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 Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation.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

Cohen traces a history of modernism in migration through the composer Stefan Wolpe, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College.

Stefan Wolpe was a member of a generation of composers, born around the turn of the twentieth century, who sought to refashion the entente between the artist and society in the belief that modernist art could transform the individual and society. To that end they composed artful functional music for amateurs as well as for the theater and concert hall. Born in Berlin in 1902, Wolpe was a disciple of Ferruccio Busoni and studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He collaborated with Hanns Eisler in the workers' music movement and left Germany in 1933. He studied briefly with Webern in Vienna before settling in Palestine. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States, where he remained until his death in 1972. Wolpe responded to the musics of his adoptive homelands, incorporating elements from folklore in music of driving and exhuberant complexity. He was a leading member of the abstract expressionist milieu in New York and was much sought after as a teacher by avant-garde composers in the fields of jazz, film, and concert music. His deeply-held optimism sustained him through a continual struggle for livelihood and recognition. The essays here are by distinguished composers, critics, performers, and musicologists, many of whom were acquainted personally with the composer. They include recollections, studies of social and cultural contexts, and detailed analyses of particular compositions and performances. The book is edited by Austin Clarkson, general editor of the composer's music and writings. A chronological catalogue of Wolpe's works concludes this first book on an eminent American composer.

Cohen traces a history of modernism in migration through the composer Stefan Wolpe, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College.

In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.

"Roth Family Foundation music in America imprint."