Associate Professor of Music pens chapter for new volume on music and fascism

Associate Professor of Music Emily Richmond Pollock’s chapter “Musical Exchange and Soft Power” has been published in the Cambridge Companion to Music and Fascism, a new book that takes a comparative look at the various roles played by all kinds of music and musicians in fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

Pollock’s contribution examines the institutional, economic, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped musical exchange between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. As a form of soft power that projected both the Axis alliance and its underlying rivalry, cultural diplomacy in realms such as opera, touring, and international festivals generated performative displays of unity and opportunities for propaganda that extended beyond live audiences.

Both regimes mobilized the musical canon to assert cultural dominance, with Germany emphasizing composers such as Mozart and Wagner while Italy highlighted Verdi, Puccini, and an openness to novelty that distinguished it from the German skepticism of modernism. Composers of new music likewise became symbolic assets in transnational exchange, and institutional frameworks for contemporary music became new venues in which to compete for cultural hegemony.

Despite differences in policy, aesthetics, and growing wartime constraints, Italy and Germany sought to position themselves at the center of a new European cultural order, a diplomatic dynamic with intriguing continuities into the Cold War.