During the second quarter of the twentieth century, Latin American composers displayed cultural agency and entrepreneurial skills in creating new musical works and modern musical scenes. These musicians challenged the musical status quo in Latin America and its compositional trends, which aligned with either neo-Romanticism or neo-Impressionism. A network of composers, performers, musicologists, journalists, audiences, and other cultural brokers created a vibrant modern music scene in Latin America, with composers’ groups, concert series, and festivals, including the Grupo Renovación (Argentina, 1929–44), the Grupo de los Cuatro (Mexico, 1935–39), the Festival de Música de Cámara Panamericana en México (1937), the Conciertos de Nueva Música (Argentina, 1937–44), the Festival Iberoamericano de Música en Bogotá (1938), the Grupo Música Viva (Brazil, 1939–48), and the Grupo de Renovación Musical (Cuba, 1942–48). Therefore it was more than just a modernist syntax that infused Latin American composers’ works; the composers did not ‘simply embrace modernism, they actually breathed and lived it’.Footnote 1 Specifically, Latin American composers’ agency enabled them to generate their own endogenous version of modernism according to their cultural contexts and in dialogue with the cosmopolitan modern music scene, beyond unorthodox harmonies, metres, time signatures, and formal, sound, and timbral experimentation, among other modernist conventions.
During the same period in the United States, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) imagined a music festival that would house a musical education centre of the highest calibre for professional musicians from the heritage of western art music. Accordingly, he officially founded the Berkshire Music Center, later renamed the Tanglewood Music Center, in 1940, which became not only the summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but also a place that would receive composers, conductors, singers, instrumentalists, and audiences from around the world. For this reason, Koussevitzky offered Aaron Copland (1900–90) a chair in composition because he sought dedicated and renowned musicians who shared his educational and musical vision. During that time, in his belief that music could play a significant role in promoting US culture and national interests internationally, Copland was a diligent agent in incorporating music into US cultural diplomacy. He therefore conceived the idea to invite Latin American composers to Tanglewood under the sponsorship of US government agencies and private foundations to support the United States’ agenda.
A number of scholars have discussed and reviewed modern Latin American art music’s function and its intersection with US cultural diplomacy.Footnote 2 Although the participation of Latin American composers and their works at the Berkshire Music Center was substantial during the period of pan-Americanism, their musical and cultural contributions remain overlooked.Footnote 3 This article examines the Berkshire Music Center’s involvement with these composers during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration (1933–45). The advent of World War II led Roosevelt to redefine inter-American relations to ensure peace, security, and access to resources on the American continent through the promotion of US-American cultural diplomacy. It was the first time in the history of the US government that culture was viewed as an area of geopolitical investment that could achieve foreign policy objectives; this display has been referred to as the Good Neighbor Policy. At the same time, Tanglewood served Latin American composers’ agency as a platform for promoting their Americanist hybrid musical identity internationally — beyond aesthetics and techniques such as neoclassicism and dodecaphony. This article illustrates how the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood became a venue where modern Latin American art music and US cultural diplomacy were intertwined.
The Berkshire Music Center’s Genesis and the First Festival (1940)
Historically, the region known as the Berkshires was associated with music before Koussevitzky chose the location for his Music Center. For instance, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864–1953) was a music patron who settled in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in Berkshire County; her musical training fostered a sensitivity for chamber music. Upon her husband’s passing, Coolidge embraced her passion for supporting chamber music by establishing the Berkshire Quartet (1917–20);Footnote 4 Cyrilla Barr explains that Coolidge envisaged a ‘music colony’ with a ‘temple’ for a chamber music festival. Coolidge announced publicly in 1917 that she would initiate the first Berkshire Festival, which would include the Berkshire Competition in Composition to support the creation of new works for chamber ensembles.Footnote 5
The Berkshire festivals, which were later renamed the Festival Quartet of South Mountain in 1923, ran continuously from 1918 to 1924, then three more separate times (in 1928, 1934, and 1938). After the 1923 festival, Coolidge visited the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and after meeting with the institution’s staff members, including its president, Herbert Putnam, she considered sending ‘performances to the hallowed halls of the library’.Footnote 6 Meanwhile, in the Berkshires, her legacy was perpetuated by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who, supported by other Berkshire music lovers, carried on the region’s musical activities. The Boston orchestra replaced the New York Philharmonic, and Koussevitzky’s dream of a music centre appeared. He observed:
This year [1936], the Berkshire Festival is doubling the number of concerts from three to six, and they are to be given for the first time in the orchestra’s own home at ‘Tanglewood’, a beautiful estate partly located in Lenox and partly in Stockbridge, in every way an ideal place for the Berkshire Music Festival.Footnote 7
A series of events led to the Tappan family later donating 210 acres of land to the Boston Symphony Orchestra trustees in 1937. The Berkshire Symphonic Festival, Inc., under the leadership of Gertrude Robinson Smith (1881–1963), then launched a fundraising campaign to build the Music Shed. The 1938 programme requested donations to complete the Shed and described the contributions of architects Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950) and Joseph Franz (1882–1959) to its design and construction, which ‘is believed to be the largest and most unique structure for symphonic music in the United States’.Footnote 8
Koussevitzky envisaged a music festival that would include a centre for music education at the highest level for college music majors and young professional musicians. He affirmed the Center’s practical approach to:
living and working in music to those who seek the best in music and related arts, and who long for a creative rest in the summer. The Music Center is designed to lay special emphasis on those aspects of musical education concerned with collective performance.Footnote 9
In 1939, he drew up a document entitled ‘Tentative Plans for an Academy of Music at Tanglewood’, establishing the different sections of the institution.Footnote 10 To discuss and refine his plans, he organized the ‘First Conference on Tanglewood Academy’ in Lenox, Massachusetts, from 12 to 14 September 1939, with a group of future faculty members. In response to the conductor’s ideas, a group of musicians — including Copland, who was appointed to the composition department — provided feedback.
The Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood launched its first season in 1940 (from 8 July to 18 August) with a distinguished faculty.Footnote 11 Koussevitzky engaged the private philanthropic community in the United States and received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for $60,000 to fund scholarships and infrastructure for the 1940 and 1941 seasons.Footnote 12 Meanwhile, he highlighted some of the festival’s objectives in ‘A Statement from the Director’, and pointed out that the Center, divided into two sections — the Institute for Advanced Study and the Academy— ‘presents a unique opportunity for a summer of living and working in music’, where the emphasis was on collective instead of individual performances.Footnote 13 The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s function was to be a model ‘for close observation of the work of a great orchestra’, besides participation in ‘student orchestras, choruses, chamber music and operatic groups’, and the educational experience would be complemented by eminent lecturers from ‘the arts and letters as well as [those] in music’.Footnote 14
Koussevitzky offered the composition chair to Copland, and the composition class was divided into two sections and shared with Paul Hindemith (1895–1963).Footnote 15 Unlike Copland, Hindemith had a hierarchical and condescending teaching style, and he did not view the younger staff members as colleagues.Footnote 16 Copland established ‘a studio with piano’, where composition students would receive ‘one hour each day of individual instruction’, and ‘two hours each afternoon for class analysis or class study in orchestration’. In addition, the composer considered it essential that composition students ‘should have the privilege [of] conferring with B. S. O. musicians on the practicability of each instrument […] be allowed to play in the upper school of amateur orchestra’, and have their works ‘included in two composers’ concerts’.Footnote 17
The fact that Koussevitzky selected one US-American and one European composer for the composition faculty signified that each composer symbolized a connection to western art music in both directions, the ‘new’ and ‘old’ worlds together, with the pedagogical goal of offering two diverse perspectives to students. In 1940, Copland realized that the Berkshire Music Center could become a place to bring Latin American musicians as fellows without opposition from the protectionist American Federation of Musicians (AFM); at this point, he considered the possibility of inviting fellows to Tanglewood during 1941. Furthermore, engaging Koussevitzky would not be difficult, as his ideals were complementary to the US cultural diplomacy machinery that Copland would support and promote through the Berkshire Music Center fellowship programme.
