Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora

Abstract

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 Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation.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.

Confronting the National in the Musical Past

“…Recent studies of the cosmopolitan aesthetics and worldviews borne of experiences of exile and statelessness offer compelling challenges to the nationbased narratives that dominate histories of nineteenth and twentieth-century music (cf. Cohen 2012Cohen , 2014). Yet, while such scholarship is of considerable significance in its own right, the tendency within it to posit cosmopolitanism in direct opposition to nationalism can be limiting.…”

“Everything Had to Change”: Nadia Boulanger's Translation of Modernism in the Rice Lecture Series, 1925

“…Boulanger is just one example of a "nomadic" historical actor operating in the world of modernist music, and her work highlights the artificiality and futility of isolating modernist musical studies, as Brigid Cohen has so trenchantly argued, along nationalist boundaries. 37 Boulanger's efforts, her mediation and canonical reinterpretation of the work of so many composers, chief among them Igor Stravinsky, did not fall neatly along nationalistic lines-a reality that became increasingly true the more influential and international her reach grew. Her discussion of music outside of France was inherently bound to the act of translation through her adoption of the English language; her work on U.S. soil was as much about teaching as it was about translation.…”

“…2 Letter from Nadia Boulanger to Raïssa Boulanger, 24 January 1925, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France (F-Pn), N.L.a. 282 (36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42).…”