How a community told its story through opera: exploring the techniques and methods in a co-created production

Abstract

In the musicological literature, the controversial 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace is commonly discussed with reference to Dmitry Shostakovich and Aaron Copland. This paper discusses the Conference from the perspective of music critic Olin Downes, who resigned the chairmanship of the Fine Arts Panel after his integrity was questioned. Downes’s case is exemplary of those who in the polarized climate of the late 1940s struggled to hold the center, and, as do the governmental and private archival sources on which this study is predicated, prompts us to reassess common assumptions concerning the Conference’s political allegiance and provenance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.