’Where to Act, How to Move’:Unruly Action in Late WolpeMartin Brody

This article challenges the view that such composers as Wolpe denied their socialistconvictions and thus betrayed their utopianism for an arcane hermeticism when theycreated a radically modernist music. The author proposes rather that Wolpe’s later musicexemplifies ways in which a maturing artist could transform the predicament of a modernexile, into a chosen, self-invented, full-achieved artistic persona. Borrowing concepts fromHomi Bhabha’s postcolonial perspective on cultural production and signification andHannah Arendt’s theory of non-authoritarian, pluralistic, political action occurringbetween non-sovereign individuals, the author proposes that Wolpe developed ever morenuanced ways to let in the large world of music and that he responded conceptually andviscerally to questions of action and memory, freedom and control. Passages are cited fromPiece for Two Instrumental Units and String Quartet to demonstrate Wolpe’s musicalenactment of antinomian actions as a cosmopolitan enterprise, modeling mutuality andmutability in terrains of incessant cultural transition.

Keywords: Adorno; Arendt, Hannah; Bhabha; Cosmopolitanism; Stuckenschmidt;Taruskin; Wolpe, Stefan

‘The Shining View of Man’

Reporting on the musical activities of Stefan Wolpe and his Novembergruppecomrades in Berlin, the musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (1928, pp. 94–101)raised an issue that still haunts the composer’s work. While admiring Wolpe for‘plunging from ecstasy to ecstasy [and] passionately investigating the materials andideology of his art’, Stuckenschmidt summarized the young composer’s prospectsambivalently: At 26, the prodigious musical explorer had ‘demonstrated in numerousworks of all kinds a more than exceptional talent that now awaits maturity.’ Yet whatwould the awaited maturity bring? How would the unruly investigations of a radicalyouth be reconciled with the refined sensibilities of artistic adulthood? And whowould be setting the terms of artistic maturity in the unsettled culture of a falteringRepublic?

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 27, Nos. 2/3, April/June 2008, pp. 205 – 225

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/07494460801951272

Some eight decades later the questions linger, and the prospects for describing amature radical modernist remain uncertain, no more so, perhaps, than for thepassionate, leftist youth of Wolpe’s generation. The historiography of modern musiccontinues to offer bleak scenarios: on the one side, a faded tableau of workers’choruses; on the other, a portrait of a mature but supremely disengaged individual, acaricature of Adorno’s Schoenberg.1 Wolpe is emblematic of both, and of thedifficulty of locating a third way.2 As Brigid Cohen (2006) has noted, a narrative ofinchoate possibilities, constructed around the composer’s early years, has since beencoupled with stories about late period aestheticism and unresolved conflict.

Wolpe’s adventurous aesthetic and leftist politics have been a subject ofconsternation for some scholars and critics, who find their coexistence entirelycontradictory . . . . Richard Taruskin, for example, has recently drawn a starkcontrast between Wolpe’s music from the early 1930s and those from his years inAmerica from 1938 onward—and especially from after the war—when thecomposer’s works ‘grew more private and abstract (although they still oftenembodied tacit political programs)’. He goes on to wonder how Wolpe’s ‘socialconscience’ could have come to terms with the fact that he had come to ‘insulatehis artistic integrity within a music that eventually became so abstract that itscontent would be a riddle, its style so advanced that few except fellow musicianscould take pleasure in it, and so demanding of its performers that almost no onecould play it?’ In a similar vein, Arnold Whittall has described the politicalaspirations of Wolpe’s music and its formally innovative modernist aesthetic as‘conflicting elements’ at war ‘in his musical personality’ over the course of his life.

In the narratives summarized by Cohen, the case of Wolpe is organized as ablocked dialectic and a retreat. Whittall (2004, p. 81): ‘[H]is move from Berlin toPalestine in 1934 (via contact with Webern in Vienna) brought the conflictingelements within his musical personality to a head.’ Taruskin (2005, p. 14): ‘After thewar, Wolpe’s retreat into abstraction continued, not in response to the suspicion withwhich left-leaning artists were held in America with the coming of the Cold War. . . .The hermeticism of Wolpe’s postwar—or rather, Cold War—music was a deliberateand demonstrative refusal to comply with the directives of the Zhdanovshchina.’ Andso forth: In both accounts, social engagement is taken to be incompatible with‘abstraction’; unresolved conflicts in Wolpe’s psyche inhibit forward motion on thepath of artistic fruition; the composer retreats into esotericism. Both scenarios castWolpe’s life story as a cautionary parable about art and ideology, a homily on theperils of overreaching utopianism.

However, both narratives also jar with an especially credible primary source for theincidents and times in question: the memoirs of Wolpe’s second wife, Irma WolpeRademacher (2003), who witnessed and participated in most of the relevant events.Here are a few pertinent passages:

[Stefan] went to the Bauhaus in search of his ideal. They were searching there forthe essence, for the pure form, and at the same time the perfectly functional. . . . In

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the beginning we started playing endless organ Bach fugues four hands. This wasstill when he was up to here in the Communist Party, playing only his own stuff forthe performances. I took him back to music even later. We met at Philharmonicconcerts and heard again Brahms. He had never given it up. It was inside him, onlythe moment demanded political action, committed action. He felt like a soldier. Henot only joined the Communist Party but also a kind of free university in dialecticalmaterialism.. . .Only poetry or music and painting he understood very deeply. These he knew.There he heard the grass grow. Everything else was on a superficial level. Stefan wasa utopian character. He didn’t really belong to this world of politics. For him theonly situations in which the utopian world, poetry, these were real to him.. . .You don’t know what it was like to live with him, what a fortifying presence, inspite of everything around. . . . The basic optimism of the man is what I miss ineverybody around me. Nobody has it. The shining view of man, of his possibility.It’s so tremendous and so lacking everywhere. It was so unbroken in him actually.

Without tracking all of the differences in narrative detail and interpretation, I notesimply that Wolpe Rademacher’s version presents ideology and abstraction, form andfunction, radicalism and tradition not as incompatible categories, but rather theinevitable terms of engagement in a maturing artist’s ‘shining view of man’. The taleshe tells is hardly one of retreat. Told from almost any angle, Wolpe’s biography readsas a wild historical fantasy, more like a hyperactive Tom Stoppard play or a prequelto Zelig than a Beckettian meditation on solipsism or paralysis. The stage is certainlypacked: Busoni, alongside Feldman; Johannes Itten, Gil Evans and Charles Olson;Webern in the chorus with Kurt Schwitters, Charlie Parker and Josef Tal; stage right,Franz Kline and Yoko Ono; stage left, the author of ‘Hound Dog’, Mike Stoller,rubbing elbows with the author of Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno. Wolpeseemed to spontaneously generate such incongruous engagements, rejoicing ineach—and in overturning the pieties that made their coincidence seem strange. Long-time critical admirers have already had a field day pondering Wolpe’s disparateencounters: his traffic with post-Marxists and proto-dadaists; his relations to the NewObjectivity and Abstract Expressionism; his excursions to the Bauhaus and BlackMountain, conversations with Klee and Cage, travels uptown and down (see, e.g.,Brody, 2003; Cohen, 2004; Clarkson, 1984, 2003; Shreffler, 1999). Wolpe was, ofcourse, hardly the only migratory modernist perennially obliged to endure repeateddislocation, to start over again and again, and to forge new connections in the space-time of an all-too-human, twentieth-century life. However, declaring himself thebard of juxtaposition, the conjurer of incongruities ‘molded into adjacent situations’,he transformed the predicament of a modern exile, into a chosen, self-invented, full-achieved artistic persona.

In rehashing a few of the historiographic details around the case of Wolpe, I wishto emphasize that the friction his story generates (as well as the worry aboutreception: too abstract, too unresolved, too engaged, too hermetic, etc.) registers

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anxieties about Stuckenschmidt’s implicit concern: how to account for a composi-tional aesthetic that is both mature and resolutely aimed at unsettling the culturalorder. In the following I will try to reframe this question, to appreciate both the formalrefinements and the social engagement of Wolpe’s late work, and, indeed, to hear thecomposer’s musical forms as modeling critical subjectivity and social engagement. If,in maturity, Wolpe repeatedly encountered conditions of ‘migration, diaspora,displacement [and] relocation’, these, I believe, spurred him to conceive of a musicgrounded not only in particular political circumstances, cultural movements or places,but in a cosmopolitan aspiration to produce an ethos of pluralism and anti-authoritarianism through abstract forms. Thus, I want to recast Wolpe’s story andinterpret his late period music in terms of mature cosmopolitanism (see Sheldon et al.,2002), rather than disappointed utopianism or solipsistic elitism. To do so, I havealready begun to borrow some of the language of Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘postcolonialperspective’ on cultural production and signification. Here is a bit of the context:

The transnational dimension of cultural transformation—migration, diaspora,displacement, relocation—makes the process of cultural translation a complexform of signification. The natural(ized), unifying discourse of ‘nation’, ‘peoples’, orauthentic ‘folk’ tradition, those embedded myths of culture’s particularity, cannotbe readily referenced. The great, though unsettling, advantage of this position isthat it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and theinvention of tradition. (Bhabha, 2005, pp. 247ff)3

In the following, I will attempt to suggest how a great, unsettling advantage iscelebrated in Wolpe’s late period music—not by attempting to unravel the tangledpatterns of influence that bind him to so many mentors, students, colleagues andplaces, nor by tracing the compound, polysemic allusions in the fractured, syntheticlanguage he substituted for a relinquished mother tongue. Rather, I will consider thecomposer’s compulsive personal mingling, exploratory compositional rhetoric andinventive, poetic language in more general terms: as the signs and gestures of anunflagging openness to reciprocal engagement and the modus operandi of acosmopolitan sensibility, which in its ‘wide and wavering nets, catches somethingof our need to ground our sense of mutuality in conditions of mutability, and tolearn to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural transition’ (Pollock et al.,2002, p. 2).

In characterizing the dialogue of mutuality and mutability played out in Wolpe’slate period music, I will focus here on two dimensions: the music’s penchant foranimated, critical argument, projected in the myriad paradoxes and juxtapositions ofadjacent opposites and antithetical structures that bristle across the surface of hismusic; and the composer’s ideas about the projection of agency in musical forms.With regard to the former, I will focus on a kind of ‘soft’ dialectic at work in Wolpe’smusic: not a form ‘endlessly ripped open’, as he starkly put it in the essay, ‘ThinkingTwice’, nor a formulaic modeling of dialectical structure, but an unremittinginclination to project nuances of resistance, opposition and irresolution in an

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intrinsically audial medium.4 As to the question of agency: I wish to draw parallelsbetween Wolpe’s American-period ideas about organization and freedom in musicalspaces and Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous theory of non-authoritarian,pluralistic, political action occurring between non-sovereign individuals. I proposethat Arendt’s discussion of ‘the communicative, intersubjective quality of meaningfulaction’ (which has provided a backdrop for much recent discussion of social andcultural cosmopolitanism) startlingly parallels Wolpe’s approach to simultaneous,pluralistic activities in the spaces of atonal music.5 I will present readings of two briefmusical passages—the openings of the 1962 Piece for Two Instrumental Units and the1968-9 String Quartet—drawing on analogies to Adorno and Arendt as a source ofcritical terms.

A clue for this exercise appears near the end of Frederick Jameson’s extendedmeditation on Adorno, where Jameson asserts the priority of form in making theoperations of dialectical thinking manifest:

[T]he vital relationship of Adorno to political thinking lies in the form rather thanthe content of his thoughts, which, conceptualizing aesthetic form or philosophicalcontent rather than politics as such, is capable of detecting within them—with astarker, more luminous articulation than can normally be achieved within politicalanalysis or social history—the complex mobilities of the historical dialectic.(Jameson, 2000, p. 225)

In suggesting that the form and pacing of Adorno’s writing might in themselvesmodel the complex mobilities of political thinking, Jameson implies the possibility ofa third element and a transitive relationship: the modeling of complex mobilities ofthought and action in the unfolding forms of music. I will sketch some of the waysthat Wolpe’s understanding of musical materials and form express a critical,oppositional awareness. However, I also want to suggest that Wolpe’s late work, whilemodeling a lone, critical subject, also evokes a restless ensemble of unruly, multipleagents whose simultaneous actions delineate a communal space of antinomianactivities. Thus, in the final section of this essay I will shift focus to Arendt. BothWolpe and Arendt, I will suggest, aim to describe a ‘shining view of man’; in Arendt’scase, explicitly reflecting the Aristotelian principle of ekphanestaton, the shining forththat occurs in freely creative social action (Arendt, 1998, pp. 225ff).

It may seem perverse, or at least un-parsimonious, to introduce another illustriousGerman emigre into Wolpe’s already overcrowded field of play. However appositetheir predicaments and experiences, as children of the Weimar Republic and later asrevered, immigrant elders in an overlapping New York milieu, the patrician Arendtand streetwise Wolpe may not seem a match in temperament or sensibility.6

Nonetheless, I want to entertain the idea of bringing Wolpe’s late, great music intoreciprocal engagement with Arendt’s magisterial social philosophy, which, takentogether, comprise a mutually illuminating ethics and aesthetics of non-sovereigntythat is at once coherent and fragmentary, discursive and intuitive, agonistic andcommunal—in short, that models the ‘unsettling advantages’ of cosmopolitanism.

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Putting Wolpe and Arendt together also helps me understand the arc of Wolpe’scircuitous artistic pilgrimage, especially toward its end, as he seemed to begeneralizing from the premise of shock and the cognitive fallout of his principle ofjuxtaposition, per se, toward what he called ‘sound exist[ing] in the maximal state ofbeing’, ‘a new dimension of time that recovers the past in the present’, and theinvention of new ways to ‘let in the big world of music’.7 As he developed ever morenuanced ways to let the big world in, Wolpe responded conceptually and viscerally toquestions of action and memory, freedom and control. And, like Arendt (as describedby the social philosopher Dana Villa), he produced ‘models of action that effectivelyconvey freedom’s phenomenality, spontaneity, and contingency . . . freedom in itsnon-sovereign worldy form as a ‘‘mode of being’’ rather than as a capacity of thesubject’ (Villa, 1995, p. 118).

Linking Arendt and Wolpe may also help us understand why the evocation ofmeaningful, pluralistic action would be crucial to the perennially uprooted Wolpeand, in turn, how musical enactments of pluralistic action might exemplify acosmopolitan, migrant modernism: an ethical and aesthetic project that was thrustwith especially cruel force on artists and intellectuals such as Arendt and Wolpe, whocame of age in the Weimar Republic, escaped the Nazi regime and faced down newexistential and cultural threats in the forced migrations of their maturity. In short, Iwish to portray Wolpe not so much as an ‘outsider in the best sense’, as Adornodescribed him, but as a cosmopolitan in the most resolute sense, who incorporatedthe lessons of a radical youth in each of the disparate artistic encounters of hisunsettled adulthood. Thus, Wolpe’s maturation involved both ongoing refinementsof artistic thought and practice and inexhaustibly affirmative responses to thedisplacements he suffered throughout his life—responses that could hardly have beenanticipated by his quizzical friend, Stuckenschmidt, during the heyday of theNovembergruppe.

‘A Starker, More Luminous Articulation’

Consider the following, a verbal etude in the articulation and mobilization ofdialectical form:

[T]he percussion has both the poverty of the brittle sound which has barely risenabove mere noise and the promise of what has never been, which is inseparablefrom the traces of the very oldest things . . . . The bass drum grumbles menacinglyand says, ‘Children, today something’s going to happen’. And it has salvaged thisdouble meaning and carried it over into great music. Xylophone: bleached bonesmake the most colourful music. (Adorno, 1993, p. 37)

In this fragment from the ‘Motives’ section of Adorno’s Quasi una Fantasia, an insightabout the poetics of orchestration provides a medium to articulate the dialectic, in theform of ironic variations on the theme of memory and anticipation (‘poverty’ and‘promise’, the primordial past and the utopian future, infancy and age, sound’s

