Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-Garde Music

"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 Krèopfl, Mario Davidovsky, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Aaron Copland, Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Olivier Messiaen, Roger Sessions, and Earle Brown. In Elite Art Worlds, author Eduardo Herrera 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, Herrera illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts concerning Latin America and the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century"–