“Cold War Tones”: Michael J. Kramer on Ansari’s *The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War* and Gentry’s *What Will I Be: American Music and Cold War Identity*

These psalms are a simple and modest affair / Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square / Certain to sicken a stout John Cager / With its tonics and triads in B-flat major. / But there it stands—the result of my pondering / Two long months of avant-garde wandering— / My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet. / And he stands on his own two tonal feet.

— Leonard Bernstein, on his composition, Chichester Psalms (1965)

In 1963, Leonard Bernstein wondered if it was appropriate anymore to create traditional classical music. “Is this world of NATO and Birmingham and the Faith-7,” he asked, mentioning symbols of the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race, “a world in which a composer is forbidden to write a melody?” He wanted to know if Americans were “still living in a world where an octave leap upward implies a sense of yearning, or reaching? Or is it become only an intervallic symbol?” Bernstein worried that the political and social situation had completely severed musical signification from emotional resonance. Were sounds now just sounds, nothing more? Or could they still summon feelings? In the Atomic Age, he feared, it was no longer so clear. An alienating, cold, rationalized technic had replaced soulful expressions of “human expressivity” (Ansari, 176).

As Emily Abrams Ansari and Phillip M. Gentry reveal, music might have felt pulverized by history during the Cold War, but it still mattered. Neither its emotional, nor its social meaning had been drowned out entirely by nuclear bomb testing or the sounds of firehouses turned on protesters or the roar of space rockets. Instead, music came to figure dramatically in issues of both collective cultural nationalism and individual self-identity. Whether one looks at Bernstein’s tonal crisis or John Cage’s infamous four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, whether one recovers the State Department-sponsored Americanisms of William Schuman, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, or Aaron Copland, as Ansari does, or the manifestations of a new kind of identity politics in early doo-wop, the whiteness of Doris Day, the presence of Asian peoples in musical theater, and Cage’s daring composition, as Gentry does, one discovers high stakes for musical expression: “intervallic sounds” and other modes of making music came to represent far more than the mere difference between notes.

Both Ansari and Gentry want to know more about music’s ideological twists and turns in the United States after World War II. Ansari is curious to better understand how art music composers adjusted their respective expressions of “musical Americanism” within the changing Cold War milieu. She discovers they often compromised their sense of liberal or socialist ideologies to the point of abandoning any strong resistance to the power of consensus anticommunism that dominated the larger society at the time, yet they were also able occasionally to incorporate alternatives and even sometimes resistance into their cultural politics. Gentry is less concerned with music’s relationship to state power than its connections to the rise of identity politics in Cold War America. Like Ansari, he sees plenty of accommodation as well, but more moments of rebellion, dissent, and opposition.

For Ansari, modes of composing music were themselves highly political by the Cold War decades. Whether a composer chose to write music with traditional, familiar harmonic relations or, by contrast, adopt the more dissonant, experimental twelve-tone technique invented by Arnold Schoenberg signaled nothing less than whether that person believed in capitalism or communism, the American Way or its Soviet counterpoint. Clefs on the staff notated more than just what sounds to make, what register in which to play the music. Instead, notes imagined nations.

For Gentry, not just composition, but the performance of music is crucial to understanding its relationship to Cold War identity politics. Subtle vocal tonal colorations and timbres articulated class, racial, and ethnic identities as older moorings of tradition and gave way to the modernist, assimilationist mix of the post-World War II milieu. As social scientists such as Erik Erickson were busy theorizing the very notion of identity itself in the 1950s, so too musicians and their audiences were theorizing the self. Erickson used psychoanalysis; they used music. All sought to navigate what it meant to “discover” oneself in the Cold War world.

These books are good examples of scholarship that does not break new ground so much as take us more deeply into topics first broached by other groundbreaking scholars. Ansari’s book is written very much in the wake of work such as Carol Oja’s studies of American musical modernity.[1] Gentry’s book draws upon the innovative interpretations of music and identity put forward by Timothy Taylor.[2] Both authors write under the influence of Nadine Hubbs’ innovative musicological research into gayness during the Cold War.[3] Nonetheless, despite being follow-ups rather than breakthrough hits, the two books bring us into the fine-tuned (or with some of the music, not-so-finely tuned) dimensions of Cold War cultural history.

