many other obligations, they were asked by the State Department to oversee and report on its Cultural Presentations program, which sent American performing artists and athletes all over the world to improve the image of the United States. Music was an important strategic resource for this kind of programming, yet diplomats struggled to use it effectively. In this book I aim to evaluate the nature and effects of U.S. musical diplomacy. Since the Cultural Presentations program administered most of the United States’ musical diplomacy efforts during the Cold War, its sponsored activities constitute most of the projects described in these pages.

The Cultural Presentations program was formally begun as the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs in 1954, though it had roots in the U.S.-Latin American exchange programs of the World War II era.2 It is more difficult to define an end point for the program’s activities. Musical diplomacy continues today in a limited way. U.S. embassies may sponsor concerts, and the State Department and Defense Department underwrite several tours each year.³ Nonetheless, the heyday of U.S. musical diplomacy came to an end in the early 1970s, when shrinking budgets forced the program to narrow its focus to the Soviet bloc countries and reduced the number of artists who could be sponsored each year.⁴ The reorganizations of the program after the early 1970s, as well as the recent resurgence of interest in musical diplomacy, must wait for a later study.⁵

As Kellogg’s detailed report suggests, the Cultural Presentations program relied heavily on embassy staff. Although performers were selected and tours planned in Washington by State Department personnel, only people in each destination country knew the local circumstances that could make or break performances—which theaters provided enough space for an orchestra, which cities had no pianos, which music audiences would prefer, and so forth. Usually a post’s public affairs officer (PAO) or cultural affairs officer (CAO) took the lead in making arrangements.⁶ Once the post learned that a particular musical attraction would visit, the officer looked for a local sponsor, booked a venue, and helped the sponsor advertise the event. When the musicians arrived, U.S. officials were on hand to resolve the inevitable difficulties with language, lodging, and transportation. Posts also hosted receptions where the musicians met local dignitaries and fellow artists. After the visit the officer sent a report to the State Department, detailing the outcomes of the performances and enclosing photographs and press clippings.

The reports that Kellogg and his colleagues sent back to the State Department constitute the most complete collection of historical sources describing America’s musical diplomacy in the 1950s and 1960s. This study relies on them for many details. Of course, these reports are shaped by a number of biases. Each officer’s beliefs about the people in the area served by the post colored his opinion of what music should be sent, as did the officer’s personal taste and his desire to connect with American music while far from home. The budget of the Cultural Presentations program was contingent on evidence of progress, so embassies were encouraged to send back glowing reports that could be cited in the published annual summaries. Congressman John Rooney likened these summaries to “a theatrical performer coming along with his clippings. He doesn’t bring any bad ones.”7 Still, the archives contain numerous accounts of failures or partial successes, which suggests that honest assessment was valued. Apart from critics’ reviews published in the foreign press, the posts’ reports are the only eyewitness accounts preserved and accessible in quantity. (Newspaper reviews are also useful, even though the historian must scrutinize them carefully. Many of them were based on press releases composed by U.S. diplomatic staff and translated into local languages. Reviews that do not rely on the press releases likely reflect local opinion more accurately.)⁸ Only a fraction of the posts’ material exists today, for the State Department kept far better records about political, economic, and military diplomacy than it did about its music programs.⁹ In sum, extant reports contain views that may be distorted by American aims and values, but the incidents they describe nonetheless have much to teach us about responses to American cultural diplomacy.

UNDERSTANDING MUSICAL DIPLOMACY: POINTS OF VIEW

The view from the field is particularly useful because what Foreign Service officers believed they were accomplishing could differ dramatically from what the program’s planners in Washington had in mind. The government officials who planned cultural presentations sometimes imagined them as a one-way instrument by which the United States could exert influence on other countries. Congress had appropriated money for artistic display overseas because the United States had an image problem. In the words of Congressman Frank Thompson Jr. the young superpower had to prove “that we are by no means a Nation of mere ‘cultural barbarians.’”¹⁰ The specific message differed from place to place. In Europe the United States aimed to demonstrate that Americans not only excelled in engineering and industry but also appreciated the artistic achievements and time-honored traditions that Europeans valued. In much of the developing world, U.S. officials pointed out their country’s embrace of spiritual values along with economic progress. Official State Department brochures described U.S. cultural and information programs as promoting international understanding and “mutual respect” among peoples, which might suggest an equality of exchange between partner countries.11 Nonetheless, the short-term aim of combating Soviet propaganda about the United States meant that broadcasting the American message to other peoples usually seemed more urgent than developing truly mutual cultural exchange. With the exception of the Soviet-American exchanges that were regulated by treaty, the United States sent out more musicians than it received as guests.

