Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities

Series Editors: Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes

1. Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe, edited by Martin Stokes and
Philip V. Bohlman, 2003.
2. Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s, by Eno Koço, 2004.
3. The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns,
Cultural Differences, edited by David Cooper and Kevin Dawe, 2005.
4. On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island,
Ireland, by Lillis Ó Laoire, 2005.
5. Transported by Song: Corsican Voices from Oral Tradition to World
Stage, by Caroline Bithell, 2007.
6. Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and
Regional Political Discourse, edited by Donna A. Buchanan, 2007.
7. Music and Musicians in Crete: Performance and Ethnography in a
Mediterranean Island Society, by Kevin Dawe, 2007.
8. The New (Ethno) musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 2008.
9. Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song, by
Dimitrije O. Golemović, 2010.
10. Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in
Europe and Beyond, edited by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding, 2010.
 Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities
Series Editors: Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes

The new millennium challenges ethnomusicologists, dedicated to studying

the music of the world, to examine anew the Western musics they have
treated as “traditional,” and to forge new approaches to world musics that
are often overlooked because of their deceptive familiarity. As the modern
discipline of ethnomusicology expanded during the second half of the
twentieth century, influenced significantly by ethnographic methods in the
social sciences, ethnomusicology’s “field” increasingly shifted to the
exoticized Other. The comparative methodologies previously generated by
Europeanist scholars to study and privilege Western musics were
deliberately discarded. Europe as a cultural area was banished to historical
musicology, and European vernacular musics became the spoils left to folk-
music and, later, popular-music studies.
Europea challenges ethnomusicology to return to Europe and to
encounter its disciplinary past afresh, and the present is a timely moment to
do so. European unity nervously but insistently asserts itself through the
political and cultural agendas of the European Union, causing Europeans to
reflect on a bitterly and violently fragmented past and its ongoing
repercussions in the present, and to confront new challenges and
opportunities for integration. There is also an intellectual moment to be
seized as Europeans reformulate the history of the present, an opportunity
to move beyond the fragmentation and atomism the later twentieth century
has bequeathed and to enter into broader social, cultural, and political
relationships.
Europea is not simply a reflection of and on the current state of
research. Rather, the volumes in this series move in new directions and
experiment with diverse approaches. The series establishes a forum that can
engage scholars, musicians, and other interlocutors in debates and
discussions crucial to understanding the present historical juncture. This
dialogue, grounded in ethnomusicology’s interdisciplinarity, will be
animated by reflexive attention to the specific social configurations of
knowledge of and scholarship on the musics of Europe. Such knowledge
and its circulation as ethnomusicological scholarship are by no means
dependent on professional academics, but rather are conditioned, as
elsewhere, by complex interactions between universities, museums,
amateur organizations, state agencies, and markets. Both the broader view
to which ethnomusicology aspires and the critical edge necessary to
understanding the present moment are served by broadening the base on
which “academic” discussion proceeds.
“Europe” will emerge from the volumes as a space for critical dialogue,
embracing competing and often antagonistic voices from across the
continent, across the Atlantic, across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea,
and across a world altered ineluctably by European colonialism and
globalization. The diverse subjects and interdisciplinary approaches in
individual volumes capture something of—and, in a small way, become part
of—the jangling polyphony through which the “New Europe” has
explosively taken musical shape in public discourse, in expressive culture,
and, increasingly, in political form. Europea: Ethnomusicologies and
Modernities aims to provide a critical framework necessary to capture
something of the turbulent dynamics of music performance, engaging the
forces that inform and deform, contest and mediate the senses of identity,
selfhood, belonging, and progress that shape “European” musical
experience in Europe and across the world.
Music and Displacement
Diasporas, Mobilities,

and Dislocations

in Europe and Beyond

Edited by

Erik Levi and Florian Scheding

Europea: Ethnomusicologies

and Modernities, No. 10

SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

by Scarecrow Press, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of

The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.scarecrowpress.com
Estover Road

Plymouth PL6 7PY

United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Music and displacement: diasporas, mobilities, and dislocations in Europe and beyond / edited by
Erik Levi and Florian Scheding.
p. cm. — (Europea: ethnomusicologies and modernities, no. 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-6379-8 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7295-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8108-7410-7 (ebook)
1. Music–History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration–Songs and music–History and
criticism. I. Levi, Erik. II. Scheding, Florian, 1976–
ML160.M862   2010
780.9–dc22                                                            2009047771

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO
Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

 CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Foreword

Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes
Introduction
Florian Scheding and Erik Levi

PART ONE: THE SILENCE OF DISPLACEMENT

1. “Das Lied ist aus”: The Final Resting Place along Music’s Endless
Journey
Philip V. Bohlman

2. Dimensions of Silencing: On Nazi Anti-Semitism in Musical

Displacement
Peter Petersen

3. Ježek, Zeisl, Améry, and The Exile in the Middle

Michael Beckerman

PART TWO: DISPLACEMENT AND ACCULTURATION

4. The Vision of the East and the Heritage of the West: Displacement as a
Catalyst for the Creation of Musical Life in the Jewish Community of
Palestine
 Jehoash Hirshberg

5. Time, Place, and Memory: Songs for a North African Jewish Pilgrimage
Ruth F. Davis

6. Displaced Sounds: Popular Music-Making among the Irish Diaspora in

England
Sean Campbell

7. On Taking Leave: Mahler, Jewishness, and Jazz in Uri Caine’s

Urlicht/Primal Light
Björn Heile

PART THREE: THEORIES AND/OF DISPLACEMENT

8. “The Splinter in Your Eye”: Uncomfortable Legacies and German Exile

Studies
Florian Scheding

9. Adorno and Exile: Some Thoughts on Displacement and What It Means

to Be German
Max Paddison

10. Places of the Body: Corporal Displacements, Misplacements, and

Replacements in Music and Dance Research
Sydney Hutchinson

11. Little Stories from the Balkans

Jim Samson

Index

About the Contributors

 SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

PHILIP V. BOHLMAN AND MARTIN STOKES

In the course of the turbulent twentieth century, displacement became one
of the defining conditions of European modernity. The collapse of empires,
the conflagration of world wars, the ravages of nationalist strife, and the
devastation of genocide collectively conspired to transform Europe into a
space of displacement. Migrants and minorities, refugees and exiles,
Gastarbeiter and peoples in diaspora, all of them were victims of
displacement, of the absence of adequate space and the political and
cultural recognition to participate in the ebb and flow of Europe’s
geographical reimagination. By the end of the century, reunification and the
expansion of the European Union strove to make space for many, blurring
the tensions between self and other that had fed the historical telos of
displacement. By the end of the twentieth century, an uncanny sense of the
normative had begun to emerge, as politicians and scholars tentatively
suggested that the solutions for displacement were about to take effect.
With borderless passage between and among the Schengen States,
displacement would theoretically disappear.
The essays in the present volume are notable for the ways in which their
authors turn to music to question the normalization of displacement in the
postmodern dismissiveness of twenty-first-century Europe. Effectively, the
authors ask us to listen to music outside of place altogether, further raising
questions about the ways in which music and place are historically coupled.
The authors resist explaining away displacement. Historical and
ethnographic approaches to music alike have traditionally claimed that
music embodies, represents, and articulates place. Ancient Greek modes
and modern Arabic modes cloak themselves with place names. Modern
music historiography employs a discourse that privileges the local in folk
song no less than the political girth of nationalism in classical music. The
musician occupies place, turning space into a domain of auditory
experience bounding the listener. The sound experience of modernity charts
paths that conveniently form from the confluence of place and
displacement.
What if, however, displacement is disentangled from place, for its
teleological connection to a goal-centered music history? What if the
metaphysics of displacement leads only to further displacement? These are
the more difficult questions posed by the essays in Music and
Displacement. Critically, the authors employ different ways of rethinking
basic assumptions about what the place of music is, before and after
displacement, but above all during displacement. In Michael Beckerman’s
chapter the place of exile is liminally situated in the middle, whereas Ruth
F. Davis shifts to a musical chronotope outside time and place. If music
creates the possibility of embodying place, displacement leads to real and
symbolic distortions of the body, for example, in the chapters by Björn
Heile, Florian Scheding, and Sydney Hutchinson. Distortion of the body all-
too-often leads to more violent destruction, to which the chapters by Philip
V. Bohlman, Peter Petersen, and Jim Samson bear witness. Exile and
diaspora would seem in the first instance to grant space, but ultimately they
pass through lands that are uninhabitable for those on the move. This is the
tautology of displacement, when theorized and experienced, that runs
through the chapters by Jehoash Hirshberg, Sean Campbell, and Max
Paddison. The specter of violence hovers over most theories of
displacement, disturbingly accompanying the leitmotifs of racism and
nationalism, which are immanent in all the chapters. The narratives of
music in displacement fail to reach happy endings, and the past does not
lend itself to nostalgia and revival. Music accompanies displacement as
necessary baggage, at once the traces of all that is treasured and a burden
that threatens to encumber the journey that the displaced do not choose of
their own accord.
By bringing perspectives from theoretical studies of displacement to
music, the editors and authors in this volume critically engage Europe in
ways both traditional and innovative. There is a conscious attempt not to
discard the themes and models that treat displacement as a symptom of
Europe’s historical longue durée. Europe has historically been the template
for diaspora, but that template has always been fragile, worn by overuse and
the failure to fit with European reinventions of its terra firma of selfness.
The culture brokers of European music have always divided the places of
music in society for the haves and the have-nots, enforcing a division of
labor symbolized by musical practice. For Europe’s others—Roma, Jews,
indigenous populations, modern migrant laborers, the “New Europeans”—
the space for music-making has been a threatened commodity, displacing
them into spaces of self-exile. The musical space of displacement in
Europe, which gives pride of place to the sounded, turns inward to the safe
space of silence.
The historical tradition of using displacement to silence music has for
too long been a marker of the very metaphysics of music as European. The
chapters in Music and Displacement return to Europe, and they address that
metaphysics on its own terms, which the authors refuse to accept as
normative. In the Europe of the twenty-first century, explaining away
displacement as a persistent condition of modernity is no longer sufficient
for theory. The past and the present that converge in these chapters ask us to
listen beyond and through displacement to a Europe that still fails to
embrace the multitudes in search of their own place beyond modernity’s
consignment to displacement.
 INTRODUCTION

FLORIAN SCHEDING AND ERIK LEVI

Although displacement has affected mankind since the dawn of time,
musicologists have remained reluctant to address the issue. This is all the
more surprising given that the establishment of musicology as an academic
discipline in the late nineteenth century coincides with the era of European
colonization, which itself triggered displacements on a worldwide scale. Yet
if one then considers the vast movement of populations that resulted from
two world wars, musicology’s evident unwillingness to investigate the
impact of displacement becomes all but negligent. The statistics speak for
themselves. The collapse of several European empires in the aftermath of
World War I led to countless refugees with nowhere to go, and World War II
generated twenty-seven million displaced persons. Since then, “the number
of refugees has multiplied beyond all historical precedent,” in the words of
former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, William
Smyser (1987:3). At the end of 2008, the UNHCR reported that there were
forty-two million refugees and internally displaced persons, with figures
rising. As Edward W. Said has stated, “our age . . . is indeed the age of the
refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” (2002:174).
Yet, just as the Western world is making entry for the persecuted ever
more difficult—and is in fact busy increasing their numbers in Iraq and
elsewhere—musicology, too, has ignored or downplayed the historical
realities of displacement for far too long. Only recently have musicologists
recognized the research area more widely. Volumes such as Driven into
Paradise (Brinkmann and Wolff 1999), which deals with the emigration of
elite composers and intellectuals from Nazi-occupied Europe to America,
have begun to tackle the topic of displacement in a direct, immediate way,
interpreting it in the sense of enforced migration. More widely, and
presetting theoretical rather than biographical issues, ethnomusicology has
increasingly reminded musicologists of the importance of place, just as
musicology continues to remind ethnomusicologists of the importance of
history. In other words, there has been a growing awareness that, in the
words of Božidar Jezernik, “there is no history without a place, and no
place without a history” (Jezernik 2006). On a more pragmatic level during
a period in which securing funding often sets the intellectual agenda, it is
worth noting that in 2005 the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council, the country’s main funding body for academic research
in the arts and humanities, launched a Diasporas, Migrations and Identities
program, thus encouraging much research in the area, including music.
Do all these relatively novel developments actually signal a genuine
awareness that displacement, whether physical or virtual, has now taken
center stage in musicology? The answer is hardly conclusive. While
questions of place, migration, and diaspora may attract greater interest
today among musicologists, displacement studies remains in its infancy in
the sphere of music. In contrast, literature studies can claim a long-standing
tradition of academic writing that explores displacement, as is perhaps even
more the case with philosophy where such diverse figures as Martin
Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou have written perceptively
about the subject.
The present book cannot hope to overturn single-handedly decades in
which musicology failed to explore displacement in any meaningful way.
Neither can it claim to be all-embracing. What it aims to highlight are some
of the broader issues involving displacement which are organized here
within three different sections, “The Silence of Displacement,”
“Displacement and Acculturation,” and “Theories and/of Displacement.”
Above all it seeks to further the now generally accepted notion of the
connection between music and place, and the somewhat more recent notion
that a change of place for music, as well as a change of music in a place,
can cause friction. Displacement must therefore be viewed in the widest
context involving both the physical and virtual characteristics of departure
and arrival, tragedy and opportunity, reality and concept.
Although the book nominally adopts a European focus, our concept of
Europe is neither geographical nor political. In fact, several chapters
explore the places and displacements of musics across the Atlantic, the
Mediterranean, and the Black Sea; more than half unfold outside the
European Union. Instead, the Europe of this book is a space, as the series
editors, Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes, put it, “for critical
dialogue  .  .  .  across a world altered ineluctably by European colonialism
and globalization.” Europe is, hence, a complex and multi-stranded
viewpoint, not a Eurocentric one; sometimes the Self, sometimes the Other,
diverse, diversified, and diversifying, in constant musical dialogue.

