A Brief History of Culture As Soft Power
What three American maestros knew about promoting freedom during the Cold War.
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In foreign policy parlance, “soft power” takes many forms. Broadcasts, scholarships, health services, study abroad, and the “cultural exchange” of orchestras, dancers, and poets are all traditionally deployed as diplomatic instruments. The Trump administration’s reorientation in favor of “hard power” alarms experienced foreign service officers.
John Beyrle, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia under both Republican and Democratic presidents, fears the State Department faces “an existential crisis.” Speaking to college students in South Dakota earlier this month, he said:
Soft power still exists. The question is whether we as a country understand that it, too, makes America great. And I am afraid that President Trump does not understand that well enough, that his view of the world is “might makes right.” I think that’s a potentially cataclysmic mistake. I fear that we will compromise our ability to influence other countries, to pursue interests that dovetail with our own national interests.
Moreover, soft power has often served as a last resort when other means of diplomacy fail. “In a new world of propaganda wars, infused with new means of manipulation, what is the place of cultural exchange and musical diplomacy?” asks Nicholas Cull of USC’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy. He continues:
With more enemies at every turn, we need each other to survive. A pertinent analogy: diplomats are advised that, if kidnapped, they should attempt to build rapport with their kidnappers. You could call this “engineering empathy.” Cultural diplomacy is engineering empathy at scale.
To move beyond a world of mutual suspicion, Cull says, requires finding “a place to collaborate and build the trust on which peace and progress depend. This is easiest achieved via artistic endeavor—so-called ‘low stakes engagement.’”
And yet the current threat to soft power is not merely a MAGA threat. More than hard power, soft power builds on a nation’s sense of self—on consensual understandings of cultural and political identity that today are rapidly crumbling.
A glimpse back at the cultural Cold War—which ultimately “engineered empathy” between the United States and the Soviet Union—gleans what we’ve lost. One linchpin was a 1958 Soviet-American agreement on “Exchange in Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields.” Its first fruit, on the American side, was an 18-concert trip to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The Philharmonic’s Russian tour was viewed with apprehension by some in the State Department, which furnished a 28-page booklet, “So You’re Going to Russia,” the intent of which was to equip visitors with facts and observations to spread “the American message of goodwill.”
But Bernstein required no coaching. He proved an exemplary cultural ambassador. He introduced Russian audiences to Charles Ives (arguably the supreme American composer for orchestra) and to the neo-classical Concerto for Piano and Winds composed by Stravinsky in Paris. Conducting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (a Bernstein specialty), he sped up the ending—and earned a screaming ovation, a rave review from the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky, and a brisk handshake from the composer.
Bernstein spoke from the podium and—in his final concert, televised to the United States—delivered a lecture juxtaposing Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid and Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony to discover fundamental commonalities mirroring “the similarity of our two great peoples.” He publicly befriended Boris Pasternak, whom the Soviets had prevented from accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, and found him to be a “great man.” He had his hair cut in full view of an entertained crowd. On the street, he was mobbed by young people.
He returned to hold a Washington, D.C. press conference advocating increased funding for cultural exchange. Twenty-eight years later, the expatriate Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman talked to Bernstein about his impressions. “His most precious memory was meeting Pasternak,” Feltsman remembered. “Bernstein’s visit to Russia was very important at that particular time. The scent of freedom was beguiling and irresistible.” In fact, Bernstein was more greatly appreciated in Soviet Russia than in Manhattan, where many questioned his depth and maturity at this nascent stage of his podium career.
Three years after Bernstein’s Philharmonic tour, the State Department sent George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet to the USSR with comparable impact. The repertoire included ballets set to non-tonal music wholly new to Russian audiences: Stravinsky’s Agon and Webern’s Five Pieces, Op. 10.
