UCLA

This dissertation examines how music and listening became instruments of American psychological warfare. Centering the Office of Strategic Services’ MUSAC Project during the Second World War, it traces the institutional organization of covert musical persuasion and the postwar persistence of personnel and cultural expertise. MUSAC connected American intelligence, British clandestine broadcasting, commercial recording networks, and émigré artists to produce music for German soldiers and civilians under concealed Allied sponsorship. Drawing on archival correspondence, production records, lyrics, scores, recordings, and reports of listening, I reconstruct the relationships among institutional directives, musical decisions, broadcast circulation, and evaluations of efficacy. I develop strategic listening as a method connecting musical analysis, institutional history, semiotics, and acoustemology. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis illuminate how institutional priorities shaped the selection, transformation, and sequencing of musical materials.I argue that MUSAC made entertainment itself a medium of psychological warfare. Familiar repertories, rewritten texts, vocal personae, and gendered address were coordinated to redirect attachments to home, intimacy, and cultural memory toward disaffection with Nazi leadership and continued fighting. Jewish émigré participation is situated within particular careers, antifascist commitments, and artistic claims to American belonging. Mobilizing artists and cultural practices repudiated by Nazi institutions enacted an anti-entartete reversal. Women’s administrative and creative labor likewise expands the account of musical authorship to include operational decisions and institutional coordination.Distinguishing persuasive design from demonstrated effects, I examine how reports of listening became institutional knowledge and claims of operational success. Postwar personnel histories and comparisons with later clandestine broadcasting examine how cultural expertise and practices of listening operated across changing intelligence institutions. I propose an acoustemology of strategic warfare to explain the recursive relationship among cultural knowledge, sonic intervention, and institutional listening: institutions drew on cultural experience to construct musical operations, then interpreted accounts of listening to assess those operations and consider further uses. The supplementary research spreadsheet documents 304 recording entries and their personnel, repertory, and classifications.