Introduction: Understanding Musical Diplomacies — Movements on the “Scenes”

The exploration of the links between music and diplomacy has gained renewed interest in recent years, around what is called the acoustic turn in international relations. The reflection presented in this book aims to contribute to this turning point by putting the emphasis and the focus on the notion of “scenes.” The perspective adopted in this volume is to study music as a series of movements in international relations defined as scenes. The different chapters that compose this volume share several ideas about the acoustic turn in IR. They rely on an extension of musical material: sounds and voices are not restricted to music per se. This book shows that music is not an artifice or an ornament in diplomatic practices. To understand musical diplomacy is not only to gain access to the musical scenes “made” by ambassadors or diplomatic agents (Part 1). It aims at capturing the moments during which these ambassadors think of the diplomatic stage as a musical scene (Part 2), how international music scenes emerge, where the musical challenges become some objects of diplomatic negotiations (the music scene is imported on the diplomatic scene) (Part 3). These processes prove that sounds and voices make diplomacy and even more, world politics (Part 4). Contributors to this volume come from several disciplines (history, musicology, sociology, political science) and do not, therefore, mobilize the same framework for documenting and analyzing these diplomatic and musical scenes—a real pluridisciplinary look at music and international relations