ABSTRACT
The early 1950s were perhaps the most anxious and intense years of the Cold War. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, and followed this with a hydrogen bomb in 1953; the conflict in Korea seemed to many a preamble to a larger conflict. One instrumental work wholeheartedly celebrated by the SED was Günther Kochan’s Violin Concerto, a tuneful and pleasant work, which was likened to the Brahms Concerto. One of Stakuko’s main strategies was to convene meetings of local musicians or officials, and to use these to communicate the line from the centre. If the supremacy of live performance was recognised in both German states in the early 1950s, politicians and musicians were equally aware that music on the radio actually reached far more people. Music was consciously used as a ‘hook’, to get people to tune in to a particular station, thus exposing them to its spoken content.
