This article repositions the space race as a sonic phenomenon by analyzing music and sounds related to the Soviet space program. Early triumphs such as the orbit of Sputnik I in 1957, Yuri Gagarin’s groundbreaking orbital flight in 1961, and Valentina Tereshkova’s success as the first woman in space in 1963 epitomized the complexities of the cultural Cold War and the utopian underpinnings of the Thaw. Space, the ultimate nonaligned sphere, was a new world for the planting of real and ideological flags. At the same time, these successes were key to reimagining the ideals of Soviet citizenship and national identity in the post-Stalin era. Heating up at a moment of great change and consequence, the space race provides an inroad to examine how music, media, and sound helped spread these emerging values. Drawing on the popular press, radio broadcasts, and variety television performances, this article demonstrates how music was used to humanize the cosmonauts and promote a new personal ethics—one that prized approachability and humility alongside heroism and bravery. The divergent ways that composers and performers celebrated Gagarin and Tereshkova reveal a complex politics of gender during the Thaw. Gagarin, the conqueror, was revered in marches extolling his colonizing feats; Tereshkova, the homemaker, was celebrated with romances and tales of domesticity. By demonstrating the prevalence of new media and the power of participatory practices in the sonic space race, this article contributes to our understanding of the cultural Cold War as a lived and performed experience.

During the Cold War, American private foundations subsidized American modernist composers, supporting their work through commissions, underwriting recordings and concerts, and promoting their ideas in radio programs and periodicals circulated at home and abroad. From its establishment in 1952, the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) acted as an important player in this field. Using archival material and interviews with people who worked with the founder Paul Fromm, I show how Fromm’s involvement in his foundation, and his reliance on professional advice, constituted a unique patronage model that enabled select composers to participate actively in the promotion of their music. Fromm’s relationship with Elliott Carter provides an especially complex example of a mutually beneficial and successful partnership. Fromm’s goal was to integrate contemporary music into American musical life by supporting the production and dissemination of new compositions. Fromm sought to play the role of patron, fostering close relationships with composers who received funds and acted as his artistic advisers. Fromm’s partnership, and consequent friendship with, Carter illustrates the many ways the FMF served composers. In 1955 Fromm commissioned what became Carter’s Double Concerto for piano, harpsichord, and two chamber orchestras (1961). Fromm’s subsequent help, administered through his Foundation and personal connections, enabled Carter to secure high-quality premieres of this piece and other difficult-to-perform repertoire, helped facilitate repeat performances and recordings of these compositions, and allowed Carter, together with his wife Helen, to establish a system to fund musicians who performed his music—and also reap tax benefits. Among the recipients who benefited from Fromm’s largesse were Charles Rosen, Paul Jacobs, and Jacob Lateiner. Fromm’s actions spawned a familiar fable. Carter’s career and the way he talked about it reinforced many persistent falsehoods about an artist’s relationship, or lack thereof, to potential listeners and audiences—a source of financial support for artists since the advent of public concert life. Fromm’s financial support and Carter’s ability to supplement it helped buttress the late-Romantic myth of creative autonomy. The details of this partnership—the words exchanged, the other figures involved, and its variegated benefits—harbor broad implications for the study of Cold War-era patronage networks and for our view of Carter’s career.

Examining the history of jazz in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953, this essay sheds light on the role of popular music in the cultural competition of the early Cold War. While the Soviet authorities pursued a tolerant policy toward jazz during World War II because of its wartime alliance with the United States, the outbreak of the Cold War in the late 1940s led to a decisive turn against this music. The Communist Party condemned jazz as the music of the “foreign bourgeoisie,” instead calling for patriotic Soviet music. Building on previous studies of the complex fate of western music in the USSR during the postwar decades, this article highlights a previously unexamined youth counterculture of jazz enthusiasts, exploring the impact of anti-jazz initiatives on grassroots cultural institutions, on the everyday cultural practices of young people, and on the Cold War’s cultural front in the USSR. It relies on sources from central and regional archives, official publications, and memoirs, alongside oral interviews with jazz musicians and cultural officials.

