The Emancipation of Memory2015

This is a study of the ways in which the past is inscribed in sound. It is also an examination of the role of concert music in the invention of cultural memory in the wake of the Second World War. And finally, it is a study of the creation and early American reception of A Survivor from Warsaw, a cantata written in 1947 that became the first major musical memorial to the Holocaust. It remains uniquely significant and controversial within the larger oeuvre of its composer, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Historians interested in the chronologies and modalities of Holocaust memory have tended to overlook music’s role as a carrier of meaning about the past, while other media of commemoration have received far greater scrutiny, be they literary, cinematic, or architectural. And yet, A Survivor...