The German-Jewish émigré composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.

In 1957 Edgard Varèse led a series of improvisation sessions in Greenwich Village with jazz musicians who included Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Don Butterfield, Teo Macero, and Ed Shaughnessy. Few scholars have explored this episode, a lacuna that speaks to a wider, racially inflected rift in historiographies of jazz and non-jazz musical avant-gardes. Against this tendency I bring new light to the sessions as a messy and fleeting exchange characterized by mutual curiosity and crossed signals, drawing on analysis of session recordings, original interviews, and archival research. Within the larger ensemble of musicians I focus on Edgard Varèse and Charles Mingus in particular, in order to address dilemmas of race and citizenship in downtown New York during a period of postwar American cultural ascendency and national canon formation. To this end I claim Homi Bhabha's notion of “third space” as the most promising sign under which to construe the sessions, a concept that foregrounds ambivalent and transient cultural crossings that play out across an uneven field of power.

No abstract