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deathly skeleton and reincarnated body). Adorno’s rapid-fire paradoxical twists andturns bear comparison to the opening of Wolpe’s Piece for Two Instrumental Units—asimilarly dense object lesson in dialectical dynamics (Figure 1).8

The urgent, comedic exchange of identity and non-identity could hardly be morefluent or paradoxical. Three obdurately unlike kinds of events appear in this opening:chords, mostly in pairs, mostly comprised of three notes; linear arcs, again mostly inpairs; and an incongruously lone and sustained tone, paradoxically inert but noisilyre-articulated. When juxtaposed and compositionally animated, however, thesedisparate gestures display subtle affinities and incongruities: The piano’s initial pairof enigmatic trichords (which disturb the cello’s initial, unruffled consonant third byadding an acerbic dissonance) provide a little tutorial in the paradoxes of identity.Although mirroring each other in pitch and pitch class space and sharing a dyad, theydisagree about a fundamental uncertainty: where the downbeat might be. The secondchord, as it answers the first, also triggers a sudden spike of activity, a second, terseaction/reaction event, an abruptly fortissimo exchange between flute and celloinvolving the pitch classes already presented but adding a new element (D-flat).Playing off of the piano’s inversion gambit, the flute/cello duo presents an action andreaction couplet related by contour inversion. However, the gesture breaks offunceremoniously, abruptly derailed by a pair of new but uncannily familiar pianochords: a reshuffling of the initial four pitch classes, producing another pairing oftrichords, at once like the opening pair (i.e., inversionally equivalent to each other inpitch and pitch-class space and sharing a common dyad), yet unlike it in set classmembership.

A new trio of instruments joins the fray in m. 4, re-presenting four of the five pitchclasses that the initial trio had put into play. However, the cello quickly intrudes onthis new group with a preposterously animated gesture, as if trying (but failing) tocompensate for the violin’s inscrutably fixed D-flat. After the music lingers inertly fora few beats on the violin’s fixed D-flat, the cello’s fitful gesture is subsumed into astrenuous but static game interplay of flute and oboe—a game that produces inexactrepetitions in awkward hiccups: abrupt, truncated recollections of the first flute/celloexchange. In m. 8 the flute unceremoniously interjects a change: two new pitchclasses, D and A, an expansion of the field of pitch classes (to seven) that fills in mostof the space of a fifth between G and D. In response to the fitful exertions of oboe,flute and violin, the piano (staying in character) offers an enervated if not entirelyinnocent response in m. 9: a laconic trichord, reiterated in a voice exchange, thisinvolving the newest pitch class in the oldest trichord type to appear in the (stillyoung) piece. The trichord becomes a tetrachord, as an added note, B, appearing withthe voice exchange, doubly underscores the affinity between the oldest and newestevents to occur thus far.

Piano chords continue to swell in m. 10, with the appearance of a five-note off-beatchord, one that incorporates the voice exchange principle from the previous measurebut contradicts the prim metrical placement of the chords that occurred there. Then,in m. 11, there’s another voice exchange in the piano chords, and another added note

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Figure 1 Piece for Two Instrumental Units, mm. 1–13. ª 2000 Peermusic.

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(taken from the already available pitch class collection): this yields another off-beatpairing of fresh trichords, members of the same set class, a newly emergent structure,made of a whole step and minor third. Against this, the oboe unfurls the mostintricate line to appear thus far. It begins by recalling the flute’s interjection of D andA in m. 8 and then slightly mis-quotes the opening flute utterance in another call andresponse dialogue. It is an imprecise recollection in which the bass assumes the cello’sinitial role. In short, everything seems to be calibrated to produce a luminous, starkand paradoxical interplay of tiny, dialectical revisions. Conventional categories ofmusical organization and structure (‘variation’, ‘contrast’) seem to melt into air,giving way to an animated demonstration of latent equivalencies among apparentopposites and dramatic differences among apparent equivalents.9

However, as the preceding description indicates, the music under discussion alsoevokes images of multiple human agents at play; its modeling of dialectical awarenessis projected through a multiplicity of simultaneous actions.10 The notion of musicmodeling a community of activity edges us toward Arendt, whose ideas about socialaction may complement Jameson’s in characterizing Wolpe’s mature, sociallyengaged, radical compositional methods. As I have already proposed, Arendt’sconception of social action also resonates with Wolpe’s conception of freedom andform; in the following, I will develop this argument, but also consider Arendt’srelevance more generally to conceptions of freedom and control in late modernistmusic. Arendt’s understanding of action illuminates the murky space of freedomcleared by the emancipation of the dissonance: Babbitt’s ‘contextuality’ as much asAdorno’s ‘autonomy’ or Wolpe’s ‘maximal state of being’.

‘The Maximal State of Being’

In a recent reflection on Wolpe, Robert Morris offered a strong clue to interpretingthe composer’s conception of non-sovereign musical action. ‘When I listen toWolpe’s music,’ Morris (2002, p. 175) said, ‘I am often struck by the way the musicalgestures seem to be motivated autogenetically, not by the composer’s invisible hand,but as if the music were a play of agents creating form; and not by design, but bymutual engagement and interaction—something Wolpe called ‘‘the panorama ofactivities’’.’ In this take on Wolpean enactment, ‘design’ yields to free play, and thesovereign author to a process of manifold, mutually engaged and engaging, musicalactors. Composition, then, may be understood not only as an assertion of structurebut also a repeated conjuring of agents in the ‘maximal state of being’.

