Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora by Brigid Cohen (review)

Reviewed by: Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora by Brigid Cohen Alexandra Monchick Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora. By Brigid Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 340. Cloth $109.99. ISBN 978-1107003002. Despite his dynamic career and imaginative musical output, Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972) has been considerably marginalized. Several general music histories have relegated any discussion of the composer to a paragraph or two, while others omit any mention of Wolpe altogether. Aside from a few, mostly analytical studies, discussion of the composer barely appeared in the literature before his centennial in 2002. Austin Clarkson, a former student of Wolpe’s and life-long exponent of the composer’s music, edited the heretofore most comprehensive volumes of English-language essays on the composer, On the Music of Stefan Wolpe: Essays and Recollections (2003) and Stefan Wolpe (2008). In addition, two issues of the journal Musik-Konzepte (2010, 2011) have been devoted to Wolpe. Brigid Cohen’s monograph, winner of the American Musicological Society’s prestigious Lewis Lockwood Award for an outstanding book on a musicological subject written in the earlier stages of a scholar’s career, fills a void in the literature as the first monograph solely devoted to Wolpe. However, the purpose of the book reaches beyond simple advocacy for the composer. Wolpe is used as a historiographical model to broadly elucidate the effect that forced migration had on artists and artistic communities during the modernist era. The author points out that, despite the displacement of European composers during World War II, questions of migration are largely not addressed in theories of musical modernism and the musical avant-garde. One of her primary goals of this book is to situate musical modernism studies within scholarship on migration and displacement from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. [End Page 692] Cohen paints a colorful portrait of Wolpe’s life and associations from the genesis of his artistic philosophy to his artistic “testament” in his later years. Wolpe was born in 1902 to Russian Jewish parents in Berlin. With the rise of the Nazis, he first emigrated to Palestine in 1934 and then settled in America in 1938. The composer’s artistic output is placed within the context of his relationships, both formal and informal, to several artistic and political movements and schools of thought. The author explores Wolpe’s Weimar era activities at the Bauhaus and in agitprop theater, his time in the 1930s in Palestine with the pacifist political group Brith Shalom and the kibbutzim, and his involvement in the postwar New York bebop scene, the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, and German-Jewish émigré circles around Hannah Arendt, Black Mountain College, and his close relationships with his private students. Unlike other composers who emigrated from Germany to America in the wake of World War II, Wolpe was never able to assimilate in America. He was incapable of securing a permanent well-paying academic position, in contrast to Paul Hindemith or Ernst Krenek, for example, who accepted posts at Yale and Vassar College respectively. Moreover, unlike his contemporaries Kurt Weill and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Wolpe chose not to pursue a career composing in more lucrative arenas such as musical theater and film. As the author shows, Wolpe’s lack of professional music training and his Marxist associations during the Cold War confined him to a couple of short academic stints and private composition instruction in America. Even though Wolpe has been associated with communism (although he was never officially a member of a communist party), Cohen places Wolpe’s political thought into a much broader context—particularly in his later career, Wolpe’s politics involved the artistic communities with which he associated and their commitment to exploring issues of human engagement and belonging. The author carefully and creatively interprets Wolpe’s self-revelatory poetics in previously unexplored diaries and correspondence located at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Vibrant and often confounding metaphors permeate Wolpe’s writing, and in order to elucidate his artistic philosophy and its implementation in his music, Cohen translates and beautifully teases out multivalent meanings and significations in his language. She pays special attention to Wolpe’s evolving “self...

Topic: Musicology and Musical Analysis
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences