UC Riverside

During the twentieth century, music festivals and organizations became places for composers to construct identity, negotiate aesthetics, promote cultural exchange, and exercise agency on the American continent. The visionary American conductor Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) officially founded the Berkshire Music Center in 1940 and imagined a music festival that would serve as a music-education center of the highest level for musicians in the Western art-music tradition. He appointed eminent musicians to support him to achieve this educational and musical dream, especially Aaron Copland (1900–1990) as Head of the Faculty. During that time, Copland was fully invested in cultural diplomacy as a way of promoting U.S. culture and values internationally, sponsored by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the U.S. State Department, and U.S.-based private foundations (Rockefeller and Guggenheim). Thereby, the dissertation contends that Copland invited Latin American composers to Tanglewood to support the Good Neighbor Policy agenda during World War II (1939–1945), and later the Truman Doctrine within the inter-American system during the early Cold War era (1947–1997).

The dissertation similarly examines individuals, groups, and concepts, such as Grupo Renovación (Argentina, 1929–1944), Grupo de los cuatro (Mexico, 1936-1940), Música Viva (Brazil, 1939–1948), Grupo de Renovación Musical (Cuba, 1942–1948), and Francisco Curt Lange’s (1903-1997) Americanism musical, just to name a few, who fostered a vibrant and creative Modern- music scene in Latin America during the first half-century. Although some recent publications have discussed and reviewed the role of modern art music on the American continent and its intersection with U.S. cultural diplomacy during the periods of Pan-Americanism and Inter-Americanism, the impact of Latin American modern music at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood remains unstudied. Throughout the dissertation, I examine how the geocultural and epistemological category of Latin American art music, despite possessing a musical/cultural history, must constantly negotiate aesthetics and politics vis-à-vis the ethnocentric and epistemological hierarchies of Western modernity. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine the intersection of Latin American modern music at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood (1941-1951), U.S. cultural diplomacy, and Western modernity, thus shedding needed light on this untold episode from the Western hemisphere’s art-music history.