UC Berkeley

The Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) has been a crucial source of funding for contemporary American music since 1952. Using private letters, speeches, concert programs and reviews, and other documents from the FMF archives (which are only beginning to be cataloged, and to which I was the first to be granted free access), plus copious interviews with people who worked with and knew Paul Fromm, the progenitor of the FMF, this dissertation chronicles the first thirty-one years of the Fromm Music Foundation.

By and large, scholars who have written about this period in American music history have focused on the influence of the Cold War on American compositional aesthetics, philosophies, and methodologies. Others have written about the confluence of ideas that led to the creation of Ph.D. programs in composition. And many have speculated as to how the installation of composers on university and college campuses affected new American classical music and musical life more broadly drawn. These scholarly preoccupations circle around perhaps the defining problem of post-war musical life: its retreat into the academy, its renunciation of a "lay" audience, and the much-disputed claim that music composition should be treated as scholarly, "scientific" research. These interests neglect more evidently material and institutional contexts for post-war American music - crucially, private foundation support for contemporary music. Consequently, this study leads to a richer understanding of the institutional pressures and funding structures, and the interpersonal relationships at their heart, that promoted certain musics at the expense of others.

Paul Fromm was an amateur pianist and classical music enthusiast. He was also a German-Jew; he and his family were forced to flee Germany in 1938. They settled in Chicago, where Fromm established two wine importing firms. According to his later account, Fromm promised himself that, once he was financially able, he would express gratitude to the United States for providing refuge and citizenship. He identified American composers and emotionally disturbed children as his primary philanthropic concerns. Influenced by his upbringing and early exposure to canonical and contemporary music, Fromm sought to develop an equivalent American "high culture" of music. His self-described "Utopian" goal for American music was to integrate contemporary composition with the mainstream of American musical life.

Fromm's network was small, and he wanted it that way. He had wanted to become a composer himself, and although his youngest brother was allowed to pursue a musical career, Fromm had to join the family business. The FMF may have been a way to give thanks to America, but it was also the way Fromm maintained an active, and influential, musical life. Fromm came to value his friendships with composers and musicians that the FMF helped him forge as much as the compositions he funded.

Unlike larger foundations aiding cultural activity during this period, Fromm took on a traditional role of patron, working closely with a select group of composers and accepting their advice. Fromm's closeness to select composers affected them in obvious ways, but his "stable" of composer-advisors, as one composer described it, influenced Fromm and the activities of the FMF to an equal degree. Insecure about his musical abilities and in need of external, professional validation, this dissertation shows how Fromm trusted a coterie of composers and used their advice to shape his Foundation's activities. Fromm and the "academic modernists" had values and goals in common, and Fromm became a close friend and a promoter of many of these composers. Yet private patronage from the FMF shaped the development of post-war ideologies about new music in ways that differed significantly from the university system. That said, Fromm was slow to recognize that his Foundation's activities had unintended consequences that undermined his professed goals - and slower still to break with the composers he trusted to advise him. He negotiated with these men for years, believing, often erroneously, that he who held the purse strings would hold sway. Only after many failed attempts to get his composer-advisors to see his point of view did Fromm sever those relationships and refocus his Foundation's support.

This history of the Fromm Music Foundation nuances our view of the period, showing the complications and confusions "on the ground," as the various actors in contemporary musical life squabbled over scarce material resources. This dissertation ultimately proposes a fresh historiographical paradigm for post-war American music.