Manufacturing Latin American Scholarships for Tanglewood (1940–41)
During World War II, Roosevelt was concerned about the Axis powers’ geopolitical plans on the American continent, and without Latin America’s resources, it would be harder to defeat fascism. Therefore he needed a person with enough social and political capital to open communication channels with a varied group of decision-makers in Latin America. The answer pointed towards Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908–79), because of the Rockefeller family’s business ties with leading personalities in the private and public sectors in Latin America and the United States. After some bureaucratic changes, on 16 August 1940 Roosevelt’s government appointed Nelson Rockefeller as the head of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA).Footnote 18
Roosevelt’s administration aimed for the OCIAA to be more aggressive by using culture as encoded US propaganda in Latin America. Roosevelt and Rockefeller, who believed in the importance of culture in foreign policy, created the Cultural Relations Division (1940) inside the OCIAA, with a subsidiary Music Committee (also known as the Committee on Music), with the objective of accelerating and controlling the implementation of their plans and avoiding governmental bureaucracy. Annegret Fauser contends that the previous State Department Division of Cultural Relations, established in 1938, had failed to neutralize Axis propaganda in Latin America, which led Roosevelt to ‘create an organization that would be under his direct influence to translate his pan-American policies into action’.Footnote 19 As a consequence, music became vital to promoting the US-American agenda, and the OCIAA sponsored tours of US artists, composers, and educators, as well as exchanges from Latin America, for this purpose.
During 1940, Copland was designated a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Music, and asserted that Rockefeller ‘was determined to set up an ideal model of what inter-cultural relations should be […] Rockefeller’s committee seemed more interested in American composers than in virtuoso performers.’Footnote 20 As representatives of a US power structure and decision-making group, this elite group preferred US-American identity to be represented by Euro-American art music over jazz, for example, which had already circulated in Europe as a popular US cultural product. Accordingly, advocates of US cultural diplomacy thought that the cultural front line would be stronger and more effective when US music represented and conveyed its creative worth and elite status. As Danielle Fosler-Lussier explains, the United States’ musical diplomacy displayed western art music, despite its European connotations, as a medium of prestige to reach elites and educated populations abroad, establishing connections between art music’s status, social value, and power and US-American ideals about democracy, freedom, modernism, and progress.Footnote 21 As a result, the United States urgently sought to demonstrate that it possessed artists who could develop works that could challenge the hegemony of European culture. In short, US cultural relations were designed according to the political requirements, national interests, and security requirements of the country, with the objective of promoting and expanding US-American agendas and institutions in Latin America.
During its meeting on 14 November 1940, the OCIAA Music Committee decided that Copland should travel to Latin America to promote modern US-American art music.Footnote 22 At this time, Copland also proposed the idea of inviting Latin American musicians to Tanglewood, a project that was supported by Carleton Sprague Smith (1905–94), who claimed that ‘the idea of having five music scholarships at the Berkshire Music Center next summer is marvelous!’Footnote 23 Copland also believed that bringing musicians from Latin America as fellows to Tanglewood would enhance the musical environment of the Center and would be the best way to avoid AFM protectionism. Consequently, he proposed that Koussevitzky invite Latin American composers with sponsorship from the State Department and US-American foundations. Copland sent a letter to him on 16 December 1940 explaining his plans for the fellowship programme:
I hope Mrs. [Margaret] Grant spoke to you about the plan I had to have the U.S. government bring a number of the best students from South American countries to the School this summer. I am a member of the Music Committee established by the State Department under Nelson Rockefeller for cultural relations with South America. This idea would be similar to that of Mrs. Bok and the Curtis Institute, except that the government would take the place of Mrs. Bok, and we would have all South America to choose from. I have spoken with the Music Committee, and they are very enthusiastic about the plan. If you have any further ideas along this line[,] I wish you would let me know, so that I can present it to the Committee.Footnote 24
In Copland’s vision, the Berkshire Music Center would contribute towards a cause aligned with multilateral internationalism within the Good Neighbor context, as noted by Emily Abrams Ansari.Footnote 25 Meanwhile, the Music Committee held regular meetings to establish the fellowship programme and determine which potential fellows to invite. When it came to choosing the first composer fellow, Argentinian Alberto Ginastera (1916–83) was the top choice and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nevertheless, as the correspondence indicates, Ginastera was unable to travel due to his professional duties as a faculty member at Argentina’s Liceo Militar and Conservatorio Nacional de Música y Arte Escénico. On 9 May 1941, he wrote: ‘I regret to have to inform you that it will not be possible for me to accept the invitation that you have kindly sent me to attend the Berkshire Music Center festival’; thus his participation in the festival was delayed until 1946.Footnote 26 Therefore, a few weeks later, Carlos Chávez’s candidate, Blas Galindo (1910–93), was awarded the first composition fellowship; his answer stated that ‘I would like to attend the Berkshire Music Center to perfect my studies in composition under Mr. Aaron Copland and write an orchestral work of Mexican character’.Footnote 27
Likewise, Koussevitzky showed his commitment to the Good Neighbor Policy. ‘I feel strongly we should proceed with plan for Latin American students. Project has been considered and approved by Government which asks our cooperation in developing friendly relations. Interest of this country and tremendous interest of Tanglewood’, he wrote to George E. Judd of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In his opinion, it ‘requires U.S. to do everything possible to realize plan in full. Its failure would create disappointment and criticism.’Footnote 28 Koussevitzky was similarly requested to ‘not represent this Office or the United States of America or any department or agency of the Government as sponsoring or being in any way connected with or responsible for the bringing of these musicians to the Berkshire Music Center’;Footnote 29 the US government officials wished to avoid the appearance of propaganda in Latin America. A significant amount of pressure was applied to the United States’ institutional efforts during World War II, and the country’s cultural diplomacy programme in Latin America was accelerated as a result.
Modern Latin American Music at the Berkshire Music Center (1941)
The Berkshire Music Center opened its second season on 6 July 1941.Footnote 30 After Randall Thompson’s Alleluia was performed in the newly constructed Theatre-Concert Hall, Penrose Hallowell, a Boston Symphony board member, introduced Dr Serge Koussevitzky. In his address to the audience, Koussevitzky expressed his gratitude to music patrons who had contributed to the construction of the new Center. In addition, he expressed his concern regarding people’s access to music and music-making, and suggested that the ‘aim of general musical development is to bring the masses to music and thereby introduce music [to] life […] but in a cultural way’.Footnote 31 This perspective compelled him to enthusiastically demand that musicians work ‘aflame with sacred love for that which we serve and those whom we serve — that is to say, for living art and living men’.Footnote 32 With his metaphorical language, Koussevitzky addressed Tanglewood participants about the mission and contribution of musicians to society.
The press reviewed the first Latin American group’s participation. In an article published in the Hartford Times of Connecticut, the newspaper reported: ‘Five distinguished young musicians, chosen representatives of five Latin American republics, have arrived at Tanglewood in the Berkshire Hills for a special purpose.’Footnote 33 The article mentioned that Koussevitzky, Copland, Sprague Smith, and Puerto Rican pianist Jesús María Sanromá (1902–84) welcomed the first festival fellows at a reception. Unlike his companions — Marcelo Montecino (Chile), Alfredo Ianelli (Argentina), Alejandro Zagarra (Colombia), and Althea Alimonda (Brazil) — the Mexican Galindo was the only composer. The article ends with the statement that they ‘all have come through scholarships offered by the Berkshire Music Center’.Footnote 34
Similar information was echoed in another article, for the Berkshire Evening Eagle, but this public media outlet offered additional details. In an allusion to the Good Neighbor Policy, the text emphasized the educational exchange principle behind the programme. ‘The scholarships’, stated the newspaper, ‘will further, it is believed, a mutually beneficial reciprocity between the two Americas.’Footnote 35 In spite of this, the article reveals the deeply embedded notion of ‘two Americas’ or ‘two continents’. It continues with a developmentalist trope by affirming that ‘it will bring to our closer attention the remarkable music talent, which is fast developing among our southern neighbors’, and concludes by reaffirming that it will enable ‘its representatives to profit by the unprecedented interpretative opportunities of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer school’.Footnote 36
At the opening of the festival season, on 1 August 1941, Koussevitzky, who had already shown appreciation for Heitor Villa-Lobos’s (1887–1959) music, selected and performed his Chôros no. 10 (‘Rasga o coração’) [‘Tear the Heart’] (1926) with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Berkshire Musical Association choir.Footnote 37 The work was the first piece of modern Latin American art music heard at the Berkshire Music Center, giving it symbolic significance, although it was already known in the United States. Chôros no. 10 exposes a positivist trend as a programmatic piece of music.Footnote 38 This philosophy infused Latin America’s modernist myths of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’, usually represented by technological advancement. But a common discursive trope of modernism in Latin America was that of a dialectic between civilization and ‘primitivism’. Hence, in Chôros no. 10, Villa-Lobos translates an idea of cultural ‘cannibalism’, which was circulating among Brazilian artists and intellectuals, into the sound sphere by ‘devouring’ foreign aesthetics and discourses found in the first section to produce a Brazilian musical text. As a participant in the São Paulo ‘Week of Modern Art’ in 1922, Villa-Lobos, together with other artists, sought to depart from institutionalized Romanticism and academicism as well as to re-examine the role of European and US-American culture in Brazil. These artists, philosophically led by Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago [Cannibal Manifesto] (1928), sought to consolidate a modern and cosmopolitan Brazilian culture.Footnote 39 Thus the metaphor of cultural ‘cannibalism’ consists of an image meant to ‘devour’ the foreign, digest it, and produce a national cultural product; in other words, it functions as a symbolic act of renovating and revitalizing Brazil’s own culture. As Rogério Budasz clarifies, cultural ‘cannibalism’ in Brazil was not about ‘emulating so-called “primitive art”’ but about the idea that artists ‘should devour what was useful in the civilization while maintaining their natural, “primitive” state’. As a result, Villa-Lobos formally established order by presenting foreign material first, which was culturally ‘devoured’ in the second section and transformed into modern Brazilian music.Footnote 40
Villa-Lobos was already a well-established composer, and his music received critical attention and space in the press. Oscar Thompson from the New York Sun wrote that ‘it remains a strange and absorbing composition that is little known’, mentioning that the unconventional percussion instruments added to the orchestral setting, which represents the composer’s Brazilian identity and the work’s soundscape.Footnote 41 The music critic for the Springfield Evening Union, Willard M. Clark, pointed out that ‘it represents a new form in musical composition in which are synthesized the different modalities of Brazilian Indian and popular music, having for principal elements rhythm and any typical melody of popular character’.Footnote 42 For the US-American critics, grasping Villa-Lobos’s music was not an easy task due to its theoretical and aesthetic frame; his hybrid music works did not correspond with Eurocentric western art music and cultural theories.
Blas Galindo in Tanglewood
The Mexican Blas Galindo, the first composition fellow to attend the Berkshire Music Center, was born on 3 February 1910 in San Gabriel, Jalisco state; he grew up in a community where popular music played a significant function in the culture.Footnote 43 The future composer worked as an organist, choirmaster, and band director from 1929 to 1931, until he relocated to Mexico City to pursue a law career. However, life had different plans for the musician. Upon his arrival in the city, Juan Santana, a member of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, invited Galindo to hear the orchestra’s rehearsal of a full programme dedicated to Mexican composers, conducted by Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) and Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940). Soon after, Galindo enrolled at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Mexico City to study composition with Chávez, José Rolón (1876–1945), and Candelario Huízar (1883–1970), among other musicians.Footnote 44 Chávez’s musical and political persona was known for being outspoken against academicism in music, which for him represented an elitist obstacle to musical modernism in Mexico. Ricardo Miranda explains that in short, the post-revolutionary notion of Mexican musical modernism as a cultural ideology emanated from the principle of social justice (anti-bourgeoisie) and reconstructed and glorified Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past and its sound.Footnote 45
Chávez transformed the Conservatorio Nacional to help young Mexican musicians express themselves musically. His composition class (Clase de creación musical, later renamed Taller de composición), included a younger generation of students: Galindo, Daniel Ayala (1906–75), Salvador Contreras (1910–82), and José Pablo Moncayo (1912–58).Footnote 46 This younger generation joined forces and became known by music critics for five years as the Grupo de los Cuatro. Many of their compositions are aesthetically aligned with the cultural movement of indigenism; in Latin America, musical indigenism represented the cultural construction used by mestizo intellectuals and artists to integrate indigenous communities left outside modernity by ethnocentric discourses. To borrow Aníbal Quijano’s concept, the coloniality of power — i.e. the persistence of colonial structures of power beyond the end of territorial colonization — kept indigenous communities on the fringe. However, intellectuals and artists created works of art with their cultures to integrate them into their own nation states’ identities.Footnote 47 Within a difficult and asymmetrical cultural context, this practice aimed to represent indigenous communities as modern subject-citizens, not as pre-modern exotic objects. From 1935 to its dissolution in 1941, the Grupo de los Cuatro organized chamber music and symphonic concerts featuring their works in different venues in Mexico City, Boston, and New York.Footnote 48 The group’s music played a significant purpose in the post-revolutionary modern Mexican art music scene, embracing the aesthetic and cultural values of post-revolutionary Mexico.
At Tanglewood, Galindo composed and heard performed his Wind Sextet (Example 1). A mostly pandiatonic one-movement work, its frequent tempo and time-signature changes (in irregular time) generate pastoral energy and atmosphere. Although the work contains multiple sections, from a macro-level perspective it generally implies a ternary form. The sextet is a neoclassical work whose main theme resembles a popular Mexican melody that is permutated throughout, after a brief introduction. Unfortunately, the performance was not reviewed by music critics.
Example 1. Blas Galindo, Wind Sextet (unpublished), final bars. Reproduced with the permission of Ediciones Mexicanas de Música.
After the cultural diplomatic success of bringing Latin American musicians as fellows to Tanglewood for the first time, the OCIAA decided to continue supporting the programme. Consequently, an unsigned and undated letter, probably from Koussevitzky, arrived at the office of John M. Clark, director of the Cultural Relations Division at OICAA. It explained:
I wish to express again my appreciation of the cooperation which we received through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, in bringing these gifted and interesting young Latin-American students to the Berkshire Music Center for the 1941 session. They contributed a great deal to the life of the Center, and we hope very much that we in turn have added something in the understanding of the United States and our musical life. […] The Berkshire Music Center will be happy indeed to collaborate with your office again this year in a similar enterprise, and to that effect, we now offer five tuition scholarships for the 1942 season. If your office wishes to accept and distribute these scholarships, and to assist in bringing the recipients to the Center, please let us know as soon as possible.Footnote 49
While Tanglewood preferred Euro-American music, the festival perceived Latin America’s addition as positive. After the festival’s end, Copland immediately embarked on his first official goodwill tour to Latin America.
Cultural Attaché of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs: Copland’s visit to Latin America in 1941
Copland travelled across the American continent from 20 August to 12 December 1941. His previous experiences in Mexico, together with his involvement in music and culture and his communicative skills, made him an ideal representative of Good Neighbor cultural diplomacy in Latin America.Footnote 50 In her book Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics, Carol A. Hess explains that Copland’s character and experience made him a suitable candidate for the United States’ incipient cultural diplomacy in the region.Footnote 51 As a result of his determination to promote US music culture, his interpersonal abilities, and his use of mass media (e.g. radio), he displayed the active and creative persona of a ‘good neighbour’.
Copland’s travels across diverse countries similarly aimed to promote US interests and musical culture and to recruit Latin American composers who would receive institutional support to go to the United States, specifically to Tanglewood. To illustrate, the composer mentioned that Dr Henry Allen Moe, a member of the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations and the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, had also instructed him:
I want you, please, to come back with a list of composers and music scholars who in your judgement based on your knowledge are first-rate and ought to be given funds to come to the United States for sound music purposes.Footnote 52
The Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations wanted to fulfil its commitment to the principle of reciprocity in cultural diplomacy to achieve more engagement and success in Latin America. Copland emphasized that his travel grant was ‘to study contemporary Latin American music, to lecture on [US] American music and to conduct concerts of [US] American music in several Latin American countries’.Footnote 53 Accordingly, between 20 August and 12 December 1941, he toured Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Cuba.
During this trip, Copland became acquainted with a large group of his Latin American colleagues, including some of the younger composers who were going to attend Tanglewood. He also promoted his compositions and others by US composers through concerts, conferences, and radio programmes in different countries. He listened to his work An Outdoor Overture being performed by the Teatro Colón Orchestra; gave the premiere of his Piano Sonata in Buenos Aires; offered conferences and a chamber music recital dedicated entirely to US-American composers organized by La Nueva Música in Buenos Aires; offered two talks in Spanish about US-American popular music, ‘The Influence of Jazz’ and ‘Music for Films’, at the Instituto Interamericano de Musicología in Montevideo; performed chamber music, such as Roy Harris’s (1898–1979) Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1934) and two Chorale Preludes (1924–26) by Roger Sessions (1896–1985), with Uruguayan musicians, in addition to some of his own works; listened to an escola de samba in Rio de Janeiro; conducted an all-Copland programme with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile and performed as the soloist in his Piano Concerto (1926), together with Quiet City (1939), El Salón México (1933–36), and An Outdoor Overture (1938); served as a jury member in the Chilean national composition competition the Concurso Iberoamericano de Composición Musical del IV Centenario de la Fundación de Santiago [Ibero-American Competition of Musical Composition for the Fourth Centenary of the Founding of Santiago]; conducted the Orquesta de Cámara de La Habana; organized a ‘Concierto de Obras Contemporáneas Norteamericanas y Cubanas’ [‘Concert of Contemporary North American and Cuban Musical Works’]; and held lectures about modern US composers at the Lyceum in Havana, among many other musical activities.Footnote 54 In short, Copland was welcomed in Latin America and enjoyed the support of local musicians and institutions to organize concerts with some of his works, conferences, and media interviews.
In his position as a cultural attaché for the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations, Copland travelled from a position of power and privilege because of his institutional support. Hess argues that he went to Latin America to teach and to promote a dual position regarding the US agency’s foreign-policy objectives. Ergo, Hess claims that for the Nelson A. Rockefeller-led OCIAA, Copland ‘championed regional rather than universal culture by glorifying liberation from Europe and branding himself a populist’, and for the State Department Division of Cultural Relations, the composer ‘channeled his infinitely protean musical personality into the norms of universal culture via the sonata, assuming a modernist stance in the process’.Footnote 55
Once back in the United States, Copland sent his report to the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations, giving recommendations. In the section titled ‘Interchange of Composers and Artists’, he claimed that ‘the need for the continuous exchange of composers, music students, musicologists and performing artists between our country and the Latin American republics is self-evident’ and suggested that they bring ‘younger talented men’ instead of ‘the older generation’.Footnote 56 In this way, he supplied his list of composers (in order of preference) to be considered for exchange programmes. He also suggested more investment in inter-American musical exchange materials, fundamentally meaning phonograph recordings, books, and scores for mass distribution and diffusion all over the American continent, complemented by the creation of a tri-lingual and bi-monthly musical magazine to maintain constant ‘intercontinental musical communication’.Footnote 57
This experience impacted the composer’s music and persona, and he ‘realized that such an experience enlarges one’s field visions’.Footnote 58 Copland praised the entrepreneurial spirit in modern music displayed by Domingo Santa Cruz (1889–1987) in Chile, Villa-Lobos in Brazil, and Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) in Argentina — beyond what Chávez was already doing in Mexico. To illustrate, Copland noted that ‘Brazil, like Mexico, has an active school of composers who are writing music easily distinguishable from the European model’.Footnote 59 In Uruguay, he acknowledged the central role in the country’s cultural life of the Servicio Oficial de Difusión, Radiotelevisión y Espectáculos, with its orchestra and radio station, and met composer Héctor Tosar (1923–2002), who ‘is one of the most impressive I found in South America. It will be fine if he could complete his studies in the United States.’Footnote 60
In contrast, Copland essentialized Brazilian music when he made an association between traditional music, folklore, and pre-modern and primitive senses which suggested a ritual; he denoted the music as being ‘languorously sentimental and wildly orgiastic’, whose Romanticism generated ‘an old-fashioned aroma’.Footnote 61 Preaching from a cultural evolutionist point of view, he criticized Brazilian composers’ preference for ‘smaller forms’, not to mention their production of ‘a few ballets and operas’ but ‘very few orchestral works’.Footnote 62 He similarly criticized the ‘Mexican popular tune’ or ‘use of folk material’ in Brazilian music, which ‘carries with it certain dangers’ or a ‘folklore bias’.Footnote 63 However, this disapproval is self-contradictory, considering that Copland used US-American folk material in his well-known ballets composed before or immediately after his 1941 trip, such as Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944).
Copland’s Latin American colleagues also expressed their opinion about his goodwill visit. Chilean composer, art administrator, and music educator Santa Cruz said that ‘Copland convinced us to be in front of a musician of great stature’, but voiced his disappointment at Copland’s lack of interest in the modern Chilean works submitted to the composition contest because of their absence of native signifiers, in essence those founded in Cuban, Brazilian, or even US-American music.Footnote 64 Thus, Santa Cruz claimed, ‘musical tourism was difficult in Santiago, with no indigenous people in sight or blacks to stir up violent dances’.Footnote 65
This exogenous experience made Copland ponder his endogenous experience in the United States. ‘It made me feel concern for the provincialism that seemed to be typical of the music scene in New York,’ asserted the composer, ‘where there was a small circle of composers encouraging to each other. The tendency to lean back and depend upon that small-circle encouragement seemed to me a lessening rather than an enlarging of one’s capacities.’Footnote 66 Copland travelled to Latin America with an ideology of cultural evolution, with which he asserted the trope of musical developmentalism in a positivist and quantitative, instead of a qualitative, manner. That being the case, Copland, among other artists, visited Latin America to promote what Néstor García Canclini has named the ‘ideology of modern high culture’.Footnote 67 Consequently, he mapped out modernism and modern art music in the geographical and ethnic register of Latin America because non-European cultures fall out of Eurocentric categories and theoretical frames.
Music or War: Keeping the Berkshire Music Center Functioning (1942)
Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941, the United States declared war against the Axis powers and became a vital force in the fight on two fronts simultaneously. The war further highlighted the difficulty of transport across the continent, and the high demand for human and material resources also negatively impacted the festival. It is imperative to understand that the festival’s disappearance would have meant the interruption of performances of Latin American works and musicians’ participation at Tanglewood. Hence the following paragraphs illustrate the obstacles Koussevitzky’s dream had to overcome to continue bringing music to the Berkshire community.
