Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise Series - Zero Hour - The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949

The project of freeing the German mind went by the name “re-orientation.” The term originated in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, which was led by Brigadier General Robert McClure. Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of military ends by nonmilitary means, and in the case of music it meant the promotion of jazz, American composition, international contemporary music, and other sounds that could be used to degrade the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy.

One key member of General McClure’s staff was the émigré Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov. “He’s hep on music and tells the Krauts how to go about it,” one military man said of this ebullient, charming, and slippery personality. Back in the twenties and early thirties, Nabokov had belonged to Serge Diaghilev’s cadre of composers at the Ballets Russes. His music was relatively negligible, his ability to cultivate high-level social and political connections positively virtuosic; in the postwar era he would show a Zelig-like ability to appear in the middle of any cultural imbroglio.

With the coming of OMGUS, Psychological Warfare evolved into Information Control, taking responsibility for all cultural activity in the occupied areas. In keeping with the re orientation paradigm, military and civilian experts were brought in to guide extant organizations and encourage new, forward-looking ones. Many in Information Control’s Music Branches had thorough training and a progressive outlook on contemporary music. Two of the brightest were stationed in Bavaria, the birthplace of the Nazi Party. John Evarts, who served there from 1946 on, had taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Schoenberg’s pupil Heinrich Jalowetz was on the faculty. Joining Evarts in 1948 was the Mississippi-born pianist Carlos Moseley, who had studied alongside Leonard Bernstein at Koussevitzky’s music school in the Berkshires.

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