POP/ROCK - Aug. 24, 1988

Perestroika-- Russian for “restructuring”--will take on a new shade of meaning in October when 20 American songwriters embark for a “songwriters summit” in Moscow and Helsinki that’s being called “Music Speaks Louder Than Words.” In details of the trip delivered by sponsors and participants at a press conference Tuesday, the songwriting squad will meet with their Soviet counterparts and compose some tunes together, thereby restructuring both teams’ notions of pop songwriting. Then, organizers say, an album containing the fruits of the “summit” will be mastered in the United States and released in both countries, with some of the profits going to the AFS Intercultural Exchange.