Avant-Gardes Abroad: Musical Modernism and European Exiles in Latin America, 1935–60

Musical modernism found a well-known refuge from Nazism in the United States; both Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg spent the war in Los Angeles. But many of their Central European students and contemporaries escaped to Latin America. In their new homelands, advocates of modernism worked to establish themselves professionally on a continent where German art music had only recently entered the concert repertoire. Many Latin American critics were still discovering Bach and Wagner, let alone the spiky, atonal works of Alban Berg or Bela Bartok. Latin American concert and radio audiences did not appreciate modernism any more than most European audiences had. Meanwhile, Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs and its cultural-diplomacy representatives, including Aaron Copland, rejected German-inflected music more generally in their efforts to create a new pan-American musical canon.

This paper will explore the European refugees’ efforts to integrate into their new setting, focusing on Mexico City and Buenos Aires as case studies. They took on the task of introducing Latin American audiences to the entire range of German and Habsburg musics and musical practices. They also worked with Latin American composers to premiere and program modernist works, create modernist salons, and invigorate the Latin American avant-garde with what they understood to be modernism’s inherently antifascist charge. Yet in their new Latin American setting, European identities and musics were slowly collapsed into one undifferentiated “German” category, in which internal differences of style, origin, or political affiliation mattered less than being problematically foreign.