Music and International History in the Twentieth Century

Bringing together scholars from the fields of musicology and international history, this book investigates the significance of music to foreign relations, and how it affected the interaction of nations since the late 19th century. For more than a century, both state and non-state actors have sought to employ sound and harmony to influence allies and enemies, resolve conflicts, and export their own culture around the world. This book asks how we can understand music as an instrument of power and influence, and how the cultural encounters fostered by music changes our ideas about international history.

Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht is Chair of the Department of History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and Alfred Grosser Chair at Sciences Po in Paris. She is the series editor of “Explorations in Culture and International History” (Berghahn Books) and her book Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany (1999) won the Stuart Bernath Prize and the Myrna Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her most recent monograph, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850-1920 (2009, 2012 paperback) won the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and is currently being translated into Chinese. In 2017, Gienow-Hecht won a grant from the German Research Association to pursue a research on a project titled “The Quest for Harmony: Classical Music, Emotion, and the Discourse on Human Rights in the United States since World War II”.