Program

Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers

Period of Performance

9/1/2014 - 8/31/2015

Funding Totals

$50,400.00 (approved)
$50,400.00 (awarded)


Musical Migration and the Global City: New York, 1947-1965

FAIN: FA-58054-14

Brigid Cohen
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)

This book is both a study of interdisciplinary avant-gardes and an exploration of migration and citizenship in the early Cold War, with a focus on New York as a center of transnational exchange. After World War II, New York's musical communities sustained a concentration of uprooted thinkers who confronted questions about citizenship, plurality, empire, commerce, and national violence. This study orients itself around key musical figures in these debates who helped to secure creative exchanges across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Three experimentalists serve as exemplary cases: Egyptian-born electronic and concert-music composer Halim El-Dabh (b. 1921), jazz composer Charles Mingus (1922-1979), and performance artist Yoko Ono (b. 1933)--alongside many other musicians and artists with whom they were connected. This book is the first study to explore a full range of musical avant-gardes as constituted by, and critically responsive to, post-war processes of globalization.



Media Coverage

Exile makes unlikely comrades of Ono and Wolpe (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Matthew Guerrieri
Publication: Boston Globe
Date: 2/21/2015

Yoko Ono’s prophetic vision of self-care (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Brigid Cohen
Publication: The Cnversation
Date: 2/17/2022
Abstract: When a young Yoko Ono formulated these actions in the 1950s and 1960s, they heralded a bracingly quirky vision for the arts as a therapeutic practice of everyday life – a vision that anticipated an ethos of self-care that’s widely embraced today.
URL: http://https://theconversation.com/yoko-onos-prophetic-vision-of-self-care-176228

New York Today: Omicron Dented Tourism Just as Visitors Were Starting to Return (Media Coverage)
Author(s): James Barron
Publication: New York Times
Date: 2/18/2022
URL: http://https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/nyregion/omicron-tourism-nyc.html



Associated Products

“Music History and Cosmopolitanism, or Musical Cosmopolitics in Cold War New York" (keynote) (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Music History and Cosmopolitanism, or Musical Cosmopolitics in Cold War New York" (keynote)
Abstract: New York crystallized as an archetypal “global city” under the pressure of the early Cold War, when the U.S. asserted heightened economic and military dominance, while absorbing unprecedented levels of immigration in the wake of the Holocaust, decolonization movements, and the internal Great Migration. During this period, the city built a cultural infrastructure that benefitted from, and sought to match, the nation’s enhanced geopolitical and economic power. This talk examines the role of musical “migrant mediators” who navigated new patronage opportunities that arose in this setting, helping to reinforce transnational art and music networks for generations to come. With attention to concert music, jazz, electronic music, and performance art—and figures ranging from Yoko Ono to Vladimir Ussachevsky—I highlight creators’ wildly disparate enactments of national citizenship and world belonging in the arts of the Cold War “global city,” their different cosmopolitanisms in counterpoint and contestation with one another.
Author: Brigid Cohen
Date: 6/4/2016
Location: Fourth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History, Helsinki, Finland

“Varèse and Mingus at Greenwich House, 1957,” February 2016. (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Varèse and Mingus at Greenwich House, 1957,” February 2016.
Abstract: In 1957, Edgard Varèse led a series of improvisation sessions in Greenwich Village with jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Don Butterfield, Teo Macero, Ed Shaughnessy, and others. Little scholarship has explored this episode, a lacuna speaks to a wider, racially inflected rift in historiographies of jazz and non-jazz musical avant-gardes. Against this tendency, I bring new light to these sessions as a messy and fleeting exchange characterized by mutual curiosity and crossed signals, drawing from analysis of sessions recordings, original interviews, and archival research. Within a larger ensemble of musicians, I ultimately focus on Edgar Varèse and Charles Mingus in order to tell a larger story about race, citizenship, and the arts in downtown New York during a period of postwar, self-proclaimed American cultural ascendency and national canon formation. I also ask what it means to grapple with to the laden silences that characterize our archives and historiography.
Author: Brigid Cohen
Date: 3/4/2016
Location: University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA.

"Varèse and Mingus at Greenwich House, 1957" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "Varèse and Mingus at Greenwich House, 1957"
Abstract: In 1957, Edgard Varèse led a series of improvisation sessions in Greenwich Village with jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Don Butterfield, Teo Macero, Ed Shaughnessy, and others. Little scholarship has explored this episode, a lacuna speaks to a wider, racially inflected rift in historiographies of jazz and non-jazz musical avant-gardes. Against this tendency, I bring new light to these sessions as a messy and fleeting exchange characterized by mutual curiosity and crossed signals, drawing from analysis of sessions recordings, original interviews, and archival research. Within a larger ensemble of musicians, I ultimately focus on Edgar Varèse and Charles Mingus in order to tell a larger story about race, citizenship, and the arts in downtown New York during a period of postwar, self-proclaimed American cultural ascendency and national canon formation. I also ask what it means to grapple with to the laden silences that characterize our archives and historiography.
Author: Brigid Cohen
Date: 4/14/2016
Location: Music Department, Northwestern University

