Music on the Frontline

In his position as Secretary General of the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Nicholas Nabokov gave music a high profile in the work of this Cold War organisation, producing four international musical festivals under its auspices. This book reveals that Nabokov's musical involvement with the CCF was a struggle on two fronts. Apparently a defence of Western modernism against 'backward', 'provincial' Soviet music, Nabokov's writings show this to have meshed closely with the domestic concern - shared by many intellectuals - that high culture was being undermined by an increasingly culturally aware middle class.