During this time, the local newspaper, the Berkshire Evening Eagle, which covered Tanglewood musical activities regularly, published an editorial entitled ‘The Berkshire Festival’. The text reflected the spirit of the time and criticized the festival’s continuation within the war context; namely, the conflict between the arts and the war also generated a conflict of interest, and this initiated a debate between idealism and realism. The article supported the notion that ‘the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, in the interest of patriotic duty, should suspend operations for the duration of the war’.Footnote 68 Koussevitzky answered the editorial by sending a letter to the Berkshire Evening Eagle’s editor ‘which presents a different point of view’, and concluded:
It is the patriotic duty of the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the trustees of the Berkshire Symphony Festival to preserve the continuity — even if on a smaller scale — of the Festival and the Berkshire Music Center which stand high and unique in all the world.Footnote 69
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s trustees also voiced their discomfort about organizing the 1942 festival. ‘I have had no other communication from the Trustees,’ Koussevitzky wrote about his position, ‘except that they intended to discontinue the Berkshire Symphony Festival, giving as [a] motive their patriotic concern to save gasoline.’ The conductor offered his resignation, ‘because I cannot participate in a premeditated destruction of cultural and artistic values or even remain as a passive witness of such an act’.Footnote 70 Despite the obstacles, the conductor decided to launch a third festival.
Mexico and Cuba at the Berkshire Music Center (1942)
The Berkshire Music Center opened its third season at a time of difficulty for both the US and the rest of the world. Koussevitzky showed his fortitude in celebrating the festival in 1942, with or without the trustees’ consent; he inaugurated Tanglewood’s third season with his opening address on 5 July 1942.Footnote 71 His rhetoric equated the armed conflict with the festival’s struggles and purpose: the conductor represented music and the arts as the war’s antithesis, which was his argument for holding a third festival. In the introduction to his speech, in which he acknowledged the people and institutions that supported his cultural enterprise, Koussevitzky told his audience: ‘I am happy to announce the continuance of the Berkshire Music Center during the 1942 summer season. I am especially happy that this was possible through the Koussevitzky Music Foundation.’Footnote 72 The speech began by recognizing in the festival ‘a sense of greater responsibility, of firmer determination and deeper consciousness’, because the ‘tide of war has reached us’.Footnote 73 He concluded his oratory by claiming:
The future of America is in your hands. We pass on to you our knowledge and our ideals. It is for you to carry them further, to persevere, to develop within yourselves the acquired atoms of a living art. I have faith in you, as I have faith in the future of mankind.Footnote 74
Koussevitzky expressed his belief in supporting the festival, despite the current adversities, and his goal of transforming Tanglewood into a symbol of peace and empowerment.
The composers Galindo and Moncayo from Mexico and Harold Gramatges (1918–2008) from Cuba were given preference in the selection process for the 1942 festival season.Footnote 75 Copland shared the composition class with the Czech Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) due to Igor Stravinsky’s (1882–1971) cancellation.Footnote 76
Harold Gramatges
The Cuban composer Harold Gramatges, whom Alejo Carpentier described as ‘one of the most solid and conscious musicians that has produced contemporary Cuban music’, received his musical training in his country at the Conservatorio Municipal de Música de La Habana, and became a member of the neoclassical Grupo de Renovación Musical.Footnote 77 Gramatges thought of himself as a composer as part of a generation that believed in an ‘objective’ musical position, in which the form gives the musical work a universal order, integration, and life in the organization of the sound elements.Footnote 78 Thus, the composer argued, the musical work was the space where ‘polytonality, polyharmony, polyrhythm and modality’ were blended, according to the principles taught in the classroom by José Ardévol (1911–81) at the Conservatorio Municipal.Footnote 79
In relation to modern Cuban art music, Carpentier joined forces with the composers Amadeo Roldán (1900–39) and Alejandro García Caturla (1906–40); together, they intended to build a ‘mature collective mind’ and launch ‘fierce campaigns’ against Italian opera ‘for the recognition of Afro-Cuban folklore’, under the slogan ‘Down with the lyre, long live the bongo!’Footnote 80 Caturla, for instance, urged a departure from modernist binary categories such as old and new in music; for him, Cuban music had to be different from European music, and he suggested that to ‘arrive at a genuinely Cuban music, it is necessary to work with the living folklore’, by which he mainly meant the transcultural ‘Afro-Cuban’ folklore.Footnote 81 He similarly supported the idea of adding Afro-Cuban and indigenous percussion instruments to construct modern sound symbols. Nevertheless, with the premature deaths of these two leading composers, Cuban and Latin American art music suffered a severe blow to its vitality. Spanish émigré José Ardévol succeeded Roldán as a professor at the Conservatorio Municipal; he held diverse institutional positions at the Conservatorio and later at the Orquesta de Cámara de La Habana.Footnote 82 Belén Vega Pichaco argues furthermore that Ardévol’s ideological and conservative agenda promoted a change of direction from the previous Afro-Cuban aesthetic trend; Spanish émigré composers in Latin America promoted a geocultural agenda known as pan-Hispanism through neoclassicism, as a path to achieving the Eurocentric musical notion of ‘universality’.Footnote 83
As José Luis Fanjul explains, ‘in 1942, Ardévol selected one of his students to receive a scholarship to study at the Berkshire Music Center in the United States, in order to attend two different courses: composition with Aaron Copland and orchestral conducting with Koussevitzky’; Gramatges was chosen among a group of participants that included Virginia Fleites (1916–66), Juan Antonio Cámara (1917–94), and Serafín Pro (1906–97).Footnote 84 For his Sonata in G♯ minor for harpsichord, performed during a concert at the Lyceum Lawn Tennis Hall on 20 June 1942, the jury awarded Gramatges the opportunity to attend Tanglewood, as reported by Clara Díaz.Footnote 85 There are no documents showing Gramatges’s musical activities there; however, in a letter written after his return to Cuba, the composer referred to his experience in ‘a musical paradise called Tanglewood’, which denotes a positive experience at the festival.Footnote 86
José Pablo Moncayo
The composer, instrumentalist, and conductor José Pablo Moncayo was one of the outstanding voices in twentieth-century Mexican music. He was admitted to the Conservatorio Nacional de Música at the age of 17, where he also studied with Huízar and in Chávez’s composition class. In 1931, he participated in the Sociedad Musical Renovación.Footnote 87 The Orquesta Sinfónica de México appointed Moncayo as its pianist and percussionist in 1932; three years later, he became a cofounder of the Grupo de los Cuatro.Footnote 88
In some early chamber music works, such as his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1934), Amatzinac (1935), and the Trio for Flute, Violin, and Piano (1938), Moncayo exhibited a language that uses pentatonic and whole-tone scales, syncopations, modern tone colours, classical or free forms, pandiatonicism, polychords, polyrhythms, and bitonality.Footnote 89 Ricardo Miranda-Pérez explains that twentieth-century Mexican composers used pandiatonicism, time-signature changes, and repetition ‘each time a composer wished to give his work a distinctive Mexican character while creating a modern musical language’.Footnote 90 Later, Moncayo gained notoriety as a composer after the premiere of his Huapango for orchestra in 1941, but unfortunately, the immense popularity of this work with concert audiences obscured the remainder of his oeuvre.Footnote 91
At Tanglewood, Moncayo worked on Llano alegre [Joyful Plain] (1942), a one-movement work for chamber orchestra and piano, divided into three sections. The use of pandiatonicism, rhythmic pulsation, accents, pointillism, and alternation between 3+2 and 2+3 emulates the plain of the title and its topographic accidents. Llano alegre was inspired by Mexican nature and the countryside, which represented social, political, and identity themes that correlated to the official Mexican discourse. It offered a musical tribute both to Mexico’s nature and also its peoples’ land ownership, one of the most significant social rights achievements of the Mexican Revolution.Footnote 92 The work also relates to a group of symphonic pieces by Moncayo with a similar ideal: Cumbres [Summits] (1940, rev. 1953), Tierra de temporal [Land of Storms] (1949), Bosques [Forests] (1954), and the ballet Tierra [Land] (1956).Footnote 93
Unfortunately, Moncayo was unable to hear the performance of Llano alegre, as wartime restrictions limited the festival’s normal functions. Copland sent a letter to Chávez asking him to give Moncayo the opportunity to hear his work, writing: ‘Through a contretemps we were unable to do it at the school although a poor attempt was made with insufficient instrumentalists.’Footnote 94 As a result of the war, human and material resources were in short supply, causing the festival to be halted. After this season, the festival ceased operations, and a new chapter began at the end of the war.
The Berkshire Music Center’s Re-opening (1946)
While the Berkshire Music Center halted its activities during World War II, the success of its first festivals piqued the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s patron board, musicians, and audiences, who supported its continuation after the conflict ended. With a renewed commitment to participation, energy, and resources, Koussevitzky relaunched Tanglewood, and the Center resumed its activities. The festival’s re-opening occurred, as previously mentioned, in the transition between the Good Neighbor era and the upcoming Cold War era of international relations. In the first sentence of his opening speech in 1946, Koussevitzky shared with the audience: ‘It is with a feeling of deep happiness that I address you today and congratulate you on the occasion of the opening of our Music Center.’Footnote 95 The conductor advocated that culture is a sphere beyond material life and above any political or economic system, concluding that ‘art and culture served as a fundamental bond between spiritual and organic evolution’.Footnote 96 Thereafter, he related this idea about the purpose of the state to public education, culture, and art that would support democracy and complement its formation.
A Concert of Latin American Chamber Music (1946)
In 1946, the festival featured significant participation from modern composers from Latin America (Figure 1), and their works demonstrate the different aesthetics and techniques these composers embraced.Footnote 97 The Chilean composer Juan Orrego-Salas (1919–2019), who attended the festival as a fellow, wrote about his experience at Tanglewood:
Not only did I share my composition classes at Tanglewood with Julian Orbón from Cuba and Héctor Tosar from Uruguay, but also with Alberto Ginastera from Argentina, Roque Cordero from Panama, Blas Galindo from Mexico, and Antonio Estévez from Venezuela […] It was a group of composers who, then, extolled the twentieth century in Latin America with works of internationally recognized uniqueness and class.Footnote 98
Figure 1. Left to right, first row: Eleazar de Carvalho (Brazil), Merces Silva Telles (Brazil), Raul Spivak (Argentina), Juan Orrego (Chile). Second row: Adolf Berle (USA), Mercedes Ginastera (Argentina), Flor Roffé de Estévez (Venezuela), Luisa Spivak (Argentina), Carmen Orrego (Chile), Oscar y Buenaventura (Colombia). Standing: Dr Alberto Carneiro (Brazil), Antonio José Estévez (Venezuela), Beatrice Berle (USA), Aaron Copland (USA), Alberto Ginastera (Argentina), Héctor Tosar (Uruguay), Claudio Spies (Chile). Photograph by Howard S. Babbitt, Jr. Originally published in the Albany Sunday Times–Union Pictorial Review, 28 July 1946. BSO Archives <https://bso.netx.net/portals/public/#asset/190257> [accessed 3 April 2025]. Reproduced with permission of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives.
In his book The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History, Pablo Palomino explains that while Latin America is highly heterogeneous, the notion of ‘Latin American’ emerged first as a geopolitical category and later, from the 1920s, as a geocultural term in which the region’s musicians and intellectuals theorized its conceptualization through musical products disseminated mainly across the western hemisphere.Footnote 99 Following this idea, a network of composers, musicologists, journalists, audiences, and other cultural brokers generated a translational field of knowledge known as Latin American music.
The Berkshire Music Center, while a venue for inter-American musical exchange, simultaneously became a pan-Latin American space of encounter for dialogue and the exchange of ideas and aesthetics. For the first time in western art music history, the US — not Europe — became the magnet for a generation of young Latin American composers. These musicians sought to keep improving their knowledge and craftsmanship and enter a more affluent modern-music market with opportunities for commissions, scholarships, and professorships.Footnote 100 In addition to the interpretations of Latin American, American, and European composers’ works performed at various concerts, the Center celebrated a special event entitled ‘A Concert of Latin American Chamber Music’ (Figure 2). The event, held on 4 August 1946 at the Chamber Music Hall, was dedicated exclusively to chamber music by young Latin American composers who participated as fellows that year. It also featured one orchestral work conducted by Koussevitzky’s new protégé, the Brazilian conductor Eleazar de Carvalho (1912–96).Footnote 101
Figure 2. Programme for ‘A Concert of Latin American Chamber Music’, 4 August 1946. Reproduced with permission of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives.
Roque Cordero’s ‘Sonatina rítmica para piano’ (1943)
The composer Roque Cordero (1917–2008) was born in Panama City and learned to play the violin and clarinet at school. In addition, he was self-taught in sol-fa, harmony, and instrumentation.Footnote 102 After composing some band works for the Firemen’s Band, he wrote his orchestral piece Capricho interiorano [Inland Whim] (1939). Marie Labonville explains that it ‘derived its distinctly national flavor from references to the rhythm and melody of well-known folk dance of the mejorana genre’.Footnote 103 Despite the scarcity of resources for music studies in his country, the composer was introduced to modern works. Cordero explained:
In Panama, after learning music by myself and doing some composing (popular dances first, something serious later) I studied with Pedro Rebolledo (a pupil of Julián Carrillo), then studied for [six] months with Herbert de Castro (a pupil of Albert Roussel), who introduced me to the music of Richard Strauss, Stravinsky and Debussy. […] I started my studies of violin, viola, and clarinet at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, where I started composing when I was 13 years old.Footnote 104
Between 1939 and 1943, Cordero ceased composing and made a living as a secondary-school music teacher and violist for the newly founded Symphony Orchestra of Panama; he also conducted research on Panamanian folk music.Footnote 105 His enrolment in a music-appreciation class taught by the American composer Myron Schaeffer (1908–65) at the Universidad de Panamá brought a new opportunity for the young composer and inspired the lecturer to help his student find a scholarship to study music education in the US (in Minnesota).Footnote 106 There, the Minneapolis Star music critic John Sherman heard Cordero’s music and introduced him to the famous Greek conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896–1960), who also introduced him to the composer Ernest Krenek (1900–91), with whom Cordero studied. He graduated as a composition major from Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.Footnote 107
According to Labonville, Krenek felt uncertain about teaching Cordero the 12-tone composition method because he ‘believed that a Central European technique was unsuited to the sensibility or aesthetic of a Latin American’.Footnote 108 However, in Latin America, dodecaphonic music was adapted to the aesthetic and ideological needs of younger composers in the 1930s and 1940s, and was not thoughtlessly integrated, as the composer Graciela Paraskevaídis (1940–2017) has explained.Footnote 109 Moreover, Paraskevaídis points out with great precision that in Europe, dodecaphonic pieces were censored by fascist governments as ‘degenerate art’ and were widely unknown between 1933 and 1945 (before Darmstadt). In Latin America (particularly Argentina and Brazil), 12-tone compositions were publicly performed and discussed.Footnote 110 In Argentina, for instance, on 31 October 1934, composer Juan Carlos Paz premiered his work Composición sobre los doce tonos [Composition on Twelve Tones] for flute and piano. In Brazil the Grupo Música Viva, which included a younger generation of Brazilian composers who achieved recognition with their works nationally and internationally and was led by Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, organized concerts with their dodecaphonic music. In sum, 12-tone composition epitomized a modernization of language and a political posture against academicism.Footnote 111 Krenek’s statement can raise different questions; however, Cordero’s own pragmatism and independent mind allowed him to find a ‘way to use the twelve-tone method while still maintaining his identity as a Latin American composer’.Footnote 112 The Panamanian composer responded to this issue by affirming that:
I never went into total serialization as I felt that it would not give me the freedom to create. I studied the twelve-tone technique with Ernst Krenek and then developed my personal way of handling the row to make the technique a servant to my artistic needs as a Latin American composer.Footnote 113
Cordero elucidated that during his fellowship at Tanglewood in 1946, conversations with his Latin American colleagues logically involved the technical resources needed to create modern works within the Latin American cultural and historical context. However, he alleged, ‘Ginastera, Orrego-Salas, Tosar, Orbon and Estevez [sic] insisted that I could not use the twelve-tone technique and remain a Latin American composer!’Footnote 114 For this reason, the Panamanian is an example of the many compromises, aesthetic and political, that these Latin American composers made due to their peripheral relationship with the canon of western art music. Simultaneously, it demonstrates their agency to adapt or develop modern compositional techniques while holding on to their identity, history, and culture. As a result of their position on the periphery of western art music, it was difficult for them to deal with theoretical categorizations coming from European and American centres. Cordero, unfortunately, did not stay for the required time at Tanglewood and left early because of his mother’s illness.
