stephan wolpe

stephan wolpe(1902-72) 슈테판볼페1902-72는독일유태미국인작곡가.프란츠슈레커,페루치오부조니에게 배운다.1902-33까지베를린에서살고일했고,뉴욕1938-72에정착하기전까지는,빈1933-34,예루살렘 1934-38에살았다. 그의생도는잭베렌스,허버트브륀,모톤펠트만,데이비드튜도,매튜그린바움,우어술라맘록,등등많이있다.세번결혼했으며,1964년파킨슨병발전하여1972년뉴욕에서죽었다.사회주의자,1929-33년사이쇤베르크12음기법불협화사용,힌데미트게브라우흐트뮤직영향,노동자연합커뮤니스트극장단체위한곡많이써서,이이유로재즈대중음악병합하려했고스타일상접근하기쉬운경향.나치가위력떨칠때그는유대인에공산주의자였고,도망하여루마니아러시아거쳐오스트리아1933-34에거했는데이때베베른을만나그와공부했다.독일을떠날때루마니아피아니스트와함께했는데빈에서그는이르마쇤베르크와결혼했다.1938뉴욕으로건너가고50년대추상표현주의화가들과관여하고세번째아내시인힐다몰리소개받고,다름슈타트하계강좌에서강연하고많은제자를거느린다.1928년첫오페라제우스운트엘리다가베를린초연되고29년곧두편오페라가완성된다.1927년체코화가올라오쿠니브스카와결혼31년딸카타리나볼페가태어나나부부는이별한다.부인은1938년런던으로탈출한다.딸은a de facto orphan in Berne during the war. 사실상 고아 전쟁중 베른에 있는.스위스수도 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 connections 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 musicology, 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. She writes that the composer raises "ongoing ethico-political questions about national community and memory . . . especially when his music and words are interpreted in relation to one another" (270). Cohen's study is a close reading of Wolpe's writings and music, placing both in conversation with each other and with the composer's life experience. For Cohen, Wolpe embodies the postwar crisis of modernism and the seeming exhaustion of progressive ideologies in the wake of the Holocaust. A refugee in postwar America, he is a displaced person stripped of everything that made him—relationships, family, professional connections, and ultimately national belonging and Kultur. "I do not belong among the Germans," he wrote to a colleague in 1948, "No . . . I only learned to speak their language" (63). Yet Cohen writes that while facing a life-threatening illness in the summer of 1951, and fearing that he had failed to produce a coherent artistic legacy, Wolpe conceived a project of personal and cultural reconstruction. In a lengthy letter to his second ex-wife Irma Schoenberg, Wolpe despairingly reflects on his narrow escape from Nazi Germany, his wanderings through Europe to the British mandate of Palestine and finally to safety and abject poverty in the United States. Cohen characterizes the letter as "a latter-day, migrant's 'Heiligenstadt Testament'" (57), and like Beethoven, Wolpe emerged from his depression fully committed to his creative mission. Shorn of the past, Cohen writes, Wolpe was able to construct an alternative modernism as a critical engagement with musical convention and networks of community. It was, she writes, an act of self-revelation that produced meaning in engagement with an audience composed not of listeners but of interpreters. His musical projects, Cohen writes, "realized a relatively optimistic faith in the value of acts of cultural 'translation'—the borderline exchange of meanings both partial and transformative—as a resource in securing such belonging while working against homogenizing communalist impulses" (19). According to Cohen, Wolpe was able to produce a uniquely cosmopolitan poetics of modern music, drawing on his early training at the Bauhaus in Weimar with Paul Klee, his involvement with the agitprop Novembergruppe in the 1920s, and (paradoxically) his flight into exile, through which he encountered Arab music in Palestine. Bauhaus montage provided the composer with a theoretical framework that "both addresses a past of cultural devastation and turns toward a future of surprising possibilities arising from the human 'will to connect'" (94). Wolpe articulated this will further in Palestine by engaging with non-European musical practices in which he "found new possibilities for coping with the extraordinary cultural and personal upheaval he had... Jonathan Bernard’s trichordal folding operations relate trichords with a maximum of shared interval content. This paper generalizes this to any cardinality of chord, focusing on the case of tetrachordal folding. A tetrachordal folding holds one trichordal subset fixed and inverts another around a shared dyad, so that the two tetrachords share five interval classes and two trichordal subsets. These operations generalize naturally from pitch space to pitch-class space and to set classes. The last section of the paper demonstrates the analytical application of tetrachordal folding networks on Morton Feldman’s “For Stephan Wolpe.”KeywordsPitch-class set theoryFoldingInterval contentMorton Feldman It’s interesting to know that in the 1950s John Cage and Stefan Wolpe spent time together exchanging ideas at Black Mountain College and in New York City. Milton Babbitt and Wolpe also interacted in New York during the same period. In some ways Wolpe was more traditional than Babbitt or Cage, in others he was surely more eclectic. In any case, Wolpe taught and influenced many of the most important American composers of the next generation—composers of many different stripes: Charles Wuorinen, Ursula Mamlok, Morton Feldman, M. William Karlins, Ralph Shapey, and Harvey Sollberger, to name only a few. From his many writings on his music, one finds that Wolpe had the sensibility of a poet. More than almost any other composer of his time, he was able to find ways to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative ways of describing composition and the music he cared about. My first encounter with Wolpe was via the 1961 broadcast of his Symphony played by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Stefan Bauer- Mengelberg. The originality and power of this and other pieces have continued to inspire me—so much so that