“No Restrictions in Any Way on Style”: The Ford Foundation’s Composers in Public Schools Program, 1959–1969

On February 19, 1959, the New York Times announced an innovative program sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Over the next three years, reported the foundation’s press release, “twenty-five composers [would] be established as ‘composers in residence’ in secondary public school systems throughout the United States.” They would “have no teaching responsibilities,” “compose music written specifically for performance by the [predominantly high school] orchestra, chorus and band,” and be selected for appointments of one year each from a pool of applicants “not … more than three years beyond their training period.”¹

Eventually named Composers in Public Schools (CPS), the program went on over the next ten years to place seventy-five composers in residence in public school systems in thirty-one of the fifty states, with the avowed purposes of giving an opportunity to promising young composers—applicants had to be no more than thirty-five years old—and generating a repertory of contemporary music for young musicians, mainly at the high school level. Each composer served for one academic year, renewable for a second if deemed successful. In fulfillment of its objectives, CPS helped launch the careers of respected, widely played composers; was responsible for the creation of enduring works; and, through its partnership with the Music Educators National Conference (MENC), contributed massively to raising the prevalence and status of “serious” newly composed wind ensemble music.

The most striking aspect of CPS was its nonpartisan stylistic attitude, fueled by the ecumenical approach of the individuals behind it, most of them composers as well. Such an attitude, which led to the selection of composers in residence with both tonal and atonal styles, both in significant numbers, is surprising if viewed in light of much contemporary historiography and therefore warrants detailed discussion.² A widely held view of the mid- to late twentieth-century environment for classical composers in the United States was summarized succinctly by Michael Broyles, writing in 2004: “It is hard to deny a prevailing mood in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Whether fact or fantasy, a sense that serialists somehow had spread a reign of terror pervaded the compositional world, and practically all young composers and many established ones felt almost helpless in the grips of a serial tyranny. Testimony is overwhelming that composers who did not wish to write serial music felt intimidated and thwarted in their careers.”³

In 1999 Joseph Straus argued—based on statistical analysis of data—that accounts of what he calls the “myth of serial tyranny” have been considerably exaggerated. Since Straus’s study, however, further treatments of the period have continued, for the most part, to perpetuate this apparent mythology.⁴ Such accounts include Anne C. Shreffler’s response to Straus, which argued that, regardless of his findings, atonality and specifically serialism were the prestige styles of the period. Shreffler declared that statistics “cannot show what is relevant or irrelevant, ordinary or extraordinary, influential or peripheral, politically correct or incorrect,” and they cannot deal with “pieces of music and their reception or the ideological associations of styles,” while impugning the “false sense of certainty that statistical studies provide.”⁵ More recent surveys of this period in well-known texts by Joseph Auner, J. Peter Burkholder, and Richard Taruskin do little to contest the idea that tonality had by the 1960s receded into historical irrelevancy, however temporarily.⁶ Auner discusses some more recent tonal composers, and Taruskin allows that “there were many composers, especially in America, … who wrote in more or less conventional ‘tonal’ idioms all through the period of stylistic revolution” but claims that “within the view of history that supported modernism, ‘tonal’ composers in the twentieth century, no matter how famous or successful, were historically insignificant” in the “modernist ‘master narrative.’”⁷ Such a narrative undeniably persists in the current literature; its continued dissemination underlies Shreffler’s equally undeniable observation that certain styles have held prestige in certain social circles. But even within the “classical” world at issue here, centered on the concert hall and university, there are many kinds and sources of...