Soprano Jaclyn Grossman and pianist/composer Nate Ben-Horin are the founders of the Likht (ליכט, “gentle”) Ensemble, devoted to uncovering and exploring the music composed within the ghettos of Europe in the course of the Second World Battle. Their focus is on works by Jap European Jews, together with music from Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
They’ll be performing their program The Shoah Songbook on the Toronto Holocaust Museum on January 10 as a part of the JCC Chamber Music Sequence.
LV requested Jaclyn and Nate just a few questions concerning the music.
Jaclyn Grossman & Nate Ben-Horin: Q&A
The duo answered just a few questions collectively because the Likht Ensemble (LE).
LV: What are you able to inform me concerning the type of analysis that goes into uncovering this music? What sort of sources? Is there a selected story about uncovering these works that you simply assume epitomizes this effort?
LE: There’s a small however passionate neighborhood of researchers and musicians devoted to Holocaust repertoire, so we do our greatest to search out and make contact with these folks, and we even have spent a good period of time poring via on-line and bodily archives. Final yr we visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) exterior Washington D.C., and spent a number of days simply photocopying all the things we may get our arms on. This March, we’ll be visiting the ExilArte Middle in Vienna (a company devoted to music that was labeled “degenerate” by the Nazi regime) to present a efficiency and discover their archives.
An essential a part of our uncovering work is reconstruction. Many if not many of the songs we come throughout are subject recordings or subject transcriptions of unaccompanied vocal melodies. A part of Nate’s job is to notate these melodies and create instrumental accompaniment elements from scratch in order that these tunes could be carried out in a classical recital setting.
Probably the most dramatic tales of music discovery come instantly from the supply. We steadily carry out a set known as “Three Lithuanian Songs” by the composer Edwin Geist. Geist was trapped within the Kovno ghetto, and as situations deteriorated round him he made an in the end unsuccessful escape try and was shot shortly thereafter. Earlier than the authorities may confiscate his belongings, his musician mates broke into his residence and rescued his musical manuscripts in order that they wouldn’t be destroyed. These songs are nonetheless unpublished, however scans of the handwritten scores ended up on the USHMM web site, which is how we discovered them.
Lots of the items we carry out have related backstories. One other one is that the Polish composer Szymon Laks, who was the conductor of the Auschwitz orchestra, found a scrap of paper on the bottom which was “crumpled, and smelled of fish” on which had been printed three Polonaise (a sort of Polish dance) melodies by an unknown composer. The orchestra’s job was to play patriotic German music and work tunes, so he orchestrated and rehearsed these Polonaises in secret. Then, after the battle, he transcribed them from reminiscence, and we’ve got programmed them in a model for violin and piano.
LV: The undertaking is an ongoing effort, so I perceive. What number of works have you ever uncovered and showcased up to now, and what number of extra do you assume there may be?
LE: We’ve developed roughly three 20-minute video recitals (specializing in music from Czechia, Lithuania, and Poland respectively) and three full-length live performance applications up to now. We’ve got a pair extra concepts within the works, together with a program of cabaret songs.
It’s onerous to say how way more music is on the market. We’ve got tons of of scans from the USHMM that we haven’t but analyzed intimately as a result of translating (from Yiddish, Polish, German, et cetera) and arranging them takes a lot time. We additionally discover pockets of recent music in surprising locations like college archives or non-public collections. A few of the composers in our roster have in depth our bodies of labor that may take years to grasp, and items in several permutations like voice-and-piano, chamber ensemble, voice-and-orchestra. So, we don’t anticipate to expire of fabric anytime quickly.
LV: How would you describe the music — are there sure components of favor or style you possibly can point out?
LE: Our music usually falls into two distinct classes — classical artwork music and people music.
The classical music occupies an enchanting stylistic area of interest throughout the Germanic custom, located between the serialists of the Second Viennese Faculty (Schönberg, Berg, Webern), who in some ways sought to interrupt with Romantic harmonic and emotive custom, and present-day composers who are likely to re-inhabit that custom reasonably than keep away from it. The camp composers are attention-grabbing as a result of their music nearly seems like a lacking hyperlink between these two durations, and certainly, if that they had lived to realize the cultural prominence they deserved, a few of them would have in all probability come to be thought to be canonical figures within the lineage of German artwork music.
The people music is simply as attention-grabbing. These are principally stunning, lyrical, approachable melodies whose simplicity frames an excessive emotional directness concerning the experiences within the camps. This is available in many flavors — lullabies, klezmer tunes, Yiddish tango… It was widespread apply to take the melody of an current people music from one’s tradition/language of origin (normally Polish or Yiddish) and substitute the lyrics with new ones about life within the camps — we’ve got many examples of this. The directness of the people music is a good distinction to the density of the classical music, so we at all times characteristic each classes in each live performance.
LV: What do you assume impressed these composers to proceed to create even in such a hostile setting?
LE: That’s an enormous query. For a lot of of them, it appeared to be nearly a matter of survival. Many outstanding artists and musicians had been held collectively within the Bohemian camp Terezin specifically, and so they fashioned a extremely productive inventive neighborhood. Viktor Ullmann, who might be essentially the most acknowledged of the camp composers, was enormously prolific throughout his time in Terezin, and wrote of that interval, “On no account did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon, and our endeavour with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to stay.”
Szymon Laks, who I discussed earlier, had a dissenting opinion. In his memoir Music from One other World, he writes about his experiences because the camp conductor in Auschwitz, and describes Nazi-organized music making extra as a type of torture than of enjoyment or self-expression. And but, he risked his life to rehearse his Polish items there.
The one factor that’s clear is that it wasn’t only one or two individuals who made a particular effort to be inventive within the camps and ghettos. There’s a big quantity of music from the camps that runs the emotional and stylistic gamut from deep mourning to humour to wild pleasure; lullabies and love songs and string quartets and symphonies. It’s a darkish mirror to on a regular basis life as we ourselves realize it.
- Discover live performance particulars and tickets for the January 10 efficiency [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. Beforehand, she was a contract author with a specialty in tradition and journey for 3 many years, and a inventive writing teacher for Ontariolearn.
