‘Where to Act, How to Move’: Unruly Action in Late Wolpe

Abstract

This article challenges the view that such composers as Wolpe denied their socialist convictions and thus betrayed their utopianism for an arcane hermeticism when they created a radically modernist music. The author proposes rather that Wolpe's later music exemplifies ways in which a maturing artist could transform the predicament of a modern exile, into a chosen, self-invented, full-achieved artistic persona. Borrowing concepts from Homi Bhabha's postcolonial perspective on cultural production and signification and Hannah Arendt's theory of non-authoritarian, pluralistic, political action occurring between non-sovereign individuals, the author proposes that Wolpe developed ever more nuanced ways to let in the large world of music and that he responded conceptually and viscerally to questions of action and memory, freedom and control. Passages are cited from Piece for Two Instrumental Units and String Quartet to demonstrate Wolpe's musical enactment of antinomian actions as a cosmopolitan enterprise, modeling mutuality and mutability in terrains of incessant cultural transition.