Rhythms of War

What the science of politics says about war and classical music

This blogletter’s name contains at least three meanings:

• I work for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I try to work some Mass content into everything—how better than a quote from the cynical failgrandson Henry Adams about Massachusetts?

• Political science really is the systematic study of hatreds. Politics ain’t beanbag. Mapping and understanding the clashes that animate the political is a worthy intellectual endeavor.

• It’s a semi-irony because it is, as often as not, about things that I like.

Today’s edition fits into the third bullet point. It’s about a cool new paper in the Journal of Peace Research by Masanori Kikuchi that tracks how war and culture are related. Specifically, Kikuchi tracks how war and the end of war affects what pieces orchestras play.

International relations scholars are more systematically exploring popular culture than they used to. The pieces often begin from a defensive crouch, insisting that popular culture can too tell us something about the world or be worthy of study in its own right. The implied contrast is not always clear. Mostly, I think, the authors mean to suggest that popular culture is worthy of study alongside war, trade, and the bureaucratic minutiae of international organizations. But sometimes I think there’s also a sense that it’s the popular bit of popular culture that needs to be defended, a kind of pseudo-radical pose that embraces discussing popular things as a way of shocking the bourgeois sensibilities of the academy. Out with Ken Waltz, in with Kim Kardashian—tres outre!¹

If that forms part of the contrast, it is somewhat ironic, inasmuch as my impression is that working social scientists are, if anything, rather pedestrian and middlebrow in their tastes. (My highest-brow taste is probably for Philip Glass, which is not all that highbrow, and there seem to be a lot more discussions about sports and Marvel than opera and Mahler at the conferences I attend.) If anything, there’s likely more pop culture and IR research than high culture and IR research, at least in the past decade—and even there, the first one that comes to mind on high culture is a (very good) article by Joseph MacKay about the social positioning of the art world, which isn’t quite about the art itself.

The past few years has, however, seen a welcome turn toward empirical inquiry into popular culture and IR that has embraced a variety of methods and more specified theories. (For instance!) This has raised the bar: no more scholar-fans , instead we will have real and useful inquiry with research designs and everything.

Kikuchi’s work brings these trends together nicely. Specifically, this intervention stands up for high culture in an unapologetic and fitting way while also bringing to bear a careful, challenging research design that combines original data collection and analysis. Kikuchi wanted to understand whether liberal democracies really are as tolerant as they claim. Despite the press releases that liberal regimes put out, the recurrent outbreaks of intolerance associated with international conflict suggest that liberalism is no antidote for xenophobia in the cultural realm: think of World War I’s “Liberty Cabbage” and the Global War on Terror’s “Freedom Fries”, to say nothing of the more dangerous anti-German and anti-Japanese campaigns in the United States associated with the World Wars.

Kikuchi proposes an original measure: the frequency with which orchestras play conductors from other countries. He built an original dataset of 10 orchestras’ performances from 1900 to 1960, a total of 29,135 concerts and 125,530 pieces, that included the nationality of each piece of music measured as the birthplace of its composer, as well as other data like the date of its composition. (On the one hand, only 10 orchestras; on the other hand, it spans five countries and includes many of the ost important orchestras in the world, which of particular interest since we care about the heights of high culture.)

Kikuchi finds, somewhat unsurprisingly, that the outbreak of war leads to a sharp drop in the frequency with which belligerents play the music of the “other side”. What’s more surprising is that this drop never fully reverses for the United States and United Kingdom: their orchestras played enemy (German!) pieces much less frequently after the war than beforehand. On the reverse side, Japanese and German orchestras played Allied composers more frequently after defeat than beforehand.

This, I think, is cool. It’s a literal systematic organization of hatreds. It suggests that global rankings of prestige really do shift in all fields after wars. It takes seriously the notion of how we can move beyond proxy measures of status (like diplomatic exchange) to think about how international macrophenomena affect seemingly unrelated fields. And it generates new avenues for future testing. Pretty good for a first solo publication by a graduate student.

1. My French has been deemed noteworthy. Specifically, the Académie Française has issued a demarche calling on me to stop using French in any setting whatsoever.