Although Messiaen is commonly portrayed as having been disengaged from worldly affairs, his eyes fixed on heaven, many of his works can be shown to possess a subtext of political or social commentary that frames worldly issues in religious rhetoric. In a notable example, the Messe de la Pentecôôte for organ (1950), Messiaen dramatizes the Cold War threat of nuclear apocalypse by contrasting a leitmotif he calls the Beast of the Apocalypse with evocations of birdsong that represent peace and freedom. Probably influenced by Picasso's use of birds as symbols of peace and by Renéé Leibowitz's Sartrean calls for artistic commitment, the Mass ends with a chord he describes as an explosion. The work's subtext appears to warn against nuclear catastrophe and to advocate faith in the face of Cold War fear and anxiety.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet's 1958 tour on behalf of the U.S. State Department, part of the grand Cold War project of propagating American-style democracy in opposition to communism, did not advance in an orderly and self-evident manner. Rather it was an extremely contingent enterprise enacted through countless individual actions and statements by a motley assortment of bureaucrats and businessmen, and frequently teetered on the brink of chaos. The story of Brubeck's tour, including its evolution and impact, is complex and multifaceted, involving overlapping and conflicting agendas, governmental secrecy, high-minded idealism, and hard-nosed business. The narrative also raises issues of race and race relations in the context of the Cold War struggle against communism and brings into focus the increasing cultural prestige of jazz and other popular genres worldwide during the period when the ideological premises of the Cold War were being formulated. Thirty years later——in 1988, as the Cold War was waning——the Quartet performed in Moscow at the reciprocal state dinner hosted by President Ronald Reagan for General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev during their fourth summit meeting. The sequence of events leading up to this occasion, including the Quartet's long-anticipated tour of the Soviet Union during the previous year, reveals Brubeck to have been not only a talented musician but a canny entrepreneur as well. By the late 1980s the cultural and political landscape had shifted so dramatically as to be virtually unrecognizable to the Cold Warriors of the 1950s. By all accounts, Brubeck's tours in the 1950s and 1980s were among the most successful of their kind. Though Brubeck attributes their efficacy primarily to the power of an influential idea that came into its own toward the beginning of the Cold War——namely, jazz as democracy——the documentary record makes clear that the impact of his travels involved a multifarious nexus of other factors as well, including reputation, personality, and marketability.

Writers across a wide spectrum of cold war discourse voiced an anxiety that American minds could be made to see things as some alien will might want us to see them. Cold War popular culture drew on such notions to fashion a spectacle of mind control and depicted advertising, Hollywood, and politics as sites for the manufacture of illusions. Each site finds its critique in a film from the first postwar decades: A Star Is Born (1954) shows Hollywood myths overwhelming the lives of their creators; John Cassavetes's Shadows (1957/1959) voices the hip critique of commodified mass culture; and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) spins a paranoid scenario in which American politics, Communist brainwashing, and television conspire to create a counterfeit reality so total there may be no escape. These films picture their characters struggling to escape the construct of false images that besets them. The musical scoring of these films, though while radically different, defines the boundary of the construct and marks the distance between reality and image.

In spring 1945, a small group of students, among them Serge Nigg and Pierre Boulez, protested during the first performances in liberated Paris of the neoclassical works Stravinsky had composed in America. Whereas Boulez's biographers have interpreted the student protests as a sign of Renéé Leibowitz's successful promotion of serialism in France, scholars of the Cold War have seen the 1945 concerts as a precursor to Stravinsky's participation in the 1952 L'ŒŒuvre du XXe sièècle , a festival in Paris indirectly funded by the CIA. These interpretations subsume the immediate postwar period in France within a synchronic view of the early Cold War era. But the 1945 protests against Stravinsky were not about the decisive embrace of a single musical style; rather, they were about the desire of young French composers to play an active role in shaping the postwar future of music in France. In 1945, Nigg——and not Boulez——represented the aesthetic opinions of a generation of French composers who had grown up during the German occupation of Paris and the political aspirations of those who, like Nigg, flocked to the French Communist Party at war's end. Nigg's participation in the 1945 Stravinsky debates gives us occasion to examine his earliest musical compositions and the political opinions he would express with increasing ideological fervor in the 1950s. Although in verbal pronouncements he supported socialist realism, Nigg's rare and complex use of a French folk tune in his 1954 Piano Concerto betrays his ambivalence about the Soviet demand for communist composers to reject "falsely cosmopolitan tendencies" in favor of their national cultural heritage. Having rejected in 1945 both Stravinsky's neoclassicism and French nationalism (the latter tainted by associations with Vichy during the occupation), Nigg had to choose in the early Cold War between his aesthetic and political loyalties.