THE SILENCE OF DISPLACEMENT

The chapters in the first part, entitled “The Silence of Displacement,” share
a common theme: the enforced movement of musicians and their musics.
Rather than a simplistic victimization of the displaced, however, a complex
picture emerges, as each writer approaches the issue from a slightly
different perspective. Philip V. Bohlman, for example, focuses his attention
on music composed or performed in the concentration camps erected by the
Nazis. In some cases, these works are lost, such as the Walter Lindenbaum
poem “Und die Musik spielt dazu,” of which we know that it was set to
music by Fred Raymond and performed in a concert in Terezín. Maybe the
score is lost, maybe it was never written down on paper. But what emerges
from this process is the fact that music, even in its phenomenological
absence, becomes an ontological witness of the displacement of
Lindenbaum—indeed, of all the imprisoned and of their silenced—
displaced—voices. Like a translator, as Bohlman puts it, we not only
“search for sound in the silence, voice in the loss of voice,” we also breathe
“new life into the silence” and open “new and alternative modes of
performing the poetry.” Thus, music and poetry, forcefully subjected to
displacement, speak of, mark, and enact displacement, indeed empower it,
managing to suspend, deconstruct, and displace the fragility of place itself
between sound and silence.
Bohlman further exemplifies this aesthetic of displacement through
Viktor Ullmann’s setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und
Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Chronicle of the Love and Death of
the Flag-Bearer Christoph Rilke). Here, unlike “Und die Musik spielt
dazu,” fragments and sketches of the score survive, and they reveal how
Ullmann, who was killed in Auschwitz only weeks after completion of the
score, weaves the everyday experience of his displacement into the music,
juxtaposing it with the transcendent aesthetic of displacement, the “timeless
instant between arrival and departure,” as Bohlman puts it, from which song
arises. And even if “The Deepest Pain Cannot Become Music,” to
paraphrase the title of one of Ullmann’s own poems, music can voice the
place of displacement.
Like Bohlman, Peter Petersen describes aspects of the oppression and
displacement of musicians under the Nazis, placing particular emphasis
upon such issues as stigmatization, ghettoization and deportation, as well as
expatriation and escape into exile. One of Petersen’s main concerns is to
focus on the impact of anti-Semitism, discussing not only passive hardships
but also active responses of the affected to their displacements and that of
their contemporaries. In doing so, Petersen empowers the displaced, and
highlights the complexity of the voices that were raised in response to
displacement. Almost immediately after her own displacement and
migration to America in 1941, Hannah Arendt not only highlighted the
centrality of anti-Semitism in the Nazi system and ideology but also
recognized that the Holocaust fundamentally changed the history and value
systems of humanity. Yet few émigré composers were prepared to be as
open and direct in tackling the Holocaust as Arendt. In this context Petersen
contrasts the response of Schoenberg in his A Survivor from Warsaw with
that of Paul Dessau, whose Deutsches Miserere signally avoids the topic of
the genocide of the Jews, even though the composer’s mother was murdered
in Terezín.
As Petersen illustrates, postwar German scholarship initially chose to
subdivide the Nazi policy of displacement into separate areas of research,
instead of adopting a more holistic approach and recognizing overall
strands. Echoing Arendt’s theory, historians today increasingly interpret
anti-Semitic displacement and the Holocaust as the ultimate purpose of
Nazism. Given this paradigm, “the experience of displacement under the
Swastika  .  .  .  transcends individual biographies,” as Petersen writes, and
precisely for this reason concerns “art and philosophy [and] humankind as a
whole.” The fact that the approximately 5,000 musicians displaced by the
Nazis were musicians “is hardly relevant before the background of the Nazi
policy of displacement.” Jewish musicians were not persecuted because
they played badly or because they performed or wrote the “wrong” kind of
music—they were persecuted because they were Jewish. Yet, the artistic
responses to displacement by composers such as Schoenberg and
intellectuals such as Arendt, even to such extreme a case as the Holocaust,
counter the silence of displacement and at the same time highlight that anti-
Semitism concerns not only the Jews but all of civilization.
Even when there is silence, in conditions of unbearable oppression,
music can still be a witness—sometimes sounding, sometimes silent—of
displacement. Michael Beckerman follows this notion through examining
music composed in exile by Jaroslav Ježek and Eric Zeisl. Forced to leave
Europe as a result of Hitler’s fascism, both composers settled in America.
Yet Beckerman demonstrates that the stories of their migrations cannot be
narrated as ones of straightforward victimhood. Unlike Ullmann for
example, they managed to escape and their lives were saved. After they
arrived in America, some aspects of their music changed, some remained,
and movements from Ježek’s Piano Sonata and Zeisl’s “Arrowhead Trio”
reveal traces of their displacements. These may not be as overt or explicit as
is the case with A Survivor from Warsaw, but implicit, hidden in the center,
interwoven into the musical texture, or as Beckerman puts it “The Exile in
the Middle.” Beckerman acknowledges that these cases are not ones of
triumphant migrations; they are not clear-cut success stories with happy
Hollywood endings. Yet, he also shows that their biographies cannot be
boiled down to tales of passivity and hardship either. Displacement did not
simply silence these composers. It rendered their stories and their
creativities diverse and complex.

DISPLACEMENT AND ACCULTURATION

In contrast to the previous section, the second part of the book presents
displacement taking on an active role as a largely positive impetus for
creativity and music-making. Jehoash Hirshberg illustrates how more than
thirty composers who immigrated from Germany to Palestine as a result of
Hitler’s rise to power not only enriched but in fact practically created a
“viable musical life in the Jewish community of Palestine and later in the
state of Israel.” Yet, the composers Hirshberg discusses did not react to their
displacements in the same way and cannot be regarded as a homogeneous
group. Rather he suggests “in-depth individual investigations, which might
eventually highlight certain features common to some, or most, of them.”
 Exemplifying his concept through the work of six composers, Hirshberg
shows how their displacements prompted diverse and very different
reactions with regard to their creative outputs, their activities, and their
biographies. For example, Haim Alexander, Hanoch Jacoby, and Josef Tal
endeavored to reconcile two opposite poles in their music that Hirshberg
terms “the Vision of the East and the Heritage of the West.” Analyses of
their post-immigration works, however, reveal the different compositional
processes and biographical strategies they employed in the course of their
acculturation and adaptation. Erich Walter Sternberg, for example,
participated in establishing and promoting musical institutions, such as the
Palestine Orchestra and a local branch of the ISCM. “Nevertheless,” as
Hirshberg writes, “his resettlement turned out to be traumatic,” Sternberg
failing to secure a teaching post or even mastering Hebrew, and retracting
from his pre-migration “avant-garde disposition to the late-romantic
vocabulary.” A rather different picture emerges from the biography of Paul
Ben-Haim. After settling in his new country he Hebrewized his birth name
and immersed himself in musical life there, creating the Hebrew lied and
composing the first ever symphony written in Palestine. Hirshberg thus
highlights that the physical displacement and hardship of individuals acted
as a decisive catalyst for a new and diverse culture of music production in a
young community.
The community Ruth F. Davis explores in her chapter can be traced
back rather longer than to 1948 or 1933. In fact, the mythical origins of the
twenty-first-century Jewish community that lives on the island of Djerba off
the eastern coast of Tunisia date back to Babylonian times. Yet, the sense of
diaspora is present. A synagogue serves as an annual site of pilgrimage, and
symbolizes through a mystical mythology the original exile, Jerusalem in
the diaspora. Paradoxically, the community’s sense of displacement and
diaspora probably even increased with the creation of the state of Israel in
1948 and Tunisian independence in 1956, when the majority of Djerban
Jews emigrated to Israel and Muslim migrants from the mainland moved
into the empty Jewish homes. With Israel, once an abstract, mythical
homeland, now a tangible reality, and against the backdrop of the
Arabization of Tunisian society and Israeli-Arab hostilities, the Jews
remaining on Djerba felt increasingly displaced in their diasporic homeland
of more than two thousand years.
 As Davis shows, by the 1920s the Jews of Djerba were connected to the
latest musical developments in Tunis, and appropriated the Jewish popular
songs of the French protectorate, which were stigmatized by the state
musical establishment. Melodies of new popular songs were frequently
adapted to Hebrew religious texts known as piyyutim, which became a
repository of pre-independence musical styles: a repertory frozen in time.
Davis thus explores how the musical culture of the community reflects both
its diasporic history as well as its more contemporary sense of
displacement.
Like Ruth F. Davis and Jehoash Hirshberg, Sean Campbell addresses
the relationships between music-making, acculturation, and identity in a
community with a background of displacement. Exploring the impact of
Irish Catholic labor migrants upon popular music in England, Campbell
makes specific reference to the work of the band The Smiths. He reveals
how the sociopolitical context of 1980s England, especially racial hatred
toward the Irish diasporic community, shaped a very particular identity
among second-generation immigrants. Describing themselves as “Irish-
Mancunian” rather than either Irish or English, The Smiths, like many other
second-generation immigrants, were in a position of sitting on the fence: at
once socially marginalized and unconstrained by either Irish ethnicity or
English assimilation.
This experience of displacement generated a dynamic interplay and
eclecticism that is clearly audible in their music. Yet, in spite of this
eclecticism, The Smiths and other English bands with migration
backgrounds, such as The Pogues, Dexys Midnight Runners, and Oasis,
managed to create a highly distinctive sound that eloquently reflects their
specific identities. These voices, sounds, and idioms ironically are today
considered to be quintessentially English. Thus music with a very explicit
identity has been acculturated and placed into the center of the very society
from whose margins it originated.
Björn Heile discusses music and displacement in a yet more mediate
and abstract context. In his case study of Uri Caine’s Mahler renditions, he
reveals several displacements. The most obvious is that of presenting the
composer’s music in arrangements for a small jazz ensemble—a
performative displacement that enables the audience, as Heile puts it, “to
listen to the original in new ways, to discover new aspects that change its
very nature.” Furthermore, Caine’s very choice of Mahler is significant. As
Heile demonstrates from a Bakhtinian perspective, Caine’s arrangements
highlight voices in Mahler’s music that would not usually be prominent in a
symphonic interpretation. The musicians subvert “the established hierarchy
between symphonic discourse and folkloristic material, [turn] it upside
down, [and] demonstrate a particularly keen ear for the representation of
otherness in Mahler’s music.”
Among these subversions, Caine’s ensemble is especially concerned to
uncover and highlight—or construct?—the Jewish aspect in Mahler’s
music. Identifying Mahler’s multifaceted voice as essentially Jewish and
embedding it within a Jewish culture is a political act, of course, and
nowhere is this more apparent than in Caine’s eclectic interpretation of “Der
Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde, which renders the piece “a lament
for the victims of the Holocaust.” Heile thus demonstrates how Caine
uncovers the sense of displacement inherent in Mahler’s music that has
itself been displaced from the symphonic performance tradition, especially
with regard to the “Jewish” aspect. But he also emphasizes that one of
Europe’s most prominent historical Others—Jewishness—finds its place
back, is re-placed, into Mahler’s music through New York’s jazz scene.
From historical hindsight, outside Europe’s geographical borders, it
becomes globalized, as part of a new musical and cultural identity. In a
strategy of double (or multiple?) musical displacements, Caine uncovers
and addresses past displacement on various levels as an enriching
opportunity. Displacement creates multiple and complex voices, sounds,
and musics; it fosters acculturation within a new musical as well as cultural
context.

