Held on November 6, 2013
Music has featured as a discourse in Holocaust narrative. From the earliest forms of recorded testimony, literary works of recognized authors, and expert accounts of musicians in SS-commissioned orchestras, music has served as a commemorative function for the Jewish community, a pedagogical tool in performance, a feature of testimony, and a complement of historical narrative.
This presentation drew upon three unique collections of musical testimony from survivors from distinct periods. The first collection comes straight after the war, in the Displaced Persons camps in 1946. Dr. David Boder’s collection of musical recordings has not been addressed by scholars, despite the keen interest in his work by historians. Professor David Bloch, one of the first academic pioneers of Terezin music research, spent years collecting musical testimony from prominent survivor musicians, in order to inform his own understanding of the place of performance in the ghetto. The final collection is personal ethnographic research, undertaken over the past twelve years with approximately one hundred survivors living on four different continents. How has our understanding of musical testimony changed with the passage of history? How do we treat this material today? Does it contain a greater potential for future commemoration and understanding of the function of music in times of extreme trauma?
Dr. Joseph Toltz was a Barbara and Richard Rosenberg Fellow of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and his presentation is co-funded by the Campus Outreach Lecture Program of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, supported by the generosity of the Jerome A. Yavitz Charitable Foundation, Inc. and Arlyn S. and Stephen H. Cypen.