Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy by Danielle Fosler-Lussier (review)

For many decades, most analyses of the U.S. government’s use of music as a tool of Cold War propaganda came from Washington insiders. Only after the Soviet Union fell did journalists and scholars begin to offer critical examinations of these campaigns, commencing, perhaps unsurprisingly, with studies of the CIA’s secret funding of prodemocracy cultural organizations.¹ Apparently less intriguing at first were the overtly government-funded international tours made by musicians, dancers, and theater troupes through the State Department’s Cultural Presentations Program. Historian Penny von Eschen was the first to demonstrate in a book-length study that the State Department’s Cold War promotion of musicians was just as fascinating and ethically complex as the CIA’s appropriation of music to win foreigners to the American cause.² Her 2004 study of the State Department’s jazz tours between the mid-1950s and the 1970s was followed by additional insightful analysis of jazz diplomacy in monographs by Ingrid Monson and Lisa Davenport.³

Yet jazz was not the only type of music employed by the U.S. government in the battle for hearts and minds. In fact, classical music was always the best-funded category, while folk, pop, and variety groups became increasingly important during the 1960s and 1970s. Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy offers the first book-length assessment of the entirety of the Cultural Presentations Program. It convincingly demonstrates that the jazz tours and the CIA’s secret cultural programs were not the only interesting or important music-related activities spearheaded by Washington. Fosler-Lussier’s carefully researched and theorized study provides both new information and new interpretations of all types of State Department–funded music tours. The result is a book that will have a significant impact on our understanding of the cultural Cold War and its ramifications.

Fosler-Lussier’s thoughtful analysis rejects grand narratives and enthusiastically embraces the messy complexities of these unusual cultural interactions. What she offers is neither a tale of propaganda devised and successfully delivered nor a triumphalist depiction of rebellious musicians undermining such strategies. Instead she understands the tours as a complicated back-and-forth interaction between the many individuals involved. Unlike previous studies, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy examines not only the agendas of State Department officials and funded musicians but also those of the State Department’s musician-advisers, local embassy officials, international politicians, tour promoters and organizers, and the international citizens who received these musicians. It is Fosler-Lussier’s contention that all of these people ultimately shaped the outcomes of the tours, creating a program that was both political and apolitical, both propaganda and entertainment, both imperialism and friendship building. Ultimately, Cold War music diplomacy was, she says, a kind of stage play in which “political and apolitical aspects of music coexisted in a productive tension” (13). Such tours were not merely or only imperialism, she shows. Those on the receiving end of this musical deployment interacted with and shaped the outcomes of the tours, suggesting for Fosler-Lussier a process of engagement more akin to globalization.

The book is organized by genre (excepting a final chapter on U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange), with classical music, jazz, choral music, and popular music each considered in turn. This structure allows the author to assess the goals of the program through different lenses, revealing through brief examples and longer case studies the way the tours were orchestrated and their effects. Each chapter displays a skillful synthesizing of a truly vast array of archival and ethnographic materials, including government documents, media repositories, personal papers, and interviews with both government officials and funded musicians. Fosler-Lussier’s claims are contextualized and extended using scholarship on soft power, globalization, imperialism, cultural mediation, and propaganda, which adds greatly to the sophistication of her analysis...