Stefan Wolpe has generally been grouped among the lesser-known disciples of the Second Viennese School, the iconic triumvirate of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern generally credited with setting the entire musical agenda for the twentieth century. Yet although Wolpe wound up in Vienna to study with Anton Webern after fleeing Nazi Germany as a Jew engaged in Marxist theater, this tutelage was short-lived, as he fled once again to Palestine in 1933 and embarked on several incredible journeys thereafter. Wolpe's migration took him not only from Berlin to Brno, Moscow, St. Gall, Vienna, Bucharest, and Palestine, but also across a wide range of cultural environments and creative circles (ranging from Paul Klee to Yoko Ono). Brigid Cohen's study of this neglected figure seeks to shed new light on defining modernism by situating it as a product of displacement, exploiting Wolpe's unusually eclectic exile experience as a case study for examining the interrelationships between avant-garde movements and the diaspora.

In a lengthy introduction that carefully lays out her theoretical framework, Cohen explores the tortured history of the concept of modernism and settles on a fusion of conceptualizations by Miriam Bratu Hansen and Michel Foucault that understands it as a process rather than a stylistic or generic artistic category (“Both theorists focus on modernism's critical engagement with conditions of the present rather than centering their descriptions and analysis on a standard, geographically confined collection of schools and styles,” p. 9). Referring additionally to problems with the term “exile” and to theories of cosmopolitanism, Cohen ends her introduction by asserting that her work should not be viewed as yet another attempt to garner overdue recognition to a Kleinmeister, but that she genuinely sees important qualities in Wolpe's work that can inform a new approach to understanding modernism.

Cohen uses her first chapter to fast-forward to 1951, the point at which Wolpe, by this time well settled in New York, looked back on his patchwork past and experienced a creative breakthrough that would result in his most influential, mature works. The next chapter jumps back to the 1920s and highlights Wolpe's exposure to the aesthetics of montage while at the Bauhaus; his movement within Marxist artist colonies in Berlin and his application of montage principles in his operetta Zeus und Elinda; and his reflection on theatrical effects that resonated with those of Brecht, while showing the first indications of distancing himself from German values of Bildung. In chapter three, we learn of Wolpe's time in Palestine, where he gravitated toward pacifism as he became acutely aware of the ethnic diversity, social inequities, and complex negotiations of statehood, all of which influenced his developing views on musical plurality that shaped his teaching, his composition, and his ideas on music education in the future Jewish state. Chapter four follows this development with his move to the United States, finding Wolpe ensconced in a radical utopia that brought him into contact with Hannah Arendt, her husband Heinrich Blücher (whose writings on the function of the artist deeply impressed him), the bebop scene, Abstract Expressionist artists, and the experimental Black Mountain College. The epilogue tracks Wolpe's return visit to Germany in 1956, providing revealing insights into his struggles with encountering the tragedies of the recent past in both his writings and his music.

This brief review cannot do justice to Cohen's fusion of meticulous research, rigorous textual and musical analysis, and a cautiously considered theoretical apparatus to construct a close scrutiny of this composer's intense engagement with his shifting environments and their impact on his work. Her study, furthermore, is a welcome contribution to a long tradition of studies on musicians in exile that has yielded more than two dozen volumes in the last forty years, at least half coming out of the University of Hamburg's decades-long project, Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil. In music especially, Exilforschung offered a relatively painless alternative for engaging with victims of National Socialism, but often has had the mixed effects of exaggerating their commitment to a vague notion of “modernism.” Rather than explicitly confining Wolpe among those intent upon preserving the “Weimar modernism,” a concept recently reinforced in Erhard Bahr's Weimar on the Pacific (University of California, 2007), Cohen offers a fresh outlook on modernism and the equally problematic concept of “exile” that allows her to start to move away from this paradigm, even though she frequently hearkens back to Wolpe's Weimar cultural and political roots as she traces his artistic development through the 1950s.

There are, however, hints scattered throughout that Wolpe may never really have seen himself as a great composer in the classical sense, but was more interested in moving in these circles and transmitting their influences to his students. Indeed, Cohen sets out to view Wolpe not so much as a self-obsessed individualist but—perhaps as an outgrowth of his Marxist roots—a member of different creative communities (he called himself a “collective individualist or individual collectivist”). It is therefore conceivable that Wolpe's agenda, as she demonstrates, was not to preserve the “other Germany” that so consumed Thomas Mann and others, but rather to open himself up to the pluralistic experiences that could potentially liberate him from his German beginnings, in sharp contrast to Adorno. That being said, the far-reaching interpretations of modernism suggested by Hansen and Foucault that form her theoretical basis open up the equally valid but generally eschewed prospect that some comparable form of modernism existed in Nazi Germany, but that project understandably lies outside Cohen's more focused agenda to conceptualize the diaspora experience and cultural displacement as key components of musical modernism.