I’ve written about Wolpe’s music on three occasions, and I will likely do so again. The present text is a response to a keynote address by Christopher Hasty at the 1999 Wolpe Conference at Northwestern University. While I disclose some ways I hear Wolpe’s music, the paper certainly suggests ways to listen to my own music. Rather than respond directly to Christopher Hasty’s lovely and inspiring paper, I want to think about Wolpe’s “ever-restored and ever-advancing witnessing moment” and Hasty’s point that we may not know how to think about the “vividness of a moment that is new and now.” Hasty’s invocation of Whitehead’s ideas of Beauty, and their connections to “process metaphysics,” will play a covert role in what I have to say. Let me begin by repeating something I’ve frequently overheard: that Wolpe’s music, especially the late music, in its gestural and kinetic character, suggests that Wolpe is performing his musical thoughts and feelings in addition to merely making music out of them. I find this suggestion apt and insightful, but also elusive, for Wolpe’s musical thought-actions often appear discursive, indicating that we don’t really have a handle on what’s going on. Music and Letters 86.2 (2005) 312-315 Volume 18 of Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1970-86) preserves, among many other things, German scripts for two radio broadcasts from 1940 in which the philosopher introduced American audiences to performances of music by the (mainly Viennese) composers with whom his name is most closely associated. On 11 June, for example, listeners to the New York municipal station, WNYC, could have heard the Piano Sonata, Op. 1, by Berg and four songs by Mahler. But there was also music from a much less familiar source: the premiere of the central movements of a four-movement Sonata for oboe and piano (the work as a whole was still incomplete) by Stefan Wolpe (1902-72), a German Jewish composer who, like Adorno, had arrived in America two years previously. The occasion was not a success. For one thing, the programme ran over time, with the result that the Wolpe (which came at the end) was cut off in mid-flow. Worse: during the performance, Adorno was called away to take a phone call. It was the city's mayor, none other than Fiorello La Guardia. He was not happy. As Austin Clarkson takes up the story in his useful biographical introduction to this volume of essays, Adorno was told that 'if he played any more of that kind of music he [LaGuardia] would take the program off the air' (p. 16). There is an element of farce here. But Wolpe was not amused: according to the pianist in the sonata, Trude Rittman, he 'had a fit'. Adorno returned from his encounter with authority 'looking very pale and disturbed'. Anyone sympathetic to the composer has to regard the broadcast as a minor calamity. The saddest part is that everything seemed to be going so well. Wolpe had the services of dedicated and skilled performers: the Oboe Sonata was written for his friend, the champion of contemporary music (and, during the composer's lifetime, his principal publisher) Josef Marx; Rittman was musical director for Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan. One doubts whether many were in a position to grasp the full significance of Adorno's words, but his ascription to the Oboe Sonata of the ability to reconstruct espressivo without recourse either to Romanticism or Expression‎ism—'not a note or chord here reveals an abyss of the soul' (GS, xviii. 582)—amounts to about as high praise as he was capable of giving. (Compare his comments on the Second Symphony of Ernst Krenek in Philosophie der neuen Musik, on which he was working at the same time (GS, xii. 121-2).) Best of all, from the perspective of an immigrant composer struggling to make his way in a new country, Wolpe had the attention of the most powerful man in New York. But it would probably have been better if the broadcast had never taken place. Empirical confirmation of Adornian theses regarding the hostility inevitably aroused in bourgeois audiences by authentically new music's refusal to communicate would have been cold comfort to a man who wrote one of his major post-war avant- garde scores (the bebop-influenced Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion, and Piano (1950-4)) in celebration of the foundation of the People's Republic of China, and said of it, 'Es ist populism, and my personal human radicalism, mit offenen Armen gesungen' (p. 73). As his third wife, the poet Hilda Morley, recalled, Wolpe clung to the optimistic belief that 'art exists to help people'. There is something unreal about Wolpe's career, as if he were less a historical figure than a character in a novel. The WNYC anecdote already gives a hint of the quality of his musical connections. Rarely was a composer in so many of what—with the benefit of hindsight—we can see as the right places at the right time, from the point of view not just of modernist and avant- garde musical composition but of the 'tradition of the... Notes 62.3 (2006) 723-724 In the last decade of his compositional career, Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972) favored two-movement forms for his music. The importance of these large-scale formal plans to the composer's conception is ably and bluntly demonstrated by the titles of many of these works: consider, for example, In Two Parts for Six Players and Piece in Two Parts for Violin Alone, both of which are featured on the compact disc included with this