Review: Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

Abstract

Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy , by Danielle Fosler-Lussier. California Studies in 20th-Century Music. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. xiii, 329 pp. Do not be deceived by the brevity of Danielle Fosler-Lussier's new book, Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy , nor suspicious of its ambitiously broad title. No scope-narrowing subtitle is needed, for in its 225 pages this remarkable study does indeed “evaluate the nature and effects of U.S. musical diplomacy” as a whole as it was practiced during the Cold War (p. 2). This compact book is a deft, readable distillation of thousands of pages of government documents and other primary sources, hours of personal interviews, and a wide range of secondary literature. The author surveys core questions of musical diplomacy including agency and power, propaganda and communication, and the politics of culture, presenting a framework within which extant studies and future scholarship on musical diplomacy can be understood. Throughout, she elegantly voices the perspectives of sending agents (government planners), those sent (the musicians), the facilitators and implementers (field officers, foreign and US entrepreneurs), and audiences, in a narrative that moves between local detail and global context with a Google-maps-like fluency. Permeating this study is the author's conviction that the nature of musical diplomacy is irreducibly complex, a process that cannot be explained by a single heuristic (economics, anxiety, politics, consensus). She provides a corrective to those who would dismiss the US government's exercise of “soft power” as wasteful and ineffective on the one hand, or misguided, colonialist, or insensitive on the other. As it was practiced in the field, Cold War musical diplomacy consisted of a web of human …