ABSTRACT
The festivals that Nicolas Nabokov organised for the Congress for Cultural Freedom formed only a small part of the overall operation. The Cold War era formed an alliance with anti-communist liberalism in terms of the ideas of individuality, risk and the 'new frontier', specifically as these were expressed in Schlesinger's The Vital Center of 1949. Martin Brody has put the case for a link between the Cold War and musical modernism in relation to Milton Babbitt. This Cold War co-option of contemporary music happened just at the point when a New Music was being incubated at Darmstadt and Donauschingen – a music in which existing tendencies towards exclusivity, 'difficulty' and the cerebral were powerfully reinforced, and a practice whose seizure of legitimacy and authority would ensure dominance in the world of academic music for several decades.