Officials in Washington believed that cultural and information programs afforded the United States power over other nations. To illustrate the nature of these programs, a 1953 pamphlet published by the State Department’s International Information Administration (IIA) depicted cultural presentations and other propaganda as water flowing directly into a vessel labeled “Country X” (figure 1). U.S. government propagandists were engaged in a “crusade of ideas” to improve America’s image among citizens of other countries. According to this picture, educational and cultural exchanges would pour American ideas and values into the minds of the foreign public, making them more receptive to U.S. policy objectives.¹² This image of “cultural flow” strongly suggests that the United States could control the content and effects of its propaganda. When people write today about America’s “soft power,” this one-way flow of consumer goods and political ideas is usually what they have in mind.

From his vantage point in Cambodia, Edmund Kellogg would have drawn the cultural presentations process differently, perhaps something like my hypothetical figure 2. Kellogg’s diagram might consist of a complex, distributed network of connections with the embassy at the center. For the Foreign Service officer on the ground, cultural presentations were mired in practical concerns, such as making sure someone at the National Theater numbered the backs of the chairs in chalk so that tickets for particular seats could be honored, or asking that the king invite Cambodians as well as Americans to the command performance at the palace.¹³ Organizing people to do these jobs placed the officer into a web of social relationships—not pouring information into a bucket but collaborating and communicating in many directions at once. Special programming for schoolchildren and university students brought teachers, university administrators, children, and young adults into contact with both the American performers and the organizing officials. Likewise, embassies tried to have the visiting American musicians meet and perform with musicians from the host country, arranging jam sessions, master classes, joint rehearsals, or performances whenever possible. All these activities required the participation of citizens in the host country, and they linked the embassy into local social networks. As the Cambodian case implies, if a potential audience was not receptive, there was little the embassy could do to reach them.

Figure 1. The flow of information into “Country X.” IIA: International Information Administration Program, Department of State Publication 4939 (1953), 8.

Figure 2. Information flow as seen from the diplomatic field.

This is a key paradox of cultural diplomacy: if we look at the State Department’s music program from the top down, we see the imperial desire to impress American values on others. The top-down view displays confidence that ideas could be conveyed to and adopted by others through artistic experiences. From this perspective music programs differ little from other forms of propaganda that tried to shape opinions by offering information. If we look from the bottom up, though, we see an intensive process of negotiation and engagement. Both views offer us true pictures of the situation, but neither picture is complete. In Matthew Fraser’s account of soft power, he distinguishes imperialism (a “deliberate project of a center extending influence and control over a periphery”) from globalization (an “infinitely subtler and more complex interplay among many interconnecting cultures and economies”).14 U.S. musical diplomacy encompassed both elements, and taking both into account offers us the best way to understand the project of extending power abroad by means of the arts. Most of the policy theorists who have written about cultural diplomacy explain it as a top-down process, envisioning art as having direct and unilateral effects.15 From other perspectives, however, the process can look very different.

This difference is not merely a contrast of global and local perspectives, for there were many roles to play in the process of musical diplomacy. The diagram would again look different if it were drawn by N.M. Khan, the chief commissioner and president of the Pakistan Arts Council. Khan was chosen by the embassy to serve as local sponsor for several U.S. musical presentations in the 1950s. To Khan the American concerts provided unparalleled personal and professional opportunities. Having heard that the U.S. government had presented an ice-skating show in India, he sought equal treatment for Pakistan.¹⁶ From July to September of 1957 Khan demanded repeatedly that the State Department provide an ice show or a “good jazz orchestra” for the International Festival of Culture to be held in Karachi in November of that year. Though Khan thanked the State Department for sending Marian Anderson to the Pakistani festival, he knew that her classical music would not engage crowds as popular entertainment would. The chargé d’affaires of the U.S. embassy in Karachi, Arthur Z. Gardiner, wrote that Khan was “looking to the U.S. for a spectacular presentation that will draw and entertain thousands of Pakistanis.” Gardiner agreed with Khan’s assessment: “Any performance where the appeal is visual would be preferable to a musical one in a country where only a small proportion of the population has been exposed to western music enough to begin to appreciate it.”¹⁷

The relationship between Khan and the embassy was complicated by the State Department’s preference that its embassy personnel not serve as impresarios in the host countries. Embassies were asked instead to find local commercial or nonprofit sponsors to help with logistics and advertising. Commercial sponsors usually took a portion of the net profit from concerts, the rest returning to the embassy to defray the costs of the tours. They shared the risk of failure with the State Department in hopes of financial reward. But even nonprofit sponsors benefited from their association with the Cultural Presentations program: they won a closer relationship with embassy officials, publicity for their organizations, and sometimes a cut of the proceeds for local charities. In many parts of the world, finding impresarios who could handle both logistics and publicity in accordance with American expectations was exceedingly difficult. Many embassies therefore relied on a few capable sponsors.¹⁸ N.M. Khan was one of these. Acting on behalf of the Pakistan Arts Council, he sponsored the successful October 1957 visit of the Minneapolis Symphony to Karachi. During one intermission Khan personally introduced the conductor, Antal Dorati, to the president of Pakistan. This gesture may have raised Khan’s prestige both with the president (for having brought the American orchestra) and with the embassy (for having arranged such a meeting). Citing Khan’s success in filling concert halls, Gardiner pressed the State Department more than once to send the music Khan wanted. The next year Khan presented five successful performances of the Jack Teagarden Sextet in Karachi—he eventually got his jazz band.19

