The Recorded Anthology of American Music and the Rockefeller Foundation: Expertise, Deliberation, and Commemoration in the Bicentennial Celebrations

A rich and diverse collection, evoking a thousand memories and suggesting marvelously the artistic range and emotional power of the American musical experience. The Recorded Anthology of American Music belongs in every library in the land. I wish it could be in every home where families like to gather together and listen to music.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.¹

The Recorded Anthology of American Music (RAAM) was a collection of one hundred LPs released between 1976 and 1978 by New World Records in celebration of the United States Bicentennial.² It included an astounding twelve hundred musical titles by five hundred composers performed by sixteen hundred musicians. With a total playing time of over eighty hours, the anthology covered a wide range of music, from Virgil Thomson’s opera The Mother of Us All, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein; to Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s musical Shuffle Along; to Ricky Ford’s jazz album Loxodonta Africana. The Rockefeller Foundation contributed $4.9 million (the equivalent of $20 million in 2015) to the RAAM, originally conceiving the project as “a gift from the foundation to the American people.”³ According to a foundation program officer, the public could find in the anthology “all the strands of music which make up the fabric of American musical experience.”⁴ Over seven thousand sets were donated to universities, libraries, and radio stations. Musicologists, leading critics, composers, and performers wrote extensive liner notes, which amounted to six three-hundred-page volumes.⁵

Members of the selection committees, however, did not always agree on the choice of repertoire. Two general divisions arose: contemporary composers viewed the project as a way to record new music that was not commercially viable, while musicologists and historians wanted the project to serve as a wide-ranging compilation of American music of all styles from the previous two hundred years. For example, composer and foundation consultant Mario di Bonaventura saw the project as a Marshall Plan for new music.⁶ By contrast, musicologist Charles Hamm perceived of the RAAM as an opportunity to include previously unrecorded popular songs, folk music, and the music of women, African Americans, and other racial minorities.⁷

Through archival evidence at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York, and oral history I have undertaken with participants, I demonstrate in this article how consultants and editorial boards tackled and debated issues of American identity, genre, and aesthetics. I argue that the employment of outside consultants in the RAAM had major implications for the inclusion and exclusion of repertoire. Americanist musicologists in particular were strongly influential in the anthology’s outcome. Their membership on the editorial committee counterbalanced the power of composers who wanted to focus predominantly on recording contemporary music. Due to the musicologists’ influence, there was a significant increase in the number of records devoted to popular music, jazz, religious music, and music of earlier time periods. Their impact was direct and proportional to their presence on the committee.

I analyze the role of these musicologists and composers through a sociology of expertise that integrates Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social and cultural capital into a better understanding of the roles experts play in society and decision making. The Rockefeller Foundation extensively employed outside consultants for a range of advice and tasks, from serving as judges for competitions, to attending conferences and deciding the future policies of the institution, to recommending for or against individual grants. Experts offered a means of acquiring specialized knowledge while contributing a wider range of viewpoints, aesthetic tastes, and geographical representation that would otherwise be absent. Not only did experts provide directly a knowledge- and experience-based service, but they also indirectly produced a legitimizing function, attaching their prestige and influence to the decisions that the foundation made. As sociologist Harald Mieg argues, experts certified the quality of certain products or services.⁸ They gave a vote of confidence, or a stamp of approval, that was tied to their vast experiences and knowledge as composers, performers, managers, and historians.

Expertise, however...