THEORIES AND/OF DISPLACEMENT

The third section of the book addresses displacement’s relation with, and
influence upon, theory and thought, as well as displacements within
methodologies and their histories. Among the issues raised here are the
degree to which displacement might or might not change, enrich, or
challenge an established theoretical position and the ways in which
displacements have been interpreted within the histories or establishments
of particular intellectual fields.
 Florian Scheding examines the theorization of displacement in the field
of Exilforschung (exile studies) in Germany since 1945. He adopts a
historiographic approach, which endeavors to situate Exilforschung within
Germany’s wider political history. In this respect Scheding argues that the
promotion of Exilforschung not only highlights the particular ways in which
the two postwar Germanys dealt with the Nazi past. It was also a political
act played out against the background of the Cold War in which both East
and West Germany aimed to justify and bolster their existence. Scheding is
highly critical of the tendency within Exilforschung to focus almost
exclusive attention upon the biographies of elite intellectuals that left Nazi
Germany. He argues that such studies are narrated as political metaphors
stressing the victimhood of the displaced, writing their histories as tales of
passivity, and therefore disempowering their voices. This interpretation fails
to take account of the fact that displacement is a contextual phenomenon
that can be viewed as an opportunity, since many displaced creative figures
made willful non-victim decisions to rebuild their lives outside Germany.
The impact of displacement upon the work of Theodor W. Adorno, one
of the best-known intellectuals among the Nazi émigrés, is explored by
Max Paddison. Although acknowledging the problematic nature of
Adorno’s relationship with his countries of exile (England and America),
Paddison moves beyond narrating his migration as merely one of tragedy
and despair. Instead, he is concerned with analyzing to what extent
Adorno’s displacement effected changes in his work and philosophy placing
particular attention on the impressive body of writings that were published
during the American years. In addition to evaluating displacement’s impact
upon Adorno’s work, which includes, for instance, a move toward
incorporating the fragment as a structural element and a refusal of the
security of absolutes, Paddison highlights the effects migration had on
Adorno’s very own identity as a German intellectual. For someone as
embedded in the German language and tradition as Adorno, the experience
of being confronted in America with a way of thinking that initially had no
meaning at all for him, together with the shock of witnessing what the
Nazis did to the world in the name of German culture, led him to a
profound and ultimately productive re-evaluation of the German
Enlightenment and “what it means to be German.” Paddison thus
emphasizes that the interaction between displacement and philosophical
work can itself be fruitful and spark different ways and nuances of thinking
and philosophizing.
In contrast to Paddison’s examination of the ways in which
displacement can alter, challenge, and ultimately enrich a given philosophy,
Sydney Hutchinson highlights a displacement inherent to a whole
discipline, namely the omission, or displacement, of the body from music
and dance research. The fact that musicology long viewed its topic from an
entirely disembodied angle and has begun only relatively recently to
consider that musicians and dancers actually have bodies is as surprising as
it is absurd. Hutchinson shows how the Cartesian mind-body dualism was
crucial in displacing the body as well as dance and movement studies from
thinking about music. This dualism was endemic in Western thought from
the time of Plato with many writers manifesting a tendency to attribute
different values to the two sides of any given binary—mind/body,
male/female, black/white, nature/culture, etc.—in effect displacing one of
them from the discourse as somehow less worthy. That this goes hand in
hand with capitalism’s demand to disconnect mental and physical labors as
entirely separate activities and consider the former more valuable—and
better paid—than the latter has been highlighted by Marxist theorists. Given
these paradoxical displacements, Hutchinson advocates thinking not only
beyond the mind-body dualism and its inherent displacement of the body, as
Foucault and Bourdieu have done, for example. She also invites us to
reconsider the concept of binarism, on which the displacement of the body
is based. Revealing the ways in which the body has been displaced from
musicology thus serves as a first step toward re-placing it back into our
thinking.
In the final chapter Jim Samson links four very different historical case
studies situated in the Balkans under the umbrella term of displacement.
Although all of his stories of forced migration share a common place and a
common theme, the similarities between them are not immediately
apparent, particularly given that they take place over a period of half a
millennium and that they concern different sets of people—Sephardic Jews,
Serbs, Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims, Kosovar Albanians and
Roma. Yet, for all their dissimilarities Samson sets these four stories within
the conceptual framework of two philosophies that embrace the dialectics
of displacement. The first narrative assumes that everyone has a proper
place, and that identity is defined by the construction of this proper place in
the present, improper place—a construction of the past in the present.
Acculturation narratives, on the other hand, suppose that we are—or can be,
or should endeavor to be—creatures of the places we inhabit today, shaped
more by our present than our imaginary past. Between these positions, two
worlds, those of departure and arrival, establish a dialogue, an “awareness
of simultaneous dimensions” (Said 2002). In doing so, Samson’s four
stories of displacement, like all the stories of displacement in this book,
“have a way of constantly taking detours from the simple characterizations
offered by grand narratives. . . . They allow us to see around the edges of
the grand narratives, lighting them up in various ways; they can instantiate
them, critique them, revise them.”

CONCEPTUALIZING DISPLACEMENT
In 1947, shortly after the Holocaust, Martin Heidegger wrote,
“homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world” (1993:243). Given
the scale of the intellectual diaspora in the first half of the twentieth century,
and particularly the horrific displacements that took place during World
War II, the timing of Heidegger’s quote neatly fits into its historical context.
Yet, displacement has always been a reality of history, a “destiny,” to
paraphrase Heidegger, of the human condition—and it has always captured
people’s imagination. As is self-evident, few factors can impact as severely
as displacement upon personal lives, creative outputs, and the cultural and
intellectual histories of societies. In fact, the dawn of Europe’s literary and
written history breaks with an epic journey, Homer’s Odyssey—and that of
music, too, for the Odyssey was, after all, recited. Silence, sound, and
contemplation link to displacement as facets of a complex phenomenon.
Given the long-standing appeal of exile, border-crossing, foreignness, and
alterity, the study of displacement can afford us a richness and diversity
fitting for the complex world we live in, especially if we recognize
displacement not as a singular physical act but as a hybrid one. To quote
Heidegger again: “A boundary is not that at which something stops
but . . . that from which something begins its presencing” (1971).
As we hope to show in this book, any discussion of displacement need
not, of course, be restricted to the physical human migration and
displacement from any one particular place to any other. The grand
narratives of (European) music history, small aspects of which the chapters
in this book address, are informed by dichotomies of emplacements and
displacements. In order to discover patterns in the whole, we thus advocate
a multi-stranded discourse that embraces displacement’s diversity and
complexity, exemplifying, defining, and contemplating its actual and virtual
appearances, causes, and consequences up to the present day. In our view,
displacement remains a central factor not only for the displaced, but is a
vital and constituting pillar of Western culture and thought. The challenges
this dialectic phenomenon of displacement’s frictions poses for postmodern
societies are topics that must be addressed today by the academic
community.
Our postmodernist era provides the ideal framework for examining
musics and displacements theoretically. At the same time, we recognize the
dialectic nature of history on one hand and displacement on the other as
mutual informants, thus acknowledging displacement as a premise and
opportunity for postmodernist thought. As Salman Rushdie argues, “There
is no longer such a place as home; except of course for the home we make,
or homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere and everywhere,
except the place from which we began” (Rushdie 1996). Interpreting, like
Rushdie, displacement as a central experience of modernity and
postmodernism therefore not only deserves close examination but also
poses some fundamental questions. Is it feasible, for example, to link the
European intellectual exile and displacement during the Third Reich to the
eventual emergence of postmodernist approaches, both musically and
theoretically? Can one analyze the notion of the self versus the other, which
so powerfully influences Western contemporary thought, as originating in
the displacement experience of the foremost thinkers of our time?
The writings of Vilém Flusser, who fled from the Nazis in 1940 to
London and shortly afterwards settled in Brazil, complement the
interpretations of Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, who stress the
fundamental loss of displacement manifesting itself in marginalized
isolation. While acknowledging the cruelty and suffering of displacement,
Flusser, like Edward W. Said, highlights displacement’s possibility of
providing positive spaces of assimilation and creative productivity. For
Flusser, displacement offers the opportunity for a creative and mutually
beneficial cross-cultural dialogue between migrant and host, so much so
that contemplating displacement can have a wide and beneficial impact. He
writes: “A philosophy of emigration is yet to be written. Its categories are
still unclear and blurred. But it should be written, because it would not only
be of importance for actual émigrés, but also for virtual ones” (2000:34; our
translation).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors are indebted to the Jewish Music Institute at SOAS, University
of London, the Royal Musical Association as well as the Institute of
Musical Research, University of London, and especially its former director,
Katharine Ellis. They provided invaluable help and financial assistance in
enabling us to organize a symposium in January 2006, which was then
entitled “Music and (Dis)Placement.” Several of this volume’s chapters are
based on papers presented at this study day. Christine Wilkie Bohlman is
due our heartfelt appreciation for her participation in the wonderful
performance of Viktor Ullmann’s setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise
von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke.
Renée Camus at Scarecrow Press has been of particular help to us with
regard to putting together this volume. We are also grateful to the editors of
the “Europea” series, Martin Stokes and, especially, Philip V. Bohlman,
who guided us from our early tentative ideas for a symposium on the topic
through to the final stages of getting this book published. He far exceeded
his brief as series editor, and it is our pleasure to express our greatest
gratitude to him.

REFERENCES
Brinkmann, Reinhold, and Christoph Wolff (eds.). 1999. Driven into Paradise. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Flusser, Vilém. 2000. ‘Für eine Philosophie der Emigration.’ In Von der Freiheit des Migranten:
Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus. Berlin: Philo.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971 [1952]. ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking.’ In Poetry, Language, Thought.
Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971.
———. 1993 [1947]. ‘Letter on Humanism.’ In Basic Writings. Ed. David Krell. London: Routledge,
1993.
Jezernik, Božidar. 2006. ‘Europeanisation of the Balkans.’ In Urban Music in the Balkans: Drop-Out
Ethnic Identities or a Historical Case of Tolerance and Global Thinking? Ed. Sokol Shupo.
 Tirana: Asmus, 23-31.
Rushdie, Salman. 1996. The Wizard of Oz. New York: Vintage International.
Said, Edward W. 2002. ‘Reflections on Exile.’ In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. 3rd ed.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 173-86.
Smyser, William. 1987. Refugees: Extended Exile. New York: Praeger.
 PART ONE

The Silence of Displacement

To a portable radio

You little box I carried on that trip

Concerned to save your works from getting broken

Fleeing from house to train, from train to ship

So I might hear the hated jargon spoken

Beside my bedside and to give me pain

Last thing at night, once more as dawn appears

Charting their victories and my worst fears:

Promise at least you won’t go dead again!

Bertolt Brecht / Hanns Eisler

 CHAPTER 1
“Das Lied ist aus”: The Final Resting Place along
Music’s Endless Journey

PHILIP V. BOHLMAN

OVERTURE: ARRIVING AT THE PLACE OF DISPLACEMENT

It is with the resounding of music that I search for place in this chapter. The
rhythm and meter of music afford me a sense of time. I pause at rhetorical
moments throughout, hoping that music might sound and invite us into the
pasts that place should realize. Music does not, however, fully open the
place of the past, rather it calls our attention to a place that no longer is. The
music upon which I draw to punctuate my narrative occupies only those
places that have been displaced, that existed at some other time and place.
We cannot really retrieve them or reach them, only sound them to realize
their place in the past of those no longer present in the place of
displacement.
The stationmaster’s youngest daughter appeared with a candle at the window-sill in a
flowery-white nightgown. She gazed at the confusion below and began to sing her evening
song:

I have sounded it,

The long journey is over.
A train has arrived,
The travelers now rest.
Lord, let me go to sleep,
The course is rightly set,
Look graciously after the next train,
Until the end of the world!
Good night! Good night!
Until the end of the world
May thanks be given to you!

As the little girl sang, everything was still for one moment, but now she’s gone again, and she
has taken the candlelight with her.
(H. G. Adler, Eine Reise 1950/51:184)1

Along the journey that stretches across the landscape of holocaust in H.

