CFP: Cold War Music Study Group, AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting, Denver, 9-12 Nov 2023

[AMS]

The Cold War Music Study Group is organizing a panel submission for the 2023 Annual Meeting of the AMS/SMT in Denver on the topic of music, religion, and spirituality in the Cold War. Recent historical scholarship has shown that the battle between communism and capitalism was as much a spiritual contest as it was a geopolitical one. We might, as Diane Kirby has written, think of the Cold War as “a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless” (2003). Jonathan P. Herzog, for example, has argued that American politicians saw religion (and specifically Christianity) as a key component that both differentiated the United States from the Soviet Union as well as placed a special urgency on the former’s triumph over the latter (2011). At the same time, following Marx’s dictum that “religion [was] the opium of the masses,” the Soviet Union sought to replace Tsarist-era religion with state-sponsored atheism. The result, as Victoria Smolkin has demonstrated, transformed atheism into a pseudo-spiritual cosmology (2018). Present in global conflicts in Korean (e.g., Chang 2014) and Vietnam as well as de- and post-colonial change in the Middle East and Africa, spiritual identity cooperated with political alignment as a tool for both propaganda and resistance. As countries around the world grappled with both Western and Soviet colonialism, religious pluralities had to be negotiated alongside resurgent national identities.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that address this topic from a variety of perspectives from across music studies. Submissions might address some of the following topics:
• Narratives of state repression in religious communities (e.g., “covert” spiritualities in atheistic countries)
• Anti-religious musics and propaganda
• Religious revivals in music
• Judaism/anti-Semitism after World War II
• Spirituality and ideological contest in the non-aligned world
• Influences of Eastern spirituality on politically aligned/dissident composers
• The musical geopolitics of religion
• Embodied religious practices at the nexus of music and Cold War politics

If interested, please submit a 350-word abstract and title to Gabrielle Cornish (gcornish -at- miami.edu) no later than March 7, 2023. We especially encourage junior and historically marginalized scholars, contingent faculty, and those working outside of academia to apply. If you might be interested in serving as chair/respondent, please email Gabrielle by the above deadline. 

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