Yom HaShoa Remembrance Lecture and Musical Performance with Alexandra Birch

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.
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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.

Dr. Alexandra Birch is a professional violinist and historian who works comparatively on the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet mass atrocity, including the Gulag through the lens of music and sound. She holds a PhD in History from the University of California Santa Barbara, and a BM, MM, and DMA from Arizona State University in violin performance. Previously, she was a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wilson Center, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, where she released CDs of recovered music and finished her first book Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe. Her current project Sonic Terror: Music, M**der, and Migration in the USSR investigates eight case studies of the Holocaust in the USSR and Gulag, including indigenous interactions with Solovki, new recordings of Weinberg’s compositions from his time in Tashkent, sound recordings of the Gulag in Kazakhstan and of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and post-Soviet world premiere compositions, creating a humanizing look at incomprehensible violence.

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Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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Host or Publisher The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University