“And” may be a simple word. But it shoots straight to the heart of “Music and the Holocaust,” an upcoming all-day symposium at Stanford University.
“How can you put together with a little conjunction like that two things which seem to nullify each other?” asks Professor John Felstiner, an organizer of the event.
Yet, as a number of scholars will discuss at the Sunday, Feb. 2 event — which is free and open to the public — music was far from absent during the Holocaust.
Ghetto dwellers sang traditional Yiddish and other songs. Partisans had their own defiant tunes. Concentration-camp prisoners hummed and sang prayers and other melodies, sometimes on their way to death.
“In the camps, there was quite a lot of musical activity,” notes Stephen Hinton, a Stanford professor of music who will join a symposium roundtable discussion. “There are reports of people having drawn considerable feelings of hope and solidarity from musical performances.
“Music,” he adds, “has a wonderful way of saying `we’ as well as saying `I.'”
Indeed the quest for hope and creative expression, even under the most horrific circumstances, reflects a fundamental human drive, says Felstiner, a professor of English.
“This is human nature: [People] can’t stay away from the need for beauty.”
But the expansive topic “Music and the Holocaust” covers facets of the subject far beyond those that inspire. Participants in the Stanford symposium will also explore the more precarious, ironic ways music was used and viewed during the Nazi era.
In concentration and death camps, orchestras were forced to play while their fellow prisoners marched to work or were executed. What’s more, the Nazis approved certain types of music while condemning others as “decadent.”
“Pamphlets were produced trying to develop policies toward music — what was deemed acceptable or tolerable,” says Hinton, who has studied Weimar-era music.
In addition to Hinton and Felstiner, those tackling the symposium’s far-reaching topic will include Leon Botstein, president of New York’s Bard College and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra; Lydia Goehr, a philosophy professor at Columbia University; Keith Baker, director of Stanford’s Humanities Center; and Steven Zipperstein, director of Stanford’s program in Jewish studies.
In addition, the Stanford String Quartet will perform Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, composed as a tribute to victims of war and fascism.
That afternoon’s performance will highlight yet another aspect of “Music and the Holocaust”: the many works composed after the Shoah in response to its horrors.