About the Project
The disorienting Great War left in its wake a grand remapping of geopolitical affinities in the western hemisphere. Many cultural and scientific organizations calling themselves “Pan-American” attempted to facilitate mutual understanding and cooperation in order to distinguish the American continent from Europe. In music, the Pan-American Association of Composers (PAAC), active between 1928 and 1934, was a loose association of cultural actors working toward “wider mutual appreciation of the music of the different republics of America, and stimulat[ing] composers to make still greater effort toward creating a distinctive music of the Western Hemisphere.” To this end, the PAAC presented over 40 concerts of “Pan-American music” in the Americas and Europe.
Music chosen for these concerts often remodeled traits that marked French and Eastern European musical modernism, such as primitivism, the use of musical folk material, and a growing interest in novel musical resources. In both the United States and Latin America, the proliferation of these traits opened possibilities for expressing local flavor with a newly modernist conception of its value. As the concert programs collected here (see Concert Programs) demonstrate, the PAAC’s strategy for approaching European audiences by collaborative force was to use their lack of a unifying musical style to their advantage. To date, I’ve collected over 50 concert reviews and archived them on this site. (See Concert Reviews.) Taken as a whole, these show how the PAAC’s purposeful stylistic diversity was lauded as courageous in some cities and rejected as amateurish and tasteless in others.
About the Author
Stephanie N. Stallings, PhD, is a pianist and musicologist. The research presented here is from her dissertation, “Collective Difference: The Pan-American Association of Composers” (2009, The Florida State University), in which she examined the geopolitical dimensions of musical production by focusing on connections between US modernists and the Latin American avant garde. She has taught courses in music history, world music, music literature, and music appreciation at Florida State University and George Washington University, served as Contributing Editor for the Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press, 2012), and contributed an essay to Carlos Chávez and His World (Ed. Leonora Saavedra, Princeton Univ. Press, 2015). She is currently Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University.