volume. But these compositions have formal implications well beyond the classical norms of contrast in tempo, style, and timbre. In particular, Wolpe frequently reuses or recasts iconic materials from one movement to another, creating a network of similarities and relationships that operates independently of (and in consort with) the traditional contrasts. The experience of reading this near-centennial collection of essays bears a striking parallel to the unfolding of one of these late compositions. The volume's formal organization divides the contributions into two sections—"Engagements" and "Makings"—that represent a sort of postmodern gloss on the traditional Man-and-Music composer biography. Stretching across and within these two parts is a complex web of associations, created by repeated references to composers, philosophers, and compositions that serve as guideposts for the authors in their explorations. That these sites of navigation are widely disparate (the titles of the essays alone invoke such diverse figures as Busoni, Eisler, Vogel, Cage, Adorno, Satie, Varèse, and Babbitt) underscores the challenge of situating Wolpe in the ever-changing contemporary landscape. The two-part structure also pays homage to the Hegelian roots of Wolpe's philosophical writings. Indeed, many of the authors (especially in the first section) invoke syntheses of varied poles of cultures, philosophies, and compositional styles to serve as lenses for their examinations. Pairs of essays also often bring about a similar sort of aggregate effect, creating a more nuanced picture through the dialectic combination of their contrasting views on substantially similar topics. The climax of the collection comes at the beginning of the second part, with essays by Martin Zenck and David Holzman that both involve Wolpe's monumental Battle Piece for piano. Zenck, a musicologist, uses neoclassicism and serialism as foils for several piano works from the 1930s and 1940s. Unusually for this volume, Zenck explicitly disavows any suggestion that Wolpe represents a synthesis of these isms (p. 175). An initial clue lies in the title: "Beyond Neoclassicism and Dodecaphony: Wolpe's Third Way." Pianist Holzman deals with the physical and interpretive challenges of Battle Piece, contrasting his own performances and recordings with those of David Tudor (renditions of Battle Piece by both artists are on the accompanying compact disc). Holzman's consideration of the large-scale impact of the differences between his and Tudor's interpretations is especially engaging and expert. The reuse and development of iconic materials figures prominently in both authors' treatments. For Zenck, it facilitates the creation of formal maps, an ostensibly serial echo of neoclassical aesthetics. The tonal implications (or lack thereof) of these materials also form a navigable layer, which Zenck imbues with almost narrative qualities. Tonality itself becomes a character whose accretions and denials find resonance with the anti-war program intended by the composition's title. For Holzman, these recastings (he borrows the term interpolations from Tudor) represent an opportunity for romantic memory, a dramatic turn of almost theatrical quality. He contrasts this with Tudor's approach, in which the interpolations are interruptions, an aggregate effect lying outside the erstwhile flow of the musical surface. Tonality again figures prominently as a source for navigation; but Holzman's map is based on harmonic and pitch relationships. Where Zenck finds programmatic impulses from the interaction of tonal and non-tonal materials, Holzman finds ebb and flow in the relationships of tonal materials to themselves. That the piece responds so ably to such different models of tonality (and, indeed, even to occasionally conflicting readings) demonstrates its own.. .The centenary year of one of the giants of 20th-century music has been and gone. It was all but ignored, so far as the UK is concerned, by his publishers, the musical establishment, the BBC etc. There had been vague plans to mount a number of relatively large-scale performances and broadcasts, to stage his two short operas for the first time and so on. They vanished. Music is a business like any other. Under the auspices of the Stefan Wolpe Society (USA), his daughter, the pianist Katharina Wolpe, managed to put together a short series of concerts in London recently, in which a few of his works received staggering performances before a very few people. The last of these, which would have seen the first performance for 2–3 decades of Wolpe's enormous Enactments for 3 pianos – had to be abandoned at the last minute for sudden lack of funds! 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. David Tudor's genius was evident from early childhood, but it was not until 1944, when he became a piano student of Irma Wolpe and a composition student of Stefan Wolpe, that Tudor began to realize his true potential. The Wolpes prepared Tudor for his extraordinary career as a path-breaking piano virtuoso and champion of the avant-garde. Tudor's years with the Wolpes culminated in the premiere of Battle Piece in 1950, Tudor's edition of which documents his collaboration with Wolpe in realizing the temporal dimensions of the score. Tudor's later path as a composer of live electronic music is traced back to his years of apprenticeship. This article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expression‎ism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.