The United States and Music

Today, female entertainers receive the same accolades that once seemed reserved for males. With a combination of talent, beauty, and class,  many female artists are now on par with some of the biggest male acts in the world.  Music is a vehicle that can entertain and promote dialogue, and women have played a part in conveying many messages that made a difference and served as positive examples for people’s lives. 

Take note of the book, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement, by Ruth Feldstein.  Musical performances are often booked and categorized in order to serve a particular outcome, but are ultimately measured based on the performances themselves. Ruth Feldstein went on to say, “The music and songs women sang, the records they sold, and the films and television shows in which they appeared where not direct extensions of preexisting political organizing or ideologies and were not mirrors that simply reflected back entrenched black activism.” The conditions that existed during the Civil Rights Movement were issues that had existed for hundreds of years. The social activism of the 1960s reflected something different.  No matter what that era appeared to be, others  injected their agendas into the situation. Those agendas still came from a colonizer-like point of view. 

Music is a response, and people should pay more attention to where those responses ultimately  come from. The book, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture, by Leonard B. Meyer addresses culture, as it relates to musical styles. Meyer stated how, “There are many musical styles. They vary from culture to culture, from epoch to epoch within the same culture, and even within the same epoch and culture. The plurality of musical styles results because styles exist not as unchanging physical processes in the world of nature, but as psychological processes ingrained as habits in the perceptions, dispositions, and responses of those who have learned through practice and experience to understand a particular style.”  The stimuli that creates certain styles come from that particular sound being categorized, remembered, and repeated.  When a style of music resonates with the masses, they gravitate toward that message and sound. Depending on how unique it is, that new sound may become its own genre.

A positive benefit of music  is demonstrated when someone from a particular country previously had an idea or held onto a  stereotype about another group of people, and gained a new perspective of them by meeting or learning more about that outside culture. Music is a universal language that has been used to bring people together, and has been known to bridge gaps  between distances.  The book,  Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier provides an example of how music has been used to influence perception.  Fosler-Lussier explained how,  “The Cultural Presentations program was formally begun as the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs in 1954, though it had roots in the U.S.-Latin American exchange programs of the World War II era.” The culture of music has been used to demonstrate commonalities among people. It opens the door for politics to be reconsidered in a way that allows opposing nations to live more peacefully.

Through the use of technology, music can be delivered in ways that do not include physical travel requirements. Satellites, computers, and mobile phones spread music’s messages in ways that were once unimaginable.  Fosler-Lussier explained how, “Musical diplomacy continues today in a limited way. U.S. embassies may sponsor concerts, and the State Department and Defense Department underwrite several tours each year. Nonetheless, the heyday of U.S. musical diplomacy came to an end in the early 1970s, when shrinking budgets forced the program to narrow its focus to the Soviet bloc countries and reduced the number of artists who could be sponsored each year.”  Despite the decrease in musical diplomacy, it must be remembered that music is still being used to encourage communication between nations all over the world. Some nations do not want certain messages to reach their people, and those regimes take measures to prevent unwanted music from reaching their shores.