An essential high culture institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has both supported and molded American musical culture. Denise Von Glahn examines the Foundation and its immense influence from the organization's prehistory and origins through the onset of World War II.

Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe—three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization's ambitious goals. Von Glahn also examines the career of the longtime musical advisor Thomas Whitney Surette while profiling early awardees Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Carlos Chàvez. She examines the processes behind their selection, their values and aesthetics, and their relationships with the insiders and others who championed their work.

|Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Family

The Foundation

The Advisors

The Network

The College

The Winners

Conclusions

Notes

Index

|"Denise Von Glahn's intricately researched new book deftly explains and exposes the inner workings of a culturally influential old boy's network—one we think we know, but of which we actually still know too little—and reveals the potential advantages and disadvantages that this set of circumstances brought about. Circle of Winners is a timely historical narrative within our current moment of cultural reckoning."—Amy C. Beal, author of Johanna Beyer
|Denise Von Glahn is a Professor of Musicology at Florida State University. She is the author of the books The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life and Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices.