Hadassah magazine: November 2002 Vol. 84 No.3
The Arts: Producing the Sounds of Silence
By Donna Gordon Blankinship
A Seattle-based orchestra is researching works from the Holocaust, giving new life to musicians whose days, and careers, were cut short.
Composer Gideon Klein was in his mid-20’s in 1939 and seeing the first signs of career success. He was working on a new piece, “Duo for Violin and Cello,” when his journey toward becoming a world-renowned composer stopped, literally, in mid-phrase. Klein never finished the piece because he was taken away by Nazi soldiers to the Terezin concentration camp. “Duo for Violin and Cello” miraculously survived the Holocaust, though its composer did not. Since 1998 Klein’s work and that of other musicians who died in the camps have been given new life, thanks to Music of Remembrance. The five-year-old Seattle-based nonprofit arts organization uses musical performances, educational programs and, most recently, recordings as a way of encouraging people to remember the Holocaust. “Music is very powerful in stimulating our emotions and images,” says Mina Miller, MOR’s founder and artistic director. “In many ways it helps us approach something that is quite intangible.”
As a musicologist and the daughter of holocaust survivors, Miller has always been haunted by the music that was never written and fascinated by the brilliant composers who were snuffed out in their youth, many of whom continued to create music until their death. “This music was a spiritual resistance to what was happening,” she says.
Miller started MOR with support and guidance from Seattle’s musical Jews, including conductor Gerard Schwarz of the Seattle Symphony; Rabbi James Mirel of Temple B’nai Torah (formerly of the klezmer group Mazeltones); and Mirel’s opera-singing wife, Julie Mirel.
MOR’s concerts, presented each year in November and April at the Seattle Symphony’s beautiful Benaroya Hall, feature the city’s leading musicians—most of them members of the symphony. After the first couple of concerts, Miller says, musicians came to her, asking to participate. Some are children of Holocaust survivors or lost members of their family in World War II, and some are not even Jewish or had never played Jewish music before.
“There’s no reason for some of these really busy symphony performers to participate,” says Julie Mirel. “They’re doing it because it is meaningful and because it’s a unique experience. It is a very personal thing for practically everyone.”
“Preparing a concert of this nature is different,” says Miller, who performs in all programs as a pianist. “There’s such a feeling of soul, your gut is on the line.”
Mirel, who lost a great deal of family in the Holocaust, has sung in every MOR concert. “I’ve been in the professional world for almost 35 years,” she says, “and this is an unparalleled experience for me.” She feels a connection to both the educational and artistic aspects of the organization. Many of the songs are in Yiddish, German or Polish—translations are included in the concert programs—and Mirel studies the translations in order to share a clear message with the audience. “There have been a lot of texts that on first studying them, I’ve had to fight back tears,” she says.
Although new works are a part of each concert program, not every new piece MOR performs has been commissioned. However, many of these new compositions had not received widespread exposure before the organization gave them a West Coast or United States premiere. To date, MOR has commissioned two pieces—“A Vanished World” by modern composer-conductor David Stock and “Camp Songs” from American composer Paul Schoenfield.
“A Vanished World,” for flute, viola and harp, premiered in April 2000 to enthusiastic reviews. Described by Seattle Times music critic Melinda Bargreen as “atmospheric” and “otherworldly,” she added that “folk-song elements in the tuneful score were interrupted by hair-raising, shrill sounds of alarm from the three instruments, warning of what was to come.”
Stock was inspired by Roman Vishniac’s book of photographs of the same name. “A Vanished World” quotes extensively from Jewish-themed music, most notably “Sholem Aleichem,” with a bit from “Hatikva” and “Eli, Eli.” Miller calls it an “aural snapshot of the prewar world of East European Jewry living on the edge of the abyss.”
Schoenfield’s “Camp Songs” premiered last spring. The work for vocal and chamber ensemble features a selection of five gritty, sarcastic Holocaust poems written in the concentration camp by non-Jewish Polish inmate Aleksander Kulisiewicz. A journalist, Kulisiewicz was denounced for antifascist writings and arrested soon after the German takeover of Poland. Sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, he wrote 54 poems and songs during six years in the camp. After liberation, Kulisiewicz devoted his life to collecting music and poetry written by concentration camp prisoners. His collection is housed in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which is where Schoenfield and Miller went in July 2000 to find inspiration.
Working with Schoenfield was a learning experience for Miller. When you commission a world-famous composer to create a work, she reflects, you do not do so with the caveat that he must create something popular. “I left everything open to him,” she says, “because I feel artists should have that freedom,” adding it was a coup to get Schoenfield, who has created works for the New York Philharmonic.
