In particular, we are interested in exploring how popular music was influenced by cultural, technological, and informal transfers, by the larger processes of modernization and development of leisure life, as well as by institutional cooperation between various states, either within the Socialist Bloc, or beyond it. The purpose of the workshop “Popular Music and Cultural Transfers during the Cold War” is to investigate the means through which popular music developed in the Eastern Bloc and circulated across borders and the Iron Curtain (on either side). From local, regional, or national folk influences, to Western based, but global reaching music genres, such as jazz, or rock, from national scenes of light music, to crossovers stemming from classical music, popular music has provided researchers with an immense canvas, which has been thus far covered only in part. Given its global dynamic during the second half of the 20 th century, popular music can prove to be an extremely fruitful ground of research for analyzing the cultural differences between socialist states, as well as the cultural transfers between these states and the Global South or the capitalist West. Furthermore, despite collective endeavors within the Bloc, each state sought to establish its own connections with other states from the Global South, or with capitalist states. East European socialist states had different political, economic, cultural and (last but not least) historical backgrounds, and they followed different paths during the Cold War period as well. Over the past decade, cutting-edge scholarship has started to dismantle this mantra and show that the Socialist Bloc was a much more complex and heterogeneous system than previously considered. It has been a long standing academic mantra that, during the Cold War, the Socialist Bloc was more or less a closed system, made of several satellite states which followed the communist path, as designed by the USSR.
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