Jonathan Hiam, Ph.D. 2005

Advisor: Severine Neff

Dissertation Title: Music at Black Mountain College: The European Years, 1939-46

Find it in the library here.

Dissertation Abstract:

Between the years 1939 and 1945 the music program at Black Mountain College was dominated by the presence of European émigrés. Heinrich Jalowetz, a friend and former student of Arnold Schoenberg, arrived at the college in 1939 as a refugee of Hitler’s rise to power. Jalowetz imbued the curriculum at BMC with the musical ideals of the Second Viennese School, and in 1944 he organized the Black Mountain College Summer Music Institute that attracted the largest gathering of Schoenberg’s disciples in America. The institute had an immediate effect upon American composers, prompting Roger Sessions to call the event “the most important thing that has ever happened in musical education in America.” Another European refugee, musicologist Edward Lowinsky, joined Jalowetz on the faculty in 1942. Under his influence, the study and cultivation of Early Music flourished. The Black Mountain College Summer of Music Institute of 1945 was devoted largely to Early Music and attracted such figures as musicologist Alfred Einstein and harpsichordist Erwin Bodky. This dissertation examines the two Black Mountain Summer Music Institutes and discusses the musical aesthetics that informed the institutes’ lectures, seminars, and performances, and closes with an evaluation of the entire known repertory performed at BMC. 

Chapter I introduces the sources and bibliographic material for this study and provides an overview of the history of the music program at BMC. Chapter II outlines the history and philosophical foundations for BMC and examines the biographies of Jalowetz and Lowinsky, drawing upon their own writings, published and unpublished. Chapter III discusses the Black Mountain College Summer Music Institute of 1944 and its relationship to Schoenberg’s Viennese Verein für musikalsches Privatauffürungen. Chapter IV examines the 1945 institute’s emphasis on Early Music and influence of the political rift of 1944 within the BMC faculty on the formation of a rival institute at Kenyon College. Chapter V compiles and evaluates a list of known works performed at BMC between 1933 and 1956. 

Dr. Hiam is currently the curator of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.