While "world music" became an important musical category and commodity in the Western world in the 1980s, an incipient world music practice had already begun to take shape in the Eastern Bloc, one with very different ideologies and forms of circulation. This project looks at the globally-oriented Festival des politischen Liedes, held in Berlin from 1970 onwards, as well as East German radio programming, artistic and scholarly exchanges, and social dancing to show how cultural and musical interchange connected diverse peoples around the socialist world, transformed musical sounds and practices and created new forms of socialist solidarity and cosmopolitan cultural formations. Drawing upon primary sources, including audio recordings, film, concert and festival ephemera, transatlantic oral history interviews, and policy documents, the project focuses on one particular trajectory of musical and choreographic exchange – the one which linked the GDR and Cuba, East Germany's most important partner in the Western hemisphere – while also touching on the influences of other Latin American musical socialisms in both Germanys. After 1989, sounds of what was then termed the "Second World"– musics transformed by socialist governments and their international exchanges - entered the Western world music market, some with great success. Yet, to date, Second World practices of international musical exchange have been left out of world music scholarship, leading to impoverished understandings of the world music phenomenon and the Cold War soundscapes, relationships, and imaginaries that form the socialist sonic circuitry. This project aims to correct the blind spot by providing a concrete example of how the Second World created and presented itself to the world as an international political/artistic movement and of its wide-ranging and highly influential cultural flows.
The project's methodology combines archival research, oral history, and experimental methods. Aside from the catalogued collections at locations like the German Broadcasting Archive (Potsdam), Academy of the Arts (Berlin), German Music Archive (Leipzig), and Dance Archive (Leipzig), the project makes use of uncatalogued and, in part, previously unknown archival materials. These include 3000 reel-to-reel tapes containing Latin American music played on East German radio and held by the Ethnological Museum, the documents of the socialist-era Research Center for Popular Music at Humboldt University, and recordings and paperwork in possession of the German Broadcasting Archive in Potsdam. Interns will be able to assist Dr. Hutchinson in her work with these unique materials.
