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Boundary Situations: Translation and Agency in Wolpe's Modernism

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07494460801951439

1477-2256

Brigid Cohen,

Music History and Culture

Abstract Which musics do or do not express subjectivity is a topic sometimes linked with an historiographic desire to seal off one tendency as modern, another as postmodern. In this article, the author asks in what ways can musics be interpreted or intended to question the limits of self-hood all the while they are profoundly self-expressive. Can music enact subjectivities quite alternative to, for example, Cone's model or related narratives of development and resolution? Can music open a representational space where uncertainties of subjective autonomy and aspirations toward lyrical wholeness and efficacy meet? Wolpe's song ‘David's Lament over Jonathan’ and two movements from Enactments illustrate Wolpe's ethic of choice and connection as a form of political engagement. Keywords: AgencyArendtHannahBenjaminWalterBoundariesTrafficTranslationVoiceWolpeStefan Notes [1] For more on Wolpe at Black Mountain College and the developments that took place during his time there, see Shreffler (1999 Shreffler, A. 1999. “Wolpe and Black Mountain College”. In Driven into paradise, Edited by: Brinkmann, R and Wolff, C. 279–297. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]); Brody (2002 Brody, M. 2002. “The scheme of the whole: Black Mountain and the course of American modern music”. In Black Mountain College: Experiment in art, Edited by: Katz, V. 237–268. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]); Kohn (2002 Kohn, A. 2002. Wolpe and the poets of Black Mountain. Perspectives of New Music, 40(2): 174–183. [Google Scholar], 2003 Kohn, A. 2003. “Black Mountain College as context for the writings of Wolpe, 1952–1956”. In On the music of Stefan Wolpe, Edited by: Clarkson, A. 111–133. New York: Pendragon. [Google Scholar]); Duberman (1973 Duberman, M. 1973. Black Mountain: An exploration in community, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. [Google Scholar]); Harris (1987 Harris, M. E. 1987. The Arts at Black Mountain College, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]); Lane (1990 Lane, M. 1990. Black Mountain College: Sprouted seeds, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. [Google Scholar]); Rumaker (2003 Rumaker, M. 2003. Black Mountain days, Asheville, NC: Black Mountain Press. [Google Scholar]). [2]Wolpe's affiliations included Berlin Dada, Ferruccio Busoni's Junge Klassizität, the Bauhaus in Weimar, the Novembergruppe, Weimar-era agitprop theater and music groups, the Second Viennese School, the kibbutzim in Palestine, Abstract Expressionist circles in New York, the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, bebop and cool jazz circles, Black Mountain College and the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. For an overview of Wolpe's life, see Clarkson (n.d., 1984). [3] Wolpe, Notebook ‘Thesen Sommer 1946’, Stefan Wolpe Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation (henceforth, SWC). [4] Diary entry from the early 1950s in ‘Numbers are …’. SWC. The second quotation is from Wolpe (1982, p. 310). [5]Carolyn Abbate's critique of Cone is also relevant in this context and suggests the extent to which a wide range of musics can be understood to enact forms of subjectivity far less stable, monolithic, and circumscribed than described in Cone's theory (Abbate, 1991 Abbate, C. 1991. Unsung voices, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 11–12). [6] E.g., Lawrence Kramer (1995 Kramer, L. 1995. Classical music and postmodern knowledge, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 9–10) tends toward this schematic approach when he claims ‘the normative characteristics of the modern subject include identity, boundedness, autonomy, interiority, depth, and centrality … probably the most familiar of postmodernist claims is that, like it or not, this vaunted subject is an exploded fiction’. When ‘decentered subjectivity’ does figure in modernist discourse, Kramer adds, it does so ‘as alienated, deviant or comic’. [7] In ‘Thinking Twice’, Wolpe (1967 Wolpe, S. 1967. “Thinking twice”. In Contemporary composers on contemporary music, Edited by: Schwartz, E., Fox, J. and Childs, B. 274–307. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. [Google Scholar], p. 296) uses the term ‘boundary situation’ to describe exchanges between strictly serial musical material and more loosely organized elements, but the concept applied to all musical parameters and beyond: ‘I am steeped in work, completely involved in, identified with and progressing in a maze of extreme borderlines’ (Wolpe, 1952a Wolpe, S. 1952a. Letter to Joe Livingston, 13 April 1952. Stefan Wolpe Collection [Google Scholar]). [8]‘I have just received a letter from Columbia Records, that my “10 Songs from the Hebrew” will definitely be released in June. That makes me really deeply happy. There is also a song among them, which you don't know, “David's Lament” (on Jonathan's death. That is my favorite song.)’ (Wolpe, 1957 Wolpe, S. 1957b. Letter to Netty Simons, 5 June. Music Division, New York Public Library [Google Scholar]a). [9] Wolpe, Program Notes for the Songs from the Hebrew (possibly from 1949). SWC. [10] This was understandably a common thematic expressed by emigré artists and intellectuals (see, e.g., Goehr, 1999, pp. 66–91). [11] E.g., Wolpe's circles at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and especially the students of Johannes Itten, were fascinated with traffic and translation (see Adler, 1921 Adler, B. 1921. Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit, Weimar: Utopia Verlag. [Google Scholar]; Itten, 1975 Itten, J. 1975. Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre, Ravensburg: Maier. [Google Scholar]). Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht had frequent recourse to both concepts in their critical writings and literary works. [12] It should not surprise us to discover certain affinities between Wolpe's and Benjamin's work. Beyond a general shared cultural and generational experience, their social circles somewhat overlapped in the early 1930s through their mutual investment in agitprop cultural production and, in particular, their participation in groups affiliated with Bertolt Brecht (more on these connections are contained in Cohen, 2007). [13] Perhaps the most prominent among this group, in addition to Hannah Arendt, was Paul Celan. The theory has also become important to a generation of postcolonial theorists grappling with issues of cross-cultural mediation, traumatic memory, and migration (for more on this, cf. my dissertation, which is currently in preparation). [14] Wolpe mentions Blücher in a diary from 1950 (‘Spätere Interpretationen vergangenen Notizen’. SWC). Wolpe was a member of the Eighth Street Artists’ Club when Blücher lectured there. Wolpe may also have become familiar with Arendt through the German-Jewish Club in New York and its periodical Aufbau, to which she regularly contributed articles. Wolpe performed at the founding celebration of the German-Jewish Club on 11 November 1939 (Anon., 1939 Anon. 1939. Rendezvous in Mecca: Gründungsfest des German-Jewish Club im Mecca Temple. Aufbau, 5(21) (15 November): 6 [Google Scholar]). Wolpe also mentions the publication Aufbau as an outlet through which to advertise his performances (‘Business Yearbook 1947 and 1954’, SWC). More on Arendt's activities with Aufbau is contained in my dissertation, which is currently in preparation. [15] Wolpe used the term ‘Menschennetz’ to describe his actions being bounded by the limiting conditions of relationships, responsibilities and past experiences (Wolpe, diary entry from 1946 in ‘Ich bin in einem grenzenlosen Sinn …’ (1946–1950), SWC. [16] It is relevant here that Arendt describes art-making as an act of fabrication and reification that functions to ‘stabiliz[e] human life': ‘Acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artists, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all’ (Arendt, 1998 Arendt, H. 1998. The human condition, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 137, 173–174). Arendt describes artists as ‘producers’ of their work in a way that subjects are not ‘producers’ of their life-stories. One could argue within Arendt's terms, however, that the sovereignty of the artist over her work is mitigated to the extent that life contingencies help to determine artistic choices and actions. [17] These lines come from an untitled poem written by Wolpe on 11 November 1953 (Wolpe Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation). Wolpe's use of the word ‘unwitty’ may be a pun on ‘unwitting’, emphasizing the non-intentionality of historical trajectories. My thanks to Anne Shreffler for suggesting this interpretation. [18] Clarkson (2002 Clarkson, A. 2002. “Stefan Wolpe and Abstract Expressionism”. In The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts, Edited by: Johnson, S. 75–112. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) has also associated Wolpe's development of such a technique with his investment in Abstract Expressionist aesthetics. [19] Richard Taruskin (2005 Taruskin, R. 2005. Oxford history of Western music, vol. 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 13–14) has recently corrected this omission by including a thorough discussion of Wolpe in his Oxford History of Western Music. Yet, even in this context, I believe he overreaches in linking Wolpe's mid-century poetics with ideologies of musical autonomy in order to present a consistent narrative about Cold War formalist aesthetics. [20] Two relatively recent large-scale studies that explore aspects of this constellation are Oja (2000 Oja, C. 2000. Making music modern, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]); Albright (2000 Albright, D. 2000. Untwisting the serpent, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]). [21] Wolpe, Notebook ‘Musik in den tunesischen Städten’. SWC.