Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Music since 1900)
Cambridge University Press, 8/31/2015
EAN 9781107116474, ISBN10: 1107116473
Hardcover, 270 pages, 25.3 x 18.1 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
This is the first musicological study entirely devoted to a comprehensive analysis of musical Holocaust representations in the Western art music tradition. Through a series of chronological case studies grounded in primary source analysis, Amy Lynn Wlodarski analyses the compositional processes and conceptual frameworks that provide key pieces with their unique representational structures and critical receptions. The study examines works composed in a variety of musical languages - from Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic A Survivor from Warsaw to Steve Reich's minimalist Different Trains - and situates them within interdisciplinary discussions about the aesthetics and ethics of artistic witness. At the heart of this book are important questions about how music interacts with language and history; memory and trauma; and politics and mourning. Wlodarski's detailed musical and cultural analyses provide new models for the assessment of the genre, illustrating the benefits and consequences of musical Holocaust representation in the second half of the twentieth century.
Introduction
1. The composer as witness
Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw
2. The philosopher as witness
Theodor Adorno's A Survivor from Warsaw
3. The composer as witness
Hanns Eisler's Nuit et Brouillard
4. The state as witness
Jüdische Chronik in the German Democratic Republic
5. The composer as witness
Steve Reich's Different Trains
Epilogue.