In New York, the latter sometimes provoked nervous titters—but not in Moscow. The biggest ovations were never for the dancers, but for the master choreography, punctuated by rhythmic shouts of Spa-si-bo!, Spa-si-bo! The company’s farewell performance was said by Bolshoi personnel to have ignited the mightiest ovation ever recalled in that theater. The cultural historian Solomon Volkov attended performances in Leningrad: “Older people hated it. ‘The Americans aren’t dancing; they’re solving algebra problems with their feet.’ But the young saw in Balanchine’s productions the heights that the Petersburg cultural avant-garde could have reached if it had not been crushed by the Soviet authorities.” They recognized an inspired sequel to Russian classical ballet.
The Duke Ellington Orchestra, arriving in 1971, was an even greater sensation, because Ellington was far better known in Russia than Bernstein or Balanchine. The reason was the phenomenally popular Voice of America Jazz Hour, which since 1955 had cultivated a sophisticated appreciation of jazz via shortwave radio. Ellington also happened to be a favorite of President Richard Nixon, who played the piano and had previously hosted a 70th birthday party for Ellington at the White House. (Nixon’s most momentous cultural initiative would come in 1973, when he not only invited Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra to perform at his second inauguration, but sent them on a landmark Chinese tour.)
Ellington was met in Leningrad by a Dixieland band marching across the tarmac. His 22 sold-out concerts played to an audience of 122,000. Because of the demand for encores, the programs ranged from 180 to 210 minutes in length; at the final concert, again in Leningrad, the encores alone totalled 90 minutes.
These three historic exercises in musical diplomacy were soft but hardly supine. According to the State Department’s Hans Tuch, when Soviet bureaucrats attempted to dissuade Bernstein from programing Ives The Unanswered Question, he exclaimed “Fuck you!” and stormed out of the room.
Bernstein performed the Ives work, he encored it, he talked about it. His closing lecture/recital pointedly placed Copland on a high plateau alongside Shostakovich. He programmed the Stravinsky concerto without having listed it ahead of time. He fulminated that a review by Alexandr Medvedev in Sovetskaya Kultura was a party-line hit job: “an unforgivable lie and in the worst possible taste.”
A script preserved in the New York Philharmonic Archives reveals that Bernstein lectured: “I want very much to make it possible for you to hear Stravinsky (whom I consider a very great Russian composer and a great international artist), and I think you must hear more than one aspect of Stravinsky.” Medvedev’s view—that Stravinsky’s turn to neo-classical modernism proved a wrong direction—was not merely ideological: it was shared by leading Russian musicians. Bernstein in Russia was a free-swinging American eager to share and quick to judge. The net outcome was a healthy airing of mutual affinities and misconceptions both.
No sooner had Balanchine set foot in Russia than he encountered a Radio Moscow interviewer welcoming him “to the home of the classic ballet.” Balanchine retorted: “I beg your pardon. Russia is the home of romantic ballet. The home of classic ballet is now America.”
This riposte was delivered in Russian—Balanchine’s native tongue. He had fled the chaos of the Russian Revolution for Paris, arriving in the United States in 1933. He had absorbed America, had succeeded on Broadway and in Hollywood, had choreographed George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Richard Rodgers, and John Philip Sousa. In Moscow, his opening night “Sunday best” (as described by his biographer Jennifer Homans) combined a Mississippi riverboat gambler’s pegged pants with a rodeo rider’s silver-embroidered shirt and string tie. When a leading critic complained that his choreography lacked “soul,” he retorted that since Soviet critics didn’t believe in God, they wouldn’t know.
And, incredibly, Balanchine replayed Bernstein’s offstage explosion: when advised to cancel his Webern ballet Episodes, he spewed the Russian equivalent of “Fuck you” and walked out.
Balanchine’s City Ballet notably featured a Black soloist, Arthur Mitchell, partnering with white ballerinas. Likewise, Duke Ellington refuted Soviet stereotypes of American bigotry. The Voice of America—a legacy of soft diplomacy—had already disabused Russian jazz audiences of party-line readings. Rather than the music of an oppressed minority, jazz was collaborative and improvisatory: it signified American freedoms. Long antipathetic to communism, Ellington stifled interviewers who tried categorizing jazz as “Black music” or himself as a “Black composer.” Joseph A. Presel, the State Department’s escort officer for the Ellington tour, observed that “Ellington was very happy to get mad at the Soviets when I asked him to; it was very effective.”
