Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics

FAIN: DR-292415-23

Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)
Laurie Matheson (Project Director: November 2022 to January 2025)

Framed by four State Department-sponsored cultural diplomacy tours in Latin America that Aaron Copland undertook between 1941 and 1962, this project traces the exchange of ideas between Copland and the critics, composers, performers, and scholars he encountered. Author Carol Hess connects American classical music with Latin American music of the twentieth century while also connecting Copland’s cultural diplomacy to U.S. government objectives, arguing that the reception of Copland’s music by Latin American critics encapsulated many of the geopolitical tensions of the moment. Drawing on hundreds of Spanish- and Portuguese-language documents; on interviews and correspondence with composers who either knew or worked with Copland during his 1963 tour; and on Copland’s diaries, this project sheds new light on the composer’s biography, the reception of his music worldwide, and U.S.-Latin American relations as enacted via the broader narrative of cultural diplomacy and its policy agendas.

Associated Products

Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Title: Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics
Year: 2023
ISBN: 9780252054006
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Author: Carol A. Hess
Abstract: Between 1941 and 1963, Aaron Copland made four government-sponsored tours of Latin America that drew extensive attention at home and abroad. Interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin American press accounts, and Copland’s diaries inform Carol A. Hess’s in-depth examination of the composer’s approach to cultural diplomacy. As Hess shows, Copland’s tours facilitated an exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers while capturing the tenor of United States diplomatic efforts at various points in history. In Latin America, Copland’s introduced works by U.S. composers (including himself) through lectures, radio broadcasts, live performance, and conversations. Back at home, he used his celebrity to draw attention to regional composers he admired. Hess’s focus on Latin America’s reception of Copland provides a variety of outside perspectives on the composer and his mission. She also teases out the broader meanings behind reviews of Copland and examines his critics in the context of their backgrounds, training, aesthetics, and politics.
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/oa_monograph/book/109452
Primary URL Description: Project Muse
Secondary URL: https://www.bibliopen.org/9780252054006
Secondary URL Description: Bibliopen
Type: Single author monograph

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