Martin Brody - Cold War Villa: Elite Sociability, Modern Music, and Transatlantic Alliances in 1950s Rome
November 24 | 10:00
Dynamiken und Erfahrungen der Globalisierung
Vortrag
Cold War Villa: Elite Sociability, Modern Music, and Transatlantic Alliances in 1950s Rome
Martin Brody (Wellesley College, Mass.)
Abstract:
On New Year’s Day 1953, Isabel Roberts, wife of the first post-war Director of the American Academy in Rome, began to keep a diary. She recorded the activities that occurred at a unique site of transatlantic cultural mediation: a Cold War villa. Under her watch, the Academy’s Villa Aurelia, originally built for Cardinal Giralomo Farnese around 1650, became a point of convergence for official cultural diplomacy and informal, elite sociability. The incongruous cast of characters who assembled there—artists, diplomats, clerics, aristocrats, arts administrators, philanthropists, and journalists—rarely appear together in the story of fortifying the post-war West. In my presentation, I will focus on the relationship between Isabel Roberts and Nicolas Nabokov, the composer and Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a paradigmatic Cold War enterprise. I will consider some ways that the rehabilitation of liberalism as a Cold War venture precipitated an inflection point in modern music and, more broadly, the relationship between artistic practices, Cold War cultural diplomacy, and the fortification of the transatlantic imperium.
Martin Brody is Catherine Mills Davis Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College. He served as composer in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2001-2 and as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director of the Academy from 2007 to 2010. As a composer, he has received grants and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He has also served as resident composer at the Bogliasco Foundation and La Mortella. He is currently President of the Stefan Wolpe Society and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome.