“No Political Significance of Any Kind”: Glenn Gould's Tour of the Soviet Union and the Culture of the Cold War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The article examines the history of Glenn Gould's 1957 concert tour of the ussr as a pivotal moment in the Cold War and the evolution of Canadian cultural diplomacy. Classical music was a disarming weapon in the conduct of foreign relations because it was understood to have universal significance that transcended politics and ideology, even though the critical rhetoric of music performance often invoked notions of artistic power and triumph. Gould was the first North American pianist to perform behind the Iron Curtain, and his visit was a spectacular success artistically and politically. Western commentators played up his individualism, national identity, and modernist repertoire, describing the impact of his performances on Soviet audiences and translating the significance of that experience back home. Privately endorsed, but not officially sponsored by the Canadian government, the tour was organized by Gould's manager, Walter Homburger. Drawing on government documents about the planning of the tour, media coverage, personal memoirs, and the lectures about culture in the ussr that Gould delivered on his return to Toronto, the article explores the role of non-state actors in advancing the interests of Canadian foreign policy both at home and abroad.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".