The Federal Music Project (FMP) was one of several New Deal projects that provided work relief for a variety of people in the arts. Organized as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, these projects, collectively known as Federal One, also included the FEDeral Theatre Project, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Federal Art Project. The FMP allowed thousands of musicians and MUsic workers to continue their crafts and to enhance the cultural life of the nation through performances, instruction, composition, and the preservation of American musical traditions.
Even before the Great Depression struck, American musicians had experienced difficult times. Such innovations in technology as the phonograph, radio, and the introduction of sound in movies had replaced live with “canned” music and displaced thousands of performers. Prohibition caused many nightclubs and other musical venues to close down. With the additional impact of the depression, up to two-thirds of the nation’s musicians were unemployed by 1933 by one estimate.
The choice of Nikolai Sokoloff, the Russian-born director of the Cleveland Orchestra, as national director of the Federal Music Project lent the project immediate prestige. Emphasizing orchestral over popular or folk music during his 1935-39 tenure, Sokoloff ensured that the FMP met the highest standards of musical competence as assessed by required auditions. Under his leadership of the FMP, the number of symphony orchestras in the United States expanded significantly, and a much larger segment of the public had access to “serious” music. A number of ciTiEs held composers’ forums, where the performance of a new work was followed by discussions between composer and audience. The FMP sponsored compositions by such masters as Aaron Copland and Roy Harris and often broadcast its compositions over the radio.
But the FMP did much more than support and stimulate symphonic music. It put on free concerts across the nation, sponsored glee clubs, dance bands, and JAZZ ensembles, commissioned operas, and provided social music to communities in rural and small-town America. The FMP gave thousands of performances in hospitals and schools, sponsored music festivals across the country, and conducted workshops and panel discussions. The project also provided work for music teachers, music librarians, music therapists, and repairers of musical implements.
The FMP preserved not only the skills of musicians and music workers but also the nation’s musical traditions. In 1938, it began cooperating with the WPA’s committee on the folk arts, and recorded and studied music by African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, as well as other regional folk music. It employed thousands of music copyists to transcribe music for easier use by schools and libraries. And it launched the ambitious Index of American Composers project, which although never completed or published (it remains stored in the Library of Congress), includes some 20,000 entries on 7,300 compositions by more than 2,000 composers.
The FMP did not encounter the sharp ideological and political opposition of other Federal One projects, the Federal Theatre Project in particular, but it faced the same struggle for adequate appropriations from Congress as did the others. When the Federal Theatre Project was terminated in 1939, the FMP and the artists and writers projects were allowed to continue under state and local sponsorship. Budget cuts reduced FMP rolls from their high of 16,000 to just 5,500 in 1939. With the coming of World War II, the WPA Music Program (as it was called under local control) organized bands to play at armed
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Forces training camps and worked with the military, until it was terminated in 1943 together with the other remaining arts programs.
Further reading: William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Project Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969).
—Timothy Arnquist
World History