G. Adler’s Eine Reise (lit. “A Journey,” though more appropriately
signifying Adler’s sense of teleology as “The Journey”), song rises from the
timeless instant between arrival and departure. A child’s evening song is
one among many songs that provide the metaphors for the end of time in
Adler’s novel, which stands at the beginning of a long tradition of novels
narrating life and its endless termination in the aesthetics of displacement.
Song provides the rhythm, the historical meter that runs through the great
literature of and about the Holocaust by H. G. Adler (e.g., 1960 and 2008),
Primo Levi (e.g., 1984), Josef Bor (1975), Paul Celan (e.g., 1968 and 2004),
Victor Klemperer (e.g., 1998), W. G. Sebald (2001), Imre Kertész (e.g.,
1996), Michel Friedman (2005), and Irène Némirovsky (2006). Song that
begins and ends, and then begins again only to run its course. “Das Lied ist
aus”—“The song has ended”—becomes Adler’s leitmotif, ironically
intoning the following song, its strophes marching toward the end of time
that is always nearer and never nearer.
The songs I weave together in this chapter intone the temporal
beginning and ending that formed an aesthetic of displacement during the
era of fascism and genocide. They provide the themes and variations for the
music of the Holocaust, works composed in concentration camps and exile,
the places without home, unheimlich or uncanny in a cruelly literal sense.
The aesthetic with which I concern myself here is that of music dislodged
from time and place. It is an aesthetic that depends on time itself, the
paradox of sustaining time in order to reflect upon its ending, its ultimately
ephemeral existence.
Song and poetry mark beginnings and endings in this chapter, places,
that is, of transition and transience. Together, they dislodge the text, and
disrupt its rhythm, at once setting it in motion and arresting it. Song and
poetry enact displacement, just as they are the victims of displacement.
They empower my prose to represent the displacement that inevitably
accompanies music. They mark the place where time starts and stops,
endowing music with the qualities of chronotope, the confluence of
temporality and spatiality. In so doing, they remind us of the many ironies
of music in modernity, in particular its seductive evocation of place, only to
deny place any permanence as music moves through time and reaches its
final moments. The song that intones the overture of the chapter transports
us already to the place of displacement that lies at the center and the
peripheries of a world envoiced by song, the concentration camp at
Theresienstadt/Terezín.
To realize this aesthetic of displacement—to make its suspended reality
real for the text of this chapter—I weave together songs and poems rich in
musical metaphor, indeed, so fecund with musical metaphor as to yield to
beginning at the moment of ending. I sample and mix the songs and musical
fragments, weaving them together performatively in the chapter’s narrative
so that they comment upon each other as call and response, point and
counterpoint.
The reader will already have noticed from the opening child’s song that
I muster a second set of metaphors for my performative prose, the aesthetic
forms that chronicle journey. I densely layer moments of arrival and
departure in the sections of the chapter. Journey as metaphor and in musical
metaphor may seem at first glance exceptional, marking the experience of
existence itself. The journeys that fill the songs and poetry enunciating
displacement in the chapter insistently continue, even when the singer in H.
G. Adler’s The Journey wants to confess that “das Lied ist aus.” Songs and
poetry intentionally realize journey in a different way, musically, that is, as
the musical chronicle of a texture formed from transcendence and the
everyday. Music intones the journey, it sets its beginning in motion even
when arrival at the eschatological moment—the moment transcending death
—seems most assured.

TRANSLATION AND PERFORMANCE: POETRY IN

ANOTHER’S NAME
I love infernally
All those, who musically
Create joy and give pause through music,
Striking even at the most evil heart.
Still, those who are quick end up in hell,
Which is the pit for the orchestra,
And to this end let me cite Shakespeare:
“Much Ado about Nothing.”
At the outset everyone’s together,
So the director leads off.
At the end, he’s standing there alone,
Conducting only for himself:

Refrain

And the audience stands around,

The drum roaring boom-di-boom-boom,
While a little kid cries: I gotta go.
And the music plays along.
One bangs out the meter on the soup bowl,
Instead of soup, though, there’s extract of music.
The town square is the center of everything,
And the music plays along.
The tuba, the baritone, the saxophone, the accordion.
The beat must be firm, for that’s what makes it sound right.
Still, at the last pause, someone toots anyway.
And one doesn’t allow
For any peace and quiet.

Whether Meyerbeer, whether Mozart,

Everything sounds so gentle to us,
For in this place a forte is taboo.
Though music here is chronic,
Many live disharmonic,
They’re not accustomed, alas, to playing together,
For everyone wants to show
They can play first fiddle.
Everyone is a conductor,
At the very least famous:

Refrain

“Und die Musik spielt dazu”

Poem: Walter Lindenbaum; Music: Fredy Raymond

Music and poetry aspire to become one in this Terezín poem by Walter
Lindenbaum, which survives in a typescript, noting only that it was
performed to music by Fredy Raymond. We can hear and listen to the
poetry, but we can only hear of and listen for the music. We witness the
experience of a Terezín concert from a distance, drawing closer because of
what was sounded but now reaches us only as traces of rhythm and echoes
of history. The act of drawing closer to this poem and song is one of
seeking to heal the wounded state of its survival and to lessen its
displacement. As we make it a performative act, we translate “And the
Music Plays Along”—hearing and listening, reading and singing.
As a scholar and performer searching to resound the music of
displacement, I approach it as a translator of memories, as one who
performs the past in the present.2 As a translator (and a musician and an
ethnomusicologist) I regard translation also as a creative form of artistic
expression. Translation runs through and underlies most of what I do with
the musics of the world, in the present and the past. I regard my aesthetic
position in my translations as a type of response—not an answer—to
Theodor Adorno’s well-known and well-worn pronouncement about the
impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. Translation that is
intertextual, intergeneric, and interactive aspires to the possibility of a
wholeness, denied or rerouted by the displacement and destruction of the
Holocaust. It opens an aesthetic place for displacement.
I empower music and theater through translation in this way because I
believe it is not a shadow of the original, diminished in some way because
of the loss of traces of originality. The translator musters many tools, which
even allow one to continue the task of creating; not to complete it as such,
but to expand it, to listen between and beyond the rhythm of the poetry, the
stepwise journey of the melody. The translator dares to think that life can be
breathed into fragments, and that the sounds of the poet’s voice need never
be abandoned to silence. Translating music that has been displaced restores
for it the place it has lost. This is the poesis of displacement.
It is a poesis that has particular resonance in the context of work on the
Holocaust. First, the translator in some measure searches for sound in the
silence, voice in the loss of voice, as a form of poetic ontology. We act by
listening to—I should say, listening into—silence. Second, the translator
breathes new life into the silence, but does not primarily use translation to
rescue and reiterate the lost life, whereby it would only confirm loss by
multiplying it. Third, the translation opens new and alternative modes of
performing the poetry.
Translating Theresienstadt through performance in the twenty-first
century demands of me that I bring more rather than less to the experiences
that may be unknowable but must not be left to an eschatology of loss.
Through translation I seek to know a new wholeness of place that at once
recognizes and defies the impossibility of fully dislodging music.
 JOURNEY IN MUSIC

IE. “ES WAR AMOL A JÜDIN”—“ONCE THERE WAS A

JEWISH WOMAN”
Source. Sung by Luke and Mina Federspiel in Höchst am Bodensee, Vorarlberg, Austria in
1960; transcribed by Josef Bitsche (DVA, A 208 483). In Dittmar and Stief 1992, 56–57.

1. Es war amol a Jüdin,

a wunderschönes Weib,

||: die hatte eine Tochter,

zum Tod war sie bereit. :||

2. “Ach Mutter, liebste Mutter,

mir tut der Kopf so weh,

laβ mich eine kleine Weile

spazieren gehn am See.”

3. “Ach Tochter, liebste Tochter,

allein darfst du nicht gehn,

sags deinem ältem Brüderlein,

er wird schon mit dir gehn.”

4. “Ach Mutter, liebe Mutter,

mein Brüderlein ist zu klein,

er schießet alle Vöglein,

die in den Lüften sein.”

5. “Ach Tochter, liebe Tochter,

allein darfst du nicht gehn,

sags deinem einzigen Schwesterlein,

die wird schon mit dir gehn.”

6. “Ach Mutter, liebe Mutter,

mein Schwesterlein ist zu klein,

sie pflückt ja alle Blümelein,

die an dem Wege sein.”

7. Die Mutter fiel in Schlummer,

die Tochter ging allein,

sie ging solang spazieren,

bis sie zum Fischer kam.

8. “Guten Morgen, lieber Fischer,

was fischest du in aller Früh?”

“Ich suche des Königs allerjüngsten Sohn,

der hier ertrunken ist.”

9. Da gab sie ihm ein Ringlein

aus allerfeinstem Gold,

da gab sie ihm ein Ringlein:

“Das soll dein eigen sein.”

10. Dann stieg sie auf die Mauer,

stürzt hinab in den kühlen See:

“Leb wohl du liebe Heimat,

wir sehn uns nimmermehr!”

“Die Jüdin” / “The Jewish Woman” (Dvldr 158) (transcribed from oral tradition; sung by Luise and
Mina Federspiel, Vorarlberg; in Bohlman and Holzapfel 2001:20-21; courtesy of A-R Editions, Inc.)

Place in the German and Jewish ballad, “Die Jüdin,” or “The Jewish
Woman,” unfolds as the path from home, the medieval Jewish ghetto in this
song from the late Middle Ages, but best known today from the variant in
Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the setting by Johannes
Brahms in his 1893 Deutsche Volkslieder. The journey of this young Jewish
woman is all-too-familiar in the everyday of many eras, not just that of
fascist Europe, from which the variant above came, transcribed from the
oral tradition of two Austrian Holocaust survivors. “Die Jüdin,” and the
other songs marking the place of displacement in this chapter, reveal the
many ways in which music narrating journey chronicles the departure from
the site of familiarity, and hence the move from the temporal world into a
domain of timelessness. Time could not be more specific in “Die Jüdin,”
since its form is a ballad, a song genre that stages moments from the
everyday and places them on the stage of individual verses. There, the
dialogue between the Jewish girl and her mother acts to draw the listener
into the everyday.
 Music mobilizes the journey by juxtaposing the everyday and the telos
evoked by the end of time. Time and timelessness become interdependent,
ending and beginning become one. Accordingly, we find a proliferation of
songs about journey in the aesthetic of displacement. Songs of exile resist
the journey beyond the homeland. The art of the everyday comes to rest
only through displacement.

RECOVERING DISPLACEMENT
You are the sun and we are the earth,

To us, those surrounded, you offer the gift of becoming something.

Yet, our paths already lead us away,

Bright is the sun, but dark are the misgivings.

How you take away the path and then disappear,

Releasing yourself from the turning of the world,

Leaving us to the devastating difficulty of the winter,

Showing us that fate leading to emptiness.

Now, the deathly wounds bleed again,

Angels bind them, they are bound faithfully to you.

Viktor Ullmann, Poem #3: “Chor unseliger Knaben” (an Rudolf Steiner) / “Chorus of the Wretched
Boys” (for Rudolf Steiner)

Performatively realized, the aesthetic of displacement requires that we

return to the moments of creation and sounding that were silenced by
genocide and holocaust. We ask much of music to recover the places of
displacement, and ultimately recognize that recovery itself is temporally
bounded, and as such is only a surrogate for the geographic boundedness of
displacement.
I turn now to one of Viktor Ullmann’s final works, his sketches for a
melodrama setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod
des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Chronicle of the Love and Death of the
Flag-Bearer Christoph Rilke). Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944) was a poet as
well as a musician and composer, and it is therefore particularly fitting that
his poetry should find its place in this chapter, for example, in the “Chorus
of the Wretched Boys,” also written in 1944 in the last year of Ullmann’s
life. Ullmann’s poetic voice lies at the threshold of music, poetry, and
theater, the threshold of the passing of time and life, which provide the
narrative leitmotifs in this chapter.
Viktor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph
Rilke is a monodrama (Monodram) for narrator and piano, according to the
sketches the composer left behind.3 Its fragments, indeed, stunningly cohere
to the eschatological aesthetic of displacement; in other words, to the
representation of death and the ending of all things, that Cornet tragically
embodies, the transcendence of the everyday. The narrative itself is told
from a number of different perspectives and in a number of different voices.
Textually, the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, employed different genres as well
—traditional narration, fragments from letters, dream sequences, and battle
chronicles. Compositionally, Viktor Ullmann reaches in many directions,
borrowing tunes and shaping them, sometimes grotesquely, sometimes with
exquisite beauty, to portray the Central European past and the horrors of
war that had so often consumed it and were, again in 1944, in the final years
of the Holocaust, consuming Europe.
As the story of the ultimate destruction and final tragedy of war and the
end of time, this is one of the most allegorical of all Ullmann’s works for
the musical stage. It is surely not by chance that the other large-scale
musical setting of Rilke’s Cornet, by the Swiss composer Frank Martin,
also dates from the war years (1943) and bears witness to the same
historical moment of genocide. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose-poem, which
appeared in 1899 as volume one of the distinguished literary series, “Insel
Bücherei,” the Cornet, that is, the “flag bearer,” Christoph Rilke, joins the
Austro-Hungarian imperial army, coming of age in the experiences of war.
For Viktor Ullmann, the allegory would be deeply personal, as if the
monodrama he created would also stage the final moments of
Theresienstadt itself. The garrison city Theresienstadt, named after Empress
Maria Theresa, had for centuries guarded the northwestern borders of the
Habsburg lands that were under siege in Cornet.
As Ullmann worked on the sketches for Cornet, time and the
displacement of time increasingly formed a performative counterpoint. The
sketches reveal the extent to which the compositional work began with
great deliberation in the spring of 1944, only to accelerate and intensify
until the compositional process itself formed a temporal stretto, the full
musical realization of the conditions of genocide. Working from beginning
to end, in other words, laying out one scene after the other and following
the course of Rilke’s prose-poem, Ullmann clearly makes decisions that
enable him to reach the final scenes as quickly as possible. Early in the
manuscript fragments, he fits the text to themes and leitmotifs carefully, but
by the second part, he begins writing them on the page, with a crayon rather
than pen and pencil, proximate to the musical passage individual phrases
might accompany. The sketches come to their end in the late summer of
1944, or at the very beginning of the autumn. The dedication to Ullmann’s
sister Elly for her birthday on 27 September 1944 is the clearest indication
of the moment of conclusion toward which he was working. There were
other moments, too, for about ten days after his sister’s birthday, Viktor
Ullmann was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered upon his
arrival, generally believed to be 16 October 1944.
During the years he spent in Theresienstadt, Viktor Ullmann forged a
compositional process that remarkably wove the temporal everyday of the
concentration camp into the sketches and scores that he was producing. He
did this figuratively and metaphorically, of course, but he also did so in the
most literal sense possible. The typed final libretto for his 1943 opera, Der
Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis), for example, appears on the
reverse side—for Ullmann, the recto side of the working libretto—of
completed camp registration forms, literal representations of the life and
death of a real person.
In the composition of Cornet Ullmann’s acute awareness of temporal
displacement at the end of time powerfully shaped the decisions he made
about writing the score. That awareness led him to choose sonorities and
motifs to represent time, but beyond such aesthetic decisions, the awareness
was coupled with decisions he made about inscribing time itself with
modernist musical notation. Ullmann’s decision to spell chords in certain
ways actually provided him with a vocabulary for “marking” the everyday
and then affording it with transcendent meaning. We witness throughout
Cornet a consistent juxtaposition of two areas of harmonic texture, the first
broadly consonant, the second not only dissonant in its reliance on quartal
and quintal extensions of consonance, but actually marked in the score by
the addition of accidentals that seemingly spurn the everyday.
These two textural areas are powerfully representational in the ways
they re-place time in the score. Consonant melodic and harmonic movement
both represents the everyday and realizes it. One example occurs when the
soldiers recall the past by calling up images of their mothers—indeed, of
the “eine Mutter,” the “single mother”—that they might all possess, albeit
only in the moment of silence that resolves the dissonance at the end of Act
I, Scene 4. Dissonance, created through juxtapositions, say, of major, tertian
harmonies, with “misspelled” tritones, a favorite Ullmann technique, set
time in motion, for example in the “reiten,” or “riding,” motif that begins
and ends Cornet.
There are abundant cases of Ullmann’s inscriptional decision to realize
temporal displacement musically. Here, however, it suffices briefly to
discuss the point at which the texture of temporal marking is so thick with
juxtaposition as to bring the listener to the moment of arrival at the end of
time in the composition, the eighth and final scene of Act II. It is in that
movement that arrival and ending collapse into a single moment of
timelessness. The juxtaposition of sonorities representing consonance with
those coupling the quotidian with the transcendent is at its greatest here,
unfolding at a pace never greater than a few measures at a time. We witness
this compositional re-placement, for example, the juxtaposed consonant-
dissonant sonorities that provide a planed and parallel movement under the
final passage of the Rilke text, “Dort hat er eine alte Frau weinen sehen”
(“There, he saw an old woman weeping”).

