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Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-garde Music

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.41.1.10

1945-2349

Noel Rivera,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

In a New York Times concert review on June 23, 1968, music critic Allen Hughes wrote:Beneath Hughes's sincere optimism lay a definite unawareness of Latin American contemporary music landscapes and, consequently, an interpretation grounded in stereotyped expectations for Latin Americans vis-à-vis North Americans and Europeans. In his opinion, these Latin Americans managed to create new music of distinctive taste, full of optimistic expressions, far removed from the serious and dogmatic avant-garde sounds from the North. One could infer that, for him, Latin America and avant-garde aesthetics had been, until that very moment, incompatible.Something he might or might not have recognized in the first place is that the five composers in question—Rafael Aponte-Ledée, alcides lanza, Armando Krieger, Edgar Valcárcel, and Antonio Tauriello—were all affiliated with a highly influential musical institution: the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM; Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies). Now, over fifty years after this concert, a detailed account of CLAEM's creation, overall output, and reception is narrated by Eduardo Herrera in Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-garde Music, part of Oxford University Press's Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music series.2Led by Alberto Ginastera and partly financed by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), CLAEM was one of the three art centers of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT), an influential, cutting-edge establishment in Buenos Aires associated with avant-garde discourses.3 From 1962 to 1971, a total of fifty-four composers from thirteen countries took up residence as fellows in Buenos Aires in twenty-month sessions, working with local and guest composers and enjoying unprecedented financial and technological resources.Herrera's interdisciplinary methodology combines rigorous archival work in Argentina, the United States, and Europe with formal and informal interviews, qualitative fieldwork, and musical analysis, in a narrative he sometimes intertwines with his own impressions and research experiences. This approach not only challenges the frequently insisted-upon divide between analyst and object of study but also models the personal and material exchanges that he highlights in assembling the history of CLAEM and its people. One must stress as well that this book does not merely arise from the constant necessity to explain to a perennially oblivious audience that which is widely known in another part of the world, but from serious historical and critical concerns of real value to those working within Latin American academic circles. While in direct dialogue with work published in Argentina and the United States, it represents a huge step for the historical and critical account of this vital institution and of music production in Latin America overall.4Chapters one and seven, respectively, outline the general structuring principles of CLAEM at its founding and address the circumstances of its demise. The remaining chapters develop a focused narrative following two broad inquiries: chapters two through four explore the configurations, intersections, and encounters between the main actors that prompted CLAEM's creation; chapters five and six analyze the discourses on avant-gardism and Latin Americanism that the Center articulated and prompted. Images and photographs aid the reader in visualizing the networks Herrera delineates. Manuscripts, too, are reproduced as unengraved images, underscoring the archival significance of his achievement.The introduction discusses the project's motivation and its contribution to scholarship about philanthropy as cultural diplomacy, elite formation, and Latin Americanism. In chapter one, Herrera provides a general overview of CLAEM in the context of the ITDT, including some impressions of each cohort's artistic and social experiences there. Within this institutional synopsis, three aspects are worth highlighting: 1) the frequent and influential visits of internationally acclaimed composers such as Aaron Copland, Earle Brown, Ianis Xenakis, Oliver Messiaen, Cristóbal Halffter, and Mario Davidovsky; 2) the impact that CLAEM's pioneering Electronic Music Laboratory had on the region's contemporary music scene; and 3) the dialogues and debates between CLAEM and Buenos Aires's musical/artistic milieu, which impacted the institution's musical production and reception.In chapter two, Herrera traces “discourses of philanthropy into their actual transmission, exchange, and interpretation” by uncovering the previously underestimated role that James P. Harrison, an RF executive, played in this history (46). Through close examination of Harrison's travel notes and letters, as well as the foundation's documents, Herrera follows his encounters with Ginastera, the Di Tella family, and others from 1958 until 1961, the