Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy

Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

Publication of this book was also supported by a grant from the H. Earle Johnson Fund of the Society for American Music.

Publication of this book was also supported by a grant from the Gustave Reese Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

MUSIC IN AMERICA’S COLD WAR DIPLOMACY

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

Richard Taruskin, General Editor

1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard

2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison

3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch

4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal

5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider

6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis

7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz

9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico

10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long

11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut

12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott

13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller

14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy

15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack

16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout

17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico

18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy

DANIELLE FOSLER-LUSSIER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fosler-Lussier, Danielle, 1969– author.

    Music in America’s Cold War diplomacy / Danielle Fosler-Lussier.

        pages cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; no. 18)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0-520-28413-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978–0-520-95978-1 (ebook)

    1. United States. Department of State. Cultural Presentations Program—History—20th century.    2. Music in intercultural communication—United States—History—20th century.    3. Arts and diplomacy—United States—History—20th century.    4. Music and globalization—United States—History—20th century.    5. United States—Cultural policy—History—20th century.    6. United States—Foreign relations—Communist countries—History—20th century.

    ML3917.U6F67    2015

    780.78’73—dc232014031326

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For the ambassadors

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Instruments of Diplomacy

1. Classical Music and the Mediation of Prestige

2. Classical Music as Development Aid

3. Jazz in the Cultural Presentations Program

4. African American Ambassadors Abroad and at Home

5. Presenting America’s Religious Heritage Abroad

6. The Double-Edged Diplomacy of Popular Music

7. Music, Media, and Cultural Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union

Conclusion: Music, Mediated Diplomacy, and Globalization in the Cold War Era

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

AT HTTP://MUSICDIPLOMACY.ORG:

Database of Cultural Presentations

Selected Sources

Appendices:

1.1. Cultural Presentations Budgets, 1961-1974

1.2. Programs of the Claremont Quartet, 1965 Latin American Tour

2.1. Recordings of William Strickland Conducting Japanese Orchestras

2.2. Recordings by Akeo Watanabe and the Japan Philharmonic Released on CRI

2.3. Strickland’s Scandinavian Recordings for CRI

2.4. American Works Recorded by the Polish National Radio Orchestra with Polish Conductors and Orchestras

2.5. Recordings by the Polish National Radio Orchestra, Strickland Conducting

Illustrations

1. The flow of information into Country X

2. Information flow as seen from the diplomatic field

3. Alwin Nikolais Dance Theatre performing Tensile Involvement

4. Strickland conducts excerpts from Verdi’s Requiem in Manila, 1958

5. The audience at the open-air premiere concert of the Saigon Symphony Orchestra, 1959

6. Visitors at the Bergama Kermes art festival wait to enter the Jazz U.S.A. exhibit in Ankara, Turkey, 1964

7. Wilbur De Paris and his New Orleans Jazz Band play at the Lido in Accra, Ghana, 1958

8. Dizzy Gillespie poses as a snake charmer, Dacca, Pakistan, 1957

9. Edward R. Murrow and Louis Armstrong in See It Now , 1955

10. Filming Louis Armstrong’s concert in Accra, Gold Coast (later Ghana), 1956

11. Marian Anderson and her accompanist, Franz Rupp, greeted by South Korean president Syngman Rhee, 1957

12. The Golden Gate Quartet at the Chin Woo Stadium in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, 1959

13. William Warfield sings at the Regal Cinema in Lahore, Pakistan, 1958

14. Steve Addiss and Bill Crofut perform in Vietnam, 1964

15. Sol Hurok

16. The Moiseyev Ensemble in New York, 1958

17. Sheila Allen and the Oberlin College Choir with Soviet students, 1964

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the musicians and diplomats who generously offered their time and knowledge to make this project come to life. Among them, Richard Crawford stands out, not only for the vividness of his recollections but also for the probing questions he asked me during our interview and his subsequent support of this project. Susie Crofut, Joe Mallare, Lanny Austin, Rudy Grasha, Kyle Lehning, Barry Campbell, Walter Denny, and Bruce Fisher graciously allowed me access to their personal collections of photographs, audio recordings, and other documents about their tours.

As ever, I appreciate Richard Taruskin’s keen editorial eye and unflagging enthusiasm. I am indebted to Peter Schmelz, Emily Abrams Ansari, and Tim Scholl for years of good conversation about cultural diplomacy, for sharing relevant sources, and for suggestions on portions of this work. Nicholas Cull, Beth E. Levy, Nathaniel G. Lew, Maribeth Clark, Leslie Sprout, Eric Fosler-Lussier, and an anonymous reader provided valuable comments on the manuscript. Ryan Thomas Skinner, Steve Swayne, and Dorothy Noyes offered supportive feedback, as did the members of my graduate seminar, Dana Plank-Blasko, Matthew Campbell, Cole Harrison, and Heike Hoffer. Laura Belmonte shared a key source at the right moment. Lisa Jakelski and Cindy Bylander helped me interpret Polish materials. Hye-jung Park translated Japanese and Korean sources, and Emily Erken located and translated Russian-language documents. I am grateful to Jennifer Siegel for Russian language consultation and to Julian Halliday for typesetting Figure 2.

Many helpful archivists made my research a pleasure. Particular thanks go to David Langbart at the National Archives; Ricky Riccardi and Lesley Zlabinger at the Louis Armstrong House Museum; John Pollack at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania; Nancy Wicklund and Amy Kimura at Westminster Choir College of Rider University; Dan Morgenstern, Elizabeth Surles, and Tad Hershorn at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University; Ken Grossi at the Oberlin College Archives; Susan Stafura of the Duquesne University Tamburitzans; and Wendy Chmielewski at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. At various times I have benefited from research assistance from Deborah Ruhl, Jeannette Getzin, Angela Black, Lauren Owens Galle, Paul Covey, Robert Lintott, N. Michael Goecke, Jennifer Stevens, Matthew Campbell, Chelsea Hodge, Austin McCabe-Juhnke, and James Naumann. Eric Fosler-Lussier coauthored the website accompanying this book.

For financial support I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences. Publication subventions were generously provided by the Gustave Reese Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and by the Society for American Music’s H. Earle Johnson Publication Subvention fund.

Some of the material presented in this book has appeared previously as follows: portions of the introduction and chapter 1 appear as Instruments of Diplomacy: Writing Music into the History of Cold War International Relations, in Music and International History, edited by Jessica Gienow-Hecht (Oxford: Berghahn, forthcoming). Parts of chapters 1 and 6 draw on American Cultural Diplomacy and the Mediation of Avant-Garde Music, in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, edited by Robert Adlington (Oxford University Press, 2009), 232–53; this material is used by permission of Oxford University Press, USA. Portions of the introduction and chapter 8 appeared in Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism, contribution to the special forum Musical Diplomacy: Strategies, Agendas, Relationships, Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (2012): 53–64. Portions of chapters 3 and 8 also draw on Cultural Diplomacy as Cultural Globalization: The University of Michigan Jazz Band in Latin America, Journal of the Society for American Music 4, no. 1 (2010): 59–93.

It has been a pleasure to work with Mary Francis, Bradley Depew, and Rachel Berchten at the University of California Press, and the keen editorial eye of Joe Abbott is greatly appreciated.