Viktor Ullmann, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, Act II, Scene 8, mm. 7-
11
 Moments later in the final scene, there is another juxtaposition of the
everyday and the transcendent, when Ullmann takes motifs of pastness and
represents them as parallel 6/4 chords in the treble, marking them in the
bass with tritone movement from b to f which will lead to an area of
prominent augmented harmonies, before yielding to the final cessation of
time in E major. And so, using the language he has acquired as a composer
at once traditional and modernist, Ullmann realizes the end of time by
transcending it.

Viktor Ullmann, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, Act II, Scene 8, mm. 22-
25

TRANSLATING THE HOLOCAUST: RESOUNDING THE

HOLOCAUST NOVEL
What things belong to this world?
What is the reality?
Ah, which passions are painfully kindled,
so that pride suddenly crumbles!
Who may make colorful pictures for himself?
What have we done,
that passion accompanies so much suffering
and we awaken only as the dead?

It is not clear how to take measure,

of that which we have made murky.
Ah, if only we could feel that life beyond ourselves
and not in the lessening danger!
Who will lead us to our own hearth,
to the wonderful home,
to the womb, where our passion truly
drives itself to touch upon eternity?

Eternity detours through us,

building for us a kingdom.
Ah, how it swirls inside us, and breaks down the proudest dykes
and how it rises powerfully within us
to level all that would compare, until death denies
and makes sacred
all the whispers of this world and
sleepily covers them with a blow.

H. G. Adler, “Vor der Ewigkeit” / “Before Eternity”

The poem “Vor der Ewigkeit” (“Before Eternity”) evokes the possibility of
an aesthetic place shared by Ullmann and Adler, a place conjoining poetry
and music. Ullmann and Adler found a common place in this poem, literally
and figuratively. They joined together in the poem in the common space of
the concentration camp, Adler penning the text, Ullmann composing one of
his final songs.
For me, the importance of Adler’s The Journey lies not so much in its
narrative as in its genre, in the fact it is a novel, whose time and space open
upon other novels of the Holocaust. Its meaning for me lies in that
situatedness, that role of joining with other works and genres that is
translation. I want to turn, then, to these other works, reflecting on the
Holocaust novel itself, in which place is opened by music’s presence.
Strikingly, there is a moment when the novel emerges as a means of
translating the Holocaust in general and the concentration camp in
particular, but there is no ending, which is to say, the genre shows no signs
of exhausting itself. The first novel is Anna Seghers’s Das siebte Kreuz
(The Seventh Cross, 2003), first published in 1942, but new novels and
translations appear even today with frequency, such as Michel Friedman’s
Kaddisch vor Morgengrauen (2005). Irène Némirovsky’s newly discovered
novels, Suite Française (2006), again draw on—even depend on—music to
recontextualize narrative time. Each of the five novels—Némirovsky
completed the manuscripts of only two of them before she was captured by
the Nazis and deported to Auschwitz, where she died—should evoke one of
the movements of a Baroque instrumental dance suite. Among the other
novels I place in the genre are Josef Bor’s Theresienstadt Requiem (1975),
Bruno Apitz’s Naked among the Wolves (2003), Imre Kertész’s Novel of a
Person without Destiny (1996), Primo Levi’s Periodic Table (1984), and
Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well (2005). I might suggest that there are
several subgenres of the concentration-camp novel, too, for example those
in which the camp itself provides a disruptive, elusive telos, a moment and
place the novel’s protagonists can only approach, not occupy, in which they
can sing, even if they are not heard. Surely, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is one
of the most brilliant examples of this subgenre. In this great novel, too, the
journey of the Holocaust begins and ends at Terezin, in the past and the
present.
What meanings are hidden in the holiday table cloth with the white comers, which would
have been thrown over the back of an ottoman? What about the easy chair with the faded
brocade? What secrets do the three different brass mortars hold, which look almost as if they
could be oracles? And the crystal bowls, ceramic vases, and the earthen mugs? The little box
of sea shells? What message does the tin sign with “Theresienstadt Water” on it tell us? And
what of the meanings in the miniature hurdy-gurdy?
(W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz [2001], 279 in German original)

When I considered these novels as a whole—both as a genre and as a

concerted attempt to explore the possibilities of recognizing and reconciling
the displacement of the Holocaust—I realized an almost uncanny
constellation of similarities. First of all, music runs through all the novels,
indirectly and directly, as in Friedman’s Kaddisch, Bor’s Requiem, and
Némirovsky’s Suite Française. Above all, the references to music provide
the reader with rhetorical strategies for listening to silence. Second, the
experiences of reception depend extensively on translation, again seemingly
as a means of sounding the silence. Anna Seghers’s Seventh Cross, written
in Mexican exile, appeared roughly simultaneously in Boston in an English
translation and in German in Mexico. Several authors wrote in languages
other than their mother tongues, or at least in their second languages. And
exile—journey, with and without end—left its mark on the language of all
of them. Third, displacement and exile are realized rhetorically. Each of the
novels attempts to reckon with journey as its sense of place. Finally, the
sense of movement that mobilizes the narrative is itself mobilized by music,
by rhythm and the movement of words that becomes music. Adler, in fact,
assigns the subtitle, “Eine Ballade” (“A Ballad”), to his novel, The Journey.

THE AESTHETIC ESCHATOLOGY OF DISPLACEMENT

My closing examples are two further poems, one by Adler, the other by
Ullmann. The two are joined—translated into stretto—by music. Ullmann,
indeed, set two of Adler’s poems, “Immer inmitten” and “Vor der
Ewigkeit,” which together became a “cantata” for mezzo-soprano and
piano.4 The themes of both could not be more richly symbolic of
displacement and the transcendent, and it is hard to imagine that Ullmann
did not realize these qualities when he envoiced Adler’s placing of
displacement with song in the closing months of his life.
Forever on the way, forever on the way,
walking through all the magical regions,
far from home, still near to where I came from,
all that the soul has not suffered,
soon to be soothed in moss, soon ripped by thorns
Forever on the way, forever on the way.

Forever on the way, forever on the way

between despondence and lustful wishes
the human finds herself in the house of salvation,
slowly she forgets why she quarreled,
coming once to a ghostly end
Forever on the way, forever on the way.

Forever on the way, forever on the way,

death rides sleepily into life.
Crackling melody, strangling rattling,
no one can say what morning will become:
Forever on the way, forever on the way.

H. G. Adler, “Immer inmitten” / “Forever on the Way” (see Ullmann 2004:182-86)

Adler’s journey translated into song, but song that reaches the end only
by reckoning with the pain of living. Can that pain be fully reconciled?
Such is the question that Ullmann the poet puts to music. Is the fullness of
stretto, of music and poetry intertwined in the common act of performing,
ultimately a witness to an emptiness? From that question issues Ullmann’s
own voice as a poet, singing of the immortality that joins, ultimately,
tragically, only with mortality. This chapter closes with one final
performative moment, ending as it began, thereby recognizing the moment
of transcendence between mortality and immortality, with Ullmann’s poem,
“The Deepest Pain Cannot Become Music,” in which he, in an instance,
sings the place of displacement into being through music.
The deepest pain cannot become music,

No word alters that pain,

It does not assume its shape from the rock of the earth—

It remains in muffled silence.

Thus, I bear silent sadness about the saddening silence,

That I missed,
And it is silent, that it only hums,

What I dreamed.
The deepest pain cannot go back Into the farthest time,

It strikes the wounds, that now deadly bum:

It has passed!

Viktor Ullmann, “Der tiefste Schmerz kann zu Musik nicht werden” / “The Deepest Pain Cannot
Become Music”

NOTES
1. All translations in this chapter are mine. The poet and translator, Peter Filkins, has recently
published a superb translation of H. G. Adler’s The Journey, published by Random House in 2008.
2. My performances include concerts and recordings of Viktor Ullmann’s melodrama, Die Weise
von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (Philip V. Bohlman, speaker; Christine Wilkie
Bohlman, piano), and of a CD of Jewish cabaret in exile (New Budapest Orpheum Society 2009).
3. The sketches reside in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, which is where the
archival research for this chapter was carried out. They were donated by Adler’s son, Jeremy Adler.
4. Adler was educated as a musician and musicologist, taking his Ph.D. in musicology at the
Charles University of Prague, but never returning professionally to that field in London, where he
lived in exile until his death.

REFERENCES
Adler, H. G. 1960. Theresienstadt 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. 2nd, expanded
edition. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Ziebeck).
———. 1999. Eine Reise: Roman. Vienna: Zsolnay Verlag.
———. 2008. The Journey: A Novel. Trans. Peter Filkins. New York: Random House.
Apitz, Bruno. 2003. Nackt unter Wölfen. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.
Bohlman, Philip V. (ed.). 2008. Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bohlman, Philip V., and Otto Holzapfel. 2001. The Folk Songs of Ashkenaz. Middleton, WI: A-R
Editions.
Bor, Josef. 1975. Theresienstädter Requiem. Berlin: Verlag der Morgen.
Celan, Paul. 1968. Fadensonnen. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 2004. “Togesfuge” und andere Gedichte. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt / Main:
Suhrkamp.
Friedman, Michel. 2005. Kaddisch vor Morgengrauen. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.
Kertész, Imre. 1996. Roman eines Schicksallosen. Berlin: Rowohlt.
Klemperer, Victor. 1998. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years. Trans. Martin Chalmers.
New York: Random House.
Levi, Primo. 1984. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken.
Némirovsky, Irène. 2006. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
New Budapest Orpheum Society. 2002. Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano: Jewish Cabaret, Popular,
and Political Songs, 1900-1945. Chicago. Cedille Records CDR 90000 065.
———. 2009. Jewish Cabaret in Exile. Chicago. Cedille Records CDR 90000 110.
Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Seghers, Anna. 2003. Das siebte Kreuz. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.
Ullmann, Viktor. 1993. 26 Kritiken über musikalische Veranstaltungen in Theresienstadt. Hamburg:
von Bockel.
———. 2004. Sämtliche Lieder für Singstimme und Klavier. Mainz: Schott.
Wander, Fred. 2005. Der siebente Brunnen. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
 CHAPTER 2
Dimensions of Silencing: On Nazi Anti-Semitism
in Musical Displacement

PETER PETERSEN

ÉMIGRÉS AND ANTI-SEMITISM

In 1963, Hannah Arendt published her remarkable book Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The opening motto quotes
Bertolt Brecht:
O Germany—
Hearing the speeches that ring from your house, one laughs.
But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.

