In 1940 he co-founded the National Music Council with Julia Ober, Franklin Dunham, and Edwin Hughes.
He soon found performing and coaching were not enough and, wishing to explore the philosophy and history of music more deeply, he enrolled at the University of Berlin in 1929, where he studied with Karl Erich Schumann, Arnold Schering, and Curt Sachs.
After receiving a PhD in musicology in 1933, with a dissertation on the objective and subjective aspects of tonal intensity, he returned to New York.
[4] In collaboration with the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, the Gertrud Clark Whittall Foundation, and the Koussevitsky Foundation, the Music Division under Spivacke's leadership sponsored hundreds of concerts of chamber music and commissioned new works from composers such as Aaron Copland, Alberto Ginastera, Roy Harris, Paul Hindemith, Gian Carlo Menotti, Walter Piston, and William Schuman.
They divorced in 1953, and two years later Spivacke married the conductor and University of Maryland professor Rose Marie Grentzer.