Abstract
The exploration of the links between music and diplomacy has gained renewed interest in recent years, around what is called the acoustic turn in international relations. The reflection presented in this book aims to contribute to this turning point by putting the emphasis and the focus on the notion of “scenes.” The perspective adopted in this volume is to study music as a series of movements in international relations defined as scenes. The different chapters that compose this volume share several ideas about the acoustic turn in IR. They rely on an extension of musical material: sounds and voices are not restricted to music per se. This book shows that music is not an artifice or an ornament in diplomatic practices. To understand musical diplomacy is not only to gain access to the musical scenes “made” by ambassadors or diplomatic agents (Part 1). It aims at capturing the moments during which these ambassadors think of the diplomatic stage as a musical scene (Part 2), how international music scenes emerge, where the musical challenges become some objects of diplomatic negotiations (the music scene is imported on the diplomatic scene) (Part 3). These processes prove that sounds and voices make diplomacy and even more, world politics (Part 4). Contributors to this volume come from several disciplines (history, musicology, sociology, political science) and do not, therefore, mobilize the same framework for documenting and analyzing these diplomatic and musical scenes—a real pluridisciplinary look at music and international relations.
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Notes
- 1.
However, some musicians would have allowed a flow of information abroad via partitions that present a coded message. But this practice refers more to intelligence or espionage than to diplomacy. For instance, the novel Imprimatur is a story of the French guitarist and composer Robert de Visée as a confidential informer. Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti, Imprimatur (Paris: Pocket, 2004).
- 2.
Lucien Bély, “Musique et musiciens dans les relations internationales à l’époque moderne,” in Christian Meyer (ed.), Le musicien et ses voyages. Pratiques, réseaux et représentations (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts Verlag, 2003), pp. 9–27.
- 3.
Jean-François de Raymond, L’Esprit de la diplomatie. Du particulier à l’universel (Paris: Manitoba/Les Belles Lettres, 2015), p. 222.
- 4.
See, for instance, Olivier Urbain (ed.), Music in Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics (London: I.B. Tauris, in association with Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, 2008); Arild Bergh and John Sloboda, “Music and Art in Conflict Transformation,” Music and Arts in Action, 2(2) (2010): 1–17.
- 5.
John M. O’Connell, “Introduction,” in John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (eds.), Music and conflict (Urbana, Chicago & Springfield: The University of Illinois Press, 2010).
- 6.
Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, “Epilogue: Ethnomusicologists as Advocates” in Music and conflict, p. 246.
- 7.
Stephen Walt, “Liberals are musicians, realists are jocks,” 2011, available at http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/24/liberals-are-musicians-realists-are-jocks/ (accessed July 2016).
- 8.
Roland Bleiker, “Aesthetic Turn in IR,” Millennium. Journal of International Studies 30(3) (2001): 509–533.
- 9.
The realist adjective here does not refer to realist theories inspired by IR but all theories founded on the idea that reality exists independently of representations of the observer.
- 10.
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 11.
Bleiker, “Aesthetic Turn in IR.”
- 12.
Roland Bleiker, “In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium 45(2) (2017): 258–264.
- 13.
M.I. Franklin, “Introductory Improvisations on a Theme: Resounding International Relations,” in M. I. Franklin (ed.), Resounding International Relations. On Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 7.
- 14.
Iver B. Neumann, “Diplomacy and the Arts,” in Costas Constantinou, Pauline Kerr, Paul Sharp (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Diplomacy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2016), pp. 114–122.
- 15.
Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher (eds.), Culture and International History (New York & Oxford: Bergham Books, 2003).
- 16.
Akira Iriye, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History, 3 (Spring) (1979): 115–128.
- 17.
Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).
- 18.
Antoine Marès, Anaïs Fléchet, “Introduction,” Relations internationales, (155) (2013): 3–9; “Musique et relations internationales I,” Relations internationales, (155) (2013); “Musique et relations internationales II,” Relations internationales, Paris/Genève, (156) (2014).
- 19.
Danielle Fossler-Lussier, 2007, Music Divided. Bartók Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press).
- 20.
Jacques Sémelin, “Communication and resistance. The instrumental role of Western radio stations in opening up Eastern Europe,” Réseaux. The French Journal of communication, 2(1) (1994): 55–69.
- 21.
Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto and Damien Mahiet (eds.), Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 22.
Jessica Gienow-Hecht (ed.), Music and International History in the Twentieth Century (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015).
- 23.
Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, selected and introduced by R. Leppert (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 113.
- 24.
Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (London: Vintage Books, 1992).
- 25.
“La merveille de la musique est de n’être que mouvement, c’est comme l’eau que l’on regarde et tout y bouge vaguement,” Louis Aragon, Le Fou d’Elsa (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 265. First verses of “La merveille de la musique” harmonized in two voices with ostinato by Marcel Corneloup (Lyon: A Cœur Joie, 1977).
- 26.
François Châtelet, Chronique des idées perdues. Conversations avec André Akoun (Paris: Stock, 1977), p. 237.
- 27.
Christopher Hasty, “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music,” in Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (eds.), Sounding the Virtual Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), p. 3.
- 28.
Châtelet, Chronique des idées perdues, p. 237.
- 29.
Gilles Deleuze, Périclès et Verdi. La philosophie de François Chatelet (Paris, ed de minuit, 1988), p. 26.
- 30.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis & London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 302. It is worth noting that a book dedicated to Deleuze and international relations did not refer to this perspective in order to study alter-globalization movements. See Peter Lenco, Deleuze and world Politics. Alter-globalizations and nomad science (London & New York: Routledge, 2012).
- 31.
Deleuze, Périclès et Verdi, p. 26.
- 32.
Hasty, “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music,” p. 5.
- 33.
Jean-Godefroy Bidima, “Intensity, Music and Heterogenesis in Deleuze,” in Hulse and Nesbitt (eds.), Sounding the Virtual Gilles Deleuze, p. 156.
- 34.
Noé Cornago, Plural Diplomacies. Normative Predicaments and Functional Imperatives (Leiden & Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2013).
- 35.
Geoffrey Wiseman, “Polylateralism and New Modes of Global Dialogue,” Discussion Papers No. 59 (Leicester: Leicester Diplomatic Studies Programme, 1999).
- 36.
Hasty, “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music,” p. 5.
- 37.
Andrew F. Cooper, “The Changing Nature of Diplomacy” in Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 35–53.
- 38.
Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “The World Is Ready To Listen: Symphony Orchestras and the Global Performance of America,” Diplomatic History, 36(1) (2012): 19–20.
- 39.
Frank Schimmelfenning, “Goffman meets IR: Dramaturgical Action in International Community,” International Review of Sociology, 12(3) (2002): 417–437. Guillaume Devin, “Observer la scène internationale: une perspective goffmannienne,” in Guillaume Devin, 10 Concepts sociologiques en relations internationales (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2015), pp. 9–28.
- 40.
- 41.
Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux, “Du cluster à la scène: l’encastrement des activités artistiques dans le territoire,” L’Observatoire, La Revue des Politiques Culturelles, 47 (January) (2016): 10. Our translation.
- 42.
Marcel Freydefont, “Scène, scènes, essaimage d’un mot,” L’Observatoire, La Revue des Politiques Culturelles, 47 (January) (2016): 16. Our translation.
- 43.
Freydefont, “Scène, scènes, essaimage d’un mot,” p. 15. Our translation.
- 44.
Will Straw, “Systems of articulation logics of change: communities and scenes in popular music,” Cultural Studies, 5(3) (1991): 368–388.
- 45.
Gérôme Guibert, Guy Bellavance, “Présentation,” in “La notion de ‘scène’ entre sociologie de la culture et sociologie urbaine: genèse, actualités et perspectives,” Cahiers de recherche sociologique, 57 (2014): 8.
- 46.
Straw, “Systems of articulation logics of change.”
- 47.
Gérôme Guibert, “La scène comme outil d’analyse en sociologie de la culture,” L’Observatoire, La Revue des Politiques Culturelles, 47 (January) (2016): 17–20.
- 48.
Will Straw, “Scènes: ouvertes et restreintes,” Cahiers de recherche sociologique, 57 (2014): 20. The original English version of this article may be found at https://www.academia.edu/16305637/Two_Kinds_of_Scene?auto=download
- 49.
Straw, “Scènes: ouvertes et restreintes,” p. 28.
- 50.
Straw, “Scènes: ouvertes et restreintes,” p. 28.
- 51.
Freydefont, “Scène, scènes, essaimage d’un mot,” p. 16.
- 52.
See, for instance, Vincent Pouliot, 2008, “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities,” International Organization, 62(2): 257–288; Vincent Pouliot, International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Emanuel Adler and Pouliot Vincent (eds.), International Practices (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 53.
Iver B. Neumann, “To Be a Diplomat,” International Studies Perspectives, 6 (2005): 72–93.
- 54.
Hubert Le Blanc, Defense de la Basse de Viole, Contre les Entréprises du Violon Et les Prétentions du Violoncel. Par Monsieur Hubert le Blanc, Docteur en Droit (Amsterdam: Mortier, 1740).
- 55.
- 56.
Will Straw, “Scenes and sensibilities,” Public, 22(23) (2001): 253.
- 57.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and The Cooked. Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 18.
- 58.
Eugene Scott, “Obama offers to beatbox for Vietnamese rapper,” CNN, 26 May 2016, http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/25/politics/vietnamese-rapper-barack-obama/ (accessed March 24, 2017).
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Prévost-Thomas, C., Ramel, F. (2018). Introduction: Understanding Musical Diplomacies—Movements on the “Scenes”. In: Ramel, F., Prévost-Thomas, C. (eds) International Relations, Music and Diplomacy . The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63163-9_1
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