On more than one occasion, Wolpe spoke of the panorama of activities in muchthe same terms as Morris—though always more recklessly, not only eliding the ‘as if’(in Morris’s phrase, ‘as if the music were a play of agents’), but also generalizingirrepressibly about the nature of the compositional occasion. Wolpe posed thequestion explicitly in a 1964 lecture (printed in this issue) he presented at FrancesParker, a private elementary and secondary school on the north side of Chicago.Describing the opening of his most recent piano piece, Form, the composer

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summarized the matter at hand. ‘Because of the infinite ways in which a piece cannow set up its operational procedures,’ he began, ‘initial restrictive confinementsdecide which tones, which order of tones shall be used.’ Wolpe thus posed afundamental issue that would be repeatedly identified by Babbitt: the problem of‘contextuality’: the challenge of establishing musical norms in a universe ofuncommon practices—of mapping the open field of musical possibilities by stakingout a set of contingent, initiating compositional premises.11 However, Wolpe’s primphrase, ‘internal restrictive confinements’, is a little obscure, at least with regardto the question of agency: Who exactly is the actor who decides ‘orders of tones’ orsets up ‘operational procedures’? The syntax already signals Wolpe’s eagerness todispense with the hand of the composer and to locate agency directly in the musicitself.

In the next sentence, Wolpe explicitly parts company with Babbitt, making anabrupt existential leap of faith: a move away from claims about structuralrelationships per se to an evocation of action. ‘Specific modes of behavior,’ he nowsays, ‘determine shape and type of action, argue about the articulation of time,organize levels of articulation, where to act, how to move, at what distances fromeach other, in what dynamic strength and so on.’ Invoking ‘restrictive confinements’does not stop Wolpe from immediately reclaiming the infinite—now not in the guiseof operational procedures, but instead in the inexhaustible possibilities of musicallyembodied actions. In the sentence under review, the composer offered images ofincreasingly more pluralistic, autonomous agency: first specific modes of behavior,then the shapes and types of action, then protagonists arguing about time, engagingwith various degrees of cooperation, and finally acting and moving at variousdistances and intensities. Wolpe characteristically emphasizes the musical projectionof plurality of non-sovereign actions, by contrast with Babbitt’s focus on a plurality ofmusical ontologies, and thus on the challenges and responsibilities of communicationbetween non-sovereign individuals. However, both affirm an (Arendtian) ethos ofopen-ended creativity in generating musical form when authoritarian orders meltaway. ‘With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world,’ Arendt (1998,p. 178) neatly summarizes.

Thinking in terms of agents and action brought into being from minimallydeterministic operational procedures helps me to grasp the almost unbearably light, ifstill visible hand of (Wolpe) the composer and his open-ended, low-tech processes. Ina number of the late pieces, he leaned heavily on one such process, a methodical butrhythmically unpredictable enlargement of the field of pitch classes through a seriesof simple operations and associations—this producing a non-binding arrangementthat shapes a musical play of agents while permitting intelligible, dialectically sensible,incidents to occur spontaneously. The outcome of this process, the exfoliation of thepitch class set, is at once pre-determined but utterly unpredictable in its moment-to-moment development.

Like the opening of Piece for Two Instrumental Units, the String Quartet 1969(Figure 2) begins with material derived from one of Wolpe’s most characteristic‘restrictive confinements’. In the Quartet it is a hexachord, the pitch class collection

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that fills the space between F and B-flat (a perfect fourth rather than the fifth filled inat the opening of Piece for Two Instrumental Units). Once the hexachord isestablished, the pitch class field expands by progressively tacking new, contiguous

Figure 2 String Quartet, mm. 1–18. ª 1985 EMI.

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pitch classes onto the collection that is already in play. After the opening six in m. 1,three more pitch classes quickly follow: B on the downbeat of m. 4, C, the first attackin m. 6, and E in the middle of m. 9.

With the arrival of B and C, the pitch class space expands from a perfect fourth to aperfect fifth; this span is immediately expressed as the coincidence of threeinterlocking collections, each bounded (in pitch class space) by a perfect fourth.These are bracketed in mm. 6, 7 and 8, which indicates the pitch class spaces from Gto C, from G-flat to B, and from F to B-flat. When the ninth pitch class E emerges inm. 10, it appears as the edge of another pitch class span of a fifth, between E and B, ahalf step down from the previously established F/C. Next comes E-flat, which firstappears demurely near the end of m. 14 in a partially doubled viola line thatelaborates the viola’s gesture in m. 9, and then brusquely, on the downbeat of m. 18,in a swift jab that recalls the strumming violin pizzicato chords in mm. 7–10—especially, of course, the stacked fourths chord in m. 9. The recalcitrant remainingtwo pitch classes, D-flat and D, finally appear in m. 31, in a plodding, slightlyfractured imitative action in viola/cello, that demonstrate one way of filling fifthswhen pitch and pitch class space coincide.

In short, there is a design, and a plot, both derived from the contingencies of theopening hexachord: gestures forming groups, the elements of which are looselycontained within boundaries of fourths and fifths, and a gradually expanding pitchclass space. The design, however, is rudimentary and the plot minimal, while their

Figure 2 (Continued).

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presentation is luxuriant, spontaneous and unpredictable. The discourse is lessfraught than that of Piece for Two Instrumental Units; however, both pieces performWolpe’s signature, magical sleight of mind: to evoke an ascendant (Adornian) subjectand, at the same time, an interplay of multiple (Arendtian) non-sovereign agents.Both thus exemplify Wolpe’s dictum against ‘prognostic security’: ‘Don’t get backedtoo much into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims,’he decreed in his most widely circulated essay, ‘Thinking Twice’. ‘When art promisesyou this sort of reliability, this sort of prognostic security, drop it’ (Wolpe, 1998, pp.231ff). This takes us to a second theme in the composer’s Arendtian aesthetic: actionas initiation.

The renunciation of sovereignty in favor of contingency and pluralistic activity,political or creative, produces what Arendt (1998, p. 178) calls a space of ‘startlingunexpectedness’, where ‘things can be seen . . . in a variety of aspects withoutchanging their identity’. Each event is a new beginning. To act, she insisted, ‘means totake an initiative, to begin (as the Greek archein, ‘‘to begin’’, ‘‘to lead’’, and eventually‘‘to rule’’, indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning ofthe Latin agere)’. The metabolic flow in late Wolpe—the volatile tempo of silence andsounds that repeatedly coalesce into gestures of extended anacrusis—strongly evoke asense of a recurrent re-initiation and the startling unexpectedness that is the hallmarkof Arendtian action.12Action, for Arendt (1998, pp. 190, 177), also ‘proceeds fromnowhere . . . into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and whereevery process is the cause of new processes . . . [where] reaction, apart from being aresponse, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others’.Wolpe’s fictive musical agents are virtuoso actors in this Arendtian sense—finelyattuned to the tension of action and reaction, autonomy and engagement, freedomand memory, and what Arendt (1998, p. 240) called a ‘constant mutual release [anda] conscious willingness to change their minds’. One way that the composer projectsthe paradoxical relation of freedom and memory is by ratcheting up the dynamictension between his static or slowly evolving fields of pitch classes and a hyperactive,rapidly reconfiguring pitch space. The tension between pitch and pitch classspaces helps to project a panorama of activities bristling with paradox and self-qualification.

Thus, a second pass at the opening of the String Quartet, now viewed as a theater ofArendtian actions: As the curtain raises and the work begins, the viola takes a modeststep, a diminutive move quietly echoed by the cello, which hovers ephemerally justabove; the cello’s A coheres with the viola’s F, then its B-flat with G-flat—two prettyparallel thirds, a portentous half step apart. The echoing tones, however, are alsoinvolved in an oddly feral gesture, the cello’s assertively lopsided offering of twinnedleaps, up and down a ninth, destabilized by an abrupt change of articulation, the shiftfrom pizzicato to arco, and dynamics, forte to piano. Although the viola’s laconic,initial half-step motion divides the opening action neatly into two (two equivalenttrichords), the cello’s paired, spatially symmetrical, but gesturally spastic, leapsthrow things slightly off balance. The event is pointedly incomplete and gently

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self-deconstructing; already, the simplest distinctions—stepping and leaping (andpitch and pitch class)—seems at least a little tense and unresolved.

Then, abruptly and enigmatically, a silence—but then immediately, a new actorinitiates a second action. The second violin, returns to the scene where the viola hadbegun, and begins again, just beyond where the viola left off (i.e., on the violin’slowest open string, which vibrates sympathetically with the cello’s previous pizzicatoG). In its own first foray, the second violin sets out by echoing high and low points ofthe pitch space of the preceding action, the pitch classes G and B-flat. However,levitating into higher zones, the second action spreads the field, while stillpunctiliously maintaining the vocabulary of the first initiative. The division of labor,whereby the viola finishes the gesture previously passed between the two violins,allows the first violin to linger fleetingly on a new high note. Again it is an A; the F-Aconcordance of the first gesture resounds ethereally in the enlarged field of play. Thepitch contour and dynamic envelope of the composite gesture also rhymes with thecello’s preceding rise and fall (while also evoking the cello’s opening dyad, pitchclasses now positioned in the registral extremes). However shapely this gesture is, andhowever responsive to what has occurred before, the relationship between theopening two actions is a little unbalanced: the six pitch classes and attack points ofthe opening initiative are answered here by five; and the pitch space has beenrecalibrated inconclusively.

Then, again, abruptly there is another silence and another new initiative. Like theimmediately preceding gesture, it is both a new start and a reaction to what hasalready occurred. Beginning loud, the third action gets louder, strenuously restatingwhat is already obvious, a bunch of notes, as Wolpe would have it, now jammed intothe snuggest space possible. The delicate half-step connections that had occurredbetween the viola’s first two notes and the second violin’s initial entrance are hererecast as an obstinately fitful convulsion. There is a new irony in this effortful, thirdbeginning—a sudden, emphatic expansion of the pitch class field that occurs justwhile the pitch space is being compressed as tightly as possible. The newest note isalso momentarily the highest: the B, appearing on the downbeat of the fourthmeasure; it is paired with G in a chipper motive that answers the viola’s A-F a halfmeasure before. The new pitch class, which seems at once deliberate andspontaneous, here for the first time displaces A as the registral high point of anevent. The two emphatic major thirds, F-A and G-B, recall the F/A, G-flat/B-flatsequence of the first initiative.

