This fall, the U.S. Department of State launched the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative to elevate music as a diplomatic tool to promote peace and exchange of ideas. In partnership with the music industry, the initiative includes a music mentorship program to bring artists from around the world to the U.S. for networking and training; a fellowship for scholars researching the intersection of arts and science; and using music as an English language learning tool around the globe.  

So, what’s the State Department doing in the music business? Actually, the State Department has a long music diplomacy history, and an expert on this is Carol A. Hess, a musicologist and Distinguished Professor of Music in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.  

Hess has written two books on the U.S. government’s cultural and mostly musical outreach — the most recent Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics, published in February, and the 2013 book Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream. Hess herself has been the beneficiary of cultural diplomacy programs in the form of two Fulbright Fellowships to teach in Spain and Argentina; those fellowships sparked her interest in the State Department programs.  

When Hess — who in 1994 became the first person to earn a doctorate in musicology at UC Davis — entered the field, scholars were paying scant attention to Latin American classical music and almost none to music of the 19th and 20th centuries in the region, let alone cultural diplomacy in Latin America.  

“In the 1990s, several musicologists began working on the special challenges involved with music and cultural diplomacy,” said Hess, who returned to the UC Davis Department of Music as a professor in 2012. “Most of these scholars, however, worked on the East-West divide of the Cold War. I realized that the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world wasn’t getting much attention, so I decided to plunge into that.” 

Read the full story.