Peter Schmelz is an associate professor of musicology at Arizona State University. In his Academy project, Schmelz studies the roles of non-state networks in cultural exchanges of music across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Focusing on Russia, Ukraine, and West Germany from the late 1950s through the early 1990s, he looks at how representative individuals from various cultural arenas worked within and around the systems of their respective countries to advance their own (often contradictory) political and aesthetic goals.