In their brief game of action and reaction, the viola and violin each fill in theirrespective major thirds. At least a little unfinished business is implied, in that onepitch class, A-flat, is left as the only such entity in play with no major third-formingpartner. A-flat will not have to wait long for the arrival of its partner, C, which occurs(as I previously mentioned) in a move that establishes a precedent for what will come:expansions of the pitch class field projected as the union of chromatically saturatedhexachords bounded by a perfect fourth. Before this, however, there is anothersilence—less lengthy than before, now more an anticipatory inhalation than an

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enigmatic zeroing out of the action—and then another initiative. The fourth newbeginning is unperturbed by comparison with the third, but it again reaches higher inthe pitch space and initiates another game of action and reaction: three notesreflected in a mirror. Although it is the most poised, least qualified pitch symmetry tooccur thus far, the event is pointedly fragmentary. Given the instability of what hasalready occurred, both the thought and the deed of a pristine, unchallengedsymmetry already seems strange, even disquieting.

In four ephemeral events, then, destabilization from within becomes the norm:‘[E]very reaction becomes a chain reaction . . . every process is the cause of newprocesses’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 190). This discharge of processes models an antinomianmusical poetics through dialectical engagements, the endpoint of which is neitherenlightenment nor alienation, but rather a celebration of proliferating, unboundedactions: an incitement to begin again and again.

Estrangement: ‘The Big World of Music’

Arendt’s social theory, I am arguing, may inspire an enriched model of Wolpe’s latepractices, to provide reasons and a vocabulary to subsume the composer’s principleof oppositions to an overarching concept of non-sovereign, antinomian actions.Wolpe’s musical enactment of antinomian actions thus appears as a cosmopolitanenterprise, modeling mutuality and mutability in terrains of incessant culturaltransition. However, the dialectic of ever-restored and ever-advancing momentsplayed out throughout Wolpe’s late period music raises yet another disquietingprospect: that the composer’s attitude of critique and self-renewal might itselfbecome smug, producing the kind of predictability and prognostic security that he soeffectively resisted throughout his artistic and personal life. As he suggested in thelecture at the Frances Parker School, Wolpe found at least one hedge against the habitof dialectical thinking: the incorporation of intact fragments of music of the past. Inwhat he poetically calls his ‘later written music’, he introduced ‘quotations of alreadyexisting pieces, of music in use which will give to it the character of a strangeindestructible event (of perhaps error and wonderment)’.

The indestructible event that Wolpe invokes is wonderful because it is imperme-able; it will not be sucked into, shaken up, and reconfigured in the composer’s vortexof compositional transformation. It is a precious exception that affirms, whilerefusing to be assimilated to, the rule of change. Here, again, there is a connectionwith Arendt: her description of Walter Benjamin’s recovery of the past, which is‘[l]ike a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate thebottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls andthe coral in the depths. . . . What guides this thinking is the conviction that . . . theprocess of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization’ (Arendt, 1968, pp.205ff). By the time he came to produce his String Quartet, I want to argue, Wolpehad become so good at making things rich and strange that he could relax hisprinciple of oppositions and inflect all his musical moments with a self-confounding,

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self-renewing antinomian twist. Thus, a new kind of boundary possibility, a new formof opposition needed to appear in the spectrum of actions: the unyielding,indestructible event—‘music in use’, the pearl pried loose from the bedrock of thepast and lifted into the panorama of actions (Figure 3).

In the final phase of his creative life, Wolpe came to include more and more kindsof events into the gamut of actions—even what was for him the most unlikely ofevents, the gesture of ending. The 1969 String Quartet concludes in an apparentlymellow mode, with an oddly deadpan, slightly inebriated stepwise inversion canon insecond violin and viola (m. 191) that diffuses some of the movement’s momentum.Then a sweet, strange, dance emerges (m. 196), an off-kilter allemande, articulated bya poignant oscillation of dissonant voice exchanges and homophonic harmonies, anda peculiarly expressive, hieratic half step mumbling melody in the upper voice viola.The Quartet comes to a final convergence of instrumental voices, and with this afinal, ephemeral concordance: the pearl-like prize of a fleeting E minor triad barelycoalescing in the last beat of ensemble sound (m. 205, beat 3). The sense of error andwonderment is alive and well, however abundantly and inventively this endingdraws on the Quartet’s mercurial past. At the close, the viola lingers enigmatically ona final E, which seems both like a cadence tone and, with its abrupt drop in intensityfrom mezzo forte to pianissimo, a last chance to make another distinction: to saysomething new.

The Frances Parker School, where Wolpe gave the lecture that I have drawn uponhere, had sponsored a host of distinguished guest speakers long before the composergraced its stage. Among his predecessors were both the celebrated icon of Americanphilosophy, John Dewey, and Albert Einstein, the emigre genius par excellence.Wolpe seems an incongruous presence, and his lecture comes to us like one ofArendt’s pearls, dislodged from the bedrock of an irretrievable past. It is difficult toimagine what the audience at Frances Parker might have made of the composer’sintensely assertive self-expression, or his gnomic diction, or the challenging music heplayed for them (some two hours worth of mostly recent pieces). The crowd, onesuspects, was small, the evening long. The event seems emblematic of the strangecontingencies that both Wolpe and Arendt faced and endured throughout their lives,and of the composer’s stark predicament as he engaged in yet another gesture ofunrepentant self-disclosure. It might also serve, more generally, as an allegory ofuncertain relationships, including those between composers, historians andphilosophers. That Wolpe and Arendt might not have engaged with orcomprehended each other may seem poignant or ironic, but hardly surprising orespecially bleak. The author of the ever-controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, asmuch as the author of the 1969 String Quartet, knew what it meant to bemisunderstood. They would surely have agreed that the ever-looming prospect ofincomprehension was an ineluctable byproduct of action and its unpredictableconsequences.13 And Wolpe would surely have concurred with Arendt’s wish that‘uncertainty rather than frailty [become] the decisive character of human affairs’(Arendt, 1998, p. 186).

