positive responses of European audiences. “The Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris,” thought Braden, “than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have brought with a hundred speeches.”38 Thus was launched a collaboration that would continue throughout the cultural Cold War. “The juggernaut of American culture,” writes Saunders, “the Boston Symphony became the CIA’s answer to the agitprop trains of old.”39
This is not to say that the CCF completely ignored American composers or the “New Music.” Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson were all on the program of the 1952 festival. (Thomson’s adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s
“donated” by Junkie Fleischmann, with the winners promised first American performances of their work by the Boston Symphony (“Now is that a prize or isn’t it?,” asked Nabokov)—he included in the lineup several representatives of the atonal, “twelve-tone” school.40
It would, however, be wrong to suppose that the 1954 Rome competition marked the conversion of the CCF to “serialist orthodoxy.”41 The twelve-tone school failed to dominate the event, and the likes of Babbitt and Cage continued to be ignored by the Congress. “As far as the New Music is concerned,” writes Nicolas Nabokov’s biographer, Ian Wellens,
“there is no evidence to suggest that a ‘hidden hand’ was at work.”42 The reason for this state of affairs—a curious one, given the growing international stature of American experimentalists, Cage in particular, in this period—might simply be that Nabokov did not personally care for the new serial compositions, his tastes remaining rooted in the tonal tradition of Russian music. If so, the situation can hardly have been helped by the spectacularly abusive response he received when he invited Pierre Boulez, one of the New Music’s best-known exponents, to take part in the Rome competition. “What do you expect to resolve by these murky undertakings, by the concentration of numerous jumping-jacks in one single location, stuck there in a pit of liquid manure?” Boulez demanded to know.
“They will undoubtedly learn to appreciate the quality of each other’s sweat but they are unlikely to produce anything more fruitful.”43
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Nabokov’s aesthetic prejudices notwithstanding, there is documentary evidence that the CIA’s own tastes in the realm of the performing arts were far from high modernist. Witness a letter written in 1955 by Frank Wisner in response to a request from Nelson Rockefeller for Wisner’s reaction to a suggestion by Lincoln Kirstein that the New York City Ballet visit and perform in Moscow. This was not, Wisner felt, a good idea, because “it would place us at a comparative disadvantage in an area in which the Russians are most prominent.” Former DCI Walter Bedell Smith was of the same view, so Wisner reported, in a passage remarkable not only for its martial metaphors but also for the image it conjures of the notoriously irascible general pondering the finer points of Cold War cultural diplomacy:
In fact, Bedell was opposed to governmental encouragement for American ballet to appear in Western Europe on the ground that it might well be met and challenged by a Soviet troupe, and this would amount to our having elected to join battle with the opposition on grounds of his choosing and greatest strength.44
This attitude, combined perhaps with the fact that Nabokov was a composer rather than a choreographer, helps explain why dance did not feature prominently in the CCF’s international program. Instead, American ballet tended to be promoted abroad by the overtly government-funded President’s Emergency Fund (which echoed the CCF’s approach to music by neglecting avant-garde dancers such as Merce Cunningham in favor of more traditional fare).45