Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes

Reviewed by M. Syd Rosen

Chance encounters, indeterminacy, dissonance, electronic sounds and non-western tunings: any and all of these are distinctive sonic markers of the twentieth-century American experimental musical tradition. However, as Brigid Cohen persuasively argues in her new book, baked into this so-called “new music” were traces of a Cold War politics of empire distinct to the United States and, even more specifically, to New York City. In Cohen’s agile account, factors as seemingly distinct as the expansionist policies of Columbia University and the construction of the Suez Canal become interlocking parts of the development of this new musical tradition. The effect is revelatory, placing the book in dialogue not just with new studies of ethnicity and experimental music but with histories of the mind sciences and the wartime development of area studies as well.

Musical Migration and Imperial New York contends that by understanding how experimental music was enlisted in the American imperial project—indeed, by examining how such music co-produced this project—we might better understand the complicated ways in which creative experimentation is entangled with questions of identity and institutional power. The author is well aware of the scale of her task, which investigates how “state ambitions on a planetary scale” resulted in experimental music operating as “a force field of US global prestige and power.” Yet by taking and revising a carefully chosen set of encounters between musicians, artists, and institutions and letting them “telescope outward” from their New York City origin, Cohen presents a revisionist history which closes in on microhistorical details whilst zooming out beyond the confines of archival and oral history.

The book’s opening chapter examines a series of promising but ultimately unproductive jam sessions held in 1957. In a much-mythologized but largely under-studied collaboration, the French-born composer Edgard Varèse and a group of jazz players, organized around Charles Mingus, came together in Greenwich Village for a series of recorded improvisations. Varèse hoped to procure tape samples to rework into compositions but left more or less empty-handed, yet as Cohen notes, “simple notions of ‘exchange’ and ‘appropriation’ hardly do justice to the multilayered complexities of the encounter.” What is important, the author explains, is not just the downtown scene’s fetishization of Black jazz musicians and their purportedly value-free, innate musical ability, but also Varèse’s own complicated racial status: a student of primitivism with racist views but also an immigrant seeking to shore up his status as a “composer,” a “modern American,” and a “modern American composer.” All of these projects are entangled myths and dynamics which complicate what it meant for Varèse and Mingus to come together when and how they did.

Musical Migration denaturalizes how these institutional ties and interpersonal relationships defined and policed the new music. Attending carefully to etymologies, omissions, and silences without overstating their interpretative weight, Cohen engages in a project “that may well render 'uptown’ foreign to itself.” She moves from listening and re-listening to the stop-start tapes that emerged from the Mingus-Varèse meetings to the work of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC). Cohen contrasts the mix of privilege and persecution experienced by Vladimir Ussachevsky, the Center’s founder, with those of the Center’s first non-American visiting composers: Halim El-Dabh, a Coptic Christian Egyptian with a background in agricultural engineering, and Michiko Toyama, a pioneering female experimentalist born into an important family of Japanese capitalists. The material conditions which enabled, blocked, and transformed these composers’ work are subject to incisive, layered attention.

In her biggest telescopic twist away from midcentury New York, Cohen touches on the story of the enharmonium, an ambitious new instrument designed by Shōhei Tanaka, the nineteenth-century music theorist. Tanaka’s invention, Cohen writes, was “both a ghost and a harbinger,” a sign of Meiji-era cosmopolitanism and an anticipation of Toyama’s later failure to receive funding to launch a studio of her own in Kyoto. Like Yoko Ono, subject of chapter four, Toyama found herself isolated in an avant-garde lineage at the same time as being threatened by her status as a Japanese woman, which was used as her principal social and professional identifier.

