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Abstract
This dissertation, “Composing American Individualism: Luciano Berio in the United States, 1960-1971,” reconstructs the Italian-born composer's American years during the 1960s by integrating the textures of American politics with the momentum of his international career. I recast Berio in the company of American musicians, experimentalists, and avant-garde performing artists, as well as cultural administrators and arts policy makers in order to broaden current Berio scholarship perspectives geographically and to examine the historical evidence more closely. At the core are three works by Berio: Traces , Passaggio, and Sinfonia. The history and contents of Traces—a censored and racially contentious theater piece composed in 1964—shed two new viewpoints on Berio and his music. First, by retracing the history of Traces, I demonstrate that American culture and politics shaped Berio and his music in fundamental ways. I show that his first American-commissioned work for the theater, Traces, was inspired by the nuanced political rhetoric of the early 1960s civil rights movement—“to erase every trace of discrimination”—and I argue that its withdrawal from the scheduled world premiere prevented a staging of the “traces of discrimination.” Second, I reinterpret Berio's most famous work, Sinfonia (1968), in light of the censored 1964 world premiere of Traces. I argue that Berio contained his personal political beliefs by embedding them in the myriad of quotations in the third movement and also obscuring explicit literary meanings in the second movement; simultaneously, I also show that Berio chose to highlight the more popular sounds in America—Mahler's symphonies and the Swingle Singers—to generate a populist reception.
Premiered in the U.S. in 1967, Passaggio provides an example of the privileges Berio received as a Western European composer of concert music in America, gathering financial support and artistic approval from American philanthropic organizations and academic institutions. Within this investigation, I bring into discussion a set of institutional documents held at the Rockefeller Archive Center that illuminate the collaborative efforts between performing arts philanthropy and academia during the 1950s and 60s.
Concurrently, this dissertation addresses Cold War politics of 1960s America as they relate to the composition, production, and reception of the three works discussed: Traces, Passaggio, and Sinfonia. I situate the recurring American Cold War rhetoric of “freedom and democracy” within the contemporaneous political concepts of George Kennan's containment and forbearance, Isaiah Berlin's positive and negative liberties, and Herbert Marcuse's individuality. In doing so, I interrogate the liberties—such as rights, responsibilities, choices, capabilities, and limitations—of individuals in the concert music-making culture. And last, I argue for a more complex understanding of politics and music in the 1960s American concert-music landscape that includes the dissonant voices among government officials, non-governmental-organization bureaucrats, private philanthropists, economists, and the American listening public.