Both books remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.  Could we not say that all historians chase the tone and timbre of an era as much as its basic facts? Music is empirical data too, we might notice, although accessing what historical information it has to offer us can be tricky business. Music catches a bit of the zeitgeist, some of the spirit and mood of the past. What was the temperament of the times? How did history modulate? Did it blend or did it growl? What changed, altering meter or tonality? What marched forward, staying in the same rhythm? What were the dissonances of the day and what still resonates now? Tone and timbre have as much to teach us as political events, economic forces, or specific social conditions. Music can help us access the more ephemeral qualities of the past. Amplitudes involve attitudes, and these are often as historically revealing as any presidential election or congressional debate or war or economic interaction or struggle in the streets. Historians must try to catch the texture as well as the substance of the times if they are to get history right. And sometimes the texture is the substance. Such was the case during the Cold War, when the smallest details as well as the largest structures of life became swept up in geopolitics.

By asking us to listen more closely and carefully to musical expression, Ansari and Gentry allow us to hear far better the howls that delivered the Cold War’s chill. Ansari helps us see that the seemingly arcane question of whether composers should embrace the modernist compositional theory of serialism became a pressing question of cultural nationalism and Cold War contestation. Composers dedicated to forging a “musical Americanism” such as Howard Hanson, William Schuman, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein had to adjust to the divisive dualities of the Cold War. “With their music intimately intertwined with the idea of America,” Ansari writes, “each of the Americanists had to decide whether to allow their music to be aligned with ‘consensus’-era conceptions of American identity or whether to pursue a different aesthetic path—perhaps the more prestigious path that serial and atonal composers were promoting.” To move in the latter, more avant-garde direction, however, meant confronting the tricky, sometimes outright hostile politics of the Cold War: composers “were forced to deal with accusations of un-American activity against leading musical Americanists—a shocking development, given their aesthetic Americanism.” The very use of more experimental compositional tactics posed professional and political dangers for these composers, “even those who were stridently anti-Communist” (21).

Ansari is quite attuned, as it were, to the subtle, sometimes ironic ways each composer navigated the treacherous dissonances of the Cold War. Sometimes they took advantage of the intensification of cultural struggles to access resources of governmental funding and influence; at other times, they backed away from state power. Howard Hanson, William Schuman, and Virgil Thomson each forged what Ansari calls “liberal pragmatic” paths. Hanson and Schuman “used a European-inspired but Europe-rejecting repertoire to win the respect of Europe” (50) while Thomson’s “Cold War music sought a similar balance between the artistic symbols of individual and community—between radical experimentalism and accessible tonal writing, between new and old, between the cerebral and the world of the emotions—even as his style was increasingly crowded out by the growing prestige of other approaches” (92). Perhaps less well-known than Thomson was Roy Harris. His “story is not simply the familiar narrative of an enthusiastic Depression-era leftist who became disillusioned by the stifling, sometimes oppressive, centrist political culture of the 1950s” (125). Instead, it was a tale of a composer who clung to the dream of writing American nationalistic music and surprisingly discovered more affiliations with composers and state cultural policy in the Soviet Union in pursuit of this project than among American audiences. His “musical Americanism” paradoxically brought him closer to Russia.

The more famous and successful Aaron Copland, meanwhile, honed a “cultural nationalism” that “was more a product of his cosmopolitanism than an intense patriotism.” For Copland, “deliberately sounding American” was, ideally, “an effective means to garner international attention for American composers,” however his “ultimate goal was always, he said, to be a ‘citizen of the Republic of Music.'” (134). Other scholars contend that the Cold War compromised Copland’s successes, but Ansari begs to differ. “By overtly disavowing the Soviet other by turning away from an accessible nationalism and allowing his ideologically antiexceptionalist music to be associated with Cold War exceptionalism,” she writes, “Copland could save the reputation of his music and continue to build connections through his art.” Cold War Americanism tried to use him for nationalistic ends, but, Ansari believes, he was also able to use it for internationalist ones. By “erasing controversial biographical features from his self-presentation and allowing his repertoire to help promote American exceptionalism, Copland was actually very well-positioned to bring musical Americanism to new audiences and to use music to help improve international understanding,” she concludes (160).

