Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation

The first comprehensive study of musical Holocaust representations in the Western tradition to examine both musical language and cultural value.

Amy Lynn Wlodarski (Author)

9781107116474, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 July 2015

251 pages, 7 tables 15 music examples
25.3 x 18.1 x 1.8 cm, 0.67 kg

'Musicologist Amy Lynn Wlodarski's debut monograph contributes a tremendous intervention to Holocaust witness, memory, and trauma studies. … The strength of this book lies in Wlodarski's generative contextualization and assessment of her archival findings (especially in the case of Reich's Different Trains), as well as her meticulous deconstruction and synthesis of vast and interdisciplinary literature collections. … Despite its deceptively compact nature, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation is formidably detailed and persuasively delivered. It deservedly won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society for most outstanding book. … With its engaging argument about the aesthetics and ethics of musical witness creations, Wlodarski's monograph provides an [indispensable] scholarly model for analyzing the artistic shocks that follow traumatic events.' Samantha M. Cooper, Musica Judaica Online Reviews

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.

Subject Areas: Trauma & shock [MMKB], Jewish studies [JFSR1], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Philosophy [HP], The Holocaust [HBTZ1], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], History [HB], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Theory of music & musicology [AVA], Music [AV]