Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy.

Vest, Lisa Cooper

Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy. By Danielle Fosler-Lussier. (California Studies in 20th-century Music, no. 18.) Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. [xiii, 329 p. ISBN 9780520284135 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780520959781 (ebook), $65.] Illustrations, bibliography, index, supplementary electronic database and appendices.

Danielle Fosler-Lussier's most recent book examines the Cold War-era efforts of the U.S. State Department to deploy music in its cultural diplomatic missions throughout the world. This summary might suggest that the intentions and goals of State institutions would constitute the foundational trajectory of the book's argument. It is, however, one of Fosler-Lussier's major achievements here that these institutions do not occupy center stage as monumental entities in their own right. Drawing on an impressive array of archival materials and personal interviews, she constantly shifts focus to the many individuals (politicians, diplomats, impresarios, performers, audience members, etc.) who were involved in planning, executing, and consuming American cultural diplomacy.

In this narrative, the personal is political and vice versa. While the State Department had its own ideological and political goals for sending musicians out as ambassadors of American culture, it was difficult to predict how those musicians and organizers would execute or interpret those goals. And it was even more difficult, perhaps, to anticipate the responses of audiences in host nations. Fosler-Lussier argues convincingly that the study of such contingencies reveals a great deal about the ever-shifting power dynamics between nations, and between states and their own citizens, during the Cold War. Further, in her close readings of personal testimony, official documentation, and media accounts, Fosler-Lussier demonstrates that the unplanned personal encounters, unexpected organizational hiccups, and messy negotiations that characterized these cultural diplomatic missions actively shaped geopolitics and international relationships. When she includes the memories of a young Oberlin student who exchanged copies of her Sing Out! Magazine for a collection of Russian and Romanian folk music (p. 197), or of folksinger Bill Crofut's unexpected performance at a Communist school in Burma (p. 158), these are not merely anecdotes, but evidence of meaningful exchanges that affected individuals and nations alike.

Questions of power are central to this book's narrative, and this power flows in many different directions. In the introduction, Fosler-Lussier includes a diagram from a 1953 State Department publication (p. 5). The diagram, drawn to resemble a canal, imagines a strictly unidirectional flow of information and influence from the United States into other nations. Throughout the rest of the book, though, Fosler-Lussier dismantles this strictly top-down image of power transference, whether between the United States and its citizens (as performers, facilitators, organizers) or the United States and its host nations. Regarding the first of these two relationships, the book presents nuanced accounts of American citizens who had widely divergent reasons for participating in the Cultural Presentations program, and who often were able to generate agency for themselves through the encounter. Challenging the notion that these Americans were participating unwittingly in acts of State propaganda, Fosler-Lussier defines cultural diplomacy as "an emergent practice that joined citizens' values closely with the state's power in a mutually reinforcing way" (p. 216). In this way, she also challenges reductive "bottom-up" narratives of power, which hold that participants in cultural diplomacy were often working actively to subvert State expectations and propaganda. Neither the top-down nor bottom-up models are sufficient; in their stead, Fosler-Lussier traces the intricate networks across which power was diffused in these cultural diplomatic missions. On both the domestic and foreign sides of the encounter, there were many points of contact and many different opportunities for cultural and political actors to advocate for their own interests.

One of the strengths of this book, which will recommend it to students and scholars beyond the subfield of Cold War studies in music, is the way that it captures the intensely dialogic nature of these cultural diplomatic exchanges. Fosler-Lussier makes a very strong argument that all of these different kinds of encounters--between superpowers, between superpowers and their own citizens, between superpowers and unaffiliated nations, and between private citizens--are always actively shaping their participants. It is a perspective that might fruitfully be placed in dialogue with Kiril Tomoffs Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945-1958 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), which similarly characterizes musical encounters of the Cold War superpowers as a productive clash of twentieth-century empires.

Drawing on theoretical literature from anthropology, sociology, political science, and media studies, Fosler-Lussier highlights the performative energy of these musical encounters, both during the musical tours themselves and in the mediated resonance that extended outwards from them. Particularly unexpected and revealing are her meditations on cultural diplomacy as a form of "gift economy" (p. 26), and also her invocation of Benedict Anderson's notion of the imaginative power of print capitalism to constitute nations (pp. 218-19). In this book, of course, Fosler-Lussier is speaking not of national identities, but of international, transnational networks. This is not a transnationalism or globalization of cultural mobilities, as Lisa Jakelski has discussed so convincingly in her study of the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music (Making New Music in Cold War Poland: the Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 [Oakland: University of California Press, 2016]). Rather, this is a transnationalism born of imagined connections, of virtual or mediated simultaneity of musical experience, and of exchange of information and knowledge. Out of these dialogic encounters are born both virtual international communities and exportable national brands. In Fosler-Lussier's narrative, music often serves a symbolic, metonymic function in such exchanges, representing nations, ideologies, traditions, and values at the same time that it provides a visceral, real-time sonic experience.

This book, together with its extensive additional online resources, opens a number of intriguing avenues for future work. Fosler-Lussier acknowledges the limitations and biases of the archival record, and even of the media reception that surrounded these cultural diplomatic missions. To a certain extent, these limitations necessarily shape the structure and scope of the book. For instance, the ambivalence of State organizers and advisors about the entertainment value of popular music (as opposed to the enculturing power of more elite forms of music making) means that the strongest chapters in the book relate to the performance and distribution of classical music. Intriguingly, Fosler-Lussier demonstrates that this strategic deployment of prestige extended also to the explicit framing of jazz within the vocabularies and historicized conventions of Western art music. However, the methodological and theoretical insights that I describe above are suggestive and proliferative, and could open further fruitful discussions about different kinds of interpersonal and institutional networks, especially in the media-rich environment of the later twentieth century.

With many academic music programs revising curricular approaches to the traditional music survey and actively working to introduce a greater diversity of voices, experiences, and approaches to their students, Fosler-Lussier's book provides material well suited for use in these new classrooms. Each chapter is an appropriate length for assignments in both graduate and undergraduate courses. I have used portions of this book in graduate courses (for musicologists and students in performance degree programs) and also in undergraduate non-music major general education courses. In both contexts, my students have responded warmly: they appreciate the clear and immediate writing and the narrative's blend of personal and political viewpoints. This book decenters the composer and the musical work in favor of performers, conductors, organizers, and audiences, and it therefore challenges readers to think actively about their own agency in relation to musical and political institutions. Students and scholars of music, of the Cold War, and of culture and politics will find that this book challenges them to think in new ways about their own research, and to consider the multi-dimensionality of the power that animates musical practice and consumption in the contemporary world.

Lisa Cooper Vest

University of Southern California