The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets - Lloyd Biggle Jr.

At the same time that Le Guin’s League of Worlds was maturing into the Ekumen, many space years before Banks’ Culture, on the theme of inducting a planet and its inhabitants into a more mature, benevolent confederation, here is Gurnil and the Interplanetary Relations Bureau.
 
Dunno about you, but I am fond of science fiction with an unlikely hero and an arresting title.
 
Biggle wrote this in 1968 and I read it on travels in Nicaragua in 2000, when the portrayal of its female character was already dreadfully dated. Move past those three pages and Biggle will give you a satisfying read via an intriguing SF imagination and packing a lot into a short novel. You just have to feel a certain admiration for a people with no interest whatsoever in politics but a deep love of the arts (the people of Kurr, I mean, not Biggle, although maybe him, too?)