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The Music Room: Betty Freeman's Musical Soirées
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2018
Abstract
For over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman's musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took place in a space in her Beverly Hills home known as the Music Room, within a broader history of salon culture in Los Angeles in the twentieth century – a history that shaped the city's relationship with the artistic avant-garde and made Los Angeles an important amplifier for many of the most important voices in contemporary Western art music of the last sixty years.
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Footnotes
Many thanks to my many interlocutors for this project, including Betty Freeman, Alan Rich, Steve LaCoste, and Danlee Mitchell. I also am indebted to Michael Lee, Jennifer Saltzstein, Mitchell Morris, and anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts.
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