From Khan’s point of view the flow of artists and ideas from the United States was not an imposition but a resource. He acted not as a recipient but as a collaborator who shaped the content of the Cultural Presentations program through his requests and his organizing efforts. For Khan the diagram would show not a nice straight pipe into Country X, as in figure 1, but a complicated series of channels, diverting American power for national and regional purposes that were not America’s own, and providing feedback that modified what America sent through the pipe.²⁰

Many people in the host countries were alert to the slippery slope between enjoying American music and ceding power to the United States. Audiences and critics often interpreted this power relationship in terms of the host country’s colonial history, as well as its current relations with the United States. In a trenchant commentary, Filipino journalist Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil wrote in the Manila Chronicle, “One can only be glad that the American State Department is continuing to try an entirely different way of winning friends and influencing people and has been steadily sending us America’s best artists. Nothing has been quite so successful since the capture of Aguinaldo”—that is, since 1901, when U.S. military forces captured the Filipino president, inaugurating a decades-long colonial occupation of the Philippines. With pointed irony Guerrero-Nakpil declared, “What an immense pleasure it has been to be held captive by the Symphony of the Air,” contrasting the orchestra’s friendly visit with the violence of the Philippine occupation. Naming the American high commissioner who argued against Philippine independence, Guerrero-Nakpil continued: “not even Paul Vories McNutt was so charming as the San Francisco Ballet. If this is cultural imperialism, let’s make the most of it.” The reviewer’s sardonic appreciation of the new phase of Philippine-U.S. relations swept nothing under the rug: she both valued the music bestowed on the Filipino audience and observed that this music might distract the public from the horrors of the past. Meanwhile, another critic in the same newspaper prized the gift of American music without apparent irony. The anti-American critic Indalecio P. Soliongco noted that though the United States could have sent its lesser musicians to the Philippines, “it has done no such thing. It has given us a taste of the best of America’s flowering musical culture, for which we should be thankful.”21 Perhaps love of music here trumped skepticism about America’s intentions.

In this Philippine instance, as in the numerous examples Kellogg offered, we see some of the risks of musical diplomacy. The possibility that the music might fail to please was only one of the State Department’s worries. If no one attended a U.S.-sponsored program, the embassy would suffer a public embarrassment. Embassies routinely provided tickets at no cost, urged businesses to buy tickets for their employees, and even sent buses to collect people for concerts. If citizens of the host nations believed the concerts were anything less than the best music the United States had to offer, they might take offense. If audiences believed that they were the targets of “sugar-coated propaganda about the American way of life,” as did one Nairobi critic, the concerts lost their appeal.²² Although most musicians understood the importance of making a good impression, sometimes they did offend their hosts. In his introductory remarks before a concert in Cairo, John Finley Williamson, director of the Westminster Singers, exclaimed, “As I look at you girls here, with your eager intelligent faces looking at me, I can hardly realize that I am in Africa—why, you could almost be European!” Williamson appears not to have understood that he hurt feelings with this remark and others like it. The American embassy in Monrovia reported that as much as Williamson might know about music, “the Doctor does not appear to be sufficiently well grounded in other matters for an effective African tour.”²³ Some performers became irritable under the strain of constant performances and social obligations, behaved crassly as privileged tourists, or wandered naively into situations they were not equipped to understand.²⁴

Yet despite these errors, the musical offerings of the Cultural Presentations program won considerable acclaim. The State Department’s own reporting system was biased in favor of positive news, but even taking that bias into account, there is plenty of evidence that the American musicians’ visits were both appreciated and useful. Among documents now available, Soliongco’s grateful appraisal is a far more typical response to American concerts than Guerrero-Nakpil’s sardonic one. Even if audiences remained aware of the political power behind the concerts—and whether or not they liked the music they heard—many did appreciate the gift of American music.

THE CULTURAL PRESENTATIONS PROGRAM: AIMS AND OPERATION

State Department officials recognized at the program’s inception that they were ill-equipped to choose the music to send abroad. They needed a means to ensure both fairness and artistic quality. To administer the artistic details of its programs, the State Department engaged the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), a private organization promoting theatrical performances. In turn, ANTA established advisory panels of experts in music and the other arts to provide artistic evaluations of candidates for tours. Performers and their agents plied ANTA with requests for tours. ANTA’s panelists met monthly to evaluate not only performers who might be sponsored by the State Department but also musicians touring privately so that they might inform diplomatic posts about the quality and potential of the performers. ANTA regularly sent updated lists of performers approved by the panels to the State Department.25 The advisory panels’ recommendations were then reviewed by an interagency committee representing the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and the Commission on Fine Arts.²⁶ In addition, the State Department solicited advice from a separate Advisory Committee on the Arts (ACA), consisting of up to ten members highly placed in a variety of artistic fields and background-checked by the FBI.²⁷ The ACA advised the State Department on its overall arts program, whereas the advisory panels evaluated specific performers. The interagency committee identified the populations most urgently to be cultivated and considered how to approach them.

