When reading Wanda M. Corn's The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 as an undergraduate art history major, I first became aware of the fact that many pioneering aesthetic innovations by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Georgia O'Keeffe resulted from twentieth-century artists deliberately constructing, or resisting, transatlantic identities.Footnote ¹ Corn investigates “le type transatlantique”––artists who moved back and forth between continents––to support her thesis that many of modern art's defining features emerged in the work of strong enthusiasts for internationalism and, paradoxically, in the work of artists who greeted this attitude lukewarmly and retreated to territories far off the beaten path, like the American Southwest. Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000 awed me with similarly complex revelations with respect to a vast array of musical repertoire. It is an incredibly valuable resource that further reveals the degree to which twentieth-century artistic interaction prospered due to fast-paced (and not necessarily positive) political and technological change. Moreover, the book further scrutinizes compositional techniques and stylistic idioms elicited from different types of twentieth-century displacement, including forced emigration for self-preservation; voluntary expatriation; and the frequent, but often overlooked, scenario of temporary relocation to escape dangerous conditions or for educational and opportunistic purposes.

Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000 is the conference proceedings of the “Crosscurrents” international conference, which met at Harvard University in the fall of 2008 and reconvened in Munich in the spring of 2009 at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. The conference conveners and volume editors (Meyer is the director of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel; Rathert is a professor of musicology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität; and Oja and Shreffler are professors of music at Harvard University) chose to investigate “trans-Atlantic musical exchange” and, for more practical purposes, organized the conference as a tangible way to alleviate the growing divide between American and European scholars (12). The editors acknowledge the impossibility of “comprehensive or representative coverage” and report that they “selected papers that illuminated salient moments of cross-cultural interaction and offered new research results” (15). One of the markers of a successful conference proceedings volume is its ability to convey the vitality of the conference to readers who were not present. Crosscurrents certainly exhibits this quality, as the individual papers invite the reader to muse on the conversations that followed, recordings of which appear to be housed in the Loeb Music Library.

Upon opening the hefty volume, my expectations were immediately defied, as I was genuinely surprised to see that its contents extend far beyond art and experimental music. The book is organized thematically with three to four papers grouped together under ten chapter headings that trace the chronological progression of the conference. The papers are preceded by keynote addresses by Michael Denning and Berndt Ostendorf and followed by transcripts of Paul Hillier's interview with Steve Reich and Vivian Perlis's interview with Betsy Jolas, who was commissioned to compose a new work for the conference (Teletalks, 2008). The format and breadth of the five-hundred-plus-page volume is to be commended: there are too few books that meaningfully address concepts of cross-cultural exchange and include contributions on jazz, musical theater, cabaret, and hip hop alongside of essays on art music composers and cultural institutions. The book's only real shortcoming is its seeming avoidance of initiating prose dialogue among the authors. It appears that the editors deliberately chose to prohibit this approach, as chapters on similar topics––for example, chapters by Nicola Scaldaferri and Claudia di Luzio on the work of Luciano Berio––do not elaborate on ideas that were introduced earlier in the book, or even acknowledge that another contributor is immersed in related research. However, this shortcoming is largely ameliorated by the book's fascinating content and its coverage of events and artistic networks in countries like Poland and Italy, which are only beginning to receive the scholarly attention that they warrant. Unfortunately, in this short review, I cannot possibly touch on all of the archival discoveries and astute instances of historiographical revision that are made by the thirty-four contributors. Below I highlight some overriding themes while referring only briefly to a smattering of the thought-provoking research that fills the pages of this volume.