Most of all, I am grateful for Eric Fosler-Lussier’s belief in the value of this project. His wholehearted support, along with that of Isaac and Elliott Fosler-Lussier and Joanne and Roger Lussier, has made this book possible.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Instruments of Diplomacy

Sitting in the American embassy in Phnom Penh, Edmund Kellogg was overwhelmed and frustrated. As the interim chargé d’affaires for the embassy, he was responsible for reporting on the success of U.S. government–sponsored concerts in Cambodia. Unfortunately, there was little success to report. The embassy had had to cancel two of the three musical groups that were supposed to appear in Cambodia in the 1958–59 season, and recent American musical performances there had been unsuccessful. Half the audience for the harmonica player John Sebastian left the hall within the first few minutes of the concert, although the rest applauded enthusiastically. The same was true for the Westminster Choir. The piano provided for Marian Anderson’s performance was terribly out of tune, and although the audience appreciated the force of her personality, they disliked her operatic repertoire. When the Benny Goodman jazz band visited, the Cambodian sponsor made no arrangements for a piano or a sound system, leaving the band without essential equipment. A local newspaper called Goodman’s music the gobbling of turkeys. Kellogg had cancelled the scheduled performances of the Golden Gate Quartet, a singing group specializing in popular songs and gospel numbers, because when he played a recording of the quartet for the Cambodian minister of public instruction, the minister asked, Do you have anybody who can sing in Cambodian? Of course, if the education minister wasn’t willing to listen, the public would have been even less receptive. As Kellogg described the scene, Cambodians routinely received musicians from the United States, the Soviet bloc, and elsewhere, but they didn’t like most of what they heard. Kellogg viewed Cambodia as strategically important, and he hoped the State Department would keep trying to reach people there—but he desperately wanted the department to recognize the difficulty of pleasing Cambodian audiences with American music.¹

Kellogg and hundreds of people like him worked in America’s diplomatic posts—its embassies and consulates around the world. Among their many other obligations, they were asked by the State Department to oversee and report on its Cultural Presentations program, which sent American performing artists and athletes all over the world to improve the image of the United States. Music was an important strategic resource for this kind of programming, yet diplomats struggled to use it effectively. In this book I aim to evaluate the nature and effects of U.S. musical diplomacy. Since the Cultural Presentations program administered most of the United States’ musical diplomacy efforts during the Cold War, its sponsored activities constitute most of the projects described in these pages.

The Cultural Presentations program was formally begun as the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs in 1954, though it had roots in the U.S.-Latin American exchange programs of the World War II era.² It is more difficult to define an end point for the program’s activities. Musical diplomacy continues today in a limited way. U.S. embassies may sponsor concerts, and the State Department and Defense Department underwrite several tours each year.³ Nonetheless, the heyday of U.S. musical diplomacy came to an end in the early 1970s, when shrinking budgets forced the program to narrow its focus to the Soviet bloc countries and reduced the number of artists who could be sponsored each year.⁴ The reorganizations of the program after the early 1970s, as well as the recent resurgence of interest in musical diplomacy, must wait for a later study.⁵

As Kellogg’s detailed report suggests, the Cultural Presentations program relied heavily on embassy staff. Although performers were selected and tours planned in Washington by State Department personnel, only people in each destination country knew the local circumstances that could make or break performances—which theaters provided enough space for an orchestra, which cities had no pianos, which music audiences would prefer, and so forth. Usually a post’s public affairs officer (PAO) or cultural affairs officer (CAO) took the lead in making arrangements.⁶ Once the post learned that a particular musical attraction would visit, the officer looked for a local sponsor, booked a venue, and helped the sponsor advertise the event. When the musicians arrived, U.S. officials were on hand to resolve the inevitable difficulties with language, lodging, and transportation. Posts also hosted receptions where the musicians met local dignitaries and fellow artists. After the visit the officer sent a report to the State Department, detailing the outcomes of the performances and enclosing photographs and press clippings.

