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PERFORMING THE PATRON: BETTY FREEMAN AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2014

Abstract

Little can be said about music during the last century without encountering the men and women who supported it financially. Pierre Bourdieu's impression that the services rendered freely for the good of society reinforce a symbolic debt between giver and recipient complicates motivations behind patronage. Indeed, applying Bourdieu's theory to altruism in general – here, patronage in particular – highlights what could be thought of as a performance of futility: both giver and receiver understand the tenacious terms yet agree nonetheless to act out the process of reaching equilibrium. In the case of iconic music patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009), her support of the avant-garde seems, at times, to call into question on what side of this ‘performed futility’ she existed. This article considers ways in which Freeman's work as patron of the musical avant-garde allowed her to perform her identity as a woman and mother among a community on the fringe.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader: First Series (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1953)Google Scholar, p. 212.

2 Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, Richard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 183.

3 Quoted in Tommasini, Anthony, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997)Google Scholar, p. 520.

4 Freeman's primary teachers during these years were David Barnett, Beveridge Webster and Johana Harris, according to an interview with Frank Oteri in 2000. See ‘The Many Views of Betty Freeman’, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/the-many-views-of-betty-freeman/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

5 Freeman was still working on the Partch book up to her death; the manuscript for the book on her musicales is held at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives in Los Angeles, California. Manuscripts for the Still and Francis books are housed within the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, DC.

6 See Locke, Ralph and Barr, Cyrilla, eds., Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 61–2Google Scholar. During a radio interview in 2006, Freeman spoke of her initial support of Young: ‘So I sent a hundred dollars and I didn't get anything in return. When he got out, he sent me a collection of his records which I listened to and was fascinated. He's somebody who can play one note for four hours, but it's what he does with this one note, with the overtones and the undertones and how he combines it. I became a fan and I'm still a fan [after] all these years’. (Betty Freeman, interview by Vicki Curry, Segment 3: A Patron of Composers, Life and Times, KCET, aired 14 July 2006).

7 Emil Richards, telephone interview with the author, 5 October 2008.

8 Freeman to John Adams, 25 January 1988. Betty Freeman Papers, University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections.

9 Freeman to Adams, 1 February 1994. Betty Freeman Papers, University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections.

10 Freeman to Steve Reich, 9 March 1989. Betty Freeman Papers, University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections. Freeman later confessed her dislike of Different Trains to composer George Benjamin, saying ‘I don't like Reich's ‘Different Trains’ even though I commissioned it – I find it pompous, banal and also profane' (Freeman to George Benjamin, 8 May 1991).

11 Freeman to John Adams and Peter Sellars, 7 November 1992. Betty Freeman Papers, University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections.

12 Freeman to John Adams, 14 February 1997. Betty Freeman Papers, University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections.

13 Although Freeman's maternal attachment to those she supported is a distinctive quality, she is not unique in her outlook. Marjorie Garber relates that Charlotte van de Veer Quick Mason, the wealthy white patron of literature from the Harlem Renaissance, preferred to be called ‘Godmother’. See Garber, Patronizing the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, p. 12.

14 In an article from Connoisseur, February 1987, Barbara Jepson revealed that although ‘Freeman did not commission [Beverly Hills Housewife] … she claims to have suggested the impish title’. See Barbara Jepson, ‘A Cultivated Ear: Betty Freeman's Living Room is the West Coast's Center for New Music’, Connoisseur, February 1987.

15 Livingstone, Marco and Heymer, Kay, Hockney's People (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2003)Google Scholar, p. 78.

16 Within her home, Freeman encouraged the proliferation of cutting-edge developments in contemporary music. From 1981 to 1991 she hosted a series of musicales, inviting two composers each month to present his or her music before an elite audience of southern California's contemporary music cognoscenti: critics, composers, performers, and other interested patrons. In a sense, these events provided Freeman a way to perform her aesthetic preferences by ‘decorating’ her house with composers she admired and music she supported. The domestic realm of Freeman's world acted as a canvas on which she could project her inner predilections in art and music, as well as her intuitive feelings about the importance of specific composers.

17 Freeman to Harry Partch, 29 March 1972, Harry Partch Collection, Music and Performing Arts Library Special Collections, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

18 Danlee Mitchell, interview by the author, San Diego, CA, 25 September 2008.

19 Barthes, Roland, Roland Barthes, trans. Miller, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)Google Scholar, p. 36.

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23 Pasler, Jann, Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, p. 320.

24 Pasler, Writing Through Music, p. 344.

25 Anthony Tommasini, ‘A Medici of Modern Arts in Tune With Composers: Betty Freeman, Long a Patron of Americans, Shifts Her Maverick Focus to Europeans’, New York Times, 19 March 1998.

26 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, Tenth Anniversary Edition (London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar, p. 173.

27 Woolf, The Common Reader, p. 215.