“Ono in Opera, 1961" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Ono in Opera, 1961"
Abstract: Yoko Ono has increasingly found recognition as a founding mother of 1960s performance and conceptual art movements and a key mediator of transnational avant-gardes. Yet little scholarship has addressed the earliest works that established her career in New York in 1961. This lacuna partly arises from the ephemeral nature of those pieces, which confound disciplinary expectations. While most critical literature on Ono is written from an art historical angle, remarkably few visual traces remain from her early career. Moreover, Ono’s first performances eschewed formal scores and tape recording, discouraging musicological methods of interpretation. Ono designated her first extended piece “AOS-for David Tudor” (1961) as an “opera.” Her use of this traditional term may seem surprising given the radical nature of the work, which involved the juxtaposition of animal sounds with human voices, a dehumanizing pile-up of human bodies, primal screaming, and amplified playback of speeches by Hitler and Hirohito. Blending archival research with a critical reading of Ono’s intermedial poetics, this paper follows Ono’s lead to consider how “opera” clarifies her earliest legacies. The term speaks to her aspirations as a dramatist accessing a heightened affective register. It also indicates her desire to “operate” in the world. To appreciate Ono as an “operatist/operator” is also to apprehend how strongly her work diverged from the Cagean circles in which she then traveled. Meant to be spread “by word of mouth,” Ono’s dramas signaled a critical moment in the politicization of the 60s avant-garde, raising questions that haunt contemporary critical practice.
Author: Brigid Cohen
Date: 2/26/2015
Location: Opera Seminar of the Mahindra Center for Humanities at Harvard University

"Musical Migration and the Global City: Greenwich Village, 1957" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "Musical Migration and the Global City: Greenwich Village, 1957"
Abstract: In 1957, Edgard Varèse led a series of improvisation sessions in Greenwich Village with jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Don Butterfield, Teo Macero, Ed Shaughnessy, and others. Little scholarship has explored this episode, a lacuna speaks to a wider, racially inflected rift in historiographies of jazz and non-jazz musical avant-gardes. Against this tendency, I bring new light to these sessions as a messy and fleeting exchange characterized by mutual curiosity and crossed signals, drawing from analysis of sessions recordings, original interviews, and archival research. Within a larger ensemble of musicians, I ultimately focus on Edgar Varèse and Charles Mingus in order to tell a larger story about race, citizenship, and the arts in downtown New York during a period of postwar, self-proclaimed American cultural ascendency and national canon formation. I also ask what it means to grapple with to the laden silences that characterize our archives and historiography.
Author: Brigid Cohen
Date: 3/2/2015
Location: Newhouse Center for Humanities, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Enigmas of the Third Space: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House, 1957 (Article)
Title: Enigmas of the Third Space: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House, 1957
Author: Brigid Cohen
Abstract: In 1957, Edgard Varèse led a series of improvisation sessions in Greenwich Village with jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Don Butterfield, Teo Macero, Ed Shaughnessy, and others. Little scholarship has explored this episode, a lacuna that speaks to a wider, racially inflected rift in historiographies of jazz and non-jazz musical avant-gardes. Against this tendency, I bring new light to the sessions as a messy and fleeting exchange characterized by mutual curiosity and crossed signals, drawing from analysis of session recordings, original interviews, and archival research. Within a larger ensemble of musicians, I focus on Edgar Varèse and Charles Mingus in order to address dilemmas of race and citizenship in downtown New York during a period of postwar American cultural ascendency and national canon formation. Toward this end, I claim Homi Bhabha’s notion of “third space” as the most promising sign under which to construe the sessions, a concept that foregrounds ambivalent and transient cultural crossings that play out across an uneven field of power.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://jams.ucpress.edu/content/71/1/155
Access Model: subscription access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the American Musicological Society
Publisher: University of California Press

Ono in Opera: A Politics of Art and Action, 1960-62 (Article)
Title: Ono in Opera: A Politics of Art and Action, 1960-62
Author: Brigid Cohen
Abstract: Yoko Ono has increasingly found recognition as a founding mother of 1960s performance and conceptual art movements and a key mediator of transnational avant-gardes. Yet little scholarship has addressed the earliest works that established her career in New York in 1961. This lacuna partly arises from the ephemeral nature of those pieces, which confound disciplinary expectations. While most critical literature on Ono is written from an art historical angle, remarkably few visual traces remain from her early career. Moreover, Ono’s first performances eschewed formal scores and tape recording, discouraging musicological methods of interpretation. Ono designated her first extended piece “AOS-for David Tudor” (1961) as an “opera.” Her use of this traditional term may seem surprising given the radical nature of the work, which involved the juxtaposition of animal sounds with human voices, a dehumanizing pile-up of human bodies, primal screaming, and amplified playback of speeches by Hitler and Hirohito. Blending archival research with a critical reading of Ono’s intermedial poetics, this paper follows Ono’s lead to consider how “opera” clarifies her earliest legacies. The term speaks to her aspirations as a dramatist accessing a heightened affective register. It also indicates her desire to “operate” in the world. To appreciate Ono as an “operatist/operator” is also to apprehend how strongly her work diverged from the Cagean circles in which she then traveled. Meant to be spread “by word of mouth,” Ono’s dramas signaled a critical moment in the politicization of the 60s avant-garde, raising questions that haunt contemporary critical practice.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686302
Access Model: subscription access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: ASAP/Journal
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Musical Migration and Imperial New York (Book)
Title: Musical Migration and Imperial New York
Author: Brigid Cohen
Abstract: Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York. From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varèse, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city’s postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo135959332.html
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0-226-81801-2
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes