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Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora. Brigid Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 328. $99.00 (cloth).
Stefan Wolpe has usually appeared in the historiography of modern music more as a footnote than a protagonist. A Jew, a communist, and a modernist composer of "degenerate" music, he is the archetype of the artist who fled the Third Reich in 1934, but Wolpe never fit very well with the conventional narratives of modern music. Between the binary poles of German serialism, exemplified by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, and Igor Stravinsky and French neo-Classicism, Wolpe is usually characterized as an eccentric wanderer, notable more for his peripatetic career and diverse personal connections than for his music.
That, however, is the point, according to New York University musicologist Brigid Cohen. In Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, Cohen contends that it is just this web of connec- tions and relationships that makes Wolpe so important as the agent and exemplar of a diasporic modernism that stands in sharp contrast to Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and their followers. Indeed, Cohen notes that his musical works "were not composed as abstract documents to be sent out into the ether-nor primarily imagined as autonomous members of a vaunted canon-but rather were created as works calling out for concentrated community engagement and dialogue" (207-8). Wolpe's art and wanderings, she writes, are one and the same.
While the notion that the artist and his art are mutually constitutive is hardly foreign to mu- sicology, Cohen's nuanced narrative of Wolpe's life and work provides an original and valuable interpretation of the contested terrain of modernism in the middle of the twentieth century....