Between the 1950s and the 1970s, more than one thousand professional and amateur musicians from the United States traveled the world to perform under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of State. From the early days of the Cultural Presentations program, many of the musicians who were sent abroad played classical music—an American offshoot of a European tradition. State Department strategists noted that audiences for classical music in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were small; yet they continued to send this music because of its social prestige.
Using documents from government archives, Fosler-Lussier describes the symbolic and practical value that audiences around the world assigned to the various kinds of classical music they were offered. In cases where classical music did not initially succeed, she evaluates the ways in which State Department planners modified their strategies to make the music more palatable. Lastly, she examines the interplay among officials, musicians, and audiences as a revealing instance of soft power that relied not only on the intrinsic appeal of the music but also on the creation and strengthening of social norms.
Danielle Fosler-Lussier has taught at The Ohio State University School of Music since 2003. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.), the University of Hamburg (DAAD scholar), and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.), she spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts before coming to Ohio. Her research on music and cold war politics in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States has been supported by an AMS-50 dissertation fellowship as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Eisenhower Foundation. Fosler-Lussier is the author of a book entitled Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (University of California Press, 2007).
Her current project, supported in 2011-12 by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, describes U.S. government sponsorship for musical performances abroad during the cold war. Her recent publications on this topic are “Cultural Diplomacy as Cultural Globalization: The University of Michigan Jazz Band in Latin America,” Journal of the Society for American Music 4, no. 1 (February 2010): 59-93; and “American Cultural Diplomacy and the Mediation of Avant-garde Music,” Robert Adlington, ed., Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (Oxford University Press, 2009), 232-253.
Her teaching and research interests include music as a site of international contact and exchange; twentieth-century music, and the music of Joseph Haydn.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Performance/Politics Working Group of the Humanities Institute and the Musicology Lecture Series in the School of Music.