“The most hardened student of Holocaust art will find these poems shocking because they really lay bare the raw life, the fury seething within the horrors of this time,” says Miller. The poems are caricatures, which, according to Schoenfield, “in Joseph Conrad’s words, ‘put the face of a joke upon the body of truth.’ They are an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.”
For example, one piece, “The Corpse Carriers Tango,” describes the conditions of prisoners who toiled near camp ovens: “It’s warm where he works, but very pleasant”—and that’s the gentlest line. In contrast, the music that accompanies the angry poetry is light and beautiful because Schoenfield used folk songs as a starting point.
“Paul is just a genius,” adds Miller. “It will challenge our audience as to what really is Holocaust art.”
Because it must deal with the ramifications of performing Holocaust works, everyone connected with MOR is mindful that the group’s focus is much more than entertainment. Schoenfield consulted a rabbi before accepting the commission because he was concerned about whether it was appropriate to use Shoah music for concerts. “It still leaves kind of a bad taste in my mouth,” he admits, but the rabbi told him that helping people remember the Holocaust was too important, and he would just have to get over his discomfort.
This month’s concert, entitled “Salt of My Tears,” commemorates the passing of 64 years since Kristallnacht. It will feature music by Thomas Pasatieri, one of America’s most important living composers. Guest conductor Schwarz will lead the premiere of Pasatieri’s “Fragments of Isabella,” a work for chamber orchestra based on the Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir of Auschwitz survivor Isabella Leitner. Leitner’s memoirs, Fragments of Isabella and Saving the Fragments, have inspired readers since the publication of her first volume in 1978.
Schwarz will also conduct the West Coast premiere of “Study for String Orchestra” by Pavel Haas. Composed in the Terezin camp for its imprisoned musicians, “Study” was first performed in 1943 during the shooting of the propaganda film Hitler Presents the Jews With a City. Two weeks later, almost the entire orchestra was transported to Auschwitz, where Haas was murdered. MOR will also reprise “A Vanished World,” and Schwarz will lead a postconcert discussion.
In the April 2003 concert, called “An Unsilenced Music,” MOR will offer the premiere of Lori Laitman’s “Fathers for Baritone & Piano Trio.” Pasatieri and Laitman will speak at preconcert lectures.
Miller explains that the Holocaust created not just a hole in Jewish music, but a hole in music history. A whole genre of “café culture,” from avant garde to jazz to folk, music the Nazis considered degenerate, never developed because many young composers were murdered. And, she says, Jews were also prohibited from playing “pure German music.”
The musicians’ stories speak especially to those bringing their works back to life. “For years I thought of myself as a composer who was Jewish,” remarks Stock. “Sometimes, I now think of myself as a Jewish composer.” He credits MOR in part for bringing about that transition.
MOR is not the only organization in this country playing music composed before and during the Holocaust—the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, presents music written in Terezin. However, MOR is the only organization commissioning music based solely on Holocaust themes. “We try to show that from this dark chapter of history, there is this glimmer of hope and renewal,” Miller says.
MOR is not just about concerts. The organization researches and uncovers pieces, such as Kulisiewicz’s poems. Miller finds music in a variety of ways. One source she has turned to is musicologist David Bloch of the Terezin Music Memorial Project in Israel. Another is Bret Werb, resident musicologist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “While Bloch specialized in art music,” Miller says, “Werb has focused more on folk, satire, theater and cabaret.”
None of the music we perform is ever...easily available,” she says. “As for newer works, I try to keep on top of what composers are writing, but I also rely on [them] to send me the material. I regularly receive scores in the mail.... MOR has an international reputation for exceptional performances.”
MOR also makes presentations and short performances in schools. Its first CD, Art from Ashes, Volume One, will be released this month on the Innova label. In addition to “Camp Songs” and “A Vanished World,” the CD features works by two composers killed in the Holocaust: Robert Dauber’s “Serenata” for violin and piano, created in 1942 in Terezin, and Erwin Schulhoff’s “Five Pieces for String Quartet” (1923). It also includes “Sonata for Flute and Piano” by Herman Berlinski, who started the composition in 1941 and lived to revise it in 1981.
MOR gets regular requests to perform in other cities, but, Miller says, they don’t have the money to travel. MOR has yet to attract any substantial grants; it depends on individual contributions and grants from Jewish and arts organizations. Miller struggles each year to balance the budget. But despite difficulties—similar to the challenges of any young arts organization—Miller and others associated with MOR agree that they are doing very important work.
“There were courageous musicians who dared to create even in the ghettos and camps,” Miller says. “It is a priceless gift that much of this music has survived as defiance in the face of catastrophe. We must ensure that these voices of musical witness be heard.”

Music of Remembrance: 2002-2003
“Salt of My Tears,” November 3, 2002.
“An Unsilenced Music,” April 27, 2003.
For more information, call 206-365-7770 or go to
www.musicofremembrance.org