AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

100 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
OPPOSING THE HYBRIDS: NICOLAS NABOKOV, ALAIN
DANIéLOU, AND THE MUSICAL COLD WAR
Harm Langenkamp
Utrecht University
In the spring of 1961, Tokyo provided the stage for what was announced as “a confrontation
of unprecedented breadth and significance in the history of music”: the “East-West Music
Encounter.” Organized as a conference-festival, nearly a hundred composers, musicologists
and music critics from Western Europe, the United States, and various parts of Asia discussed
problems of cross-cultural understanding and contemporary musical life during the day, and
by night reveled in high-profile performances of, among others, the New York Philharmonic,
the NHK Symphony Orchestra, and prominent interpreters of Indian, Thai, Korean, and
Japanese traditional music. The driving spirit behind the Encounter was Nicolas Nabokov,
composer and secretary-general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a worldwide
coalition of intellectuals united from across a broad political spectrum in a network of committees
and institutions which had been founded in the early 1950s with the stated aim of
defending artistic and intellectual freedom against totalitarian oppression, and which would
be exposed in the mid-1960s as a CIA instrument designed to lure non-aligned intellectuals
away from the blandishments of Soviet-style Communism.
Predicated on the conviction that “the preservation of the various traditional systems of
music” had become a “world problem,” the conference adopted an outline of what would
become the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies. Founded in 1963—with
support from the Ford Foundation—in the enclave of the “free world,” West Berlin, and led
by one of Nabokov’s creative partners, the Indologist Alain Daniélou, the Institute devoted
its resources to the study of “the practical means of integrating the musical achievements of
Asian and African cultures into world culture” in an effort to oppose “the influence of hybrid
forms of music” that (supposedly) constituted a threat to “the continuation and preservation
of authentic traditions.”
Based on archival research and the correspondence between Nabokov and Daniélou, this
paper discusses the troublesome gestation of the Encounter and the Institute against the political
background of the late 1950s and early 1960s: the global competition between the United
States and the Soviet Union for the allegiance of decolonizing nations in Asia and Africa,
the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement led by India, and a wave of anti-American
demonstrations in Japan. The CCF’s investment in musico-cultural preservation will be interpreted
as a strategy to win over the intelligentsia of what in 1952 had been coined the “Third
World” for the “First World.” Subsequently, it will be argued that this strategy emerged from
a general concern for what many CCF members saw as the threat of “middlebrow culture,”
the type of media which emphatically encouraged accessibility and hybridization, and which
was, therefore, much to the distress of Nabokov, deployed by the Eisenhower administration
for its cultural diplomacy programs. By considering the various, and at times conflicting,
agendas held by participants, institutions, and sponsors engaged in “East meets West” events,
this study aims to contribute to the wider debate on both enabling and disabling tensions of
globalization that to a large extent emanated from Cold War ideology and taste politics.