Full Description
Sounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
A Note on Toponyms, Translations, Transliterations, and Archival Citations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Imagining Cultural Continuity in the Polish Bloodlands
Part I. The Interwar Years
1. Musical Belonging and Its Limits
2. A Civil Society for Music
Part II. World War II and the Holocaust
3. The Nation Is Now a Matter of Life and Death
4. We Cannot Imagine Life without Music
5. We Must Restructure the Musicians into Soviet Thinking
Part III. The Aftermath
6. Synthesizing Socialism
7. The Aesthetics of Loss
Conclusion: A Generation in the Shadow of the Cold War
Appendix 1: Cast of Characters
Appendix 2: Key Institutions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
