Scholars have explored the use of Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess and its stellar ensemble cast to counter Soviet criticism of US race relations during the Cold War—but an equally prominent theme in contemporary coverage of the production is spirituality. Onstage as well as off, the Soviet tour of Porgy and Bess reflected both American and Soviet ideas about religion's role in international diplomacy in the mid-1950s. This article explores religiosity in the Breen-Davis production as well as the reception of the 1955–56 Soviet tour both in the United States, where the production represented a hopeful vision of the nation's racial tolerance and religious pluralism, and in the USSR, where the tour's twin messages of American spiritual superiority and racial equality were challenged by Soviet authorities. Drawing on materials from the Robert Breen Archives housed in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, this article considers Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess as a religious export to the USSR, enriching our understanding of US cultural diplomacy and Cold War–era musical exchange with broader implications for American–Soviet history, religious studies, and opera analysis.

By the 1950s, ASCAP and its associated songwriters and composers seemed out of touch with contemporary musical tastes and industry trends. With the introduction of competition in the form of BMI in 1939, many members of ASCAP were experiencing a sense of status anxiety, an anxiety exacerbated by the many cultural, social, political, and economic changes that swept across postwar US society. Rather than adapt to the changing musical landscape of the 1950s, some members argued that ASCAP's fading cultural prestige and diminished influence within the music industry were the result of a conspiracy perpetrated by the broadcast networks and BMI. This article examines how, in an attempt to reassert the status and prestige they had enjoyed before the war, ASCAP and its supporters exploited contemporary Cold War anxieties as part of their ongoing feud with BMI. In congressional hearings from 1956 and 1958, individuals and organizations sympathetic to ASCAP portrayed BMI as part of a coordinated conspiracy that not only threatened free market practices through the establishment of an alleged “electronic curtain,” but also sought to foist an inferior product on audiences who were being manipulated by “hidden persuaders.” I suggest that the rhetoric that dominated both of these hearings reflects ideological debates that were being fought at the height of the Cold War, debates involving the culture of consensus and the image of the “American Way.”

Constantly fearful about the fragility of the young republic in the decades following the Revolutionary War, Americans assiduously organized commemorative rituals. While historians have examined these commemorations, music's place in them has yet to be fully understood. By highlighting key themes in cross-regional, cross-racial discourse on commemoration and drawing on rich records preserved from Bennington, Vermont, this article exposes the varied purposes for which Americans used music in commemorations from the 1780s to the 1810s. In early postwar commemorations, Benningtonians used music to emphasize gratitude and virtue and educate local youth about proper behavior. As political rifts developed in the 1790s, community members also used music to articulate contemporary politics in terms of the revolutionary past and exhort their neighbors to take political action. To sustain these practices as new generations matured without firsthand experience of the war, locals used music to cultivate stronger ties to the battle. As Bennington illustrates, music provided a powerful means of shaping Americans’ perceptions of the past to urge them to action in the present for outcomes envisioned in the future, compellingly anchored in terms of gratitude, virtue, and memory.

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson's poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson's Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet's attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem's relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem's sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.'s study of “mastery and deformation,” theorizes the poet's tone. While prior critics have read the poem's lofty conclusion as sincerely aspirational toward assimilation, this article emphasizes the ambiguity, or irony, that Tolson develops: he embraces the symphony's capacity as a symbol to encompass multiple meanings, using the genre metaphorically as a mark of achievement, even as he implicates such usage as a practice rooted in conservative thought. The “symphony,” celebrated as a symbol of pluralistic democracy and liberal progress, meanwhile functions to reinforce racialized difference and inequality—a duality that becomes apparent when this poem is read alongside Tolson's concurrent poems, notes, and criticism. Such analysis demonstrates that “Dark Symphony” functions as a site for heightened consciousness of racialized musical language, giving shape to Tolson's ideas as a critic, educator, and advocate for public health.