Music and International History in the Twentieth Century

Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht is Chair of the Department of History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and Alfred Grosser Chair at Sciences Po in Paris. She is the series editor of “Explorations in Culture and International History” (Berghahn Books) and her book Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany (1999) won the Stuart Bernath Prize and the Myrna Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her most recent monograph, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850-1920 (2009, 2012 paperback) won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and is currently being translated into Chinese. In 2017, Gienow-Hecht won a grant from the German Research Association to pursue a research on a project titled “The Quest for Harmony: Classical Music, Emotion, and the Discourse on Human Rights in the United States since World War II”. 

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors



Introduction: Sonic History or Why Music Matters in International History

Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht



Part I: Music, International Relations and the Absence of the State



Chapter 1. The Wicked Barrisons

David Monod



Chapter 2. Modern Music and the Popular Front: The International Society for Contemporary Music and Its Political Context (1935)

Anne C. Shreffler



Part II: Music, International History, and the State



Chapter 3. Music and International Relations in Occupied Germany, 1945-1949

Toby Thacker



Chapter 4. Instruments of Diplomacy: Writing Music into the History of Cold War International Relations

Danielle Fosler-Lussier



Chapter 5. "To Reach... into the Hearts and Minds of Our Friends": America's Symphonic Tours and the Cold War

Jonathan Rosenberg



Chapter 6. Music Diplomacy in an Emergency: Eisenhower’s “Secret Weapon,” Iceland, 1954–1959

Emily Abrams Ansari



Chapter 7. Intimate Histories of the Musical Cold War: Fred Prieberg and Igor Blazhkov’s Unofficial Diplomacy

Peter J. Schmelz



Chapter 8. “Where I Cannot Roam, My Song Will Take Wing”: Polish Cultural Promotion in Belarus, 1988

Andrea F. Bohlman



Index