Musical Migration and Imperial New York

“This is a field-changing book. Cohen calls to account many legends about experimental music in New York and strips away the heroic storytelling of the past to reveal uncomfortable truths about the racial and imperial underpinnings of modern music in the United States. In Cohen’s study, hard-to-find and fragmentary sources are brought to light in ways that change what we know. The readings of music and sound are deeply illuminating, sometimes breathtaking, in their revelations and in their surprising connections with biographical detail.” * Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State University *
“In Musical Migration and Imperial New York, we witness a scholar working at the height of her powers. Through this expansive and novel history, we watch fascinating yet understudied actors play out their imperialist and technological fantasies on an urban landscape marked by racial and gendered differences. After reckoning with Cohen’s reenvisioning, scholars of twentieth-century music, art, and urban life will have to rethink the New York City they thought they knew.” * Ryan Dohoney, Northwestern University *
“Conventional approaches to experimental music tend to overemphasize the idea of ‘musical genius’ and often lead to problematic exceptionalist narratives. In Musical Migration and Imperial New York, Cohen sidesteps this problem by focusing on the ways in which experimental artists as aesthetically and ideologically varied as Charles Mingus, Vladimir Ussachevsky, or Yoko Ono mediated conversations about belonging at the intersection of external geopolitical power plays and internal assimilation. Cohen’s acutely tuned ear and brilliant prose guide us through the rich and thrilling experience of listening to the physiognomic overtones of citizenship, migration, and empire-building as they shaped the development of experimental art and music scenes in Cold War New York City.” * Alejandro L. Madrid, Cornell University *
"Cohen masterfully marshals alternative sources including rare tapes, interviews and interpretations of official recordings. The result is a work of scholarship that not only pays long overdue attention to artists like Toyama and El-Dabh but changes the terms by which we encounter major figures like Mingus and Ono." * The Wire *
"Cohen, a professor in NYU’s Department of Music, illuminates the contributions of these artists—many of them underappreciated—through the venues where their creations were displayed, performed, and composed. Some of these sites have similar purposes today, while others offer only architectural whispers of the history made there more than a half century ago." * NYU News *
"In Musical Migration and Imperial New York, Cohen demonstrates the ways in which musical actors have negotiated their entanglements with power—power of the political elite, to be sure, but also the soft power of those working behind the scenes to finance, create, preserve, and subvert artistic movements in the shadow of the United States’ rapidly expanding empire. . . I believe this text will be embraced by scholars of contemporary/experimental/avant-garde music and will also be of great interest to anyone curious about migration, imperialism, Cold War politics, totalitarianism, performance art, postwar technology, or citizenship. In short, this densely woven and comprehensively researched book is a welcome addition to our field and to those of our cross-disciplinary collaborators." * Journal of American Musicology Society *
"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. . . . 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." * Gotham Center for New York City History *
"In Musical Migration, Cohen. . . points to a welcome path forward for postwar music scholarship—perhaps the only sustainable path forward, in which scholars embrace the uncharted, harness the imagination, and bask in music’s potential
to both imagine and perhaps create new worlds." * Notes *