Conference Agenda

The establishment of the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) is often framed as a landmark in the institutionalization of musical modernism, epitomizing the European model of state-funded cultural institutions. The institute not only embodies Pierre Boulez’s (1925-2016) uncompromising vision for new music but also is a nationalistic project of the French President Georges Pompidou (1911-1974). However, this narrative obscures the critical role of private patronage networks and personal connections in shaping IRCAM from its inception. In particular, the contributions of the patron Paul Sacher (1906-1999) and the former First Lady of France Claude Pompidou (1912-2007) were essential in safeguarding IRCAM’s otherwise insecure future.

In this paper, I argue that IRCAM cannot be understood solely as a triumph of state-funded institutionalized culture or as the embodiment of Boulez’s artistic vision but that it must also be understood as an institution deeply embedded in a network of private patronage and personal relationships. Boulez’s own ambivalence toward funding structures – advocating for state support while embracing private capital – further complicates narratives of artistic autonomy from the neoliberal market. Extending Marianna Ritchey’s critique of the pervasiveness of market logics in the U.S. cultural sphere, as analyzed in Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era, I point to the largely overlooked role of elite private sector patronage in the historiography of European modernist cultural production.

Referencing archival documentation, I foreground the roles of Sacher and Claude Pompidou, first examining their early involvement in the project of IRCAM and then analyzing their continued advocacy throughout the 1970s–1990s. As a member of IRCAM’s executive board, Sacher mobilized Swiss private donations, while Pompidou leveraged her influence among the French political elite. By foregrounding the roles of Sacher and Claude Pompidou in these patronage networks, this analysis challenges the notion that musical modernism operated independently of economic and social power structures. Ultimately, I point to the contradiction that European avant-garde radicalism often remains dependent on the systems of power it seeks to resist.

This paper examines how the reception of the Darmstadt School in the Latvian SSR exposed ideological and aesthetic tensions within Soviet musicology, revealing the fluid interpretation of cultural policy on the USSR’s western periphery. Musicologists in the non-Russophone Soviet west accessed banned Western music through cultural exchanges with satellite states like Poland and by illicitly tuning in to broadcasts from West Germany (Zakšauskienė 2015; Jakelski 2015). Latvian critics wrote in their native language, operating primarily under local censorship with limited oversight from Moscow. In the Latvian SSR and the broader Soviet-Baltic region, these cultural contact zones fostered interpretations of politics and modernist aesthetics that diverged from those in the Soviet interior.

Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s approach to aesthetics and politics (2000), this paper examines how marginalized interpretations of musical modernisms challenged and reshaped dominant narratives in Soviet Latvian criticism. Using unpublished manuscripts, conference proceedings, and periodical reviews from Riga’s archives, I reconstruct and analyze debates on the Darmstadt School in the Latvian SSR, focusing on critics Vija Muške (1927–1988) and Arvīds Darkevics (1918–1992). Darkevics, a zealous Marxist-Leninist and powerful cultural bureaucrat, rigidly enforced socialist realism as the only ideologically and morally acceptable aesthetic for new music—equating it with extended tonality and classical form. Meanwhile, he denounced pointillism, electronic music, and musique concrète in Latvian-language publications aimed at the Western diaspora, declaring, “In the capitalist world, new musical trends are invented, new creative schools are announced, each more superficial than the next” (Darkevics 1960). Muške, an independent scholar who had spent nearly her entire childhood as a gulag prisoner, defended the artistic legitimacy of the Darmstadt School, particularly the works of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis, incorporating a profound analytical basis to her arguments. She framed her critiques, however, in strictly aesthetic terms. How did Muške’s aesthetic autonomy in Riga operate under such ideological pressure? Ultimately, this paper advocates for a more nuanced understanding of the broader field of Soviet music history that considers both the local realities of peripheral republics and their relation to the imperial center of Moscow.

Why did James Loeb (1867–1933) contribute huge amounts of money to the Institute of Musical Art (The Juilliard School), the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the Loeb Classical Library, art collections, and a hospital? Born into an extremely wealthy Wall Street family, he was not permitted to live the life he wished. Due to the German notion of Familiengefühl (family duty), Loeb was denied his desired career (archeology) and forced to join his father’s firm Kuhn Loeb. Loeb was also told he would be disinherited if he married a Gentile; therefore he remained unmarried until the age of fifty-four. Seeking medical treatment, he left New York for Germany in 1905 and never returned to this country. Despite being thwarted in these two important areas and suffering from significant mental illnesses, Loeb nevertheless made major contributions to four cultural institutions: music, classical studies, psychiatry, and antiquities.

The ethos of Jewish philanthropy in New York City at the turn of the last century meant that the patrons did not always put their name on the institutions they founded. This modesty on Loeb’s part meant that he was nearly forgotten by Harvard’s music department—he paid for their building in 1914—and by the music conservatory he founded with Frank Damrosch in 1905: the Institute of Musical Art, which became The Juilliard School. His musical philanthropy was entirely in the US, almost all of it after he had left the country.

Unaware of his musical contributions, in 2011 a James Loeb Gesellschaft was founded in Germany to call attention to his three European philanthropic endeavors: his collection of antiquities, his building a hospital, and the Loeb Classical Library. I shall edit a book to be published by Harvard University Press in 2027 that concentrates on his musical life and work and will help to bring attention to this major musical philanthropist.

By seeking out archives and privately published family memoirs, and investigating his family, the author has pieced together a portrait of a talented musician and answered the question of what made him so committed to music.