Cohen moves from considering the CPEMC studio as a site for developing a certain uptown aesthetic to becoming “a node in the circulation of labor and expertise in a US imperial setting.” In this way, the CPEMC reemerges not just as an important site of musical innovation but as both a haven for immigrant artists and a node of racialized elite activity. No more clearly is this seen than in the book’s extended treatment of George Maciunas, the founder of the neo-Dada Fluxus movement. Born in Lithuania, Maciunas and his family fled the Soviet army in 1944. They resettled near Frankfurt, where Maciunas’s engineer father obtained a job working for Siemens in an unclear but surely dubious role in the diffused Nazi war machine. While the family moved to New York a few years after the end of the war, Cohen is right to pay close attention to how the 1962 birth of Fluxus came not in New York City but in West Germany, where Maciunas later worked as a graphic designer on a United States air force base. Equally weird and relevant is the fact that Emmett Williams, Maciunas’s principal Fluxus collaborator, earned a living by editing Stars and Stripes, the army’s in-house magazine. Fluxus’s aesthetics of (self-)sabotage appear particularly pertinent in light of these formative, transatlantic back-and-forths, fraught with the opportunities and tragedies of militarization.

In quick time, Maciunas the ironist transformed into the dictator of Fluxus, the quasi-Stalinist with thwarted dreams of setting up shop in the USSR, excommunicating his friends in the process. Cohen sees previous attempts to “locate Maciunas within a canonical history of white European avant-gardes intersecting with radical left-wing politics” as an unfortunate negation of the “histories of genocide” central to these stories. Although they are absent from Cohen’s account, it is relevant to note that Maciunas’s predecessors in artistic provocation were intimately bound up with the history of genocide. As scholars increasingly recognize, Guy Debord, the ideologue-in-chief of the Situationist International; André Breton, “the pope of surrealism,” and Alfred Jarry, the founder of ’pataphysics* each forged their revolutionary identities in a fraught dialogue with the French colonial project. Cohen’s treatment of Maciunas relies on a rather casual use of the work of historian Timothy Snyder and his contested theory of an Eastern European “bloodlands,” but nonetheless provides an important corrective.

The study’s precision can occasionally become wordy. But this does not detract from the whole, which is marked by a striking balance of erudition and ambition. A brief turn in the final chapter towards the work of Fluxus co-founder Ben Patterson is tantalising, as is a nod to composer and theorist Henry Flynt’s protest work. Likewise, Cohen’s rich account of Maciunas’s explicitly Marxist attempt at developing a “people’s music” made me wonder how the parallel efforts of Cornelius Cardew might be brought into the conversation. In his brief and varied career, the London-based Cardew shifted from being the assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen—the pinnacle of postwar high art—to founding the amateur-focused Scratch Orchestra and reemerging as a fierce critic of Stockhausen’s perceived imperialism.[1]

Cohen’s New York is alive with fleeting, fascinating encounters. That said, I couldn’t help but wonder how the author might treat San Francisco’s parallel trajectory of experimental music and American imperialism–which raises the important question of the uniqueness of New York City in this history. The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was established in San Francisco in 1958; three years later Ramón Sender (later Sender Barayón) spearheaded the development of the influential San Francisco Tape Music Center. The son of a prominent Spanish poet, Sender’s mother was killed by fascists; his father fled Franco, leaving his son to be adopted by a wealthy family in the United States. Via Rome and then San Francisco, Sender became a pioneering electronic musician and Fluxus-adjacent experimenter. By the time the Tape Center benefited from a $200,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Sender had transformed into a collaborator of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and become a key figure in the Californian back-to-the-land movement. Sender’s story of privilege, tragedy, dislocation, and extra-spatial exploration, so similar to those Cohen tells in Musical Migration, shows that the political feedback of post-war experimentalism bounced not only across oceans but also over the continent.

By embedding a rich and challenging set of case studies in a web of think tanks, visa problems and interpersonal dynamics, Musical Migration and Imperial New York initiates an important new way to consider the role of music in the construction of soft and hard power. Scholars and artists from a variety of disciplines will benefit from Cohen’s thoughtful and challenging account. In turn, readers will be left feeling that, however well-tuned and well-studied the downtown scene might have been, other histories may soon slot alongside, revise and even supersede them.

[1] See Tony Harris, The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013).

* Correctly rendered: ’pataphysics. The meaning of the apostrophe has been the matter of some debate, but it is considered crucial.

M. Syd Rosen is a doctoral student in the History of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on avant-garde art, political radicalism, and competing notions of ‘popular culture’ in post-war New York.

Reviews, Postwar New York, Manhattan, Politics, Arts & Culture, Race & EthnicityAndrew LangJune 28, 2023Comment