The Rockefeller Foundation, the University New Music Center, and “Foundation Music”

Abstract

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.”

Funding bodies

“…19. Michael Sy Uy's (2020) salient and allied research also charters new territory with regard to music policies and norms at the time that I completed my manuscript revision. Whereas Binkiewicz focused her study on the realm of visual art, Uy's work weighs the role played by public and private funding bodies in institutionalizing western classical music artists and models of production.…”

FUNDING BODIES: FIVE DECADES OF DANCE MAKING AT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS by Sarah Wilbur. 2021. Middletown: CT: Wesleyan University Press. 296 pp., 18 photos. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780819580528. $95.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780819580511.

“…Funding Bodies deftly tackles fifty years of the agency's activities in three fifteen-year sections from 1965 to 2016, filling a scholarly gap in dance history and arts policy research, as the first monograph about the NEA Dance Program. The publication adds to a series of recent, discipline-specific investigations into the NEA, including Michael Sy Uy's Ask the Experts: How Ford, Rockefeller, and the NEA Changed American Music (2020), and Donna M. Binkiewicz's, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1980 (2004). Wilbur supports her readers through the administrative history of the NEA by deploying the three “hegemonic ‘verbs’ of dance authorization:” leveraging, touring, and incorporating (23).…”