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As twentieth-century composers go, Hanns Eisler is doing very well. Literature on the composer is expanding vibrantly, on both sides of the Atlantic, and transcending language boundaries. It is easy to see why. Eisler's multifaceted output and colourful life are fascinating and invite multiple approaches, interpretations, and readings. Eisler survived two world wars and numerous political systems, becoming a political refugee twice over in the process. He was one of Schoenberg's outstanding pupils, worked at the forefront of Hollywood, and, as author of a national anthem (of a now deceased nation, the GDR), probably ranks amongst the twentieth-century's most performed composers. It is not my intention to categorize the wide diversity of literature on the composer, although.

Begun on a train from Svendborg in Denmark to Prague in 1937 and developed until his forced departure from the United States in 1948, Hanns Eisler's Reisesonate (Travel Sonata) is inextricably linked with the composer's displacements. This article positions the Reisesonate in several contexts—its material, performance, stylistic, and political histories—that challenge the directional simplicity of emigration as the move from home to exile, from nation to nationless-ness. We situate the sonata's genesis against the background of Eisler's travels and discuss strategies in Eisler scholarship vis-à-vis his places. Mobility emerges in an analytical reading of the work that destabilizes static notions of musical modernism. Performance history and further documentary evidence, including the surveillance files of the British Security Service, provide portraits of the composer on the move. We suggest that the Reisesonate provides musical counterpoint to Eisler's biography, like a travel companion, and sheds light on the journeying that defined his life at mid-century.

The 20th Century has been called the era of displacement, exile, and mass migration. Bringing their music with them, migrants arrived in Britain throughout the century from all over the world. To this day, however, there has been no holistic discussion of their impact on British musical life. While excellent scholarly investigations of migrations and mobility as crucial factors for music in Britain have been undertaken, the field is fragmented, with insufficient collaboration across discussions of specific musical genres and diasporic communities. More broadly, musicology has long neglected migrations and migrants in its historicisation of a national cultural history. This forum places the migrant within discourses on national identity. The authors embrace a multi-faceted approach to the history of Britain's diverse musical immigrants across a wide range of musical styles and genres that span the entirety of the 20th century, reaching into the late 19th and the early 21st centuries. We reveal the impact of immigrant composers and second-generation migrants and diasporic communities with global backgrounds on popular music, musical comedy, jazz, concert music, folk music, and film music. The forum highlights the connections across genres, the time period, and diverse migrant backgrounds, thus revealing a multi-faceted narrative in which debates concerning 'the national' form a current in British musical life and open up questions regarding constructions of a national music history and historiography. The forum thus highlights the contributions of immigrants to British musical life; the extent to which immigrants are, or are not, narrated as part of British music history and the extent to which their musics have been marginalised or otherwise; and what opportunities this poses for an understanding of British music. In combination, the contributions challenge the notion that the migrant and the nation are incompatible, highlighting instead a narrative of (musical) diversity. Discussing the impact of migration as a sonically enriching experience seems urgent given how current debates frame immigration as a crisis at the heart of national socio-cultural discourses more broadly. Putting music centre stage, this colloquy widens the debate on migration as it encourages a discourse that is not restricted solely to economic, legal, and narrow political contexts. The focus on music allows for an exploration of the impact of highly skilled creative migrants on British cultural history. In turn, it sets it against questions of national belonging and the sonic-cultural narratisation of the nation. The forum includes contributions by Florian Scheding, Justin Williams (University of Bristol), Catherine Tackley (University of Liverpool), Derek B. Scott (University of Leeds), Erik Levi (Royal Holloway University of London), and Tom Western (University of Edinburgh).