It is the beginning and a further two lines from Brecht’s 1933 poem
Germany (Brecht 1967:487). In prosaic writing, the poem describes
Germany’s situation since Hitler’s takeover, a bloody and radical change, of
which her “poorest” and “best sons”—the proletarians—have become the
victims. “Soiled” and “besmirched,” Germany is labeled a “system” that is
praised by “oppressors . . . everywhere.” The other peoples fear this “pale
mother . . . as at the approach of a robber.”
The motif of robbery in the last line I mention here—the last one of the
poem’s penultimate stanza—announces Hitler’s war of conquest. It is
missing in Arendt’s quotation, even though it forms part of the sentence
“but whoever sees you, reaches for his knife / as at the approach of a
robber.” Given its position and function as the opening motto of Arendt’s
book, and given the book’s overall theme of Holocaust and Shoah, however,
a reader of Eichmann in Jerusalem would probably complete the missing
line of the poem differently, such as “as at the approach of a murderer” or
“as at the view of a monster.” Yet, Brecht does not speak of the Holocaust,
but of the fascist dictatorship in Germany, which he saw as an extreme
product of capitalism, and which was necessarily going to culminate in a
world war.
Around the same time, in 1943, and 20 years before the publication of
her Eichmann book, Arendt first highlighted this side of Nazism. Of Jewish
descent like Dessau and Eisler, Arendt had fled to Paris in 1933, and, after
imprisonment in Camp Gurs in 1940, managed to escape and arrived in the
USA in 1941. One and a half years later, she published an essay, “We
Refugees,” in the New York Menorah Journal. Written in English and with
undertones of polemics and sarcasm, she wrote of the failed Jewish
assimilation of the previous 150 years and described the absolute lack of
human rights of Jews in contemporary Europe. The article opens, “In the
first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’ ” (Arendt 1943:69). Since
they were not perpetrators, they could not be refugees. Instead of
recognizing the fact that they were threatened and had escaped, Arendt
argues, the Jews in exile cultivated a demonstrative optimism and talked
themselves into having found a new home. Yet, she inferred, “No, there is
something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd optimists among
us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the
gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way” (Arendt
1943:71).
From then onward, the topic of the essay, the Holocaust and the
persecution of the Jews, permeated Arendt’s entire work until her death in
1975 in New York. The end of “We Refugees” first highlighted concisely
that the Holocaust concerns not only the Jewish people. Instead, it changed
fundamentally the conditions of the coexistence of all peoples. “For the first
time, Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of all other nations.
The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it
allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted” (Arendt
1943:77). The sheer dimension of the Nazi displacement and persecution of
the Jews affects the value systems of all civilized peoples, as it violated the
idea of the humane as such. The history of Jewry, Arendt argued, can
therefore not be separated from the history of humanity as a whole.
 The philosopher Günther Anders, who was married to Arendt for a few
years, developed this concept and extended it with the theme of the
complete extinction of all human life that the twentieth-century invention of
the atom bomb had first rendered possible. For Anders, the Holocaust
exemplified the notion that the modern human being can create (herstellen)
something without being able to imagine (vorstellen) the consequences. In
the first volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Outdatedness of
Human Beings), with its psychological title Über die Seele im Zeitalter der
zweiten industriellen Revolution (On the Soul in the Era of the Second
Industrial Revolution), Anders used the term “the devastation of
humankind” (“Verwüstung des Menschen”) to refer to the same
fundamental violation of the idea of the humane as Arendt.
György Ligeti exposed the same view when, in an autobiographical
essay published in 1978, he wrote about the persecution of his family for
the first time. The deportation of Jews in Hungary began only in April
1944. Ligeti was interned in a forced labor camp and survived only by
coincidence. He managed to escape the camp, hid in a forest and returned to
Klausenburg, where he endured the war in hiding. Like seven others of his
close relatives, his father and brother were deported to Auschwitz and killed
there. His mother survived the women’s camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Like
Arendt and Anders, Ligeti ended his essay by highlighting the overall
significance of the Holocaust for Jews and non-Jews.
I remained what I had been, a middle European Jew, reasonably assimilated and religiously
unattached. For professional reasons I lived in Austria and Germany, I stayed here, aware that
the tension and resentments that all of us, Jews and non-Jews, carry with us since the Hitler
era, cannot be healed—they are psychological facts we have to live with. (Ligeti 1978:246)

COMPOSING DISPLACEMENT: A SURVIVOR FROM

WARSAW
Among the artists, the composers demonstrated a certain reluctance to
approach this monstrous issue. Two oratorio-like vocal works, that contain
(parts of) Brecht’s Germany and have the word deutsch in their titles,
represent similar cases: Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Symphonie op. 50 and Paul
Dessau’s Deutsches Miserere. Eisler’s choral symphony, begun in exile in
1935 and last revised in 1957, concerns the antifascist resistance of
peasants, workers, and intellectuals. The headings of several movements
(“An die Kämpfer in den Konzentrationslagern,” “Bauernkantate,”
“Arbeiterkantate. Das Lied vom Klassenfeind”) and the quotation of The
Internationale at the apotheosis of the first movement highlight their
connection with the Third International, the Comintern (Phleps 1988:55 and
119). The persecution of the Jews, however, is not mentioned openly.
Composed in exile in the USA 1943-1947, the subject of Dessau’s oratorio
is World War II; here, too, the Holocaust is excluded as a topic, even though
it affected Dessau personally, as his mother died in Theresienstadt in 1942
(Reinhold 2005:33). Both Eisler’s and Dessau’s works with words by
Brecht were, thus, not only composed in exile. They also respond explicitly
to the cause of their exile and translate it artistically. Nonetheless, their
concept of Nazism restricts Hitler’s dictatorship to its fascist characteristics,
and ignores its racism and the persecution of the Jews. Both compositions,
Deutsche Symphonie and Deutsches Miserere, omit the Holocaust
thematically.
Nevertheless, there exist today a number of compositions with the
Holocaust as subject matter (see Fetthauer 1997; Lehmann 2004; Nanni
2004). The best-known and probably most significant example is Arnold
Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw for speaker, choir, and orchestra,
composed in the USA in 1947. Based on witness accounts of survivors,
Schoenberg depicts an imaginary scene of the dissolving of the Warsaw
ghetto in April and May 1943. A fictitious narrator recounts in English his
story of survival: he is presumed dead after an excessively violent roll call
preceding the deportation of a group of Jews. Recovering consciousness, he
hears how the remaining male Jews are again forced to count off
(abzählen). He remembers the orders of the SS men in German, with a
naturalistic Berlin accent. When the commanding officer drives the frail
men to count more quickly because he wants to know within a minute how
many to hand over to the gas chambers, the unexpected occurs: the
oppressed begin to sing spontaneously and in unison the song of Sh ’ma
Yisroel.
Schoenberg composed the work in a mere eighteen days. It lasts only
seven minutes, yet has an extremely dense structure and is markedly
expressive. The three languages, English, German, and Hebrew, stand for
testimony, guilt, and human dignity, respectively. By singing from the Torah
in the face of death, the victims leave the murderers behind in indignity and
degradation. The same dichotomy exists between the sophistication of the
dodecaphonic method, which is used from beginning to end, and the
crudeness of the diction of the culprits’ language. In addition, Schoenberg
arranged the Hebrew choral text such that the selected extract that
corresponds to Moses book 5, 6:4-7, ends with the last sung word
uvkumechó (you rise). Even the particular meaning of each word reaffirms
right to the end that the victims were superior to the murderers, that the
weak were the truly strong. A Survivor from Warsaw is thus an example for
an artwork that artistically addresses the most radical form of displacement,
the murder of millions of innocent people.

ANTI-SEMITISM AND GERMAN SCHOLARSHIP

The German humanities initially subdivided displacement and persecution
in Nazi Germany into three separate areas, NS-Forschung, Exilforschung,
and Holocaust studies. NS-Forschung investigated the mechanisms of the
dictatorial system, whereas Exilforschung traced German and European
artists in the host countries. Holocaust studies uncovered forms and
dimensions of displacement and extermination.
An early example of NS-Forschung is Joseph Wulf’s 1963 standard
series Kultur im Dritten Reich. Wulf was himself a victim of the Nazis.
Born in Chemnitz in 1912, he grew up in Krakow, where he became a
Rabbi and historian. He was interned in the Krakow ghetto and deported to
Auschwitz in 1941. He escaped from the death marches of spring 1945 and
dedicated the rest of his life entirely to the documentation of the Nazi
system (Berg 2003:311-46). The five volumes of Kultur im Dritten Reich
contain copies and reproductions of primary documents from Nazi
Germany in the areas of the media, literature and poetry, the arts, theater,
film, and music. Wulf includes Nazi legislation and publications,
defamatory and denunciation letters, personal files, court decisions and
verdicts, etc., but refrains from an interpretation or analysis of his sources
(see Wulf 1989).
Exilforschung, the second area mentioned above, researches a specific
form of displacement, namely exile. The term exile is generally defined as
political displacement and eviction abroad. The reasons for this restriction
are manifold, and often very basic. As Florian Scheding describes in this
volume, the different approaches from the various relevant studies mirror
contrasting sociopolitical backgrounds.
One of the major research projects on exile during the Nazi era was
Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil 1933–1945, published in
seven volumes between 1979 and 1981. Based at the Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Künste in East Germany, with Werner Mittenzwei
and Ludwig Hoffmann in charge, it assumed a narrow notion of exile. For
example, the editors did not consider the mere fact that many émigrés had
escaped because their lives were threatened a sufficient reason to include a
record of their biographies. Only those among the persecuted who had
followed a calling to active resistance and had joined the international
underground fight were deemed worthy of inclusion in the documentation
of “antifascist exile,” thus phrased in the title. This focus on political
activists led to an exclusion of the apolitical Jewish refugees, and thus
avoided the issue of anti-Semitism. The preface to the first volume, which
is dedicated to exile in the USSR, puts this approach into succinct terms:
We do not conceive the various centers of exile as places of escape but as meeting points in
the fight against fascism. . . . First and foremost, we want to portray lives, fight, desperation,
and sighs of relief of those German artists and writers that pursued the liberation of their
fatherland from the fascist yoke in their exile, those who persisted with their fight, those who
perished and those who were victorious. (Mittenzwei 1979:5)

Shortly after the publication of Kunst und Literatur im

antifaschistischen Exil, a second major project, the four-volume
encyclopedia Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration
1933–1945, reached the public in 1983. Under the auspices of the Munich
Institut für Zeitgeschichte and the New York-based Research Foundation
for Jewish Immigration, the editors, Werner Röder and Herbert A. Strauss,
decided to include all Nazi refugees from Austria and Germany, most of
them Jews, who had achieved some prominence through publications or
recordings. Less well-known migrants or non-German speakers were not
included, however, and the editors also decided not to consider those who
had been deported or murdered, or those that had survived the ghettos and
concentration camps and migrated after 1945 (see Röder and Strauss 1983).
The third research area is Holocaust studies. Besides the work in
memorial sites of former concentration camps and death camps and
research activities for commemorative publications of cities and states,
Holocaust studies did not achieve any more comprehensive portrayals until
quite recently. Today, the four volume Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, edited
by Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich, and Julius H. Schoeps, is regarded as
a benchmark (Jäckel, Longerich, and Schoeps 1995). Prior to this
publication and since, however, several others have researched the topic,
such as Saul Friedländer, Raul Hilberg, Götz Aly, and Wolfgang Benz, so
that the knowledge about the Nazi genocides on Jews, Sinti, and Roma as
well as all the other systematic killings of humans considered “genetically
unworthy” is today very differentiated and reliable. The topic of music in
concentration camps has also been covered by several specialized studies
(e.g., Fackler 2000; Karas 1985; Knapp 1996; Kuna 1993).
History, meanwhile, records a paradigmatic change. It concerns the
interpretation of Nazism and the ascertaining of its real core and purpose.
While the Nazi era had been viewed from the aspects of fascism,
totalitarianism, and war until the 1980s, today’s historians recognize anti-
Semitism and, hence, the Holocaust, as Nazism’s ultimate purpose. The
addiction to extermination had become independent and successively
abandoned rational aims. As historian Dan Diner put it in 1999, “the Nazis
exterminated for the sake of extermination.” Devoid of rational purposes or
the striving toward their own advantage, it is this utter will to extermination
that renders the genocide of the European Jews exceptional, which is not
equivalent to the occasional claim of the singularity of the Holocaust as a
genocide (Diner 1999:242).
The Jews, which constitute by far the largest group of Nazism’s victims,
were subject to a diabolic stigmatization, irrespective of whether or not any
individual was religious, was registered in a Jewish community, was
baptized Christian, or even considered themselves Jewish. As Hannah
Arendt put it in no uncertain terms as early as 1943, “We are the first non-
religious Jews persecuted” (1943:72). While the centuries-old tradition of
anti-Semitism developed as a racist variant of the nineteenth-century ideas
of Gobineau, Hitler’s programmatic Mein Kampf in 1925 introduced a tone
of inhumanity that was yet further aggravated inasmuch as the “Jewish
question” was narrated from the perspective of unconcealed racial hatred:
“A folk-state should in the first place raise matrimony from the level of
being a constant scandal to the race. The State should consecrate it as an
institution, which is called upon to produce creatures made in the likeness
of the Lord and not create monsters that are a mixture of man and ape”
(Hitler: Mein Kampf).
 This had made into a principle the most radical displacement
conceivable: the exclusion of Jews from the community of humankind. As a
consequence of such abstruse thinking that lies at the root of “eliminatory
anti-Semitism” (Daniel Goldhagen), the stigmatized could not escape their
fate. For Hitler and his millions of followers so much was certain: one
cannot stop being Jewish. What was and is certain for the survivors of the
Holocaust including all those who had managed to exile themselves,
therefore, is that they were all intended to be mass murdered and that they
are mere escapees.
The experience of displacement under the Swastika thus transcends
individual biographies, even though each of the displaced had to cope with
his or her experiences individually. A violation of civilization on this
magnitude concerns art and philosophy. When the dignity of human beings
is impeached on an unprecedented scale, it impacts on the state of
humankind as a whole. State-approved racism changed social and everyday
life in its entirety. For those at the receiving end, even daily experiences of
seemingly small dimensions, like the neglect in schools or clubs or signs
labeled “Jews not welcome,” therefore had a catastrophic perspective, even
if only few were aware of it initially in 1933.

