OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND:
MUSICAL REFLECTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST
Part 1

This is part 1 of a multi-part exhibit on the Musical Reflections of the Holocaust

 Part 2

I

n recent decades, much research and concert programming concerning music and the Holocaust has focused on the musical life during and adjacent to the years of the Second World War. This work has helped bring to broader public attention music that was suppressed, used to foment and bolster resistance, or simply used as propaganda by oppressive regimes.

Attention has also been paid to what is referred to in the Milken Archive as "Musical Reflections of the Holocaust." That is, musical works that attempt to address the inhumanity of the Holocaust and honor the memory of its victims. The émigré philosopher Theodore Adorno hinted at the difficulty of this endeavor when he famously wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” While Adorno was not advocating a ban on Holocaust-related art, Gershon Kingsley seems to have been channeling him when he confronted the task of composing Voices from the Shadow. “Is it possible to write songs about Auschwitz, or, even more important, is it permitted to do so?”

Kingsley offers us a unique viewpoint to the issues his question raises. Born in Germany in 1922, Kingsley was just eleven when the National Socialist Party assumed power. His response to that regime's increasing persecution of Jews was to join the Zionist youth movement. He escaped the Holocaust by joining that group on a voyage to Palestine, later immigrating to the U.S. and becoming a composer of considerable renown. Kingsley's escape was narrow, having left on one of the last trains out of Berlin. That someone who actually fled the Holocaust questions the ethics of writing music about it highlights the topic’s gravity.

In raising the issue, Kingsley is far from alone. Musicologist Maria Cizmic, who has written about music and trauma in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and '80s, asks a similar question somewhat more poignantly: "can music create a point of entry into an empathetic response to another’s pain or do the dangers of aestheticizing suffering lurk nearby?" (2012:3). Ruth Schonthal, also a German-born refugee of the Third Reich, is among the composers featured here who share Cizmic's concerns. "I always wanted to stay away from the Holocaust, because I didn't want to trivialize it," she once remarked. Cognizant of the fine line that separates memorialization from exploitation, suppressed music specialist Simon Wynberg has gone so far as to label some contemporary Holocaust music presentations “Shoah business” (2011).

A related issue here is personal experience. Unlike Kingsley and Schonthal, most of the composers in this exhibit did not experience European anti-Semitism directly, even if they may have been personally affected by the Holocaust. Some were not even born until after the war. From this perspective, “musical reflections” can also serve to highlight the disparity between the European and American Jewish experiences. Indeed, one of the most famous Holocaust-related works, Steve Reich's Different Trains, takes this discrepancy as its starting point.

But the disparity does not preclude a sincerely felt and genuine connection to the tragedy that was the Holocaust. “I sat and cried as I wrote this piece,” Ralph Shapey has remarked about The Covenant. On occasions when survivors have asked him how, as an American who did not experience the Holocaust directly, he could have captured its emotional resonance in that piece, he has responded, “Because my blood was there.” But however close any particular composer might feel to the Holocaust, works of memorialization are not objective history and, in many cases—Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw being a well-known example—are purely or partially fictional. As such, musicologist Amy Wlodarski has warned, “[composers'] memorial narratives must not be misconstrued as historical documents but understood as secondary imaginative accounts of the Holocaust and markers of its cultural meanings” (2015:2). Her point is to emphasize that works often construct meaning and shape collective memory at least as much as they reflect them.

Most of the works included in part one of this exhibit can be viewed as belonging to two basic categories, those based on victims' texts and more abstract instrumental works. In the former category, composers have found a “way in” to the Holocaust by turning to the artistic work of those more directly affected. Settings of poetry composed in the camps, or afterwards by survivors, comprise a significant number of the works and feature prominent writers (i.e., Primo Levi, Paul Celan) as well as lesser known ones (i.e., children interned at Terezin). Instrumental works range from elegiac tributes to intense depictions of violence and trauma.

Music’s ability to speak beyond words, to evoke emotion through pure sound, to re-present horrors that belie the limits of the imagination can bring us closer to events that we can never fully comprehend. Whether and how to harness that power with respect to the Holocaust is an ongoing conversation in which these works—by virtue of their existence—take part.