Composer Paul Hindemith

ADAM GARRIE writes at The Duran:

In order to make American culture appear freer and more open than the Soviet culture, in 1950 the CIA established the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation which would promote the most radical art of the western world, art so radical that most people in the West didn’t particularly care for it. One might cynically say it was more Operation Paganini than it was Operation Gladio.

Out were composers whose melodies everyone implicitly knows, and in came atonal music, dissonant music poly-rhythmic music.

I personally  listen to all of it from Beethoven to Stockhausen, so I write this without fear or favour. But I must say, if one wants to attract a general audience, I should think Tchaikovsky’s 6^th or Beethoven’s 9^th have wider appeal than Pierre Henry stabbing a tape recorder with a pencil (yes, it sounds more or less as you think it would do).

The CCF organised concerts throughout the world featuring the mostly atonal music of the so-called Second Viennese School including composers like Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and latterly Hindemith – in other words the composers whose records never sold much in the free market place compared with the likes of Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Mozart.

So the CIA, in promoting ‘the American way’, were actually promoting music that most people in America shunned.  Instead most people actually preferred the accessible orchestral music promoted by the democratic Soviet ideal!  You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Here’s an hilarious cartoon.

Hello, Paris Symphony Orchestra?

This is the CIA. You play anymore Tchaikovsky and we’ll break your oboes.

Could the CIA be behind the awful music in supermarkets (and drugstores, clothing outlets and chain restaurants?) There’s a conspiracy theory for you!

— Comments —

Bert Perry writes:

It’s worth noting that it’s not just the CIA, but also the rest of the State Department, that was pushing some rather “progressive” versions of American culture. For example, Paul Child–the husband of cooking guru Julia Child–did that for a few decades after leaving the OSS at the end of WWII. See “Appetite for Life,” a biography of Julia Child, for details.

The result of this, and media coverage specializing in our big cities and crime, is that when a young kid visits with a family in rural Bavaria, he’s asked how he deals with the huge murder rate in D.C….and he can just smile and say, “I don’t go into those neighborhoods–outside the hood, it’s really pretty safe.” (True story of mine from a few years back.)

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