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.
Review of Jennifer Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2019)