ThoughtGallery.org > Yom HaShoah Remembrance Lecture and Musical Performance

Yom HaShoah Remembrance Lecture and Musical Performance

IIJS welcomes Dr. Alexandra Birch for a Yom HaShoa remembrance lecture and musical performance titled “Musical Stolpersteine: Classical Music, Recovered Scores, and Alternative Holocaust Memorials” on Tuesday, April 22 at 6:00 p.m.

Register to attend the event virtually via Zoom on this page. If you would like to attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall, please register on the In-Person event page, linked here.

“In the wake of the Holocaust, composers alongside their counterparts in the visual arts grappled with how to represent mass atrocity in music, and process their own traumatic experiences. Scholarship from the last 70 years has also highlighted composers like Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, and Erwin Schulhoff, murdered by the Third Reich and their collaborators. Responsive works and recovered music can both be combined in an alternative form of memorialization. Creating musical “tripping stones” or Stolpersteine within the wider canon of Western art music reincorporates these composers correctly with their European counterparts rather than relegating them to a separate category of subjugated or eradicated music.

I present music I recovered from both Western Europe and the former USSR from family collections within larger archives, prewar scores from murdered composers, music of Soviet partisans, and the preserved folklore of Yiddish-speaking evacuees to show a more comprehensive view of musical responses to and creation during the Holocaust. This analysis combined with the recentering of these composers within European classical music articulates the immense cultural destruction of the Holocaust focusing on the excellence of musicians’ artistic production rather than their victimhood.”











When: Tue., Apr. 22, 2025 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Where: Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University
511 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Ave.
212-854-2581
Price: Free
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IIJS welcomes Dr. Alexandra Birch for a Yom HaShoa remembrance lecture and musical performance titled “Musical Stolpersteine: Classical Music, Recovered Scores, and Alternative Holocaust Memorials” on Tuesday, April 22 at 6:00 p.m.

Register to attend the event virtually via Zoom on this page. If you would like to attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall, please register on the In-Person event page, linked here.

“In the wake of the Holocaust, composers alongside their counterparts in the visual arts grappled with how to represent mass atrocity in music, and process their own traumatic experiences. Scholarship from the last 70 years has also highlighted composers like Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, and Erwin Schulhoff, murdered by the Third Reich and their collaborators. Responsive works and recovered music can both be combined in an alternative form of memorialization. Creating musical “tripping stones” or Stolpersteine within the wider canon of Western art music reincorporates these composers correctly with their European counterparts rather than relegating them to a separate category of subjugated or eradicated music.

I present music I recovered from both Western Europe and the former USSR from family collections within larger archives, prewar scores from murdered composers, music of Soviet partisans, and the preserved folklore of Yiddish-speaking evacuees to show a more comprehensive view of musical responses to and creation during the Holocaust. This analysis combined with the recentering of these composers within European classical music articulates the immense cultural destruction of the Holocaust focusing on the excellence of musicians’ artistic production rather than their victimhood.”

Buy tickets/get more info now