ANTI-SEMITISM IN PRACTICE: THE CULTURAL

APARTHEID OF THE JÜDISCHER KULTURBUND
Prior to the Nazi change from the politics of expulsion to that of
extermination, two parallel musical worlds existed in the Third Reich.
Delusional profiteers like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Richard Strauss
inhabited the bigger of these two, while the Jewish minority lived in the
smaller. This separation was neither natural nor a coincidence, however.
Instead, it provided the Nazis with the ability to control the minority fast
and rigorously; and indeed so they did later for the “Final Solution of the
Jewish question,” a camouflage term used in official correspondence at the
latest by spring 1941 (see “Endlösung der Judenfrage” 1997). The
organization for this part of the politics of expulsion during the Third Reich
was the Jüdischer Kulturbund. Founded initially in 1933 as a self-help
organization under the name Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, the music and
theater performances were controlled by the party and its administrative
institutions. Non-Jews were not admitted to the Kulturbund, while Jews
were prohibited to visit public cultural events (see Hofer 1982:295).1
The members of the Jüdische Kulturbünde, of which there existed
approximately 750,000, also deluded themselves. Many musicians and
actors as well as the many theatergoers and music lovers in the Jüdischer
Kulturbund nurtured false hopes that the cultural ghetto presented them
with an opportunity to make music in peace and quiet; there was no lack of
qualified artists, after all. They were truly fantastic times, as a documentary
by Henryk Broder and Eike Geisel about the Kulturbund puts it ironically
(Broder and Geisel 1988). On 11 September 1941 the Jüdischer Kulturbund
was finally dissolved. Eight days later, a law was promulgated that forced
all Jews to wear the yellow Star of David in public; the expulsion was
rendered visible for everyone. The absolute ban on emigration for Jews
came into force a few days later, on 23 October 1941, with a secret decree
of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Expulsion now turned into extermination.
The music in the Jüdischer Kulturbund was marked by a double-edged
characteristic. This was reflected in an exhibition held in 1992 at the
Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Its title Geschlossene Vorstellung
(private/closed performance) ironically alludes to the German phrase
geschlossene Gesellschaft (private party / closed society) and means
ausgeschlossene Gesellschaft (excluded society). On the other hand, the
concerts and theater performances had a positive effect. Art and
entertainment counteracted the daily oppression, and during the
performances of music by Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Mendelssohn, Mahler,
and others one could reclaim one’s human dignity.

PHYSICAL DISPLACEMENT: CONCENTRATION CAMPS

AND EXILE

Beside the displacement through cultural ghettoization on the one hand and
the worst form of displacement through deportation and extermination on
the other, displacement in Nazi Germany also took the concrete form of
expatriation and escape into exile. Fortunately, numerous musicians
managed to escape Germany, Austria, and the occupied territories between
1933 and 1941 or to survive in hiding or even inside one of the camps.
Today, one can only estimate the relation of survivors and émigrés to those
who perished. Of the data I have collected since the 1980s, a collection that
is provisional and definitely incomplete and contains the names of
approximately 5,000 musicians acutely or potentially endangered, further
details of the biographies of two thirds are completely unaccounted for; the
way things stand, the last information available in many cases is an entry in
the Nazi Lexikon der Juden in der Musik of 1940 or 1943. If international
research does not prove otherwise, the blank spots on this map of musical
persecution give cause for the most serious concerns.
Given the current state of affairs in research, it seems hardly surprising
that solid data is available first and foremost regarding those musicians who
managed to escape. Furthermore, it is only natural that the biographies of
music history’s most famous personalities should be described first.
Alexander Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Robert Stolz, Béla Bartók,
Richard Fall, Emmerich Kálmán, Ralph Benatzky, Bohuslav Martinů, Paul
Abraham, Darius Milhaud, Paul Dessau, Paul Hindemith, Friedrich
Holländer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, Ernst
Krenek, Josef Tal, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and György Ligeti are
some of the composers among them. Similar lists could also be drawn up
for conductors, instrumentalists, singers, musicologists and music critics,
publishers, theater impresarios, and personalities of public musical life.
Such name lists regularly give the wrong impression, as if all musicians
stigmatized by the Nazis could have survived simply by leaving. My list of
composers, all of which have been selected entirely subjectively, may
appear quantitatively substantial to all those who read it slowly. Yet they all
are exclusively front-ranking celebrities; behind them stand the names of
professional musicians of the second, third, and fourth tier, whose number
is possibly a hundred times greater. Escaping Germany was easier for
prominent artists than for tutti players, choir members, and music teachers.
Interpreting the writings on the wall correctly was easier for the politically
and intellectually educated than for the ordinary citizen. Furthermore,
expatriation was expensive since the Nazis went to great lengths to first rob
the Jews before driving them out of the country. And who could say that
they had relatives abroad or knew citizens of the US or another host country
so that they could apply for an affidavit, the condition for an immigration
visa? Older people found the thought of leaving their homes difficult and
were afraid of life abroad with an unknown language. For those affected in
the occupied countries difficulties increased yet further, or made migration
altogether impossible.
Today, musicology is forced to acknowledge that it only knows about
very few of the professional musicians affected by the Nazis. This situation
may be regrettable; worse, however, is that research was begun far too late,
when many of the witnesses had died before they could be interviewed.
More recent projects, such as the online encyclopedia Lexikon verfolgter
Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit (Maurer Zenck and Petersen
2005–), are designed with the aim to take into account all those affected and
to include all reasons and forms of persecution and displacement.

CONCLUSION: ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE DISPLACEMENT

OF MUSICIANS

There are biographies that combine all dimensions of displacement, from

the minor injustice all the way to the deprivation of the right to live. The
violinist Henry Meyer, born in 1923 and a survivor of Auschwitz, wondered
as a teenager why he had to leave school and was excluded from all social
activities. His envisaged solo career was cut in 1933, when Meyer was ten
years old, as the private lessons with the concertmaster of the Semper
opera, Jan Damen, could not continue due to the Gestapo’s intervention. In
hindsight, Meyer was sure that the following catastrophe had begun with
these displacements: “Suddenly everything changed. We—the German Jews
—were gradually displaced and ostracized until we found ourselves to be
complete outcasts on the way to extermination” (cited in Allende-Blin
1993:28).
The fact that Henry Meyer was a musician is hardly relevant before the
background of the Nazi policy of displacement. He shares his experiences
with millions of other people of Jewish origin and few of them were
musicians. Survival as a Jew under the Nazis was as great a coincidence—
autobiographies mention time and again the feeling of guilt this created
with the survivors—as the professional background of the individuals was
arbitrary. Given that the Nazis were indifferent toward the cultural character
of individuals so long as they were Jewish or of any other alleged genetic
constitution considered dangerous for the Volk’s ethnic purity, one must
seriously consider the question as to why the musicians among the
persecuted should receive any more attention than anybody else. Regarded
in this way, one can only ascertain that the issue of musicianship among the
Nazi victims is of peripheral importance.
For example, it is a fact that the performances of the Hamburg vocal
humorists Gebrüder Wolf were not banned because they had written popular
songs such as An der Eck steit’n Jung mit’n Tüdelband or Von Snuten und
Poten, but because they were descendants of the Isaacs, a Jewish family
from Hamburg (see Huckeriede and Müller 2002). Likewise, it is a fact that
the Lithuanian-born solo cellist of the Hamburg Philharmonisches
Staatsorchester, Jakob Sakom, lost his position and later his life only
because he was Jewish, and not because he might have perhaps played
badly or been a bad colleague (see Pfaff 1995:67-80). And it is undoubtedly
the case that Arnold Schoenberg, the head of the musical avant-garde at the
beginning of the twentieth century, was not dismissed from the Berlin
Academy because he had invented a method of composing with twelve
tones which are related only with one another or because of his master class
for composition at the Academy, but solely because he, a baptized
Christian, descended from a Jewish family. The Nazi hatred of musical
modernism in general and Schoenberg’s music in particular were but
secondary reasons for persecution. Nazism’s anti-Semitism was at the core
of the displacement of musicians, and not the fact that they were musicians.
Going beyond such considerations and evaluating anti-Semitism’s
consequences for the cultural existence and musics of Germany, Europe,
and the world instead, for one can certainly detect specific traces of the
Nazi terror in the areas of culture and art that are not of secondary or
peripheral importance. Composers, like artists in general, have different
susceptibilities than the rest of us. They are hypersensitive, imaginative,
intellectually mobile, individualistic, and vulnerable. As they communicate
as individuals with a large public, they are more affected than others when
this public turns barbaric. With their compositions and performances, they
make aesthetic experiences possible that become transcendental, as
exemplified most obviously in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw.
Their topics are not a reflection of their own personal circumstance but the
image of the human condition that characterizes an era.
 In the most extreme context, even music that would normally appear to
have very little, if any, connection to anti-Semitism, can take on a new and
unexpected connotation. The cellist and Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-
Wallfisch remembers that she once had to play Schumann’s Träumerei
especially for SS commander Josef Mengele (see Lasker-Wallfisch 1996).
This perverse situation, where a mass murderer forces a Jewish inmate to
play a romantic Biedermeier character piece, indelibly connects the music
with the horror, at least for Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and for all those who
know of this story. Moreover, such a grotesque context for a performance of
a piece one may consider the apogee of innocence and dream-like naivety
represents the ultimate example of the displacement of music and the
silencing of all it was intended to represent.
The threat to the European Jews and the genocide that few had foreseen
and that became a factual certainty was of such far-reaching significance for
the notion of the humane and the image of the humanly possible that
philosophy and art were forced to react with their own respective methods.
This is manifested in the earliest writings of Hannah Arendt and other
émigrés and, subsequently, through the later responses from German
scholars in NS-Forschung, Exilforschung, and Holocaust studies.
Anti-Semitism on a primary level would appear to have concerned only
the Jews. It is a part of the lives of those who managed to escape into exile
or who survived in hiding or in a camp or ghetto. Moreover, in Ligeti’s
words, it is a “burden of the tension and resentments that all of us, Jews and
non-Jews, carry with us.” The traces of these tensions concern all of us, in
society as well as in music. Anti-Semitism is, hence, not simply an issue
concerning the Jews, but one relevant to all of civilization.

NOTE
1. A formal decree to exclude Jews from public cultural events only came into force in 1938. The
order of the president of the Reichskulturkammer, Goebbels, of 12.11.1938 reads: “With immediate
effect Jews are no longer allowed access to such events, especially to theaters, cinemas, concerts,
lectures, artistic enterprises (varieties, cabarets, circuses, etc.), dances and exhibitions of a cultural
nature.”