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Figure 3 String Quartet, mm. 191–209. ª 1985 EMI.

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Wolpe, in any event, came to play. At the end of the Frances Parker lecture, he re-affirmed the principle of self-disclosure through new initiatives in the guise of apersonal ‘creative form sense’, the only faculty that the composer could claim as a

Figure 3 (Continued).

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hedge against the ‘mechanics of arbitrariness’ in a universe of unbounded action.Then he returned to the question of ‘music in use’ he raised earlier on. ‘It mightamuse you,’ he announced in describing his Piece for Two Instrumental Units, ‘that Imade three short quotations of existing music in this piece, one from Beethoven’sNinth Symphony, one from Verdi’s Rigoletto, and one from a sonata of Scriabin.’Then he added, in a point that might apply to so many of the charged moments inthis tour de force of myriad engagements, initiatives and enactments: ‘If you missedonly those, don’t worry, you haven’t missed too much.’

Notes

[1] To track the adventures of the alienated composer (from Schoenberg to Babbitt, say) isbeyond the scope of this article. My point of emphasis here is that the trope of alienation iscommonly put to use to normalize and exclude various musical practices and values.Accordingly, if ironically, the ‘alienated’ composer may be neutralized—positioned as adisengaged ideologue suffering from false consciousness rather than an engaged subjectstruggling at the margins. Alternatively, the question of modernist alienation may be viewedethnographically, in relation to that of sub-cultural formations and communicative mores—astory for another day, though it is touched upon in the following.

[2] ‘Third way’—here, the opposition of ‘autonomous’ and ‘political’, not dodecaphony versusneo-classicism, as in Martin Zenck’s insightful ‘Beyond Neoclassicism and Dodacaphony:Wolpe’s Third Way’ (Zenck, 2003).

[3] Bhabha has written at length about the significance of Hannah Arendt’s theories, discussedbelow, in the conversation on postcolonial culture. The extent to which Wolpe saw himself asan unrooted, migrant cosmopolitan is a central topic in Brigid Cohen’s current dissertationresearch.

[4] Wolpe (1998, p. 302) declares that ‘the form must be ripped endlessly open’ in ‘ThinkingTwice’.

[5] I refer to a recent discussion of Arendt by Martin Jay in a review essay entitled ‘AgainstSolitude’ (Jay, 2006): ‘[Arendt’s work was] enriched by the tacit adoption of Jaspers’distinction between Existenz and mere existence, which she understood as the differencebetween action and behaviour. Even more important to Arendt was Jaspers’ belief in thecommunicative, intersubjective quality of meaningful action, which allowed her to break freefrom the inclination to solipsism in Heidegger’s early work.’ The distinction between actionand behavior is fundamental to Arendt’s definition of human freedom—which in turn, gainsa new meaning in light of the cataclysms of the Second World War. As Jerome Kohn (2000, p.119) proposes: ‘What is as new as totalitarianism itself . . . is the recognition that the capacityfor human freedom may make life supremely worth living.’

[6] Thinking in terms of cosmopolitanism suggests a common aspect of the American careers ofArendt and Wolpe. Emigres but not exiles, both engaged intensely with the intellectual andartistic scenes of New York, and both became central figures (according to John Cage, a ‘secretcenter’ in Wolpe’s case) in their communities.

[7] The phrases cited here all come from Stefan Wolpe’s ‘Lecture at the Frances Parker School’,which is published in this issue of the journal and discussed in the following.

[8] As Austin Clarkson has suggested to me, Wolpe’s opposition of two instrumental ‘units’ in theseptet is itself suggestive of a dialectical scheme at work in the conception of the piece. Inrapidly recalibrating the dialectical discourse, Wolpe quickly challenges the integrity of thetwo units as the piece unfolds.

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[9] See, e.g., Hasty (2002, p. 165): ‘His focus again is on the vividness of a moment that is new ornow—a moment that is new and now and vivid, expressive, meaningful (however we want tocharacterize it) not from privation, not because it is separate or detached, but fromplenitude—because it is extravagantly connected to a vast world of past events and to adynamic, expanding world of possibility. Past and future here are not line segments to the leftand right of a durationless present instant. They are . . . who can say? . . . forces?, powers?,stores of all that did and might happen? It is difficult to know how to think about this.’

[10] For a discussion of Wolpe’s ideas about action in musical space, see, e.g., Brody (2003, pp.177ff).

[11] Babbitt (e.g., 2003 [1961], pp. 83ff) addresses the ‘contextual phase’ of modern music in manyplaces.

[12] In a personal correspondence about this essay, Austin Clarkson asked a perceptive andimportant question that I would like to note here: ‘Does this notion of initiation,’ Clarksonasks, ‘have implications for Wolpe’s embargo on repetitions of all kinds—ostinatos, reprise? Ifso, then what about the reprises in the Trio and In Two Parts for Six Players?’ I want to suggestthat these uncanny reprises—in contexts of so much emphatic re-initiation—are themselvesanother kind of dialectical twist of the knife (repetition as the antithesis of relentless ‘newness’,or what I call a ‘hedge against the habit of dialectical thinking’ and a refusal to be ‘assimilatedto the rule of change’ in the concluding section of this article).

[13] Or appropriation to a preconceived historiographic model, a la Whittall’s reductiveopposition of formalism and social engagement or Taruskin’s morality play about retreatinginto hermeticism during the Cold War (as discussed above).

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