"Composer and Community"
An Inter-Disciplinary Colloquium
Voicing Life in the Face of Death:
Composer and Community in the Concentration Camp
Philip Bohlman
Ethnomusicology
University of Chicago
Abstract:
As fascism swept across Europe and the world during the 1930s and 1940s, the distance between composers and their communities necessarily collapsed. Even modernist composers who had sought to disentangle themselves from national or ethnic identities found themselves labeled and ghettoized, indeed, placed in communities to which they claimed no real allegiance. With the Holocaust fully underway by the 1930s, the incarceration of racialized and stigmatized communities because increasingly egregious, leading to the forced imprisonment in concentration camps and other community structures designed to destroy human creativity and human life itself. When we look today at the creativity of composers in concentration camps, however, it is not the destruction of human creativity that we witness, rather its transcendent power. It is that power, mobilized when composer and community engage in an intensity wrought by tragedy, that is the subject of my offering Juan Orrego Salas on his 85th birthday. At the center of my remarks will be a series of reflections on composers who created for the theatrical stage of the concentration camp, and I shall look at the ways in which transcendence emerges from the combined strength of composer and community. In particular, I shall look at two works by Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), a distinguished and decidedly cosmopolitan composer prior to the Holocaust, who rediscovered the voice of his community during the years of incarceration in the concentration at Theresienstadt. I shall draw my reflections to a close by thinking about the burden of responsibility that accrues to a composer in our own era of globalization, when the ciudad celeste so richly evoked in Juan Orrego Salas's newest cantata poses a challenge to which musicians must arise in service to their communities.
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