Sonatina rítmica [Rhythmic Sonatina] for piano (1943) is a work in three movements that explores metric modulations combined with rhythmic grouping and pitch-class sets.Footnote 115 The first movement begins with a toccata spirit consisting of an interplay between two contrasting themes, which could suggest a sonata form. Nonetheless, the composer does not follow this form strictly and gives the movement its own shape. The second movement, with an adagietto tempo marking, is defined by the inversion of the registers across the movement, in an ABA form. Cordero puts the bass in an ostinato crotchet rhythm, oscillating between 4/4, 5/4, and 6/4; this ostinato has a pitch centre of G. The third movement, Allegro deciso, also has a toccata spirit that suggests improvisation; the movement in general includes the alternation of hemiolas, arpeggios, metric modulation, two-voice contrapuntal textures, and Panama’s mejorana dance rhythm.
Juan Orrego-Salas’s Sonata for Violin and Piano (1944)
With the establishment of the Facultad de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Chile in 1929, headed mainly by the composer and art administrator Domingo Santa Cruz, musical life in Chile embraced a dynamic institution that sponsored the Asociación Nacional de Conciertos Sinfónicos [National Association of Symphony Concerts], which organized 234 concerts between 1931 and 1938 featuring Chilean and European works.Footnote 116 From 1936 to 1943, besides attending these concerts frequently, Orrego-Salas, whom Luis Merino Montero positions among the third generation of modern Chilean composers, continued his musical training by studying music theory with Julio Guerra (1876–1932), piano with Alberto Spikin Howard (1898–1972), and composition with Pedro Humberto Allende (1885–1954) and Santa Cruz at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música.Footnote 117
As part of the Good Neighbor policy of cultural diplomacy, he received scholarships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations to study musicology at Columbia University; he also studied composition with Randall Thompson (1899–1984) at the University of Virginia and Princeton University and with Copland at Tanglewood.Footnote 118 In New York, Orrego-Salas enjoyed and profited from the city’s cultural life and briefly met with composers Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Hindemith, with whom he exchanged ideas that impacted his music.Footnote 119 Copland played an essential role in bringing Orrego-Salas to the US; the Chilean composer admitted:
I came to the U.S.A. because of Copland. Copland had been to Chile [in 1941], and he had seen little things that I had written. So, he said, you should come to the United States. And he was my mentor in the United States.Footnote 120
Nevertheless, Orrego-Salas was emphatic in claiming that it was Randall Thompson who had
helped me more than Aaron Copland. Copland showed me very useful things along his path of thought in music. But Randall Thompson gave me more freedom in conveying to me to do what you feel, what you think, what you want.Footnote 121
Orrego-Salas wrote a letter to Copland on 30 May 1946 concerning his fellowship at Tanglewood, in which he wrote:
I have just received from Dr Moe, as well as from the Berkshire Music Center, about the scholarship that the Guggenheim Foundation and the Berkshire Music school has granted me. I know of your work and interest, in order to make possible this, so I want to thank you very sincerely for what you have done.Footnote 122
He added, ‘I am sure that my work in composition as a member of your class would be highly profitable and stimulating’.Footnote 123 As can be seen from this paragraph, US foundations’ collaboration with US cultural diplomacy continued beyond the Good Neighbor era.
At Tanglewood, Orrego-Salas said about Copland’s pedagogical abilities that his ‘classes were always very engaging with precise and imaginative comments and suggestions’.Footnote 124 Expanding on Copland’s pedagogical method at Tanglewood, he wrote: ‘The weeks in Tanglewood gravitated around my classes with Copland, from what I observed in the works I submitted to his consideration, in which he corrected me with precision or deliberately stopped pointing so that I could discover my weaknesses.’Footnote 125
The Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 9 (1944, rev. 1965), is a neoclassical work and was first performed on 4 August 1946 with violinist Kenneth Gordon (b. 1930) and pianist Lukas Foss (1922–2009) at the Berkshire Music Center.Footnote 126 Basing his assessment on Orrego-Salas’s stylistic aesthetic, Merino Montero positions this work in the composer’s second creative phase, which he calls his ‘neoclassical focus’ (1942–61).Footnote 127 As Omar Corrado explains, for contemporary composers neoclassicism was not a political or aesthetic reaction but rather a sign of progress and an entrée into modernity.Footnote 128 The composer’s harmonic language in the first movement emphasizes arpeggiated quartal and quintal chords, and the piano part has a three-voice contrapuntal accompaniment with an alto voice that works as a countermelody. The second movement begins with a tempo marking of Grave: tempo di chaconne and a time signature of 3/4; it is based on the idea of a chromatic tetrachord bass lament. The third movement is in sonata form instead of rondo form.
