Musical Exchange during the Cold War

Often overlooked in histories of electronic music are the contributions of Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh (1921-2017), who first experimented with wire recorders in 1940s Cairo and extended related projects at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) from 1959 to 1962 (Seachrist 2002).  The CPEMC was founded in 1958 as a hub for cultural diplomacy, supported by a massive Rockefeller Foundation grant (Patterson 2011). This event testified to an era when public and private agencies scrambled to invest New York City with a cultural infrastructure befitting its global status as a symbol of ascendant U.S. power.  At mid-century, Columbia University's longtime nickname "the acropolis" gained new value in public discourse, including in Rockefeller-funded projects of philanthropy. The term "acropolis" captured the desire to transform the university into "the spiritual, cultural and intellectual center of the world" and thus to defend "Western civilization" inherited from the traditional learning centers of Europe, as one report put it (Zipp 2012).  "Acropolis" figured the university in a contradictory way as both a cosmopolitan center and a fortress, an emblem for both U.S. democracy and dominion during the Cold War.


Globally the CPEMC attracted visiting and immigrating composers such as El-Dabh who pursued projects of cultural diplomacy.  Similar to early 20th-century European sound laboratories, the CPEMC's earliest ventures included an underexplored ethnographic dimension fraught with questions of racialized self-representation.  Although these topics figure little in the sparse existing literature on the studio, they surfaced repeatedly in interviews I conducted with El-Dabh in 2014. His own journey followed a path from elite Egyptian emissaryship in 1950 to U.S. citizenship in 1961, enmeshing a story of soft power strategy with one of minoritarian belonging.  Drawing on interviews, archival research, El-Dabh's electronic oeuvre, and reception history, I examine the CPEMC's contradictions as a lively cultural crossroads and a defensive bastion for restrictive ideas of "Western culture." As such, the CPEMC emerges as more than just an incubator for the "uptown" composition scene, but rather as a sound laboratory at the heart of imperial circulations of labor, expertise, and subjectivity.

In the fall of 1952, members of the Tokyo-based Fujiwara Opera Company, led by the charismatic Japanese tenor Fujiwara Yoshie, performed a bilingual production of Puccini's _Madama Butterfly_ in Japanese and Italian with the singers of the New York City Opera. After two performances, the Japanese company headed to another engagement in Salt Lake City. The following year, the company embarked on more extensive tour, stopping at Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. In their third tour in 1956, they performed both Puccini's opera and Gilbert and Sullivan's _The Mikado_. The company's repeated visits coincided with the period in the U.S.-Japan relationship shaped by the lasting memories of WWII, the U.S. occupation of Japan that followed it, and the emergence of the Cold War. Drawing on archival materials, media coverage of the tours, and Fujiwara's own recollections, this presentation explores how the members of Fujiwara Opera and their American collaborators positioned themselves in this new cultural landscape and how their efforts were interpreted in the U.S. and in Japan.


Cultural historian Christina Klein (2003) has demonstrated the influential role that Puccini's opera played in the formation of what she terms "Cold War Orientalism" in the U.S. Musicologists such as Fujita Fumiko (2015) and Danielle Fosler-Lussier (2015) have examined the active part that musicians played in the U.S. cultural diplomacy toward Japan in the postwar years. However, the activities of Japanese musicians in the U.S. operating outside of the officially sanctioned diplomatic framework have attracted less attention. The documents related to Fujiwara Opera's U.S. tours demonstrate that Fujiwara relied heavily on the professional connections he had cultivated with western musicians prior to the war. At the same time, Fujiwara forged new relationships with the leaders of Japanese American communities and American promoters. Together, these individuals navigated the tumultuous political and cultural shifts that took place in the early years of the Cold War refashioning the network of musicians, promoters, and community leaders of the two nations.