Second World Music: Latin America, East Germany, and the Sonic Circuitry of Socialism

While “world music” became an important musical commodity in the “West” in the 1980s, an incipient world music practice with different ideologies and forms of circulation had already begun to emerge in the Eastern Bloc. This project looks at East German radio, artistic and scholarly exchanges, social dancing, and the Festival of Political Song to show how musical interchange connected diverse peoples around the socialist world, transformed sounds and practices, and created new forms of socialist solidarity and cultural formations. Through archival research and oral history, the project focuses on the musical and choreographic exchanges that linked the GDR and Cuba while also touching on the influences of other Latin American musical socialisms in both Germanys. It provides a concrete example of how the Second World created and presented itself to the world as an international political/artistic movement and of its wide-ranging and highly influential cultural flows.