year he prepared and submitted the grant proposal, the acceptance of which created CLAEM. Moving from individual to institution, in chapter three Herrera explores the intricate ties between philanthropy and Cold War foreign policy in the United States by delving into the circumstances and motivations behind the RF's funding of contemporary Latin American music. Here, Herrera challenges notions of philanthropy as independent from public and private spheres. He argues that, beyond its fair-minded commitment to social reform, the RF supported the arts in Latin America in order to neutralize growing socialist sentiments in the region and to link concepts of artistic freedom with democratic-capitalist values. Herrera also notes that the RF (like Hughes, quoted above) harbored stereotypical ideas about what Latin American composition should be, assuming that the Center would promote and study the region's indigenous music.In another study of the relationship between philanthropic ventures and larger political and economic concerns, in chapter four Herrera turns to Guido and Torcuato Di Tella, the founders of the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation, the parent organization of the ITDT. Herrera examines why and how the brothers came to embrace a set of politicized ideals about economic development and philanthropy—their family history, their education in the United States, and their quest to consolidate their family's elite status in Argentina—that further spurred their support of avant-garde art forms. Just as he argues for Harrison's decisive role in the founding of CLAEM, Herrera highlights the agency of Enrique Oteiza, the director of the ITDT and a close friend of the Di Tella Brothers, in the Institute's support of CLAEM and, more specifically, the creation of its Electronic Music Laboratory. The chapter also relates the demise of the three ITDT arts centers to the family's changing political values and personal relationships.With the institutional pillars of his narrative situated, Herrera examines a sampling of the artistic output at CLAEM, providing some valuable glimpses of little-known works. Considering avant-gardism as a “particular positioning of the artist with respect to the field of cultural production in which they participated,” in chapter five he uses a series of short case studies to illuminate the wide range of compositional and political positions that CLAEM composers took during the Center's almost ten years of existence (106). Herrera carefully points out that CLAEM was not conceived by Ginastera and the RF as a center for avant-garde music: the fact that so many of the fellows adhered to such aesthetics resulted in part from the institution's general commitment to artistic freedom, heightened by the transnational exchanges it facilitated. Two further arguments are particularly relevant for future inquiries: 1) the artistic collaboration within the ITDT; and 2) the intricate correspondence between avant-gardism/experimentalism and political activism in that context.Chapter six centers on Latin Americanism. Herrera argues that despite the Pan American values underlying the CLAEM foundation (because of Ginastera and the RF's involvement), composition fellows consciously developed a particularly Latin Americanist discourse as both an aesthetic stance and a professional strategy. Significantly, this reformulated discourse was elicited in part by a collective decolonial desire, and therefore “not imposed from outside, but rather a product of the region itself” (131). It becomes clear through Herrera's discussion that the unprecedented transnational exchanges facilitated by CLAEM not only triggered this new way of articulating a Latin Americanist discourse but also allowed a generation of composers to envision, collectively, a new way of existing on the continent. The CLAEM experience forged unseen networks of solidarity with strong artistic, institutional, and personal implications throughout the continent, and, in more than one way, it defined the careers and activism of an entire generation of Latin American composers. Chapter seven briefly outlines the demise of the institution from the financial, political, and personal perspectives of its main officials, and considers the institutions and programs in Buenos Aires (particularly for electronic music) that, in various ways, continued CLAEM's legacy.As can be expected, little academic work exists on almost any CLAEM composer. Therefore, future investigations, including those aimed at exploring the many interactions between CLAEM and the other ITDT centers, are needed to uphold and extend some of Herrera's arguments. In that sense, this significant work, broad in scope and detailed in realization, does not merely uncover the closed-off history of a vanished institution and its people, but it also presents itself as a step forward, as an invitation to open a universe of possible academic and artistic inquiries that could reframe the ways we think of Western contemporary art music production and reception in the late twentieth century. For that reason, a translation of this book should be made available to the entire Spanish-speaking community soon.