The reports that Kellogg and his colleagues sent back to the State Department constitute the most complete collection of historical sources describing America’s musical diplomacy in the 1950s and 1960s. This study relies on them for many details. Of course, these reports are shaped by a number of biases. Each officer’s beliefs about the people in the area served by the post colored his opinion of what music should be sent, as did the officer’s personal taste and his desire to connect with American music while far from home. The budget of the Cultural Presentations program was contingent on evidence of progress, so embassies were encouraged to send back glowing reports that could be cited in the published annual summaries. Congressman John Rooney likened these summaries to a theatrical performer coming along with his clippings. He doesn’t bring any bad ones.⁷ Still, the archives contain numerous accounts of failures or partial successes, which suggests that honest assessment was valued. Apart from critics’ reviews published in the foreign press, the posts’ reports are the only eyewitness accounts preserved and accessible in quantity. (Newspaper reviews are also useful, even though the historian must scrutinize them carefully. Many of them were based on press releases composed by U.S. diplomatic staff and translated into local languages. Reviews that do not rely on the press releases likely reflect local opinion more accurately.)⁸ Only a fraction of the posts’ material exists today, for the State Department kept far better records about political, economic, and military diplomacy than it did about its music programs.⁹ In sum, extant reports contain views that may be distorted by American aims and values, but the incidents they describe nonetheless have much to teach us about responses to American cultural diplomacy.

UNDERSTANDING MUSICAL DIPLOMACY: POINTS OF VIEW

The view from the field is particularly useful because what Foreign Service officers believed they were accomplishing could differ dramatically from what the program’s planners in Washington had in mind. The government officials who planned cultural presentations sometimes imagined them as a one-way instrument by which the United States could exert influence on other countries. Congress had appropriated money for artistic display overseas because the United States had an image problem. In the words of Congressman Frank Thompson Jr. the young superpower had to prove that we are by no means a Nation of mere ‘cultural barbarians.’¹⁰ The specific message differed from place to place. In Europe the United States aimed to demonstrate that Americans not only excelled in engineering and industry but also appreciated the artistic achievements and time-honored traditions that Europeans valued. In much of the developing world, U.S. officials pointed out their country’s embrace of spiritual values along with economic progress. Official State Department brochures described U.S. cultural and information programs as promoting international understanding and mutual respect among peoples, which might suggest an equality of exchange between partner countries.¹¹ Nonetheless, the short-term aim of combating Soviet propaganda about the United States meant that broadcasting the American message to other peoples usually seemed more urgent than developing truly mutual cultural exchange. With the exception of the Soviet-American exchanges that were regulated by treaty, the United States sent out more musicians than it received as guests.

Officials in Washington believed that cultural and information programs afforded the United States power over other nations. To illustrate the nature of these programs, a 1953 pamphlet published by the State Department’s International Information Administration (IIA) depicted cultural presentations and other propaganda as water flowing directly into a vessel labeled Country X (figure 1). U.S. government propagandists were engaged in a crusade of ideas to improve America’s image among citizens of other countries. According to this picture, educational and cultural exchanges would pour American ideas and values into the minds of the foreign public, making them more receptive to U.S. policy objectives.¹² This image of cultural flow strongly suggests that the United States could control the content and effects of its propaganda. When people write today about America’s soft power, this one-way flow of consumer goods and political ideas is usually what they have in mind.

From his vantage point in Cambodia, Edmund Kellogg would have drawn the cultural presentations process differently, perhaps something like my hypothetical figure 2. Kellogg’s diagram might consist of a complex, distributed network of connections with the embassy at the center. For the Foreign Service officer on the ground, cultural presentations were mired in practical concerns, such as making sure someone at the National Theater numbered the backs of the chairs in chalk so that tickets for particular seats could be honored, or asking that the king invite Cambodians as well as Americans to the command performance at the palace.¹³ Organizing people to do these jobs placed the officer into a web of social relationships—not pouring information into a bucket but collaborating and communicating in many directions at once. Special programming for schoolchildren and university students brought teachers, university administrators, children, and young adults into contact with both the American performers and the organizing officials. Likewise, embassies tried to have the visiting American musicians meet and perform with musicians from the host country, arranging jam sessions, master classes, joint rehearsals, or performances whenever possible. All these activities required the participation of citizens in the host country, and they linked the embassy into local social networks. As the Cambodian case implies, if a potential audience was not receptive, there was little the embassy could do to reach them.

Figure 1. The flow of information into Country X. IIA: International Information Administration Program , Department of State Publication 4939 (1953), 8.

Figure 2. Information flow as seen from the diplomatic field.

This is a key paradox of cultural diplomacy: if we look at the State Department’s music program from the top down, we see the imperial desire to impress American values on others. The top-down view displays confidence that ideas could be conveyed to and adopted by others through artistic experiences. From this perspective music programs differ little from other forms of propaganda that tried to shape opinions by offering information. If we look from the bottom up, though, we see an intensive process of negotiation and engagement. Both views offer us true pictures of the situation, but neither picture is complete. In Matthew Fraser’s account of soft power, he distinguishes imperialism (a deliberate project of a center extending influence and control over a periphery) from globalization (an infinitely subtler and more complex interplay among many interconnecting cultures and economies).¹⁴ U.S. musical diplomacy encompassed both elements, and taking both into account offers us the best way to understand the project of extending power abroad by means of the arts. Most of the policy theorists who have written about cultural diplomacy explain it as a top-down process, envisioning art as having direct and unilateral effects.¹⁵ From other perspectives, however, the process can look very different.

This difference is not merely a contrast of global and local perspectives, for there were many roles to play in the process of musical diplomacy. The diagram would again look different if it were drawn by N.M. Khan, the chief commissioner and president of the Pakistan Arts Council. Khan was chosen by the embassy to serve as local sponsor for several U.S. musical presentations in the 1950s. To Khan the American concerts provided unparalleled personal and professional opportunities. Having heard that the U.S. government had presented an ice-skating show in India, he sought equal treatment for Pakistan.¹⁶ From July to September of 1957 Khan demanded repeatedly that the State Department provide an ice show or a good jazz orchestra for the International Festival of Culture to be held in Karachi in November of that year. Though Khan thanked the State Department for sending Marian Anderson to the Pakistani festival, he knew that her classical music would not engage crowds as popular entertainment would. The chargé d’affaires of the U.S. embassy in Karachi, Arthur Z. Gardiner, wrote that Khan was looking to the U.S. for a spectacular presentation that will draw and entertain thousands of Pakistanis. Gardiner agreed with Khan’s assessment: Any performance where the appeal is visual would be preferable to a musical one in a country where only a small proportion of the population has been exposed to western music enough to begin to appreciate it.¹⁷

The relationship between Khan and the embassy was complicated by the State Department’s preference that its embassy personnel not serve as impresarios in the host countries. Embassies were asked instead to find local commercial or nonprofit sponsors to help with logistics and advertising. Commercial sponsors usually took a portion of the net profit from concerts, the rest returning to the embassy to defray the costs of the tours. They shared the risk of failure with the State Department in hopes of financial reward. But even nonprofit sponsors benefited from their association with the Cultural Presentations program: they won a closer relationship with embassy officials, publicity for their organizations, and sometimes a cut of the proceeds for local charities. In many parts of the world, finding impresarios who could handle both logistics and publicity in accordance with American expectations was exceedingly difficult. Many embassies therefore relied on a few capable sponsors.¹⁸ N.M. Khan was one of these. Acting on behalf of the Pakistan Arts Council, he sponsored the successful October 1957 visit of the Minneapolis Symphony to Karachi. During one intermission Khan personally introduced the conductor, Antal Dorati, to the president of Pakistan. This gesture may have raised Khan’s prestige both with the president (for having brought the American orchestra) and with the embassy (for having arranged such a meeting). Citing Khan’s success in filling concert halls, Gardiner pressed the State Department more than once to send the music Khan wanted. The next year Khan presented five successful performances of the Jack Teagarden Sextet in Karachi—he eventually got his jazz band.¹⁹

From Khan’s point of view the flow of artists and ideas from the United States was not an imposition but a resource. He acted not as a recipient but as a collaborator who shaped the content of the Cultural Presentations program through his requests and his organizing efforts. For Khan the diagram would show not a nice straight pipe into Country X, as in figure 1, but a complicated series of channels, diverting American power for national and regional purposes that were not America’s own, and providing feedback that modified what America sent through the pipe.²⁰

Many people in the host countries were alert to the slippery slope between enjoying American music and ceding power to the United States. Audiences and critics often interpreted this power relationship in terms of the host country’s colonial history, as well as its current relations with the United States. In a trenchant commentary, Filipino journalist Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil wrote in the Manila Chronicle, One can only be glad that the American State Department is continuing to try an entirely different way of winning friends and influencing people and has been steadily sending us America’s best artists. Nothing has been quite so successful since the capture of Aguinaldo—that is, since 1901, when U.S. military forces captured the Filipino president, inaugurating a decades-long colonial occupation of the Philippines. With pointed irony Guerrero-Nakpil declared, What an immense pleasure it has been to be held captive by the Symphony of the Air, contrasting the orchestra’s friendly visit with the violence of the Philippine occupation. Naming the American high commissioner who argued against Philippine independence, Guerrero-Nakpil continued: not even Paul Vories McNutt was so charming as the San Francisco Ballet. If this is cultural imperialism, let’s make the most of it. The reviewer’s sardonic appreciation of the new phase of Philippine-U.S. relations swept nothing under the rug: she both valued the music bestowed on the Filipino audience and observed that this music might distract the public from the horrors of the past. Meanwhile, another critic in the same newspaper prized the gift of American music without apparent irony. The anti-American critic Indalecio P. Soliongco noted that though the United States could have sent its lesser musicians to the Philippines, it has done no such thing. It has given us a taste of the best of America’s flowering musical culture, for which we should be thankful.²¹ Perhaps love of music here trumped skepticism about America’s intentions.

In this Philippine instance, as in the numerous examples Kellogg offered, we see some of the risks of musical diplomacy. The possibility that the music might fail to please was only one of the State Department’s worries. If no one attended a U.S.-sponsored program, the embassy would suffer a public embarrassment. Embassies routinely provided tickets at no cost, urged businesses to buy tickets for their employees, and even sent buses to collect people for concerts. If citizens of the host nations believed the concerts were anything less than the best music the United States had to offer, they might take offense. If audiences believed that they were the targets of sugar-coated propaganda about the American way of life, as did one Nairobi critic, the concerts lost their appeal.²² Although most musicians understood the importance of making a good impression, sometimes they did offend their hosts. In his introductory remarks before a concert in Cairo, John Finley Williamson, director of the Westminster Singers, exclaimed, As I look at you girls here, with your eager intelligent faces looking at me, I can hardly realize that I am in Africa—why, you could almost be European! Williamson appears not to have understood that he hurt feelings with this remark and others like it. The American embassy in Monrovia reported that as much as Williamson might know about music, "the Doctor does not appear to be sufficiently well grounded in other matters for an effective African tour."²³ Some performers became irritable under the strain of constant performances and social obligations, behaved crassly as privileged tourists, or wandered naively into situations they were not equipped to understand.²⁴

Yet despite these errors, the musical offerings of the Cultural Presentations program won considerable acclaim. The State Department’s own reporting system was biased in favor of positive news, but even taking that bias into account, there is plenty of evidence that the American musicians’ visits were both appreciated and useful. Among documents now available, Soliongco’s grateful appraisal is a far more typical response to American concerts than Guerrero-Nakpil’s sardonic one. Even if audiences remained aware of the political power behind the concerts—and whether or not they liked the music they heard—many did appreciate the gift of American music.

THE CULTURAL PRESENTATIONS PROGRAM: AIMS AND OPERATION

State Department officials recognized at the program’s inception that they were ill-equipped to choose the music to send abroad. They needed a means to ensure both fairness and artistic quality. To administer the artistic details of its programs, the State Department engaged the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), a private organization promoting theatrical performances. In turn, ANTA established advisory panels of experts in music and the other arts to provide artistic evaluations of candidates for tours. Performers and their agents plied ANTA with requests for tours. ANTA’s panelists met monthly to evaluate not only performers who might be sponsored by the State Department but also musicians touring privately so that they might inform diplomatic posts about the quality and potential of the performers. ANTA regularly sent updated lists of performers approved by the panels to the State Department.²⁵ The advisory panels’ recommendations were then reviewed by an interagency committee representing the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and the Commission on Fine Arts.²⁶ In addition, the State Department solicited advice from a separate Advisory Committee on the Arts (ACA), consisting of up to ten members highly placed in a variety of artistic fields and background-checked by the FBI.²⁷ The ACA advised the State Department on its overall arts program, whereas the advisory panels evaluated specific performers. The interagency committee identified the populations most urgently to be cultivated and considered how to approach them.

In addition, as we have already seen, embassy personnel in U.S. diplomatic posts worldwide informed the State Department about what music they believed would meet programming needs in the countries where they were serving.²⁸ On the basis of all this advice, State Department personnel in Washington decided what music to send where within a tight budget.²⁹ Some individual composers, lecturers, and conductors also traveled under the State Department’s separate American Specialists program, and Fulbright awards provided a further means of moving American music beyond U.S. borders.³⁰

The evaluation of the program likewise involved many stakeholders. Congress appropriated the money for cultural presentations as an emergency measure in 1954, followed by a permanent appropriation in 1956. The State Department was required to produce annual reports for Congress, and its personnel and those of the USIA were routinely invited to testify before congressional budget panels to explain the program’s value and effectiveness. American and foreign publics followed the tours in the press, on the radio, and sometimes in the new medium of television. They, too, communicated their wishes and complaints to the State Department directly or through its diplomatic posts abroad. From the founding of the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations in 1939, its programs were designed not to fund the arts outright but to coordinate the activities of private individuals and institutions.³¹ Thus, thousands of people, all of them with agendas, shaped the content of the tours. The State Department’s decisions were never unilateral but reflected a dynamic array of artistic and political interests.

Cultural diplomacy was always an uncomfortable mix of information propaganda (intending to shape the thoughts and opinions of the world’s citizens, as seen in figure 1) and a gentler, high-minded vision of mutuality and respect, regarded as separate from politics. It was easiest to justify cultural presentations to the budget hawks in Congress by explaining that these presentations changed foreign publics’ opinions about the United States, enabling other kinds of information to penetrate in areas that had previously resisted U.S. messages. President John F. Kennedy articulated the high stakes of this enterprise in a 1961 speech:

It is clearer than ever that we face a relentless struggle in every corner of the globe that goes far beyond the clash of armies or even nuclear armaments. We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle. We dare not fail to grasp the new concept, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we will need to combat it. And we dare not fail to realize that this struggle is taking place every day without fanfare in thousands of villages and markets day and night and in classrooms all over the globe.³²

Accordingly, music and other attractions were among the assets that should be deployed to bring the world around to America’s point of view.

Yet many American officials were reluctant to let culture be so openly used in this way. As early as 1939 Ben Cherrington, the first leader of the State Department’s new Division of Cultural Relations, explained that cultural exchanges would not build strong ties unless they reflected mutual relationships, sharing some interest or activity which has rich meaning for each of us.³³ Charles Frankel, who served two years as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, believed that the problems cultural diplomacy could address were similar to other problems in international affairs but were not a matter of exerting power over others. Rather, cultural diplomacy could rectify imbalances of intellectual power, remove obstacles to communication, control cultural aggression, and create institutions and enterprises in which there is an international stake, so that the edge is taken off international hostilities and the reasons for keeping peace are multiplied.³⁴ In this way the practice of cultural diplomacy was meant to improve relations by placating the participants. This kind of relationship would only be weakened by the obnoxious intrusion of information propaganda. Music had special power to open doors, but paradoxically, the only way to maintain that power was to resist using music for political purposes. These two philosophies—music as information propaganda and music as nonpolitical human contact—remained in conflict throughout the existence of the Cultural Presentations program.

