Making a Modern Canon (1974)

The Fromm Foundation and the 1974 Survey of Composers

The paucity of performance opportunities and public recognition for postwar composers in American concert life was an abiding concern of Paul Fromm throughout his career as a patron of new music. In 1974, the Fromm Foundation conducted a controversial study of the sociology of musical taste, soliciting responses from over 1,600 musicians, journalists, scholars, and arts administrators with a single prompt: “Which composers of the past forty years are not yet established in the repertoire?” A diverse assortment of respondents identified 2,207 works by 686 composers, evidence of the pronounced lack of consensus about precisely which strains of modern music deserved to become what Fromm characterized as “the mainstream of public performance.”  -Mathew Blackmar