The Quest for Harmony: Classical Music, Emotion, and the Discourse on Human Rights in the United States since World War II

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Jessica Gienow-Hecht
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 387333020

The Project stems from the hypothesis that in the 20th and 21st centuries, classical music has had special political influence and has been closely linked to discourses on humanity, human rights and morality. A case study on U.S. American symphony orchestras aims to demonstrate both how classical music functioned as the bearer of emotions and political content since the 1940s, and how American Cultural Diplomacy played a role in this process.Three profound links between classical music and human rights, which have mostly been neglected by scholars, suggest the need for a more thorough look at their interplay. First, both music and human rights show universal patterns and are both therefore negotiated and operating inter- and transnationally. Second, both fields are closely linked to values such as dignity, respect and equality. They refer to classical ideals, ideas of the enlightenment era and of idealism, which have common, primarily Western, origins. Third, classical music and the human rights discourse have a strong emotional impact on people, a feature which has been used by U.S. American actors in the form of Cultural Diplomacy to accomplish political goals since the end of the Second World War.Inspired by these three observations, the project seeks to apply emotion as a conceptual framework. Emotion not only demonstrates the entanglement, but also the tension between music, human rights and U.S. American Cultural Diplomacy as well as of state and non-state actors. The long-term study starts in the mid-1940s. At that time, the political and public human rights discourse gained importance in Europe and North America due to developments in world politics and upheavals such as the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War and the decolonization of former colonies. Furthermore, in contrast to other Western states such as France, the U.S. only started to exploit its cultural exports for political means after 1945. The project intends to expand the boundaries of the usual periodization of the Cold War, and by doing so to study the disruptions and (dis)continuities of U.S. American Cultural Diplomacy until the end of the Cold War and into the 2000s. The events of 9/11 and their impact on American cultural policy are also part of this study. Altogether, this project seeks to provide new insights into informal, barely visible and nearly unstudied practices, relations and influences of music and the discourse on human rights.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants