Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading ...postmodern composer. George Rochberg, American Composer, is the first comprehensive study devoted to tracing and putting into a rich cultural context the career of George Rochberg, widely acknowledged as one of the most prominent musical postmodernists. Drawing from unpublished materials including diaries, letters, sketches, and personal papers, the book traces the impact of two specific personal traumas--Rochberg's service as an infantryman in World War II and the premature death of his son--on his work as a leading composer, college educator, and public intellectual. The book significantly expands our understanding of Rochberg's creative work by reconstructing and examining the earliest seeds of his aesthetic thinking--which took root while he served in Patton's Third Army--and following their development through his mature compositional period into the final stages of his long career. It argues that Rochberg's military service was a transformative life experience for the young humanist, one that crucially shaped his worldview and influenced his artistic creativity for the next sixty years. As such it reveals personal trauma and aesthetic recovery to be the basis of Rochberg's postwar ideas about humanism, musical quotation, and neotonality. This book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC-BY-NC. Support for this publication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.
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; 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.
Taking my cue from the postcolonial cultural analyses of Edward Said, as well as a recent postcolonial turn in Holocaust studies, I define a practice of contrapuntal listening for the copious musical ...witness that constitutes the extensive Holocaust testimonial archive. Contrapuntal listening recognizes the inherent power dynamics and potential narrative desires present within the capture of testimony, a process that is never ideologically blank and is often driven by the explicit goals of the interviewers (amateurs and experts alike), whose relationship to the traumatized individual before them ranges from the empathetic to the antagonistic. This essay attempts to listen contrapuntally to one documentary source concerned with Viktor Ullmann’s musical activities in Terezín: Goethe och Ghetto (1996), the award-winning film directed by Peter Berggren and Göran Rosenberg. My analysis places the original witness testimonies collected for the project in contrapuntal conversation with the final documentary to illuminate its intentional “voicing” of three survivors as well as the power dynamics inherent in the testimonial exchange. My aim is not to cast aspersions, but to call for increased attention to these varied counterpoints as we expand our understanding of music’s roles in multivocal spaces like Terezín. To do so is to begin to enable a self-critical exchange with musical testimonies that considers their engagement within historical networks of power and authority.
Korngold and His World Daniel Goldmark, Kevin C. Karnes / Daniel Goldmark, Kevin C. Karnes
2019, Letnik:
47
eBook
A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition ...of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, Korngold and His World provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments.Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. This collection examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. The volume also features numerous historical documents—many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations—including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold.The contributors are Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Bryan Gilliam, Daniel Goldmark, Lily Hirsch, Kevin Karnes, Sherry Lee, Neil Lerner, Sadie Menicanin, Ben Winters, Amy Wlodarski, and Charles Youmans.Bard Music Festival 2019 Korngold and His World Bard College August 9–11 and 16–18, 2019
This collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of East German art, film, literature, music, and museum studies, seeks to renegotiate the artistic legacy of the German Democratic ...Republic. Combining a range of theoretical and practical perspectives, the volume challenges the narrow frameworks of totalitarianism and Ostalgie that have dominated discussions of art produced in the GDR. It explores the diversity of art produced in the state and contests the long-held perception that socialist realism and artistic innovation were mutually exclusive. Crucially, the collection puts art itself to the fore; GDR art is considered not simply as a political by-product, as is so often the case, but as an entity of innovation and aesthetic value in its own right.
Often praised as an exceptional artistic response to the Holocaust, Steve Reich's Different Trains adopts a documentary approach to Holocaust representation in which Reich assembled short excerpts ...from three survivor testimonies and published transcriptions of their accounts in his libretto for the work. This article explores the consequences that arise when fragments from very emotional testimonies are recast as purportedly unmediated documentary. The authority attributed to this sort of historical narrative has come under scrutiny in the field of Holocaust studies, in which it is called “secondary witness”—an intellectual interpretation of survivor testimonies advanced without the author revealing his or her own subjective standpoint or scholarly agenda. I argue that Reich's use of the voices of the survivors, Paul, Rachel, and Rachella, constitutes a form of secondary witness. Analysis of the original sources reveals that as Reich worked with extracts from the testimonies, in some cases his composition took on the aesthetics of the original testimonies, yet in other cases, he altered meaning and tone and even misheard certain phrases, producing transcription errors that reframed key moments by substituting his account of the Holocaust for that of the primary witness. Such revelations prompt reevaluation of the moral and political success that has been claimed for Different Trains, since the compositional process could never have been as objective and self-effacing as Reich and his critics suggest.
This article explores the role of memory within Schoenberg's Gedanke Manuscripts and its musical encoding in A Survivor From Warsaw, his 1947 Holocaust cantata. In the Gedanke Manuscripts human ...memory serves as analogy for the connective processes that aid the listener in comprehending and identifying the musical idea. Schoenberg argues that a musical idea is recognized (erkennt), retained, and then re-recognized (wiedererkennt) by the listener in a process similar to that of memory. These comments form the basis for an analysis that demonstrates the patterning of Survivor's 12-tone rows according to such mnemonic principles. The encoding of memory in the narrator's testimony as well as in the musical structure suggests that memory functions as an overriding poetic idea that holds several implications for evaluations of the cantata's musical and religious significance within Schoenberg's corpus.
Often praised as an exceptional artistic response to the Holocaust, Steve Reich'sDifferent Trainsadopts a documentary approach to Holocaust representation in which Reich assembled short excerpts from ...three survivor testimonies and published transcriptions of their accounts in his libretto for the work. This article explores the consequences that arise when fragments from very emotional testimonies are recast as purportedly unmediated documentary. The authority attributed to this sort of historical narrative has come under scrutiny in the field of Holocaust studies, in which it is called “secondary witness”—an intellectual interpretation of survivor testimonies advanced without the author revealing his or her own subjective standpoint or scholarly agenda. I argue that Reich's use of the voices of the survivors, Paul, Rachel, and Rachella, constitutes a form of secondary witness. Analysis of the original sources reveals that as Reich worked with extracts from the testimonies, in some cases his composition took on the aesthetics of the original testimonies, yet in other cases, he altered meaning and tone and even misheard certain phrases, producing transcription errors that reframed key moments by substituting his account of the Holocaust for that of the primary witness. Such revelations prompt reevaluation of the moral and political success that has been claimed forDifferent Trains, since the compositional process could never have been as objective and self-effacing as Reich and his critics suggest.
