Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy
Author(s):
Jennifer L. Campbell
Publication Year:
2012
Type:
journal article
Journal/Book Title
Diplomatic History
Publisher
Editor(s):
Pages:
29-39
Volume:
36
Issue:
1
Abstract:
[extract:] Within the last twenty years several historians, musicologists, and dance scholars have published their findings regarding the relationship between the U.S. government and its exportation of American culture through music and dance.1 This relatively recent body of work largely focuses on the Cold War period and understandably so as this was, by all accounts, the height of U.S. artistic exchange with other countries. Although these scholarly contributions exhibit a variety of ways of handling the intermingling of culture and politics, most authors neglect, and even ignore, the connections between the “cultural Cold War” and the events that preceded it in South America during the 1940s,2 when the State Department and the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) initiated a program of cultural propaganda to strengthen alliances between the United States and South America.3 In this article I argue that the model for American musical diplomacy was established much earlier through the work of the OIAA Music Committee and that an examination of the precedent set by this committee results in a fuller understanding of the events that took place thereafter. I discuss the circumstances surrounding the creation of the OIAA Music Committee, as it was a relatively new initiative on behalf of the U.S. government; explore the objectives and artistic priorities of the committee members and the processes by which projects were selected for government funding; and conclude by looking at how the decisions of this committee, made with the input and the approval of the U.S. government, formed an unwritten policy for U.S. musical diplomacy that would be revisited during similar subsequent undertakings.
Citation (Chicago Author-Date):
Campbell, Jennifer L. 2012. “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940-1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy.” Diplomatic History 36 (1): 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01006.x.