Mainly, however, Ellington thrived in Russia. “Anybody who writes music, plays music, has a sincere interest in music, wants to come to Russia—particularly the people who write music, I’m sure. They all want to come here to see if breathing the same air that those great composers breathed might help them a little bit,” he told an interviewer for Radio Moscow. He mentioned Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff. And he introduced a new composition called “Moscow Metro.” It was his version of Bernstein preaching mutual understanding.
Bernstein, Balanchine, and Ellington exuded a robust and unfettered individuality. They pursued their dreams and spoke their mind. They were “American.”
If American diplomacy cannot today deploy a Leonard Bernstein, George Balanchine, or Duke Ellington, it is not merely because soft diplomacy is waning. With cultural consensus shattering, with cultural memory eroding, such creative artists—not ephemeral epiphenomena, but icons carved deep into the American experience—do not exist any longer.
Bernstein, as of 1959, was pursuing a New World mission: how could the United States become a more organic home for classical music? What should American concert music sound like? He insisted that, beyond recycling European masterpieces, American orchestras curate the American musical past. Balanchine relished the rhythm and speed of Manhattan. He had his ballerinas dance en pointe to cowboy tunes. He absorbed African-American dance. “America,” he said, “has its own spirit—cold, luminous, hard as light. Good American dancers can express clean emotion in a manner that might almost be termed angelic.” The Ellington band integrated generations of African-American and American popular styles—and also European art music influences. These were kindred endeavors to excavate both New World and Old World roots in pursuit of a lasting synthesis, of a permanent lineage.
Bernstein, Balanchine, and Ellington were television celebrities at a time when TV defined home entertainment. Life and Time magazines endorsed hierarchies of taste—as had commercial radio, even more so, in its early heyday.
But who, today, embodies “America” in the performing arts? Certainly no symphonic conductor, choreographer, or composer. President Trump, appointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, drops names like Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Elvis Presley. He mentions Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and Les Misérables. Others might nominate Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. Who is to say what best represents the American arts right now?
Notions of individual freedom, however incompletely fulfilled, once grounded an historic American experiment in governance. Freedom and democracy forged a mainstream ideal. They limned—as Nicholas Cull writes of soft diplomacy—“the soul of a nation, making it possible for friends and adversaries alike to see what makes a country tick.”
No longer. We cannot even agree on facts, on standards, and sources of truth. The present debate over whether the Voice of America is “balanced” and “objective” becomes futile in the absence of a mainstream “factual” narrative about Palestinians and Israelis. In education, is there any feasible consensus about how Columbia University, now penalized by the president, handled “free speech”? Does the Kennedy Center, chaired by the president, over-emphasize diversity, equality, and inclusivity? Many in the American arts privately agree that DEI has done more harm than good.
Viewed from the left, the American experience is overshadowed by the slave trade and the Indian Wars—and a soft criterion of virtue is applied. Viewed from the right, the criterion is hard and emphasizes power regained. Ideals of freedom—once embodied and shared by Leonard Bernstein, George Balanchine, and Duke Ellington—sit uneasily in the back seat of this debate. And so, in the end, does soft diplomacy.
Joseph Horowitz’s thirteen books include “The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War.” His National Public Radio “More than Music” documentaries—including one on “The Cultural Cold War Revisited”—may be found here.
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Readers who were in a position to listen to the Voice of America Jazz Hour (or anything on VOA, which was required to direct its signal away from the continental USA) will fondly remember its host, Willis Conover.
Conover sounded exactly the way he looks in the at-work portrait photo on Wikipedia. He had the kind of deep voice, combined with a General American accent, that was revered among American radio announcers as "a voice like God."
His leisurely delivery -- which was actually part of the job on VOA's Special English service -- was in any case soothing and had a special charm when those resonant tones caressed the name of Blossom Dearie, a singer for whom he had the greatest respect.