The effort to have one’s exceptionalist American cake and eat one’s internationalist universalism too also marked the career of Copland’s protégé Leonard Bernstein, but the latter figure struggled more than Copland to negotiate the tensions between musical Americanism and cosmopolitanism, particularly as the more conformist 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s. “Although Bernstein used every mechanism at his disposal…to imagine and promote a different, more progressive future for the United States,” Ansari explains, “his career peaked at a particularly problematic moment in which to realize such an agenda” (164). Trying to make sense of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, and the escalation of US military and political involvement in Vietnam, “Bernstein offered a striking and bold challenge to Cold War binaries—both musical and political.” Yet his “attempts to break down such oppositions were complicated, and even compromised, by his promotion of cultural nationalism.” Musical theater provided a means by which Bernstein “advanced a progressive musical Americanism” by combining popular theater and art music to reshape cultural hierarchies and advocate for egalitarian social change (186). By contrast, classical composition proved a more difficult form for Bernstein’s political and social goals.

In wonderfully close interpretations of his musical tactics in Symphony No. 3 (1963) and Chichester Psalms (1965), Ansari documents how the composer confronted “the very real limits of Cold War dissent” (189). As much as he tried to expand Copland’s pursuit of cosmopolitan goals by way of nationalistic means, Bernstein could not transcend the potency of Cold War American nationalism and exceptionalism. He wanted to foster a community above the divide between the capitalist West and communist East, but with “his own two tonal feet” he could not confidently span the divide between the United States and the Soviet Union (181). Instead, his music fell back into a nationalistic project. Tone—even Bernstein’s occasional incorporation of a Schoenbergian row of twelve of them—was no match for the geopolitical moment. The exceptionalism of musical Americanism proved louder than any subtler effort to achieve a global cosmopolitanism. The American state had little problem co-opting any aspirations for universality into its efforts at cultural imperialism and Cold War struggle.

Ansari focuses on “musical Americanism” as a problematic collective project faced by individual art music composers; Phil Gentry, by contrast, flips the orientation. He starts with individual musical encounters to speak to larger collective problems and concerns, particularly about the question of identity, which he takes to be a crucial area of contestation and change in the decades after World War II. “The central argument of the book,” he explains, “is that the cultural transformation at work here is more fundamentally the project of self-making called ‘identity’.” For Gentry, “it is a project that is at once both psychological and sociological, a process by which an individual knows him or herself in relation to others in a specific historic moment” (5). How, Gentry wonders, did certain musicians wield sound, timbre, tone, harmony, and rhythm—and even, in John Cage’s case, silence—less to forge an overt political movement than to make sense of self and group?

Taking place within the larger framework of the Cold War, the rise of rhythm and blues, the emergence of new types of ethnic music in the popular mainstream, daring avant-garde assertions about counting silence and noise as musical sound, feminist musical challenges to patriarchal structures, the anti-Orientalist appearances of Asian musicians, and assertions of gayness and queerness formed, according to Gentry, the musical dimensions of “a new project of identity” from which what we now call “identity politics” emerged (5). Before there was a cogent form of identarian politics in the United States, in which groups vied for legal or state-recognized inclusion, rights, or power based on who they were culturally or ethnically, music was a medium in which they had to figure out the deeper matter of identity itself.

Gentry’s book is, he himself admits, “more descriptive than prescriptive, focusing on small details of specific individuals rather than grander theories of social behavior,” but it nevertheless achieves some intriguing theoretical and interpretive positions by way of close readings of sound not merely as musical text, but also as performance. Gentry notes that the field of performance studies informs his musicology. Whether on recordings or performed live, Gentry contends, musical performance “choreographs” sound, to use dance historian Susan Leigh Foster’s term.[4] It is in performance that identity got made, then revised, resisted, and challenged, then remade again during the Cold War decades, Gentry believes (24). Most of all, he wants to catch little moments when something strange in musical performance encapsulated a shift in identity formation. For instance, a strange harmonic blend in Sonny Til and the Orioles’ smooth, crooning, choral secularized forms of gospel singing reveals the tense class politics of the Black bourgeoisie in a moment when working-class civil rights militancy was increasing during the 1950s. “Even as their music provided the perfect soundtrack for the black bourgeoisie,” Gentry writes, “the Orioles also tapped into an almost inaudible oppositional sentiment that resonated with the nascent African American youth culture, at least to those who wanted to hear it” (58).

Meanwhile, Doris Day’s performances promulgated a mass cultural whiteness that folded extremes into its all-purpose assimilationist conquest of difference; yet the coming tensions of sex and gender that would erupt in the 1960s with women’s liberation and second-wave feminism lurked in Day’s seemingly All-American girl persona. “Unlike the overwhelmingly smooth sound world of R&B vocal groups such as the Orioles,” Gentry writes, “the white girl singers were pushed into extreme vocal effects, encouraged to sing at the very broadest extremes of their registers, and often placed visually, in marketing, television shows, or movie appearances, to emphasize their comedic abilities.” This was a “specific articulation of whiteness” that sought to evoke a “naturalized authenticity” yet in doing so never resolved underlying questions about “femininity, especially when it came to sexuality” (86). Similarly, in tracking shifting representations of Asia during the Korean War era and its aftermath, with the American involvement in the Vietnam War hovering on the horizon, Gentry again highlights shifting contestations of identity that had lurking political implications. Colonial stereotypes in musicals by Rogers and Hammerstein, he writes, began to give way to new spaces for Asian-made identities at the margins of the often-inhospitable mainstream American milieu (117).

Finally, in a chapter that might have formed a book in of itself, Gentry carefully reconstructs the milieu of early performances of John Cage’s 4’33”. Cage generally resisted identity politics, pushing for what Gentry rather cleverly calls the composer’s “anti-identitarian identification” (136). Nonetheless, he argues that the daring composition of 4’33”, in which music became nothing more than whatever atmospheric noises were in the air at the time, fed a resistance to mainstream American configurations of the heteronormative, conformist self in the postwar decades. To Gentry, a kind of “queer discourse” flourished in the sheer physicality of the performance of 4’33”. The emphasis on the piano as a material object and the experience of bodies together in space unsure of how to make sense of the piece and thereby made more alert to the presence of each other’s awkwardness yet also their individual agencies as actors in the world created a volatile musical space not merely for identity formation, but also for identity reformation (126). “Scenes of mass seduction,” Gentry writes, met Cage, David Tudor, and colleagues as they toured the piece in the early 1950s, such as when the all-male audience in Wesleyan University’s Memorial Hall virtually stormed the stage upon Cage’s invitation that they witness his preparation of the piano. When performed, the composition was, Gentry contends, indicative of the composer’s “oppositionality.” It was not outrightly political, but 4’33” became an opportunity for Cage’s “utopian desire to educate his audiences, to change the way they thought” by fostering a disconcerting setting that was “at once pedagogical and perhaps faintly erotic” (149). Out of silence, noise; out of listening, music; just beyond the conventions of the concert hall, a world of potentially liberating action.

This was, Gentry believes, Cage’s intent with daring composition and it still had an effect decades later, when Gentry heard the piece performed for the first time. He recalled that “for four and a half minutes we contemplated the physical presence of strangers’ breath next to us, strangers willing to also sit quietly and listen to the silence” (150). Here was an experience of ecological sounds to be sure, of a natural world larger than the human one, but it was most of all an experience of other audience members “shuffling, coughing, murmuring, and breathing” (150). The sociality of silence resonated in the room. Identity was not created in this context so much as dismantled. Identity politics gave way to the possibilities of the universal human condition, experienced in moments of togetherness.

Yet by ending his book this way, with a close reading of the radical implications of Cage’s daring piece, Gentry almost undercuts the very arguments of his own study. The focus on self gives way to a yearning for collective connection, the making of identity to its unmaking in communal bonding. That old trickster Cage is up to his usual confoundings. So too, the composer turns up, slyly, in Ansari’s book. When Leonard Bernstein worries that his 1965 composition Chichester Psalms is so tuneful it will be “certain to sicken a stout John Cage,” Ansari is struck that Bernstein desperately yearned to combine Cage’s daring moves with a more palatable sense of musical convention (189). Strike another victory for Cage’s unsettling avant-garde gestures. He out-cooled the Cold War itself, generating new possibilities far beyond its rules, anarchically defying its efforts to order society.

These two books catch some of the tone of the Cold War decades. They remind us that music, if handled skillfully, is an excellent vehicle for investigations of intellectual history. Ansari pays attention to art music caught up in state policy and cultural pressure. What would it take, she asks, for composers to stay in tune with the times? Could they ring the alarm of dissonance and dissent or were they always doomed to reproduce larger structures of power? Addressing these questions, she helps us understand the ways in which music responded to, mediated, and sometimes even resisted larger geopolitical forces. Gentry explores how musicians and their fans reached for new tonal centers of identity. Sometimes they even succeeded at altering the very sense of self itself. Listening carefully to music, both authors help us take better note of how the Cold War world got pitched in new directions.

[1] See, for instance, Carol J. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[2] See Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[3] Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

[4] See, for instance, Susan Leigh Foster, Choreography & Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011); and the collection of essays she edited, Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Her work is just one example of the vast field of Performance Studies, which, as a side note, would be valuable to integrate more extensively into intellectual history.