Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation [Paperback]

The first comprehensive study of musical Holocaust representations in the Western tradition to examine both musical language and cultural value.Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation explores the historiography of musical Holocaust representations and outlines the genre's compositional and reception history through a series of analyses. Amy Lynn Wlodarski engages interdisciplinary sources from the fields of musicology, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and philosophy, and situates musical representations within a broader discussion about Holocaust aesthetics.Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation explores the historiography of musical Holocaust representations and outlines the genre's compositional and reception history through a series of analyses. Amy Lynn Wlodarski engages interdisciplinary sources from the fields of musicology, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and philosophy, and situates musical representations within a broader discussion about Holocaust aesthetics.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; and 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 HlÃ*