Music and musical composition at the American Academy in Rome

349 Pages·2014·7.72 MB·English

by  Brody

E MUSIC AND
The American Academy in Rome launched its Rome Prize in Musical d
i
t
Composition in 1921, a time in the United States of rapidly changing ideas e
d
about national identity, musical values, and the significance of international b
y
artistic exchange. Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy MUSICAL
B
in Rome tells the story of this prestigious fellowship. Combining cultural R
O
analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life
D
at the American Academy in Rome, the book offers new perspectives on a Y
COMPOSITION
wide range of critical topics: patronage and urban culture, institutions and
professional networks, musical aesthetics, American cultural diplomacy, and
the maturation of a concert music repertory in the United States during the
twentieth century. at the AMERICAN
“Each essay in this important volume addresses a previously unexamined
facet of the transatlantic musical exchange fostered by the American
a M ACADEMY IN
Academy in Rome, deftly combining eyewitness and scholarly accounts of t
U
the many men and women whose creative works have been cultivated by th S
the AAR to the present day. This richly documented book is an essential e I
A C
companion to the audible record of their compositional achievements.” M
A ROME
— nancy newman, author of Good Music for E N
R
D
a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in I
Nineteenth-Century America C M
A
U
N
S

A I
C
C
contributors: Martin Brody, Elliott Carter, John Harbison, A
A
Christina Huemer, Carol J. Oja, Andrea Olmstead, Vivian Perlis, Judith Tick, D L

Richard Trythall E C
M O
Y M
martin brody is the Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at I P
Wellesley College and served as the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the N O
R S
American Academy in Rome from 2007 to 2010. O IT
M I
O
Cover image: Detail from a photograph of an Academy studio, 1932. E
N
Courtesy of the American Academy in Rome.

Edited by MARTIN BRODY
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA
P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.urpress.com
Music and Musical Composition at
the American Academy in Rome
Eastman Studies in Music
Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor
Eastman School of Music
Additional Titles of Interest
Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-Class Set Theory and Its Contexts
Michiel Schuijer
Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945:
Essays and Analytical Studies
Edited by Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann
A Dance of Polar Opposites:
The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language
George Rochberg
Edited by Jeremy Gill
Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995
Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard
Elliott Carter’s “What Next?” Communication, Cooperation, and Separation
Guy Capuzzo
Intimate Voices: The Twentieth-Century String Quartet, Volumes 1 and 2
Edited by Evan Jones
John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page
Drew Massey
Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher
Robert Riggs
Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers
Bá lint András Varga
The Whistling Blackbird: Essays and Talks on New Music
Robert Morris
A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series
may be found on our website, www.urpress.com.
Music and Musical
Composition at the
American Academy in Rome
Edited by Martin Brody
The University of Rochester Press gratefully acknowledges the following
for generous support of this publication: The Howard Hanson Institute for
American Music at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester;
and the American Academy in Rome.
Copyright © 2014 by the Editor and Contributors
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no
part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2014
University of Rochester Press
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.urpress.com
and Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-245-7
ISSN: 1071-9989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Music and musical composition at the American Academy in Rome / edited by
Martin Brody.
pages cm — (Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071-9989 ; v. 121)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58046-245-7 (hardcover : alkaline paper) — ISBN 1-58046-245-6
(hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. American Academy in Rome—History.
2. American Academy in Rome—Awards—History. 3. Composition (Music)—
Awards—Italy—Rome. 4. Composers—United States—Biography. I. Brody,
Martin, 1949– editor. II. Series: Eastman studies in music ; v. 121.
ML33.R66A444 2014
780.71'145632—dc23
2014034314
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
Martin Brody
Part One: A History of the Rome Prize
1 The Rome Prize from Leo Sowerby to David Diamond 13
Andrea Olmstead
2 A History of the Rome Prize in Music Composition, 1947–2006 42
Richard Trythall
Part Two: Origins, Ideology, Patronage
3 The Classicist Origins of the Rome Prize in
Musical Composition, 1890–1920 127
Judith Tick
4 “Picked Young Men,” Facilitating Women, and Emerging
Composers: Establishing an American Prix de Rome 159
Carol J. Oja
Part Three: Two Case Studies in Internationalism
5 Forging an International Alliance: Leo Sowerby, Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge, and the Impact of a Rome Prize 195
Carol J. Oja
6 Class of ’54: Friendship and Ideology at the
American Academy in Rome 222
Martin Brody
Part Four: Primary Sources
7 What They Said: American Composers on Rome 257
Vivian Perlis
vi contents
8 The New Music Scene in Rome and the American
Presence since World War II: Excerpts from a
Roundtable, Moderated by Richard Trythall 267
Edited by Martin Brody
9 For the Academy 276
Elliott Carter
10 Two Visits in 1981 279
John Harbison
11 Music Resources at the American Academy in Rome 285
Christina Huemer
Appendix: Composers at the American Academy in
Rome, 1921–40 289
Compiled by Carol J. Oja
Selected Bibliography 301
List of Contributors 307
Index 311
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Howard Hanson in Rome, ca. 1921 18
1.2 Normand Lockwood in his Academy studio, 1932 26
1.3 Portrait of Samuel Barber by Robert B. Green 32
2.1 Goffredo Petrassi and Isabel and Laurance Roberts at
AAR Spring Concert reception, 1955 46
2.2 AAR Director Laurance Roberts and Alexei Haieff, 1955 59
3.1 Charles Follen McKim 130
3.2 Spring Concert in the Cortile of the American
Academy in Rome, 1923 152
4.1 Mussolini at AAR, 1933, accompanied by AAR Director
James Monroe Hewlett 163
4.2 King Victor Emmanuel III’s visit, 1922 183
5.1 Painting of Leo Sowerby by Frank Fairbanks, 1924 197
6.1 GIs’ leave courses at AAR, 1945 226
6.2 Yehudi Wyner accompanying the soprano Anna Moffo
in AAR salone, 1955 247

Introduction
Martin Brody
The United States came late to the game. The French founded a national acad-
emy in Rome 110 years before the American Revolution; it took as many years
again for the United States to produce a counterpart. Long thereafter, the
Americans tended to look over their shoulders at the Académie de France à
Rome, if from the high ground of the Janiculum. The French Académie set the
stage and established a formidable paradigm for all the ensuing foreign acad-
emies that would appear in the Eternal City. The elements were clear: aspir-
ing artists, strong patrons, consecrated antiquities, breathtaking real estate,
national glory, cultural hegemony. The composition of the brain trust charged
with launching the French enterprise was in itself imposing: Louis XIV’s invin-
cible minister of fi nance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, joined by the premier peintre du
roi, Charles Le Brun, and the celebrated Roman sculptor and architect Gian
Lorenzo Bernini.
The institution that they established provided a daunting prehistory for the
national academy of a self-conscious and still youthful democratic republic an
ocean away. Jacques-Louis David, one of the Académie’s most illustrious pensi-
onnaires, offered an especially inspiring model for generations of Americans
aiming to solve the equation of high art, patrician patronage, and democratic
society. As a Prix de Rome winner in 1774, David had communed with Johann
Joachim Winckelmann and demonstrated the virtually mystical benefi ts of
sketching in Rome. In the ensuing years, he steered deftly through the lim-
inal space between empire and republic; and he conducted a lifelong demon-
stration of the effi cacy of neoclassicism as a premise for nationalist art—both
as a hero of the fi rst Republic and then in 1804 as court painter to a newly
anointed French emperor. This emperor, the fi rst Napoleon, had overseen the
Academy’s move to the Villa Medici in 1803, a grand building adjacent to the
Spanish Steps, located on the magnifi cent site of the ancient Horti Lucullani.
It would be yet again seventy years before a cadre of elite Beaux-Arts art-
ists and architects would hatch their plan for a corresponding American orga-
nization. The American Academy in Rome’s founding fathers included the