Brigid Cohen
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Assistant Professor of Music, New York University

Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Fall 2010

Brigid Cohen is a musicologist whose research and teaching center on the twentieth-century musical avant-garde, jazz, postcolonial studies, cultural theory, cosmopolitanism, as well as on intersections of music with the visual arts and literature. She earned her PhD from Harvard University in 2007 and is currently completing a study of the émigré composer Stefan Wolpe that explores “how dilemmas of migration and cultural plurality shaped interdisciplinary modernist movements from the Bauhaus to the kibbutzim, from bebop to Black Mountain College.” The book that followed from this project, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.

 

Cohen has received grants and fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, the Getty Research Institute, the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Paul Sacher Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was also awarded the Harvard University Bok Center Certificate for Excellencein Teaching.

Project Description

Sounds of Translation: Musical Modernism beyond the Nation

During her time at the American Academy, Cohen worked on her second book, tentatively titled “Sounds of Translation: Musical Modernism beyond the Nation.” The project sought to reframe the history of musical modernism through a sustained focus on experiences of displacement and acts of “cultural translation.” Questions of migration and cross cultural encounter, Cohen argues, have only been marginally treated in histories of the musical avant-garde, despite the fact that many of its practices and products have been the work of émigrés, cosmopolitans, and refugees. She sees this lacuna as arising from long-standing national frameworks that encourage a conception of musical modernism as a set of schools and styles implicitly oriented around ideas of national expression. Examining musical modernism beyond this national matrix, Cohen’s book will consider a wide range of musical thinkers – figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Seeger, Charlie Parker, and Yoko Ono – all of whom practiced forms of cultural translation in response to the uprooted conditions of their times.

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