Sonic Worlds of Systemic Competition during the Cold War

Abstract

The articles within the present special issue highlight recent developments in scholarship on the cultural and intellectual history of post-Second World War Soviet history. Taken together, the texts portray a lively cultural field that formed around the activities of producing, transmitting, listening to or simply speaking and writing about music. The commentary picks up aspects that bind all the texts together. In particular, the author focuses on the intersections between musicology, Soviet history and Cold War studies. Music arguably played a central role in Soviet education and identity politics. In the long run, discussions among musicians, bureaucrats and listeners of music affected the discursive development of the canonical concept of kul’turnost’, and the more general debate about how to differentiate between “modern”, “traditional”, and “classical”, or between “high”, “middlebrow” and “low” culture. Thus the commentary does not only offer new perspectives on the history of the Cultural Cold War, but also on the various ways of producing cultural meaning within the late Soviet Union.