In addition, as we have already seen, embassy personnel in U.S. diplomatic posts worldwide informed the State Department about what music they believed would meet programming needs in the countries where they were serving.²⁸ On the basis of all this advice, State Department personnel in Washington decided what music to send where within a tight budget.²⁹ Some individual composers, lecturers, and conductors also traveled under the State Department’s separate American Specialists program, and Fulbright awards provided a further means of moving American music beyond U.S. borders.³⁰

The evaluation of the program likewise involved many stakeholders. Congress appropriated the money for cultural presentations as an emergency measure in 1954, followed by a permanent appropriation in 1956. The State Department was required to produce annual reports for Congress, and its personnel and those of the USIA were routinely invited to testify before congressional budget panels to explain the program’s value and effectiveness. American and foreign publics followed the tours in the press, on the radio, and sometimes in the new medium of television. They, too, communicated their wishes and complaints to the State Department directly or through its diplomatic posts abroad. From the founding of the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations in 1939, its programs were designed not to fund the arts outright but to coordinate the activities of private individuals and institutions.31 Thus, thousands of people, all of them with agendas, shaped the content of the tours. The State Department’s decisions were never unilateral but reflected a dynamic array of artistic and political interests.

Cultural diplomacy was always an uncomfortable mix of information propaganda (intending to shape the thoughts and opinions of the world’s citizens, as seen in figure 1) and a gentler, high-minded vision of mutuality and respect, regarded as separate from politics. It was easiest to justify cultural presentations to the budget hawks in Congress by explaining that these presentations changed foreign publics’ opinions about the United States, enabling other kinds of information to penetrate in areas that had previously resisted U.S. messages. President John F. Kennedy articulated the high stakes of this enterprise in a 1961 speech:

It is clearer than ever that we face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes far beyond the clash of armies or even nuclear armaments. We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle. We dare not fail to grasp the new concept, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we will need to combat it. And we dare not fail to realize that this struggle is taking place every day without fanfare in thousands of villages and markets day and night and in classrooms all over the globe.³²

Accordingly, music and other attractions were among the assets that should be deployed to bring the world around to America’s point of view.

Yet many American officials were reluctant to let culture be so openly “used” in this way. As early as 1939 Ben Cherrington, the first leader of the State Department’s new Division of Cultural Relations, explained that cultural exchanges would not build strong ties unless they reflected mutual relationships, “sharing some interest or activity which has rich meaning for each of us.”³³ Charles Frankel, who served two years as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, believed that the problems cultural diplomacy could address were similar to other problems in international affairs but were not a matter of exerting power over others. Rather, cultural diplomacy could rectify “imbalances of intellectual power,” remove obstacles to communication, control “cultural aggression,” and create “institutions and enterprises in which there is an international stake, so that the edge is taken off international hostilities and the reasons for keeping peace are multiplied.”³⁴ In this way the practice of cultural diplomacy was meant to improve relations by placating the participants. This kind of relationship would only be weakened by the obnoxious intrusion of information propaganda. Music had special power to open doors, but paradoxically, the only way to maintain that power was to resist using music for political purposes. These two philosophies—music as information propaganda and music as nonpolitical human contact—remained in conflict throughout the existence of the Cultural Presentations program.

The combination of music’s broad appeal and its seeming political neutrality made music a very special form of government propaganda. In the early years the State Department was inclined to keep its sponsorship of musical events low-key for fear of making people abroad feel that they were being targeted by an information campaign.35 As Acting Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr. put it in 1956, “In modern, sensitive Asia, the best propaganda is the best-hidden propaganda.”³⁶ Posters advertising the concerts often omitted the State Department’s name, and the sponsorship was rarely trumpeted in the press. Sometimes, however, it was necessary to tout government sponsorship to demonstrate that the United States was interested not only in armaments but also in art. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra visited the USSR, much was made of its official sponsorship and mission—yet the greatness of art music was nevertheless held to rise above politics. Walter Walmsley, chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow, identified the peculiarity of using music as diplomacy: “it would be fatuous to suggest that great music interpreted by magnificent musicians has any role in the solution of the problems which separate the United States and USSR.”³⁷ Yet when the same orchestra went to Czechoslovakia, the U.S. ambassador reported that “ovations, without ever getting out of bounds, tended [to] assume proportions of manifestations in expression of things more than musical.” The ambassador cited audiences’ praise for the music’s excellence, their delight at “feeling themselves again in the main stream of European civilization,” and their astonishment that such an event was permitted. Crowds gathered wherever the musicians went, hoping for a memento or some kind of contact with the musicians.³⁸ Over time, officials in Washington recognized this attractive power. Rather than dissociating the State Department from the American musicians’ tours, they put the State Department’s name on the posters and issued press releases explaining that the U.S. government valued music.³⁹

