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During the Cold War, thousands of musicians from the United States traveled the world, sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Presentations program. Performances of music in many styles—classical, rock ’n’ roll, folk, blues, and jazz—competed with those by traveling Soviet and mainland Chinese artists, enhancing the prestige of American culture. These concerts offered audiences around the world evidence of America’s improving race relations, excellent musicianship, and generosity toward other peoples. Through personal contacts and the media, musical diplomacy also created subtle musical, social, and political relationships on a global scale. Although born of state-sponsored tours often conceived as propaganda ventures, these relationships were in themselves great diplomatic achievements and constituted the essence of America’s soft power. Using archival documents and newly collected oral histories, Danielle Fosler-Lussier shows that musical diplomacy had vastly different meanings for its various participants, including government officials, musicians, concert promoters, and audiences. Through the stories of musicians from Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson to orchestras and college choirs, Fosler-Lussier deftly explores the value and consequences of \"musical diplomacy.\"

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is being acknowledged as one of its most significant and multifaceted composers.Schoenberg and His Worldexplores the richness of his genius through commentary and documents. Marilyn McCoy opens the volume with a concise chronology, based on the latest scholarship, of Schoenberg's life and works. Essays by Joseph Auner, Leon Botstein, Reinhold Brinkmann, J. Peter Burkholder, Severine Neff, and Rudolf Stephan examine aspects of his creative output, theoretical writings, relation to earlier music, and the socio-cultural contexts in which he worked. The documentary portions ofSchoenberg and His Worldcapture Schoenberg at critical periods of his career: during the first decades of the century, primarily in his native Vienna; from 1926 to 1933, in Berlin; and from 1933 on, in the U.S. Included here is the first complete translation into English of the remarkableFestschriftprepared for the 38-year-old Schoenberg by his pupils in 1912; it presciently explored the diverse talents as a composer, teacher, painter, and theorist for which he was later to be recognized. The Berlin years, when he held one of the most prestigious teaching positions in Europe, are represented by interviews with him and articles about his public lectures. The final portion of the volume, devoted to the theme Schoenberg and America, focuses on how the composer viewed--and was viewed by--the country where he spent his final eighteen years. Sabine Feisst brings together and comments upon sources which, contrary to much received opinion, attest to both the considerable impact that Schoenberg had upon his newly adopted land and his own deep involvement in its musical life.

Este artículo pasa revista a los contactos entre Juan Pablo Izquierdo y el compositor chileno-israelí León Schidlowsky cuando ambos residían en Chile hace cincuenta años. Hans Loewe, un violonchelista germano-chileno, fue también parte del grupo. Continuaron los contactos posteriormente en Israel, país en que León Schidlowsky reside en la actualidad, cuando Izquierdo se hizo cargo de la dirección musical de los Festivales Testimonium que se realizan en Jerusalén.

Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice.

Composer Iannis Xenakis felt the need to commit to paper not only his theoretical discoveries, but also his artistic and philosophical questionings as well as his concerns as a humanist. He published 12 fundamental articles in his mentor Hermann Scherchen's bilingual review, \"Gravesaner Blatter.\" In the meantime, Xenakis was invited by Aaron Copland to lecture at Tanglewood at the Academy for Advanced Musical Training session during the summer of 1963. A summary of the topics of his lectures is offered. In the fall of 1963, his \"Musiques Formelles, nouveaux principes formels de composition musicale\" was about to be published. It offered a radically new and original approach not only to music composition, but also to the philosophy of music and of the arts in general. The original \"Table of Contents\" of \"Musiques Formelles\" mirrors in content the same articles/subjects presented in the \"Gravesaner Blatter\" and at Tanglewood and must be considered the foundation of Xenakis's early theoretical explorations.

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) figures prominently in most American musicological narratives of Western Europe during the Cold War, both because of its distinctive relationship with the United States and because of its unrivaled support for new music. That support included dedicated international events, most famously Darmstadt's Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (IFNM), working in tandem with radio stations to commission, record, disseminate, and promote new repertoire. Schoenberg was the centerpiece of those early efforts. Less well documented in American musicology is the fact that this agenda also met with considerable resistance. The subject of this chapter is the West German resistance to A Survivor. This chapter treats the piece's West German premiere, which took place under Hermann Scherchen at Darmstadt on August 20, 1950, as well as a 1956 incident in which the music critic and former Nazi Hans Schnoor was involved in a scandal, culminating in a series of lawsuits involving Fred Prieberg over his use of “the language of National Socialist journalism” to describe Schoenberg and A Survivor. The scandal was big news—Walter Dirks made sure the story received broad coverage in the general press, and Heinrich Strobel covered it in Melos.

[Wilhelm Furtwaengler] is the most famous among these musical titans, and while his main vehicle was the Berlin Philharmonic, the discs also have him leading the Vienna Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and London's Philharmonia Orchestra. Compare Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, with the Berlin orchestra in 1942 and the Philharmonia in 1954: the wartime performance shows the strings warmer than today's American counterparts, but winds and brasses less acceptable by today's standards. (German school woodwinds use vibrato differently, and their sound takes some getting used to). Most characteristic is the conductor's expansiveness and flexibility, traits that have nearly become a lost art. The post-war version is sleeker and more brilliantly played, with a better quartet of vocal soloists (led by soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf), a little more restrained but still deeply expressive.

Apart from the choice of versions, Stuttgart did the piece proud. Christof Nel's modern-dress production was especially effective in its use of chorus, which mimed the agony of war's victims and littered the stage with corpses. Karl Kneidl's setting of an off- white apartment interior with a staircase and, in a lone suggestion of the period's architecture, a cut-out window worked well. Claudia Mahnke was in wonderful form in the soprano role of Simplicius, displaying a brightness of tone on top and a compelling richness for the boy's more fervent utterances. Michael Ebbecke conveyed the Mercenary's brutality. Helmut Berger-Tuna was likewise in firm voice as the Farmer, and Heinz Gohrig brought a suitably oily tenor to the role of the Governor. Marcia Haydee made a fine contribution in the dance role of a Woman. Kwame Ryan conducted the orchestra (what there was of it) with spirit. [Karl Amadeus Hartmann] was a respected figure in postwar Munich until his death in 1963, continuing to compose orchestral works. Many deserve a hearing.