The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Music in the 1960s: The Creation of Indiana University’s LAMC and Di Tella Institute’s CLAEM

In 1961 and 1962 John P. Harrison, associate director for the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation, successfully sponsored grants toward the creation of the Latin American Music Center (LAMC) at Indiana University and the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. The first was meant to be a research and teaching center encompassing Latin American countries and the second a graduate school for Latin American composers in the Western art music tradition.¹ Only a handful of music projects in the United States received as much funding from the Rockefeller Foundation as these two, and even fewer had as much success. This increased attention to Latin American music happened at the same time that U.S. foreign policy in the region shifted from the hands-off approach of the 1950s to the support of social and economic development programs of the 1960s, as exemplified by the Alliance for Progress. The Cuban Revolution had brought Latin America to the center stage of the Cold War, and, at least initially, U.S. developmental aid was seen as a way to promote economic growth and prevent the spread of Communism. Most scholars explain the alignment between U.S. private philanthropy and state-derived foreign policy as the result of philanthropy being a mediating third force located between the public and the private sectors.² By tracing the constitutive networks that led to the LAMC and CLAEM grants, this article seeks to destabilize the concept of philanthropy as a preexisting third force and instead argues that philanthropy is an emerging domain resulting from complex entanglements, webs of relations and ideas, all being mediated and enacted as the result of human, institutional, discursive, and even material actors.³ This project illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts in the mid-twentieth century and brings to the foreground the part played by individuals acting within the weblike domain of philanthropy in the United States and Latin America.

The story of the creation of LAMC and CLAEM can be told from at least three perspectives: from the standpoint of the Rockefeller Foundation as a U.S.-based institution; from the point of view of LAMC and CLAEM; or from how the Rockefeller Foundation, LAMC, and CLAEM were perceived either in the United States and/or in the larger region as a result of their initiatives. The often-told stories about the creation of LAMC and CLAEM focus on the roles of Juan Orrego Salas and Alberto Ginastera, their respective founding directors. Notwithstanding their importance, I have decided to privilege the first perspective and give voice to individuals related to the Rockefeller Foundation, particularly John P. Harrison, the officer most closely connected to both projects. Among the different people involved in the creation of these centers, Harrison is perhaps the least known, yet his role is crucial for both. Ultimately, this focus contributes to my main argument in that there is a lot to be gained from our understanding of how philanthropy is deployed by looking carefully at trustees and officers, at the institutional documents they produce, and at their points of contact with other areas of social life.

Philanthropy and the Arts: From a Third Force to a Peopled Emergent Domain

Most investigations of the role of philanthropic organizations in mediating intellectual production during the twentieth century have discussed the ways in which financial aid reinforces foreign policy associated with political, social, and private interests. The origins of a model that conceptualized foundations as a third space between the private and public sectors can be traced back to the work of Donald Fisher and Martin Blumer during the 1980s.⁴ This model has shaped the majority of sociological scholarship on the subject.⁵ Understanding foundations as a mediating force has also been central in studies of specific patrons such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the financing of the arts in England, and more general studies in what has been called the...