The Cultural Presentations program also reflected a tension between the short-term aim of competing with Soviet propaganda and the long-term vision of cultural understanding. A 1962 report explained that the rivalry with the USSR had driven the program in its early years but that “competitive displays of cultural accomplishment tend to be wasteful and inappropriate.”40 Nevertheless, the many stakeholders in the program were far from unanimous about this policy shift. Embassy and consular staff continued to report the activities of Soviet and Chinese performers within the areas they served, as if to facilitate the planning of artistic countermeasures. Cultural diplomacy, the province of the State Department, was supposed to be separate from propaganda, which fell to the USIA. The State Department handled diplomacy and the movement of people: it funded and planned the Cultural Presentations program, the Specialists program, and other exchanges. The USIA managed the movement of cultural objects such as books, films, musical scores, and audio recordings. In the field, though, both cultural diplomacy and propaganda were enacted and supervised by the same people, the USIA’s public affairs officers and cultural affairs officers who worked in U.S. diplomatic posts.⁴¹

Some commentators have adopted wholesale the peaceable explanation of cultural diplomacy. In 2003 Milton Cummings explained cultural diplomacy as the “exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding.”⁴² Yet, as Ambassador Laurence Pope has reminded us, “cultural diplomacy was not about the search for international understanding, nor was it about putting oneself into the shoes of another. Rather, it was about the exercise of state power.”⁴³ Still, one may allow that political and apolitical aspects of music coexisted in a productive tension throughout all these activities. Music’s special power is that it brings into play many kinds of human behavior, most of which are thought to be separate from politics or governance. Musical performance tends to be warmly rewarding for participants as they marvel at unusual talent, gather in public places for festive occasions, or welcome guests from afar. Musical diplomacy calls on these conventions not to conceal the political sponsorship of the enterprise but to engage people, building relationships that encompass both political and artistic experiences. Distinguishing which is the primary objective and which the by-product is entirely a matter of perspective.

AMATEUR DIPLOMATS

Diplomacy has typically been regarded as a matter of state-to-state negotiations, although it is now widely understood that persons not given the authority of formal ambassadorship frequently play important roles in shaping international relations.⁴⁴ The musicians who toured for the State Department were not trained diplomats. Some received in-person briefing or printed information from the State Department before their tours. Most were also told about local conditions by embassy personnel when they arrived at each destination. Yet except perhaps for a few high-profile musicians, the briefings were not extensive, and in many cases the “cultural ambassadors” received no significant training before they went abroad. Many musicians report that the State Department did not restrict their behavior. As one performer put it, “We were not asked to be anything other than what we would be in Springfield, Illinois.”45

Because the musicians were frequently preoccupied with the need to perform well, any political briefing they did receive probably did not influence their behavior. When the University of Michigan Jazz Band was preparing for its Latin American tour of 1965, the State Department sent the musicians booklets of background information, pamphlets with titles such as “Democracy vs. Dictators,” “Why We Treat Different Communists Differently,” and “U.S. Policy toward Cuba.”⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the pamphlets were distributed right before the students’ winter break for a tour beginning in early January. Several band members report that they never read the materials. Musicians typically focused not on politics but on matters of performance and performing conditions. One band member protested having to sit through briefings, saying, “What do we care about this stuff? We’re going to play.”⁴⁷ Committed to excellent music-making, most were not interested in learning the finer points of diplomacy, let alone hearing about the varieties of Communist front groups they might encounter or being admonished condescendingly to mind their manners.⁴⁸

Given their lack of concern with the political aspects of their mission, musicians made unlikely diplomats. Yet their enactment of diplomacy served purposes that official diplomacy could not. Their performance extended well beyond their musical activities. Their interactions with hosts, fans, and fellow musicians left impressions of what Americans were like. That the musicians were sometimes unaware of the importance of this role only strengthened the perception that they were not offering propaganda but merely entertainment or art. Their frankness in conversation and their curiosity about music of other places presented Americans as sometimes naive but engaged interlocutors. Their superb musical skills bore witness to the excellence of the American educational system, and their generosity in sharing their expertise was evidence of American goodwill.⁴⁹ The obviously positive working relations of musicians in ethnically integrated ensembles served as a potent demonstration counteracting widespread perceptions of America’s racial bigotry. Thus, the musicians were performing not only music but also a highly visible role as Americans abroad.⁵⁰

