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.