The Closing and Lasting Impact of CLAEM

This chapter evaluates the conditions leading to the closing of CLAEM and the impact the center as a whole had on the Latin American art music scene. Touching upon the three main themes of the book, the chapter discusses the lessons learned and the weaknesses revealed from the most significant philanthropic incursion into avant-garde art music in Latin America, and the lasting legacy of a generation of fellowship holders, both in terms of their embrace or rejection of the avant-garde, and their adoption of an identification as Latin American composers based on strong and intimate social bonds. It argues that the impact that the relatively short-lived center had during the following fifty years on the classical music of the region was the result of calculated philanthropic efforts, the embodied and multi-faceted embrace of avant-garde ideas, and the conscious and strategic construction and identification of Latin American composers.

The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Music in the 1950s and 1960s

This chapter focuses on the dynamics and overlaps between the history of CLAEM and U.S. philanthropy, cultural diplomacy, and foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s, decades shaped by the Cold War and the Cuban Revolution. By tracing the constitutive networks that led to the initial CLAEM grant, this chapter seeks to destabilize the concept of philanthropy as a preexisting third force between the public and private sectors. Instead, it argues for its examination as an emerging domain that results from complex entanglements, webs of relations and ideas, all being mediated and enacted as the result of human, institutional, discursive, and material actors. The chapter argues that CLAEM was one of the most successful projects in the arts supported by the Rockefeller Foundation during the 20th century and that few if any had such broad repercussions in the musical scene of a whole region.

John Harrison, Alberto Ginastera, and the Creation of CLAEM

This chapter explores the creation of CLAEM through a series of vignettes that use the interactions between Rockefeller Foundation officer John P. Harrison and the famous composer Alberto Ginastera to show how institutional forces, usually imagined on a seemingly abstract level, actually come into play on the ground through the exchanges of specific people. The chapter demonstrates how Harrison played a fundamental role in the creation of CLAEM and heading several inroads of the Rockefeller Foundation into Latin American art music during the early 1960s. The narrative constructed in this chapter around the creation of CLAEM sets up several issues that will be further explored in the rest of the book in relation to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Di Tella Family, and the mission and vision of CLAEM.

Embodied Avant-garde(s)

This chapter uses CLAEM as a window into how musical avant-gardism was understood and experienced. The chapter provides a thick description of how different CLAEM fellows engaged with a wide range of practices that were ultimately manifestations of avant-garde desires. It argues for a plural understanding of the avant-garde and its diverse reception which included life-long embrace, temporary adoption, gradual disillusionment, and even intolerant rejection. The chapter portrays the broad meaning of CLAEM participation for many composers in the musical avant-garde: it meant working within certain aesthetic ideals and extending these ideals to everyday practice as part of fluid and rich identities. These composers went well beyond writing music to militantly organizing events, promoting works, musicological writing, and teaching.

Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales

This chapter locates CLAEM as part of a fast-growing cosmopolitan Buenos Aires and within the Di Tella Institute and its other art centers. It then provides an overview of the fellows, professors, facilities, and activities that constituted CLAEM during its ten years of existence, payin attention to the ways material conditions—including infrastructure, salaries, fellowships, guests, library, and the electronic music laboratory— created an ideal space for creativity and experimentation. The chapter reveals how these intellectual, material, and personal conditions made CLAEM a crucial transnational space for the creation of regional professional networks of solidarity and considers how the two-year duration of CLAEM fellowships and the regional focus of the program allowed profound exchange among some of the most talented composers of the entire region.

Introduction

This introduction presents the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the intersecton of the three key themes in the book Elite Art Worlds. First, understanding how local and international philanthropy providing funding for CLAEM articulated foreign policy, private interests, and cultural diplomacy. Second, how diverse models of musical avant-gardism were followed, consumed, and rearticulated and then embodied, resignified and institutionalized in Latin America, problematizing the idea of a single homogenous avant-garde. And third, the ways in which participants of CLAEM navigated a regional discourse about identity and professional positioning labeled Latin Americanism. The chapter concludes with a discussion and problematization of the idea of elites and art worlds.

From Musical Pan Americanism to Latin Americanism

This chapter demonstrates that a significant shift in identity politics took place at CLAEM when a younger generation of composers advantageously adopted a regional identification as “Latin American avant-garde composers” in an art world that was largely European and U.S.-centric. The discourse of musical Latin Americanism that emerged among these composers shared ideas with earlier proponents of hemispheric solidarity but with a renewed, critical, and much more strategic regional identification, solidified by the social networks nurtured at CLAEM. This chapter explores the emergence of a shared discourse of Latin Americanism as a professional strategy and as musical style among the graduates of the Center and the short and long-term consequences that this had for the contemporary music scene in the region.

The Di Tella Family, Art Philanthropy, and the Legitimation of Elite Status

The Di Tella family owned one of the largest industrial emporiums of Argentina and in 1958 decided to use part of their fortune to create the Torcuato Di Tella Institute. In 1962, the Institute collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation to create a music center, CLAEM, under the direction of Alberto Ginastera. This chapter examines the ways in which avant-garde music, and art in general, was relevant to the Di Tella family at a time when they were in the process of reconfiguring their elite identity. It shows the complex and often contradictory positions of Guido and Torcuato S. Di Tella as they legitimized their status and associated the Di Tella name not just with refrigerators and automobiles, but also with contemporary arts. Built upon oral histories, this chapter explores the social meaning and value of philanthropic practices for the Di Tella brothers. The complex picture painted by this story underlines the need to understand elites as dynamic and not as static or homogeneous social groups.