Argentina’s Centro de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Cold War

Between 1962 and 1971, the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires became the central hub of Latin American avant-garde music. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the wealthy Di Tella family, CLAEM offered two-year fellowships to some of the most recognized young composers of the region to undertake graduate studies in a unique privileged setting under the direction of Alberto Ginastera and with permanent and visiting faculty that included Gerardo Gandini, Francisco Kröpfl, Mario Davidovsky, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Aaron Copland, Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Olivier Messiaen, Roger Sessions, and Earle Brown. Engrained in the history of CLAEM were elite worldviews about the role of philanthropy in society and deep Cold War ideologies that shaped US–Latin American foreign relations in the early 1960s such as Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress.”

Specifics of the Interpretation of the Canon in the Works of Luigi Dallapiccola in the 1940s and 1950s

В творчестве Луиджи Даллапикколы канон как форма и прием изложения занимает важнейшее место. Трактовка канона композитором рассматривается в статье на примере одного из ключевых этапов творчества, который связан с установлением собственного типа серийного письма, — десятилетия от начала 1940-х до начала 1950-х годов. Объектом анализа стали две сходных по своему составу пары сочинений Даллапикколы, возникшие в начале и в конце обозначенного этапа: «Каноническая сонатина» (1942–1945) и «Шесть песен Алкея» (1943), а также «Музыкальная тетрадь Анналиберы» (1952–1953) и «Песни на стихи Гёте» (1953). Их сравнение показало целый ряд отличий в подходе композитора к канону. В более ранних циклах каноническое изложение охватывает все части, а виды используемых канонов необычайно разнообразны; в более поздних на каноническое письмо опирается только часть номеров, сам канон представлен теми формами, структура которых связана с идеей полипараметровости (ракоходный, в увеличении, в обращении). Эти, а также другие особенности циклов начала 1950-х (изменение концепции вертикали в сторону диссонантности; появление канонических закономерностей в виртуальном слое фактуры, на уровне серийной диспозиции), демонстрируют овладение Даллапикколы серийным мышлением и типом письма. Canon as a form and principle occupied an important place in Luigi Dallapiccola’s creativity. In this paper the composer's interpretation of the canon is shown on the example of a pivotal moment of his creativity, which is related to establishment of his own type of 12-tone writing and spanned a decade from the early 1940s to the early 1950s. The object of the analysis is two similar pairs of works by Dallapiccola, which appeared at the beginning and at the end of the indicated stage: “Sonatina canonica” (1942–1945) and “Sex carmina Alcaei” (1943), “Quaderno musicale di Annalibera” (1952–1953) and “Goethe-Lieder” (1953). А comparison of these opuses showed a number of differences in the composer’s approach to the canon. The canonical exposition is present in all the movements; the types of canons are unusually diverse in the earlier cycles. In later works only a part of the movements is based on the canonical writing, the canon itself being represented by the forms, whose structure is associated with the idea of total serialism (in retrograde motion, in augmentation, in inversion). These and other features of the cycles of the early 1950s (for example, the change in the vertical towards the dissonance; the appearance of canonical principles in the texture and in serial disposition), show Dallapiccola’s mastery of serial thinking and type of composition.

Elite Art Worlds

Between 1962 and 1971, the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires became the central hub of Latin American avant-garde music. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the wealthy Di Tella family, CLAEM offered two-year fellowships to some of the most recognized young composers of the region to undertake graduate studies in a unique privileged setting under the direction of Alberto Ginastera and with permanent and visiting faculty that included Gerardo Gandini, Francisco Kröpfl, Mario Davidovsky, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Aaron Copland, Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Olivier Messiaen, Roger Sessions, and Earle Brown. This book combines oral histories, ethnographic research, and archival sources to reveal CLAEM as a meeting point of US and Argentine philanthropy, local experiences in transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation, and regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism. The story of CLAEM shows how musical avant-gardes were articulated, embodied, resignified, and institutionalized in Latin America; how composers during the 1960s engaged with discourses of Latin Americanism as professional strategy, identification marker, and musical style; and sheds light into the role of art in the legitimation and construction of elite status and identity. By looking at CLAEM as both an artistic and a philanthropic project, the book illuminates the relationships among foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts concerning Latin America and the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

Rhythm in the Works of Luigi Dallapiccola

Творчество Луиджи Даллапикколы 1950-1960-х годов отмечено активными экспериментами в области метра и ритма. У композитора сложилась концепция так называемого плавающего ритма (schwebender Rhythmus). В статье данное понятие интерпретируется как связанное со свободной метрикой, ритмической нерегулярностью, безакцентностью. К комплексу приемов, способствующих нарушению метроритмического равновесия, автор относит вуалирование сильных долей, использование внутритактовых и межтактовых синкоп, добавочной длительности, полиметрию. Принципы композиторской работы с ритмом демонстрируются на примере отдельных сочинений 1950-1960-х годов: Музыкальной тетради Анналиберы , вокальных циклов Песни на стихи Гёте и Пять песен , концерта для виолончели с оркестром Диалоги , оперы Улисс . Даллапиккола синтезирует достижения старых мастеров полифонии и композиторов новой венской школы. Он автономизирует звуковысотные и ритмические каноны, оперирует длительностями как конструктивными элементами, работает с ритмическими ячейками как синтаксическими единицами, ищет эквивалент звуковысотной инверсии в ритмическом параметре путем обращения долгих длительностей в короткие и наоборот. Автор проводит параллели между ритмическим мышлением Даллапикколы и ритмическими идеями Мессиана, Булеза, других сериальных композиторов. Прослеживается тенденция к усложнению ритмических структур: Даллапиккола обращается к разнообразным способам числовой организации ритма и наделяет его образно-символическим смыслом. The work of Luigi Dallapiccola of the 19501960s is characterized by active experiments in the field of meter and rhythm. The composer has developed the concept of the socalled floating rhythm (schwebender Rhythmus). In the article, this concept is interpreted as associated with a free metric, rhythmic irregularity, and lack of focus. The complex of techniques mentioned by the author as contributing to violation of the metro-rhythmic equilibrium, includes the veiling of accented beats, the use of in-bar and inter-bar syncopes, additional duration, polymetry. The principles of composers work with rhythm are demonstrated by particular compositions of the 19501960s: Quaderno musicale di Annalibera Musical Notebook of Annalibera, the vocal cycles Goethe-Lieder and Cinque canti, Five Songs, the concert for cello and orchestra Dialoghi Dialogues, and the opera Ulisse. Dallapiccola synthesizes the achievements of ancient polyphony and composers of the new Viennese school. It autonomizes pitch and rhythmic rules, operates with du-rations as constructive elements, works with rhythmic cells as syntactic units, searches for the equivalent of pitch inversion in the rhythmic parameter by converting long dura-tions into short ones and vice versa. The author draws parallels between the rhythmic thinking of Dallapiccola and the rhythmic ideas of Messian, Boulez and other compos-ers-serialists. There is a tendency toward complication of rhythmic structures: Dallapiccola re-fers to various methods of numerical organization of rhythm and gives it figurative and symbolic meaning.

Dallapiccola, Luigi (1904–1975)

Luigi Dallapiccola was the leading Italian composer of the middle half of the twentieth century, contributing much to the development of musical modernism in Italy as well as writing some of the most famous and widely performed music of his era. He was born in Pisino in modern-day Croatia; his Istrian background and the changing political ownership of his hometown are often cited as the root of many of his later musical and esthetic directions. However, it could be claimed that his more crucial relationship with place occurred in Florence, where he re-located in 1922 as a burgeoning compositional talent to study with Ernesto Consolo and later the modernist Vito Frazzi. He never left, finding the city of Dante, Botticelli, and Boccaccio to be a perpetual artistic muse. By the end of the 1930s, Dallapiccola had been firmly established as Italian music’s principal pioneer and was known overseas as a vocal supporter of musical internationalism through the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Petrassi, Goffredo (1904–2003)

Goffredo Petrassi (b. 1904, d. 2003) was an Italian musician and composer who spent much of his working life in Rome. Alongside Luigi Dallapiccola and Giorgio Federico Ghedini he inhabited an "intermediate" generation in Italian twentieth-century modernism, spanning the gap between the flamboyant trio of Alfredo Casella, Ildebrando Pizetti, and Gian Francesco Malipiero in the 1920s and ‘30s and the avant-gardists Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Luciano Berio in the 1960s. Petrassi grew up surrounded by the polyphonic heritage of the Italian renaissance, being born in the same village as Palestrina and studying as a teenager in Rome at the Scuola Cantorum of San Salvatore in Lauro; Weismann notes that "various manifestations of Catholic baroque art displayed on architecture, interior decoration and music … undoubtedly contributed to the formation of his taste" (Weissmann, 1957, 3). His student days were spent at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, where he studied with Bustini and Casella, and produced a flourish of remarkably mature works which combined extreme contrapuntal complexity with the harmonic language of Stravinsky. In addition, Petrassi’s ability to overcome the Italian aversion to the orchestral "set-piece" (for instance, the Partita of 1932, the Concerto for Orchestra of 1933–34) led to fruitful international connections in Britain and Germany.

Togni, Camillo (1922–1993)

Camillo Togni was an Italian composer, aesthetician and pianist. Launching a career in the midst of the chaos of World War II, he played his part in the trends and polemics that emerged from Italian art music in the late 1940s, but his prominence faded into the 1960s as Italian musical modernism diversified. A precocious talent from an early age, Togni left his hometown of Brescia aged 17, on the outbreak of war, to commence study with a string of artistic luminaries: Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) for composition, Luigi Rognoni (1913–1986) for esthetics and Benedetto Michelangeli (1920–1995) for piano. Togni’s career subsequently thrived in the heady atmosphere of postwar crisis that beset Italian music in the late forties, and he was a veteran of the numerous conferences and congresses accompanying the quasi-evangelical turn towards serialism and other high-modernist compositional techniques in Italy during this period. An early adopter of serialism (for instance, in the "Variazioni" of 1945–46), Togni demonstrated a rigorous adherence to the method combined with a block-like approach to musical texture, similar in substance to Stravinskian serial efforts and the later work of Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975).

Mercure, Pierre (1927–1966)

In 1952, Pierre Mercure became the first director of the CBC musical television broadcasts. His long-standing concern with the interaction between the different arts gave dance and movement an important place in his repertoire and has left behind him a series of innovative and often visually experimental productions. He was a student of composers such as Darius Milhaud and Luigi Dallapiccola, and surrounded himself with professionals of artistic fields as varied as theater (Gabriel Charpentier), dance (François Riopelle), and poetry (Fernand Ouellete). At an early age, he composed symphonic pieces evoking those of Milhaud and Honegger (Kaleidoscope, 1948, rev. 1949). Art songs taken from his Dissidence cycle (1955) were later integrated into the Cantate pour une joie (1955), which became one of his most celebrated works. During the last years of his career, Mercure devoted his work to a synthesis of traditional and electronic musical means in a major triptych (Psaume pour abri, 1963; Tétrachromie, 1963; Lignes et points, 1964).