Amateur and lesser-known professional musicians were particularly effective in their interactions with foreign publics. The most famous professional musicians tended to play in large cities, and they were in great demand at diplomatic functions for elite society members and diplomats in the host countries. Celebrities were typically watched over closely for security reasons, which limited their personal interaction with general audiences. By contrast, amateur and collegiate groups and a few of the smaller professional ensembles performed in more remote places, where the presence of Americans was a greater novelty and the opportunities for interaction were extensive. Many amateur groups toured Europe every year under private auspices; therefore, State Department officials typically declined to fund tours to Western Europe. Instead, amateurs were typically sent to the developing world.51 In shaping a musical impression of America, there were risks in allowing amateurs to represent the United States, for many were not inured to the hardships of touring abroad, and they were sometimes compared unfavorably with professional groups. At the same time, their dual status as envoys and tourists allowed them unusual access to the public.⁵² Except in the East Bloc and the Soviet Union, the less-famous musicians were allowed to break into small groups and wander into cafés or shopping venues. They often participated in impromptu musical events and parties. Even offstage, they were performing an observable role as American citizens. Their diplomatic performance was a special resource, for it created memorable human connections as well as vivid musical impressions.

A State Department official explained in 1962 that “our particular aim these days is wherever feasible to put a new ‘accent on youth.’ For we believe that our young people often are particularly effective in demonstrating abroad the virtues and depth of our democracy.”⁵³ Indeed, U.S. officials found that sending student musicians was the best way to gain access to students in other countries. For example, the University of Michigan Jazz Band’s 1965 visit to La Paz, Bolivia, was the U.S. embassy’s first successful attempt to organize a cultural event on the campus of the Universidad mayor de San Andrés in La Paz. To make arrangements for the band’s performance at the university, CAO Michael Boerner enlisted the cooperation of a small group of influential student leaders. Little could be accomplished on the campus without these leaders’ consent.⁵⁴ The student leaders valued the jazz band’s presence because so many students enjoyed jazz, and bringing good music to campus reflected well on the leaders. From Boerner’s point of view the tour was a way to make constructive contact with these influential students. In this case the relationship was fruitful. After the Michigan band’s departure Boerner continued to cultivate relationships with the student leaders, and he eventually arranged for a group of them to travel to the United States, despite the difficulty of obtaining visas for political radicals. That trip, in turn, made a deep impression on the Bolivian students; they were enthusiastic witnesses to an election in New York, and Boerner believes they felt more friendly to the United States after their return to Bolivia. According to Boerner, the jazz band’s tour started a conversation with politically important individuals who otherwise would have had nothing to do with U.S. citizens, least of all embassy personnel. The appeal of jazz was vital to the success of this project, for the cooperation of the student leaders was won only because bringing good music to campus allowed the leaders to demonstrate their effectiveness in improving student life.55

In organizing concerts and informal visits to college campuses by American students, State Department officials cultivated institutional connections and opportunities for informal contact.⁵⁶ On tours of Indian universities, for example, members of the collegiate Westminster Choir discussed with Indian students problems of local and international politics, standards of living, and educational methods. Students on both sides appreciated the conversation: one American student noted that “we were made to feel at home.”⁵⁷ Because they were not trained diplomats, visiting musicians were able to adopt a variety of roles, acting variously as guests, peers, or tourists, as well as performers and ambassadors.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The chapters that follow introduce the various kinds of musical performances sent abroad by the U.S. government and the characteristic achievements of each. From the beginning of the program, officials frequently chose classical music—that is, music composed in the European tradition that was intended as a form of art rather than entertainment. (Hence the alternate term art music.) The members of the ACA and ANTA’s Music Advisory Panel were drawn from America’s elite, among them arts philanthropists, museum presidents, composers, and university professors. These people had a sizable investment in the “highest” arts, regarding music as a means of representing an educated, “cultured” society.⁵⁸ The State Department explained to one of its diplomatic posts in 1957 that “the most important purpose of the President’s Program is to demonstrate that American artists are in the very forefront of the world’s artistic achievement.” Stressing the originality and excellence of American performers was one way of demonstrating American greatness.⁵⁹ In chapter 1 I explain that the decision to present classical music and its offshoot traditions was made on political as well as aesthetic grounds. Program officials used classical music as evidence against Soviet claims and European stereotypes that the United States, a land of business, lacked culture. Classical music appeared to be the music that Europeans and citizens of former European colonies would respect most; it therefore seemed the best music to use to win respect for America. This supposition led to expensive, high-profile European tours by U.S. orchestras—the New York Philharmonic in 1955, the Boston Symphony Orchestra the next year—as well as Metropolitan Opera soloists.60 By reaching opinion-makers with impressive concerts of indisputable quality, State Department officials hoped to break down prejudices about America, allowing U.S. positions in all matters to be taken more seriously. We see in chapter 2 that classical music could also serve as development aid, helping countries around the world to participate in a classical music culture that was believed to have common value for all. When the conductor William Strickland worked with orchestras throughout Asia and Europe, he fostered a sense of striving toward “world-class” performance, inspiring performers and audiences alike to envision their countries as peers of the United States and Europe.

These efforts were predicated on many unspoken assumptions about the “culture” in “cultural presentations.” First, culture was supposed to be simultaneously national and universal: national in that a single example of art could be understood as representing some characteristic of the United States as a whole; universal in the sense that people abroad should be able to interpret the music, like it, and evaluate it much as the senders would. When the Music Advisory Panel chose the “highest-quality” music to represent America, the panel believed that people elsewhere in the world would agree that the music was excellent. As the anthropologist Anna Tsing has noted, universals are local knowledge, existing in the minds of particular people—yet the act of calling on a cultural universal identifies an element that can be valued in more than one place or that might even retain its value as it moves. Tsing calls universals “mobile and mobilizing”—they not only travel from place to place but also inspire people to participate in the practices they represent.⁶¹

Second, the project’s planners seemed to agree that culture is portable—that a particular performance retains its identity even if it is transported thousands of miles away to a radically different linguistic and social environment. Third, they took for granted that a clean distinction could be drawn between givers and receivers. In figure 1 the flow is clearly unidirectional: from the United States to others, not vice versa. These assumptions made even faraway people and places seem close and accessible. The fact that musical diplomacy was usually carried out through in-person visits and face-to-face concerts brought to the project a sense of immediacy and authenticity, reinforcing the idea that moving music across borders was simple and effective. Yet in many cases the seeming simplicity of musical diplomacy was an illusion. Whether or not people acknowledged it, mediating music—moving it across space and time—changed its meanings. The visible, immediate contact of musical performance happened amid a welter of other kinds of contact, through print and audiovisual media, governmental relations, local politics—all of which shaped the outcomes of the face-to-face encounters that took place at American concerts abroad.62

In the early years of U.S. cultural presentations, feedback from the field radically changed some of the program’s premises. The rapid decolonization of states formerly ruled by Europeans and elites called attention to the power of the masses: the State Department no longer regarded elite audiences as the only people worth reaching. At the same time, the embassies sent word that classical music simply could not attract the socially and economically heterogeneous audiences the department had begun to seek. In hopes of connecting with these audiences, officials added jazz, variety shows, and popular music to the classical music they had preferred. Such programming, which began in 1956, remained controversial among some of the program’s advisers, but it provided a means of competing with the Soviet variety shows and Chinese acrobatic displays that were proving popular in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Jazz, the best-known case of cultural diplomacy, was a music with popular elements that also encouraged thoughtful connoisseurship. As we will see in chapter 3, it was well situated to reach both novice and expert audiences. The programming of jazz highlighted some of the same problems of elite (avant-garde) vs. popular (Dixieland, swing) styles that the United States faced with regard to classical music. While the most famous artists were sometimes kept at a distance from fans, for less-famous musicians the State Department typically arranged jam sessions where jazz musicians could perform together with musicians from the host countries. The sense of “playing together” helped cultivate a feeling of community among the small but growing subcultures of committed jazz fans abroad.

Jazz also gave the State Department a means of shaping perceptions of America’s racial problems by programming black, white, and integrated ensembles according to political need. Because the civil rights movement within the United States was drawing attention abroad, the issue of race was nearly omnipresent throughout the planning and execution of the tours. A typical feature of cultural diplomacy is its indirectness. It is difficult to measure any changes in attitude or increases in prestige due specifically to musical performances. Yet calling on African American musicians as cultural diplomats was a more direct strategy. Because race was omnipresent in critiques of the United States in the foreign press, sending African Americans abroad offered a rare opportunity for the State Department to present observable evidence about the achievements of its black citizens. The use of African Americans as ambassadors elicited a great deal of comment at home in the United States. Chapter 4 presents two highly visible African American musical ambassadors, Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson, and explores how the media and American and foreign publics responded to their work abroad. These musicians, more than any others, spurred U.S. citizens to write to Congress, newspapers, the State Department, and television networks to express conflicted opinions about how America, its artistic life, and its race relations should be presented abroad.

Chapter 5 reveals that despite the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state, the State Department’s music program deftly presented America’s largely Protestant religious identity abroad. The Westminster College choir performed in Protestant churches across Asia and proclaimed an openly religious identity. Even secular choirs and solo singers included religious music on their programs. African American spirituals were especially important, for they engaged a wide variety of audiences and implicitly addressed both America’s religious identity and its racial problems. Like jazz, religious music supported subcultures abroad, this time through church institutions. Choral singing was a way to involve large groups of people in music-making. Furthermore, religious music depicted the United States as a nation not only of business but also of respectable spiritual traditions, and it flew in the face of Soviet atheism.

