This chapter focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of university new music centers and contemporary chamber ensembles, offering new insights into a commonly understood historiography of U.S. twentieth-century music: the dominance and prestige of experimental music and serialism at universities. Most notably, composers at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Mills College served dually as outside experts and commissioned artists and performers. Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky benefited greatly from their involvement at Rockefeller and the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center. The composers and performers justified their work initially through the Soviet threat and rivalries with European studios, and later with innovation and creativity. The new music ensembles solidified a musical circuit that crisscrossed the country, making stops at many Rockefeller-funded centers. The foundation revealed ways it was both an advertent and inadvertent patron of what New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant pejoratively referred to as “foundation music.”
For three weeks in 1955 and 1956 the Everyman Opera Company staged Porgy and Bess in Leningrad and Moscow. In the previous two years, the Robert Breen and Blevins Davis production of Gershwin's opera had toured Europe and Latin America, funded by the U.S. State Department. Yet when Breen negotiated a performance tour to Russia, the American government denied funding, stating, among other reasons, that a production would be “politically premature.” Surprisingly, however, the opera was performed with the Soviet Ministry of Culture paying the tour costs in full. I argue that this tour, negotiated amid the growing civil rights movement, was a non-paradigmatic example of cultural exchange at the beginning of the Cold War: an artistic product funded at different times by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Through an examination of the tour's archival holdings, interviews with surviving cast members, and the critical reception in the historically black press, this essay contributes to ongoing questions of Cold War scholarship, including discussions on race, identity, and the unpredictable nature of cultural exchange.
This chapter analyzes several definitions and understandings of expertise, as well as its relational and social aspects. It investigates the role of artists and arts managers as “contributory experts.” Grantmaking institutions invited consultants and panelists to help them make cultural policy. One Rockefeller vice president referred to his music advisory committee as his “wise men” who guided the foundation in “the most creative and promising direction.” These experts, in turn, determined and defined artistic excellence and quality, deciding the fate of hundreds of millions of dollars in music. They chose which kinds of music and which composers and performers received foundation and government money. Experts evaluated criteria they believed to be objective, such as budgets and project feasibility, while also expressing their own subjective tastes and preferences. Peer and expert review provided a system of legitimization and authority while concentrating power in a remarkably small and overlapping network of artists.
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