POSTPONED: Listening Salon: Music and Intimacy in ‘The Americans’ Or, Listening to the Cold War on TV

This listening salon, inspired by the television show The Americans, is curated by Andrea Bohlman (UNC-CH) and Ryan Dohoney (Northwestern University). Their public conversation will allow us to listen and watch together, be excited, entranced, and moved by the series again, and to put these feelings in the context of contemporary geopolitics.

The Americans, a six-season television series on FX, was one of the most suspenseful spy dramas in recent years. Fabulously building on a true Cold War story, the show captured the tensions of 1980s geopolitics, inviting viewers to become emotionally invested in Russian and American spies (and their families, lovers, friends, and dreams) alike. A key to the dramatic heft of the series was its use of music and media: it carved out spaces for viewers to feel, sensationalized the overhearing and masked role-play of espionage, and underscored the power of intimacy as the show’s dramas unfolded.

Andrea F. Bohlman is Associate Professor in the UNC Department of Music. Her research concerns sound, affect, and social movements in East Central Europe, as well as the history of sound recording, particularly tape.

Ryan Dohoney is a musicologist and historian who writes on U.S. and European Modernism in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University.