The Quest for Harmony: Classical Music, Emotion, and the Discourse on Human Rights in the United States since World War II

该项目源于这样一个假设，即在20世纪和21世纪，古典音乐具有特殊的政治影响力，并与关于人性、人权和道德的论述密切相关。本文以美国交响乐团为例，探讨了古典音乐在20世纪40年代以来作为情感和政治内容的载体的作用，以及美国文化外交在这一过程中的作用。古典音乐与人权之间存在着三种被学者们忽视的深刻联系，这三种联系表明，有必要对它们之间的相互作用进行更深入的研究。第一，音乐和人权都显示出普遍的模式，因此都是在国家间和跨国谈判和运作的。第二，这两个领域都与尊严、尊重和平等等价值观密切相关。他们指的是古典理想，启蒙时代的思想和理想主义，这些思想有共同的，主要是西方的起源。第三，古典音乐和人权话语对人们有强烈的情感影响，这一特点自第二次世界大战结束以来一直被美国人以文化外交的形式用来实现政治目标。受这三个观察的启发，该项目试图将情感作为一个概念框架。情感不仅表现了音乐、人权与美国文化外交之间的纠缠，也表现了国家与非国家行为者之间的紧张关系。长期研究始于20世纪40年代中期。当时，由于世界政治的发展以及第二次世界大战、冷战开始和前殖民地的非殖民化等动乱，政治和公共人权讨论在欧洲和北美变得重要起来。此外，与法国等其他西方国家相比，美国只是在1945年之后才开始利用其文化出口来实现政治目的。该项目旨在扩大冷战时期的边界，并通过这样做来研究美国文化外交的中断和（不）连续性，直到冷战结束和进入2000年代。9·11事件及其对美国文化政策的影响也是本研究的一部分。总而言之，该项目旨在提供新的见解，以了解音乐和人权话语的非正式、几乎不可见和几乎未被研究的做法、关系和影响。

The Project stems from the hypothesis that in the 20th and 21st centuries, classical music has had special political influence and has been closely linked to discourses on humanity, human rights and morality. A case study on U.S. American symphony orchestras aims to demonstrate both how classical music functioned as the bearer of emotions and political content since the 1940s, and how American Cultural Diplomacy played a role in this process.Three profound links between classical music and human rights, which have mostly been neglected by scholars, suggest the need for a more thorough look at their interplay. First, both music and human rights show universal patterns and are both therefore negotiated and operating inter- and transnationally. Second, both fields are closely linked to values such as dignity, respect and equality. They refer to classical ideals, ideas of the enlightenment era and of idealism, which have common, primarily Western, origins. Third, classical music and the human rights discourse have a strong emotional impact on people, a feature which has been used by U.S. American actors in the form of Cultural Diplomacy to accomplish political goals since the end of the Second World War.Inspired by these three observations, the project seeks to apply emotion as a conceptual framework. Emotion not only demonstrates the entanglement, but also the tension between music, human rights and U.S. American Cultural Diplomacy as well as of state and non-state actors. The long-term study starts in the mid-1940s. At that time, the political and public human rights discourse gained importance in Europe and North America due to developments in world politics and upheavals such as the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War and the decolonization of former colonies. Furthermore, in contrast to other Western states such as France, the U.S. only started to exploit its cultural exports for political means after 1945. The project intends to expand the boundaries of the usual periodization of the Cold War, and by doing so to study the disruptions and (dis)continuities of U.S. American Cultural Diplomacy until the end of the Cold War and into the 2000s. The events of 9/11 and their impact on American cultural policy are also part of this study. Altogether, this project seeks to provide new insights into informal, barely visible and nearly unstudied practices, relations and influences of music and the discourse on human rights.