Women’s Volunteerism, State Propaganda, and Subsidies for New Music in the USA: Following the Money on CRI 145

In 1961, the National Council of Women of the United States and the National Federation of Music Clubs sponsored a long-playing record of contemporary music by five American women composers: Mary Howe, Louise Talma, Julia Perry, Vivian Fine, and Mabel Daniels. As project organizers Anne Hull and Grace Spofford intended, the LP immediately became part of the US government’s propaganda program: the United States Information Agency circulated copies worldwide, as did the two sponsoring organizations. The making of this record, published by Composers Recordings, Inc. as CRI 145, allows us to witness a remarkable entanglement of interests: how volunteers assisted the government in projects that aligned with their own long-standing purposes; how musicians inside the United States recruited resources from US government agencies that were intended to reach people in other countries; and how government patronage supported an ostensibly private industry. Tracing the funding and labor that went into Hull and Spofford’s “special record project” demonstrates that hidden subsidies from the US government and the work of women volunteers altered the market for new music in the United States.