Although jazz tours were the most visible, the tours of popular music best masked their function as propaganda. Chapter 6 evaluates tours that included American popular music, including rock ’n’ roll, folk, and blues. Popular music groups were easier to transport than large ensembles, and they attracted the young people the State Department was increasingly interested in reaching. Still, popular music also challenged the premises of the Cultural Presentations program. Rock and blues, for example, were valued in the United States for their subversive power, as well as their capacity to energize audiences. Although as a matter of policy U.S. officials discouraged dancing at U.S.-sponsored events lest the crowds become too unruly, they were happy to take advantage of the strong attraction rock held for young people abroad. Folk music was likewise associated with the antiwar movement in the United States. These various genres of popular music made very effective propaganda abroad, but as the 1960s wore on, musicians’ association with the U.S. government sometimes proved a liability for them at home.

Chapter 7 examines the exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union, which were the most famous cultural presentations—watched for their symbolic and political import as well as their musical significance. These tours were often described after the fact as having undermined Soviet society and thereby hastening the end of the Cold War. Such triumphalist views are scarcely borne out by the evidence the State Department collected. Still, the department negotiated avidly to keep its exchange programs in place even through geopolitical crises that reinforced the two nations’ antagonism. Indeed, highly visible cultural exchanges allowed Soviet citizens to meet Americans at a time when few Soviets could leave their country. These tours also familiarized the traveling Americans with the Soviet state’s restrictions on privacy, commerce, and expression in a way that made the Soviet situation seem familiar as well as strange. By keeping lines of communication open and publics in contact, U.S.-Soviet cultural exchanges laid the groundwork for the expansion of relations in the 1970s.

James Der Derian defines diplomacy as “a mediation between estranged individuals, groups or entities,” where “mediation” can mean either a connecting link or an intervention.63 To some extent this definition helps to unite the peaceable with the political definitions of musical diplomacy. But the word mediation also invokes the communications media, and these media play important roles in every chapter of this book. The final chapter examines the ways in which the practice of cultural diplomacy relates to all these ideas of mediation. To shore up alliances during the Cold War, nation-states strengthened cultural diplomacy, a mode of interaction in which it is important not only to make an impression, but to be seen making that impression, and have the activity amplified by the media for others to observe and interpret. The music’s appeal showcased a positive aspect of international affairs, and the growing availability of radio and television increased opportunities for citizens to feel involved in diplomacy. People’s feelings of involvement as musicians, audience members, and citizens altered their behavior, affecting how they watched their own governments and how they chose to imagine their own lives. Musical diplomacy allowed individuals to see themselves as participants within global musical or political scenes and to want their nations to be represented within a global order. This globalized perspective helped define what it meant to be a citizen in the Cold War era.

When we consider musical diplomacy from all these angles, the question of whether music succeeded in serving U.S. interests remains important. Yet I aim for a broader perspective: I seek to understand the effects of cultural diplomacy, whether intended or not, whether aligned with U.S. interests or not. The outcomes of cultural diplomacy were not limited to those envisioned by the State Department. Rather, they encompassed a variety of effects, both musical and political. Certainly, the Cultural Presentations program brought American music to people who had never heard it. The program also succeeded in cultivating new audiences and opening new markets for U.S. cultural products. Many in the Foreign Service believed that it also strengthened America’s reputation as a cultured nation. Yet perhaps the most significant results derived from music’s peculiarity as an art form. As the music critic Christopher Small has described it, music creates “relationships among the performers, between the performers and the listeners, among the listeners and anyone who may be present, and even between those who are present and those who are not. It is in those relationships . . . that the meaning of a musical performance lies.”64

Indeed, musical diplomacy fostered complex relationships between the United States, as a mythologized sender of music, and listeners who liked or disliked its music; between embassy staff and citizens in the countries where they worked; and between State Department staff in Washington and the people they hoped to reach through music. Recipients experienced a variety of feelings about the United States—trust and admiration, anxiety and inferiority. Both face-to-face relationships and those that existed only in the participants’ imaginations built affective bonds among people. The premise of this book is that these human connections constitute the essence of “soft power.”

A study of this size and scope cannot do justice to the countless stories of all the participants in U.S. musical diplomacy. In the end it must remain evocative rather than definitive, showing some of the effects of cultural diplomacy, leaving others untouched. I especially hope that others will take this reception history further into the field with detailed archival and oral history studies. There is no ideal way to grasp the totality of music’s diplomatic function, for each tour engaged musicians, audiences, impresarios, and diplomats in a different way. Music’s ability to cross borders depended on that engagement and a host of other factors particular to local opinions and the political environment of the moment: sometimes music made the necessary connection between people; sometimes it did not. Zelma George, who toured worldwide to sing and lecture about African American spirituals, exclaimed that “music is not an international language. . . . That’s the big lie. I wish it were true, believe me.”65 One could not rely on music alone to break down barriers of mutual distrust. Yet music’s capacity at once to serve and transcend political needs proved a powerful tool for America’s Cold War diplomacy.