Not surprisingly, the modes of dissemination and venues for consumption of music that migrated from Europe to America, and vice versa, are treated in depth. Celia Applegate demonstrates that the spectacle surrounding the arrival of European virtuosos, such as British organist Edwin H. Lemare, and the physical and cultural displacement of European music at international fairs in the United States often resulted in “the de-classing of culture,” as well as “planned and unplanned interactions” (68). Similarly, James Deaville studies the showmanship of African American performers who appeared on Varieté stages in fin-de-siècle Vienna, singing “what the central Europeans would consider to be authentic American Negro style” as well as “adopting Austrian and Bavarian culture in acts of good-natured adaptation and parody” (115). Berndt Ostendorf, Penny Von Eschen, and Zbigniew Granat highlight the importance of the dissemination of American music, especially jazz, through radio programs like Willis Conover's “Voice of America Jazz Hour,” which premiered in 1955. Emily Abrams Ansari examines the State Department–funded overseas tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic during the Cold War to expose how “the cultural diplomacy program quickly became a site for machinations among musicians that significantly affected both the State Department's activities and the presentation of American classical music, both at home and overseas” (289). J. Griffith Rollefson considers the “(African) Americanization” of European hip hop in recent times and observes that “minority youth across Europe are adopting the highly mediatized musical politics of American hip hop and aligning themselves with African-Americans in their struggle for equality” (473).

Many authors detail the ideas of composers, musicians, and pedagogues whose achievements have not yet been adequately documented or appreciated. Christopher Moore and Eckhard John describe how the French composer/theorist Charles Koechlin and the Russian émigré Joseph Schillinger shaped their own public artistic personas in part through an unveiling of their meticulous impressions of American jazz and popular culture to their countrymen. Sarah Adams and Elizabeth Titrington Craft, curators of an exhibit on Nadia Boulanger's time in Boston (in 1938, 1939, and the early 1940s) on display during the Harvard conference, discuss Boulanger's reluctance to abandon her country during the Nazi occupation of France and illustrate how the public's captivation with her immense talent laid the groundwork for breaking down gender barriers in American academia. This piece is followed by Jeanice Brooks's assessment of how Boulanger's concert programming negotiated “the competing demands of progressivism and history by constructing a sphere in which tradition and innovation could be reimagined” (174).

While research on the Darmstadt School composers and festival continues to command the attention of twenty-first century scholars, many chapters in Crosscurrents demonstrate the significance of other collaborative ventures and concert performances or show how socio-political stances were aired through compositional technique.Footnote ² By now, many readers are familiar with Brigid Cohen's impressive monograph on Stefan Wolpe and cosmopolitanism, which investigates how Wolpe's “hazardous and circuitous” flight from Nazi Germany––“via Brno, Moscow, St. Gall, Vienna, and Bucharest to Palestine in 1934 before he finally settled in New York in 1938”––shaped his musical rhetoric and fosters the formation of politically engaged artistic collectives.Footnote ³ It is enriching to examine an abridgment of Cohen's work in the broad context of the Crosscurrents volume: her unpacking of Wolpe's terminology––for example, his admiration of “inter-responsible community” and “plurality” (205)––and illustration of how his utopian thought pertains to particular works in his output enables readers to discern how Wolpe's idiosyncratic musical attributes amplify philosophical concepts. We can then carry this awareness with us when reading Pietro Cavallotti's study of the adoption of the twelve-tone technique by Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek, and Wolpe himself to express anti-fascist sentiment, and Jonathan Hiam's chronicling of Heinrich Jalowetz's reinstatement of Schoenberg's Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in 1944 at Black Mountain College. Imparting ethics through composition and performance extended into the postwar era: Angela Ida De Benedictis elucidates how composers who are typically viewed as adversaries utilized open forms to promulgate similar ideological values, and Amy C. Beal shows how the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), ensembles comprised of American musicians who lived and worked in Paris and Rome in the late 1960s and early 1970s, radically altered the conventions of chamber music performance to replicate the galvanizing forces that propel social justice movements.

The perspectives and insights contained in this book are unquestionably of interest to twentieth- and twenty-first century specialists of all stripes, and the book would serve as a wonderful text for a graduate seminar. Yet some of its broader concepts will also resonate with scholars who are engaged in exile studies and who investigate musical transmission and its channeling through linguistic, political, and cultural infrastructure.