Musical Americanism, Cold War Consensus Culture, and the U.S.-USSR Composers' Exchange, 1958-60

Ansari, Emily Abrams

doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdu006

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Previous studies examining the development and prominence of contemporary music aesthetics, particularly of serialism in the United States after World War II, have focused on individual composers and ties between serial aesthetics and the cultural environment of the Cold War (Brody 1993, Shreffler 2005, Ansari 2014). These studies highlight the importance of understanding American serialism and American post-war musical modernism more generally as an "intentionally oppositional stance" to both Communism and a strong belief in cultural diversity to combat the perceived dangers of mass culture (Shreffler 2005, 238).…”

Section: Using Orchestral Programming Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutionalization of ‘Uptown': Contemporary Orchestral Music Practices in New York City 1960-1975

Abrams-Husso

2022

Trio

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The aim of this paper is to investigate how contemporary music composition aesthetics and performance practices in orchestral music came to be defined and institutionalized in New York City through the 1960s and 1970s. The geographic distinctions commonly referred to as Uptown and Downtown identify separate networks of American contemporary music that sprouted in New York City already in the 1950s, and developed across the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. I propose that the division of contemporary music practices and the ultimate institutionalization of Uptown is inextricably linked to changing orchestral practices in New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s. Using the digital program archives from the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, I analysed contemporary programming in orchestral and large ensemble concerts from 1960 to 1975. Using this data, one observes that contemporary music programming decreased in this period, that the performance of contemporary music became less stylistically diverse, and that “contemporary music”, as a genre, came to be increasingly defined as European and modernist. I therefore conclude that changing orchestral practice was a major contributing factor in the division and institutionalization of contemporary musical practices in New York City.

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Section: Using Orchestral Programming Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutionalization of ‘Uptown': Contemporary Orchestral Music Practices in New York City 1960-1975

Abrams-Husso

2022

Trio

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Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company andPorgy and Bess, 1955–56

Uy¹

2017

J Soc American Mus

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For three weeks in 1955 and 1956 the Everyman Opera Company staged Porgy and Bess in Leningrad and Moscow. In the previous two years, the Robert Breen and Blevins Davis production of Gershwin's opera had toured Europe and Latin America, funded by the U.S. State Department. Yet when Breen negotiated a performance tour to Russia, the American government denied funding, stating, among other reasons, that a production would be “politically premature.” Surprisingly, however, the opera was performed with the Soviet Ministry of Culture paying the tour costs in full. I argue that this tour, negotiated amid the growing civil rights movement, was a non-paradigmatic example of cultural exchange at the beginning of the Cold War: an artistic product funded at different times by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Through an examination of the tour's archival holdings, interviews with surviving cast members, and the critical reception in the historically black press, this essay contributes to ongoing questions of Cold War scholarship, including discussions on race, identity, and the unpredictable nature of cultural exchange.

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The ASCAP-BMI Feud, Status Panic, and the Struggle for Cold War Consensus

Brackett¹

2021

J Soc American Mus

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By the 1950s, ASCAP and its associated songwriters and composers seemed out of touch with contemporary musical tastes and industry trends. With the introduction of competition in the form of BMI in 1939, many members of ASCAP were experiencing a sense of status anxiety, an anxiety exacerbated by the many cultural, social, political, and economic changes that swept across postwar US society. Rather than adapt to the changing musical landscape of the 1950s, some members argued that ASCAP's fading cultural prestige and diminished influence within the music industry were the result of a conspiracy perpetrated by the broadcast networks and BMI. This article examines how, in an attempt to reassert the status and prestige they had enjoyed before the war, ASCAP and its supporters exploited contemporary Cold War anxieties as part of their ongoing feud with BMI. In congressional hearings from 1956 and 1958, individuals and organizations sympathetic to ASCAP portrayed BMI as part of a coordinated conspiracy that not only threatened free market practices through the establishment of an alleged “electronic curtain,” but also sought to foist an inferior product on audiences who were being manipulated by “hidden persuaders.” I suggest that the rhetoric that dominated both of these hearings reflects ideological debates that were being fought at the height of the Cold War, debates involving the culture of consensus and the image of the “American Way.”

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Musical Americanism, Cold War Consensus Culture, and the U.S.-USSR Composers' Exchange, 1958-60

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Institutionalization of ‘Uptown': Contemporary Orchestral Music Practices in New York City 1960-1975

Institutionalization of ‘Uptown': Contemporary Orchestral Music Practices in New York City 1960-1975

Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company andPorgy and Bess, 1955–56

The ASCAP-BMI Feud, Status Panic, and the Struggle for Cold War Consensus

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