The combination of music’s broad appeal and its seeming political neutrality made music a very special form of government propaganda. In the early years the State Department was inclined to keep its sponsorship of musical events low-key for fear of making people abroad feel that they were being targeted by an information campaign.³⁵ As Acting Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr. put it in 1956, In modern, sensitive Asia, the best propaganda is the best-hidden propaganda.³⁶ Posters advertising the concerts often omitted the State Department’s name, and the sponsorship was rarely trumpeted in the press. Sometimes, however, it was necessary to tout government sponsorship to demonstrate that the United States was interested not only in armaments but also in art. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra visited the USSR, much was made of its official sponsorship and mission—yet the greatness of art music was nevertheless held to rise above politics. Walter Walmsley, chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow, identified the peculiarity of using music as diplomacy: it would be fatuous to suggest that great music interpreted by magnificent musicians has any role in the solution of the problems which separate the United States and USSR.³⁷ Yet when the same orchestra went to Czechoslovakia, the U.S. ambassador reported that ovations, without ever getting out of bounds, tended [to] assume proportions of manifestations in expression of things more than musical. The ambassador cited audiences’ praise for the music’s excellence, their delight at feeling themselves again in the main stream of European civilization, and their astonishment that such an event was permitted. Crowds gathered wherever the musicians went, hoping for a memento or some kind of contact with the musicians.³⁸ Over time, officials in Washington recognized this attractive power. Rather than dissociating the State Department from the American musicians’ tours, they put the State Department’s name on the posters and issued press releases explaining that the U.S. government valued music.³⁹

The Cultural Presentations program also reflected a tension between the short-term aim of competing with Soviet propaganda and the long-term vision of cultural understanding. A 1962 report explained that the rivalry with the USSR had driven the program in its early years but that competitive displays of cultural accomplishment tend to be wasteful and inappropriate.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the many stakeholders in the program were far from unanimous about this policy shift. Embassy and consular staff continued to report the activities of Soviet and Chinese performers within the areas they served, as if to facilitate the planning of artistic countermeasures. Cultural diplomacy, the province of the State Department, was supposed to be separate from propaganda, which fell to the USIA. The State Department handled diplomacy and the movement of people: it funded and planned the Cultural Presentations program, the Specialists program, and other exchanges. The USIA managed the movement of cultural objects such as books, films, musical scores, and audio recordings. In the field, though, both cultural diplomacy and propaganda were enacted and supervised by the same people, the USIA’s public affairs officers and cultural affairs officers who worked in U.S. diplomatic posts.⁴¹

Some commentators have adopted wholesale the peaceable explanation of cultural diplomacy. In 2003 Milton Cummings explained cultural diplomacy as the exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding.⁴² Yet, as Ambassador Laurence Pope has reminded us, cultural diplomacy was not about the search for international understanding, nor was it about putting oneself into the shoes of another. Rather, it was about the exercise of state power.⁴³ Still, one may allow that political and apolitical aspects of music coexisted in a productive tension throughout all these activities. Music’s special power is that it brings into play many kinds of human behavior, most of which are thought to be separate from politics or governance. Musical performance tends to be warmly rewarding for participants as they marvel at unusual talent, gather in public places for festive occasions, or welcome guests from afar. Musical diplomacy calls on these conventions not to conceal the political sponsorship of the enterprise but to engage people, building relationships that encompass both political and artistic experiences. Distinguishing which is the primary objective and which the by-product is entirely a matter of perspective.

AMATEUR DIPLOMATS

Diplomacy has typically been regarded as a matter of state-to-state negotiations, although it is now widely understood that persons not given the authority of formal ambassadorship frequently play important roles in shaping international relations.⁴⁴ The musicians who toured for the State Department were not trained diplomats. Some received in-person briefing or printed information from the State Department before their tours. Most were also told about local conditions by embassy personnel when they arrived at each destination. Yet except perhaps for a few high-profile musicians, the briefings were not extensive, and in many cases the cultural ambassadors received no significant training before they went abroad. Many musicians report that the State Department did not restrict their behavior. As one performer put it, "We