After his return to Chile, Orrego-Salas became a critical agent in the country’s cultural life. In 1948, the Sonata for Violin and Piano won the second prize in the newly founded modern music series Festivales de Música Chilena.Footnote 129
Alberto Ginastera’s ‘Doce preludios americanos’ (1944)
Ginastera arrived in the United States in 1945.Footnote 130 After a copious amount of correspondence in which he and Copland exchanged ideas about musical works and modernism, among other topics, he announced his projected arrival in New York on 22 December 1945, along with his eagerness to get deeply involved with US-American art music composers and institutions.Footnote 131 Once in New York City, Ginastera and his family established contact with Copland, and the composer began his planned Good Neighbor policy activities, which included visiting university music departments and schools of music in the US, representing Argentina in 1946 as a member of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Educadores en Música [Latin American Association of Music Educators] at the Music Educators Conference in Cleveland, publishing an article on modern Argentinian composers in the journal Modern Music, meeting American composers, and attending concerts.Footnote 132 Later, on 21 March 1946, Ginastera wrote a letter to Copland in which, among diverse other topics, he said:
Of course I would be very interested in attending the Berkshire Festival […] I would like to attend the courses and concerts and observe the organization of the festival now, since I could not do it in 1941 when you invited me. However, I must accommodate the monthly payment of the Guggenheim, which does not allow me extraordinary things in terms of travel and visits.Footnote 133
During his summer at the Berkshire Music Center, Ginastera heard the US premiere of his Doce preludios americanos [Twelve American Preludes], op. 12 (1944), performed by his countryman Raúl Spivak, to whom the piece is dedicated.Footnote 134 Erik Kleiber (1890–1956), who conducted orchestras across the American continent, also performed the Panambí Suite with the NBC Radio Orchestra. Further, Ginastera’s new Duo for Flute and Oboe, op. 13, was commissioned and performed by Carleton Sprague Smith.Footnote 135 Ginastera similarly heard his works at Unión Panamericana and the League of Composers before returning to Argentina in 1947.Footnote 136 The Doce preludios americanos had been premiered on 7 August 1944 at the Asociación Wagneriana in Buenos Aires; some of the movements were based on Argentinian dances and genres, shown in the works’ titles (Vidala, Triste, Danza criolla), and some were dedicated to American colleagues such as Copland, Villa-Lobos, Roberto García Morillo (1911–2003), and Juan José Castro (1895–1968). Ginastera thus manifests a national and continental political statement in support of musical Americanism. José María Neves explains that while Latin Americans ‘lived in geographically diverse regions, they shared numerous common elements in their way of life, culture, and art’.Footnote 137
The Doce preludios americanos combines and manipulates musical elements from diverse cultural sources that merged into Latin American modernism, besides reaching an extensive range of musical personalities on the American continent. To illustrate, in ‘Danza criolla’ [‘Creole Dance’] (no. 3), Ginastera recreates within a rondo form the malambo, the masculine dance of the gauchos, whose articulation, use of cluster chords, quartal harmonies, and rhythms evoke the rustic zapateado. Likewise, in ‘En el 1er modo pentáfono menor’ [‘In the First Minor Pentatonic Mode’], the composer seeks to evoke a ‘pre-Columbian’ atmosphere by using a monophonic melody using a G Mixolydian pentatonic scale, and a second voice initiates a strict canon. In ‘Tributo a Juan José Castro’ [‘Tribute to Juan José Castro’], Ginastera uses the expression Tempo di tango as a tempo marker; with this work, he honours his esteemed colleague, a composer and conductor, whose Tangos for piano (1942) became well known in the Argentinian modern music scene. In ‘Homenaje a Aaron Copland’ [‘Homage to Aaron Copland’], Ginastera creates a musical phrase with jazzy grace notes which functions as both an introduction and a coda, while in ‘Homenaje a Heitor Villa-Lobos’, after the brief introduction, he creates a disjunct melodic design based on a mechanical semiquaver pattern that transitions into an arpeggiated ostinato juxtaposed with an augmented Brazilian chôro rhythmic cell. Esteban Buch notes that after returning to Argentina from the US, Ginastera began his international composing career.Footnote 138
Julián Orbón’s ‘Capriccio Concertante’ (1943–44)
The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) generated a new wave of emigration to Latin America. Thousands of Spaniards left their country to be received across the American continent in a different context, full of better life opportunities. A Spanish émigré in Cuba, Julián Orbón developed his identity as a Hispanic American composer. After his arrival on the island, a place strongly connected through its past ties with the former Spanish metropole, Orbón integrated himself into the musical and cultural life of Havana, where he continued his music studies with the Spaniard José Ardévol. Ardévol adopted him as a protégé, especially because of the combination of his musical creativity and his Spanish background, a portentous combination for a disciple.
The intellectual environment of Cuba gave the young Orbón a fertile space to nurture his intellectual curiosity, which led him to meet regularly with the Cuban literati and artists; he eventually became a collaborator for the cultural journals Orígenes and Musicalia. Footnote 139 Thereafter, Orbón joined the Grupo de Renovación Musical, which heard some of his works, such as the Sonata (Homenaje sobre la tumba del Padre Soler) [Homage on the Tomb of Father Soler] (1942), at the group’s concerts. However, the new soundscapes of Cuba, combined with Orbón’s wide-ranging musical taste, began modifying his philosophy and aesthetics. More than a homeland, Cuba represented for Orbón a transcultural space where his personal and musical identity could develop, which materialized, for instance, with the work Pregón [Proclamation], for voice, flute, oboe, French horn, bassoon, and piano (1943).
The composer also contemplated other options beyond Ardévol’s mentorship in neoclassism. Moreover, Orbón’s identification and dialogue with Americanismo musical began impacting his compositional output. Politically, he detached himself from the precepts established by Ardévol in the Grupo de Renovación Musical’s foundational manifesto Presencia cubana en la música universal [The Cuban Presence in Universal Music] because he felt the need to connect his music more with the world of folklore and popular music that surrounded him, instead of continuing Ardévol’s disciplined, formalistic, and neoclassical compositional line.Footnote 140
The premiere of his Capriccio Concertante para orquesta de cámara (1943–44) was performed by the Orquesta de Cámara de La Habana, conducted by Ardévol, on 22 June 1944. As a sign of Orbón’s growing reputation, some of his early works were performed outside of the group’s concert series; thus Orbón also witnessed a performance of the same piece by the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana, conducted by Erich Kleiber, and his Concerto de cámara [Chamber Concerto] by the Orquesta da Camera de La Habana.Footnote 141 Capriccio Concertante’s score was never published, and its manuscript was missing from the composer’s archive until recently.Footnote 142 Nonetheless, a recent publication by Ana G. Fernández de Velazco Casanova has examined the original manuscript.Footnote 143 The neoclassical work for chamber orchestra in three movements (sonata form, theme and variations, and rondeau), which mostly embraces a polyphonic texture across the work, epitomizes a connection to Spanish music with the paraphrasing of motives from Tomás Luis de Victoria’s O magnum mysterium (1572), Manuel de Falla’s ‘El paño moruno’ [‘The Moorish Cloth’] from Siete canciones populares españolas [Seven Spanish Folksongs] (1914), and Cuban and Latin American folklore topoi.Footnote 144
In short, ‘A Concert of Latin American Chamber Music’ represented a pan-Latin American musical event and showed that Latin American musical modernism was an eclectic phenomenon. The Latin Americanist twentieth-century hybrid musical identity — which cohabited with neoclassical and dodecaphonic works — continued to embrace the notion of transculturation as articulated by the Cuban cultural scholar Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969).Footnote 145 Hence the Latin American modernists’ cultural and musical borders were difficult to establish because of the inherent hybridity of Latin American music, and composers embraced interculturality as a leading force to create modern Latin American art music when they ‘gather[ed] cadences, vocalizations, rhythmic-melodic designs of different sorts, from diverse cultural sources’, including indigenous, West African, and Hispanic sources; then they would freely elaborate on such sources and integrate them into their music works, as Ana María Locatelli de Pérgamo says.Footnote 146 The aesthetics and techniques embedded in these concert works are a clear case of the composers’ personal approaches towards musical modernism.Footnote 147 Thus this concert programme allowed audiences to converse about and compare diverse modern musical aesthetics prevalent across the American continent at that time.
Conclusion
This article demonstrates that the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood became a space where modern Latin American art music and US cultural diplomacy intersected. The Latin American musicians who attended the Center from 1941 to 1946 contributed to the cultural and musical enrichment of their countries as composers, conductors, pedagogues, and art administrators, and developed significant musical careers in Latin America. Moreover, the composers benefited from Tanglewood as a platform for promoting their musical identities on a transnational level, illustrating how a variety of modernist aesthetics and compositional techniques, circulated throughout Latin America, were reimagined and mediated by agency and transculturation. These findings provide an additional insight into the sociohistorical and cultural contexts of the Latin American modern music scenes, beyond the analysis of the musical syntax and semantics of the works performed at Tanglewood at this time.
During World War II, Tanglewood became one of several geopolitical resources that contributed significantly to US cultural diplomacy. Consequently, this research provides evidence demonstrating the importance of the collaboration between US government agencies and some of the most prestigious philanthropic foundations in the private sector to promote US interests in Latin America. For instance, the Tanglewood fellowship programme, despite its paternalistic function, enabled the US government to exercise the ‘principle of reciprocity’ without being accused of propaganda.
The Berkshire Music Center holds a prominent position in the history of modern western art music. Therefore without an adequate examination of the festival’s Latin American participants and their contributions, scholars underestimate their impact, ultimately leading to an uneven understanding of the function of modern art music on the American continent during the twentieth century. In sum, venues like Tanglewood became places for the construction, negotiation, and display of modern Latin American composers’ identities, cultures, politics, and aesthetics, which were not only based on a relationship between North and South Americas, but also between South and South.
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