Pushing Boundaries

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Jakelski
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West ◽  
International Festival

This article examines how the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music facilitated mobility across socialist borders in the 1960s. The Warsaw Autumn was one of the most important zones of cross-border cultural contact during the Cold War, for its eclectic programming featured musical works and performers from both the Soviet and American zones of cultural, political, and economic influence. The article demonstrates that the festival enabled multiple connections to form across socialist borders. Some of these were top–down, international contacts among socialist state institutions, which resulted in carefully curated performances of cultural diplomacy that tended to reinforce prevailing notions of East–West opposition. Other connections involved informal, personal ties that facilitated the transnational circulation of musical modernism throughout the socialist bloc. The article proposes that the Warsaw Autumn’s advocacy of modernist music by unofficial Soviet composers exposed and encouraged the development of cultural affinities that challenged the socialist bloc’s presumptive hierarchies while also mitigating the Cold War’s broadly drawn divisions between East and West. The article further suggests that the significance of mobility at the Warsaw Autumn in the 1960s depended on the continued fixity of borders in other areas—between states, the Cold War’s geopolitical regions, and contrasting musical styles.

Ausentes presentes: Art Music from the Chilean Exile in the Anacrusa Festivals at the Goethe-Institute Santiago (1985–89)

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
DANIELA FUGELLIE
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Transfer Process ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractCreated in 1984, the Anacrusa Music Association organized concerts, workshops, and festivals of contemporary music in Chile during the last years of Pinochet's military dictatorship. Crucial for these events was the collaboration with the Goethe-Institute Santiago, which enabled a space for free expression within the repressive context of the dictatorship. This article explores the circulation and reception of musical works by Chilean composers living in exile performed in the 1985, 1987, and 1989 Anacrusa festivals. The trajectories of the pieces by three main figures of the politically engaged avant-garde of the 1960s – Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Sergio Ortega, and Fernando García – can be seen as a transfer process that involved the goals of West German cultural diplomacy in Chile, as well as the interaction between Anacrusa organizers, Latin American colleagues, and performers who returned from exile.

The Principled Brand Strategist

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
The State ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Strategic Response ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Old Left ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the Cold War experience of composer Aaron Copland. It argues that after suffering at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cronies in the early 1950s, Copland reoriented himself. He not only turned away from musical Americanism as a composer but also took advantage of opportunities to tour overseas for the State Department, both to remove the taint of leftism from his image and to politically neutralize the Americanist style. Yet Copland’s Cold War choices were not simply a strategic response to a radically altered political landscape. Both his work with government and his musical works from this period show his enduring commitment to a set of strong personal principles that shaped his compositions, his writings, and his cultural diplomacy work across his long career. Copland’s ability to stay true to what he believed in ensured he never succumbed to cynicism, as did many other members of the Old Left.

Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, The

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Jakelski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Festival

The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music (WarszawskaJesień) is one of Europe’s longest-running festivals of contemporary music. With two exceptions (1957 and 1982), the festival has taken place annually since 1956. During the Cold War, the festival was an important venue for transnational connections. In the early 2010s, it remains one of Poland’s liveliest cultural institutions. Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki are often credited as the Warsaw Autumn’s initiators, yet the idea for the festival came from the Polish Composers’ Union as a whole. The timing of their proposal reflected the expanded possibilities of the mid-1950s, when hard-line Stalinist policies were giving way to the limited political and cultural reforms of the Thaw. Many composers hungered for the restoration of foreign contacts that had been severed by Poland’s occupation during World War II and its subsequent absorption into the Soviet bloc. They hoped that an international festival of contemporary composition would counteract years of isolation and bring Polish musical life into the modern age. Crucial early support came from higher-ups in Poland’s communist party, who approved of the Warsaw Autumn festival based on its potential as an arena for Cold War competition. And the festival delivered: the first institution of its kind, it featured an eclectic line-up of compositions and performers from both the American and Soviet zones of influence.

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Jakelski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Institutional Organization ◽  
Arts Administrators ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the first and most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. The festival’s stylistically diverse programs ranged from Soviet-sponsored socialist realism to the modernism of the Western avant-garde. It also facilitated encounters between people (performers, composers, critics, arts administrators, government functionaries, and general audiences) from both sides of the Cold War. Drawing on Howard Becker’s model of the art world, and Stephen Greenblatt’s model of cultural mobility, the book contends that the performance of social interactions in particular institutional frameworks (such as music festivals) have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with “new” music (or “contemporary” music). Moreover, the book contests static notions of East-West division and challenges the metaphor of an impermeable “Iron Curtain.” Chapters 1-3 examine the Warsaw Autumn’s institutional organization, negotiation, and reception in socialist Poland during the post-Stalin Thaw. Chapters 4-6 consider the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the performance of cultural diplomacy, engendered international and transnational ties, sparked change within the Eastern Bloc, assisted the globalization of avant-garde ideas, and facilitated the cross-border circulation of people, objects, and ideas. The epilogue briefly considers how new music is being defined and disseminated in post-socialist Poland.

Producing and Displaying Grief

Grief ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
World Peace ◽  
Soviet People ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Wartime Experience ◽  
Soviet Experience

Under Khrushchev, Baltermants returned to his wartime archive and produced art photographs for exhibition of some of his best work that he had taken during the war for publications. This chapter describes the process by which he produced Grief. This photograph, named for an emotion of the living, became a defining image of the Soviet experience of war. Given the horrors the photograph depicts, Baltermants hoped that it might also be used to position the Soviet Union as the global advocate for world peace. To that end, Baltermants curated his solo exhibitions, first in Moscow and then in London, in which he explored the tension between the commonalities of human experience and the differences in the wartime experience of the Soviet people. The chapter shows how in the 1960s, Baltermants made Grief both a powerful photograph and a useful weapon in Soviet cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.

East–West cooperation in the automotive industry: Enterprises, mobility, production

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Fava ◽  
Luminita Gatejel
Keyword(s):  
Automotive Industry ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Transfer Of Technology ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Eastern And Western Europe ◽  
East West

The paper introduces the special issue ‘East–West cooperation in the automotive industry: Enterprises, mobility, production’ which includes four contributions on the development of socialist automotive industry and on the technological relations between Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War. The 1960s and 1970s intense relations between socialist governments and Western European automobile companies provide further evidence of the permeability of the Iron Curtain, the early entanglements between the two blocs and the lack of internal cohesion inside each of them. The papers stress the role of the enterprise, both socialist and capitalist, as a crucial agent in directing East–West flows of technology and knowledge. They invite to reconsider the classical vision of West–East transfer of technology and to go deeper in the study of the political uses of foreign technology and on the processes of reception, adaptation and transformation of Western technologies in Socialist Europe.

Liberal International Theory and Imagining the End of the Cold War

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Grieco
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

Liberal international theory foresaw neither the end of the east–west rivalry nor the fall of the Soviet Union. However, from the 1960s up through the 1980s, several liberal international theorists put forward insightful analyses of the evolution of the cold war, its changing importance in world affairs and the problems that increasingly confronted the Soviet Union. Well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, several liberal international writers sensed that the cold war was abating, that this abatement was important for world politics and that the Soviet Union was having serious problems in maintaining its status as a superpower with an Eastern European empire.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Nasser's Gamble

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This book draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as “my Vietnam.” The book argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen, the book demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the “Arab Cold War” set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, this book brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.

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