REFERENCES
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Allende-Blin, Juan. 1993. Musiktradition im Exil. Zurück aus dem Vergessen. Cologne: Bund-Verlag.
Arendt, Hannah. 1943. ‘We Refugees.’ Menorah Journal 31:69-77.
———. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber.
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Historikerdiskurs der Bundesrepublik.’ In Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und
Kultur 1. Ed. Dan Diner. Munich: Saur, 311-46.
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Werner Hecht. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp.
Broder, Henryk, and Eike Geisel. 1988. Es waren wirklich Sternstunden. Der jüdische Kulturbund
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Hermann Graml, and Hermann Weiss. Munich: Dtv.
Fackler, Guido. 2000. “Des Lagers Stimme”—Musik im KZ. Alltag und Häftlingskultur in den
Konzentrationslagern 1933 bis 1936. Bremen: Temmen.
Fetthauer, Sophie. 1997. Marc Neikrug: “Through Roses.” Musiktheater im Kontext der Holocaust-
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Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden. 4 vols. Munich and Zurich: Piper.
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Bewältigung. Hamburg: von Bockel.
Kuna, Milan. 1993. Musik an der Grenze des Lebens. Musikerinnen und Musiker aus böhmischen
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 CHAPTER 3
Ježek, Zeisl, Améry, and The Exile in the Middle

MICHAEL BECKERMAN

INTRODUCTION
Any collection with the title of Music and Displacement must at least
imagine what it might be like to hear its subject in music. But what should
this subject be? Displacement? Somewhat antiseptic, without a human
scale, flat. Exile? A word with too much scale and biblical implications
besides. The former a simple description, the latter a result of cataclysms
and arbitrary acts, but more often malevolent deeds that have driven people
from their homelands on a series of forced marches to a Diaspora. Both
words imply a population cut off from their traditions, friends, and patterns
of existence, striving to create new lives, or not, from some inhospitable
patch of alien soil.
When we rehearse the words exile and displacement in regard to
composers who were forced to emigrate around the time of the Second
World War, a certain heightened drama springs into focus, with a complex
flavoring. First, we imagine the grossness of the horror that set them on
their path, juxtaposing the isolation and aridity of exile with the gigantic
Nazi machine, carefully calibrating the reality of their survival with the
challenges of their condition. This is a kind of problem, for how can we pity
the exile and celebrate survival at the same time? And, indeed, should we
pity or celebrate them? But there are other problems: how do we know
exactly what their condition was?
The Birdshit Theory of History
When we write history we are like the puppeteer. Since most of the past has
vanished, we have enormous freedom to invent. Even without realizing it,
we are free to make the characters move according to our whim. I once
wrote a Festschrift article entitled “Brahms, Birdshit and History.” This was
not only an attempt to read a certain word into the musicological literature
where it no doubt belongs, but bears on issues of exile in a specific way.
The article looks at a photograph of Brahms that appears in Ivor Keys’s
monograph of the composer with the caption: “Brahms adding his voice to
the sung tributes at Clara Schumann’s funeral.” Indeed Brahms is standing
there with a group of men, and appears to be holding something that looks
like a piece of sheet music.
 When we study the picture, though, we see that the “music” is actually
the shoulder of the man next to him and that the protagonists are all
standing around casually. And it looks as if the man in white is smiling.
Smiling at Clara Schumann’s funeral? At such a time of devastated
mourning? Can there be some explanation? Something of the sort is found
in a letter written by the grandson of the photographer in whose garden the
picture was taken: “In the picture where a bird has shit on Von Beckroth and
Brahms helps to wipe it off . . .” (Beckerman 1998).
So just because we have set up categories such as “Clara Schumann’s
Funeral,” or “Composers in Exile,” does not mean that all our characters
will behave the way we think they ought to behave. Brahms is not supposed
to smile at Clara Schumann’s funeral, yet he may well be smiling, or worse,
making others smile. Leaving aside the pressing question of why bird poop
is so amusing, the quite natural avian defecation must have come,
perversely, as some kind of relief at such a sad affair. So according to what
might be called “The Birdshit Hypothesis,” the reality we supposedly seek
when we try to recover the past is the sum total of what we think should
have happened and what we cannot imagine happening.
The serious-minded among us may not like such things. Milan Kundera
tells the story of arriving in France as an exile in 1975, several years after
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. A well-known French intellectual—
unidentified—starts to express his sorrow at the gravity of the situation, but
Kundera interrupts to say how much fun he had had playing tricks on the
Secret Police. The Frenchman is horrified, uttering the chilling phrase:
“That’s not funny” (Kundera 2007). But how should the exile behave and
what should he feel?

Jean Améry
One of the most powerful commentators on the issues that concern us is
Jean Améry (1912–1978). In its pain and richness, his work surely is
essential reading for the student of exile and displacement.
Born Hans Mayer in Austria, he studied philosophy and literature in
Vienna, and until his forced emigration, saw himself as part of the great
German intellectual tradition. Following the Anschluss, he escaped to
France and in 1941 fled to Belgium, where he became a member of the
Resistance. In 1943 he was captured and tortured before being sent to
Auschwitz. These experiences formed the core of his work titled At the
Mind’s Limits.
Its opening three chapters are potent. The first is an inquiry as to
whether being an intellectual has any value in a place like Auschwitz; the
second deals with torture, and leads into our subject by concluding that
“whoever has succumbed to torture can never be at home in the world.”
His commentary on exile may be found in the third chapter in the form
of a question: “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” The answer, in
brief, runs something like, “all the more, the less he can carry with him.”
But it is more complex than that. The one displaced, according to Améry, is
caught between several populations, one symbolized by “the Police,” who
cannot be read (“Was the smile of the police official who checked out our
papers good-natured, indifferent, or mocking? Was his deep voice resentful
or full of goodwill? I didn’t know.”) and another by figures who should be
sympathetic but instead experience the exiles as a threat to their own well-
being (“Did the old bearded Jew, whose gurgling sounds I nevertheless
grasped as sentences, mean it well with us or did he hate us because by our
mere presence in the city we incited against him the native population
which was already tending to anti-Semitism?”).
Améry makes a distinction between other German exiles and German
Jews (those who “knew that they were outcasts and not curators of an
invisible museum of German intellectual history”). He further states that his
compatriots “had not lost our country, but had to realize that it had never
been ours” and eventually concludes that in order to play a role in a society
you need its consent, “but if society repudiates that we ever were that, then
we have also never been it” (Améry 1980).

SECOND INTRODUCTION: OUR THREE QUESTIONS

The three fundamental questions we ask when we speak of music and
displacement—even in a simple inquiry—are awesome in their implications
and complexity: What happened in the past? What is the nature of reality at
any present time as understood by its participants? Is music, particularly
what we call instrumental music, able to provide evidence about any of this,
and how can this be demonstrated? My assumption is that these questions
must be the starting point for the investigation of our topic. For if we do not
know what happened in the past, it is impossible to say how anyone might
have reacted to it, and if we cannot interpret musical communication in
relation to life experience, then it does not really matter if we do know what
happened. Such considerations, of course, are treacherous, and we fool
ourselves continually by cutting intellectual corners when we approach
them.
Until we can understand one thing in all its complexity, there is no proof
that we can grasp anything at all. Therefore, in some real sense, it cannot
matter which chunk of this particular puzzle we decide to work on, since
our ignorance is fractal: we understand the little bits precisely as poorly as
the larger bits, the overviews as poorly as the details. It cannot then matter
that I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen to look at and loosely compare two
composers who have been identified as exiles, both by themselves and in
the literature, and two passages from their works to see if any illumination
follows.

Exiles in America
At first it may seem as if Jaroslav Ježek (1906–1942) is a special case. Of
course, we come to realize that all cases are special cases. Ježek was not
forced out of Czechoslovakia because he was Jewish, but rather because he
was part of a wildly popular antifascist comedy revue troupe called the
Osvobozene divadlo (Liberated Theater). In one sense Ježek’s exile was
particularly wrenching as he moved from the easy fame of a Prague
superstar—celebrated in popular circles and highly regarded in the concert
tradition as well—to giving a few private lessons and conducting worker’s
choirs in New York. To make his transition even more complicated, from
early childhood Ježek had been almost blind, and was generally in poor
health. Ježek himself seemed to predict a bleak future in exile in a rant
recalled by his friend Gustav Janouch when he suggested that things might
turn out well for the composer in the United States. “Don’t give me that
nonsense. Pears don’t ripen in Kamchatka. My music was planted here, in
this land, in this soil. It’s not something you can take with you. We can’t
just pop our homeland in a suitcase” (Cinger 2006:147).
To write history one would probably conclude, as did his biographers,
that Ježek’s attempts to establish himself in New York came to naught, and
further note that his work is almost entirely forgotten outside the Czech
Republic. These conclusions are simultaneously more or less correct and
completely irrelevant. They distort the reality of his time in the United
States the way a global view of Clara Schumann’s funeral destroys the
nuance as the participants moved from one moment to the next. For
example, Ježek’s American letters reveal a mixed collection of moods,
activities, and passions. They paint a complex picture, but perhaps the most
telling and most impenetrable record of his exile is not a letter at all, but his
Piano Sonata and the story of its composition.

Ježek Grows a Piano Sonata

Of all the dozens of songs composed by Ježek, many of which were huge
hits in their time and several of which are considered classics, precious few
were written in the United States. If songs were pears and New York
Kamchatka, Ježek was certainly correct. But even in Kamchatka certain
things do grow, and some of them are just as worthy as pears. Sensing, as
he once put it, that there was enough jazz in America already, Ježek turned
to a form he had only rarely used, the sonata, to frame some of his
responses to his new reality.
We know a bit about the circumstances in which the work was
composed from Ježek’s letters. Clearly, he hoped that the work, possibly to
be played by Rudolf Firkušny, would make an impression on the New York
critics, and perhaps help to launch his New York career. He submitted his
Sonata as part of a kind of competition to win a place on an ISCM concert
to be held in the spring of 1941. A few weeks later he was notified that his
work would be played—in fact there was such an announcement in the New
York Times on 16 March 1941.
Somewhat mysteriously, and still without explanation, Ježek’s Sonata
was replaced by Viktor Ullmann’s Piano Sonata, and he was told his work
had been “lost” (something he did not believe for a minute)—it was later
returned unceremoniously. Ježek’s music was never heard by the New York
critics, and six months later he was dead of kidney failure.

Poor Zeisl! Happy Zeisl!

When Malcolm Cole and Barbara Barclay wrote their biography of Eric
Zeisl they titled it Armseelchen: The Life and Music of Eric Zeisl, and the
book’s title, “The Poor Little Soul,” was meant to apply to the subject of the
biography. Zeisl was one of several composers poised to have a great career
in Austria when the Nazis came to power. Born a year before Ježek, in
1905, he was among the youngest of a large group of composers who had
emigrated to the United States (among them Ernö Rapée, Schoenberg,
Krenek, Korngold, and Eisler) and this has been offered as one reason for
the difficulties he had in making his music known. Zeisl came to New York
in 1939 with few connections and eventually made it to Hollywood where
he was a kind of journeyman figure, writing music for travelogues and the
occasional major picture though he never received a main credit. Teaching
evening school at Los Angeles Community College, Zeisl died tragically of
a heart attack at the age of fifty-three just after finishing a lecture. Poor
Zeisl!
But there is, as always, another way to tell this story. First and foremost,
as opposed to millions of his compatriots and coreligionists, Zeisl manages
to leave Europe. He survives. Shortly after his arrival in New York he meets
a successful conductor, Ernö Rapée, who makes the composer’s “Little
Symphony” into a sort of hit. After some time in a cramped apartment, the
family moves to a grand home on the water in Mamaroneck, New York,
where Zeisl has time to compose. Zeisl moves to (is lured to?) Hollywood,
and while it is true he seems to hate the sunshine, he finds work in the film
industry, is able to feed his family, and indeed, turns his home into a
meeting place for fellow émigrés. In fascinating passages from recorded
interviews, Zeisl’s wife says on the same page that the family was so broke
they had to depend on money from their daughter’s piggy bank in order to
go to a movie and that they routinely hosted Hollywood parties for forty or
more (see Zeisl-Schoenberg 2009). Zeisl no doubt had to work hard to
make ends meet, but he does receive invitations to work as a composer-in-
residence in several Jewish camps, and becomes a productive teacher before
his sudden death in 1959. He has a wonderful family who adore him. And,
unlike many other musicians who are considered not to have “made it”
during their lifetimes, Zeisl is the subject of two full-length biographies, a
beautifully produced and edited collection of essays based on an exhibit at
the Vienna Museum, and a collection of letters (Cole and Barclay 1984;
Wagner 2005, 2008; Wagner and Haas 2005). Happy Zeisl!

LAST INTRODUCTION: WHAT WE WANT AND WHERE

TO LOOK FOR IT

Back to the beginning: why all this interest in exile and music? Are we
mere sociologists, or do we always wish for some angle from which to
access the sounds made by these exiles? Do we ultimately wish to hear
exile in music, and do we really believe that we can? How would it sound?
Where should we look for it?
The answer I offer is both simple and reductive, but it is the best I can
do at this point: one place to look for answers is in the middle of pieces. It
is my experience that middles often represent composers at their most
unguarded and honest, their most creative, and quite often their most
expressive. Middles are a land of dreams and desires, a place where
structure may be forgotten, at least for a while, containing everything from
death (funeral marches) to amorous secrets. The middle (whether of a
phrase, a movement, or an entire work) may be understood as something
like the sonic subconscious.

Blues in the Center

Hearing music and displacement/exile is always an act of faith, and like all
such acts, is subject to obfuscation, distortion, and manipulation. For
though we might think that the music of exile, say, is bound to be pathetic,
or somehow twisted, there is no reason why it might not be joyous, tenderly
satisfied, or anything else at all we think we can grasp from a collection of
sounds. If we use the test of middles, or even middles of middles and focus
on Ježek’s Sonata, however, we hear things that might confirm our view
that the most personal expression lies in the center.
The Sonata is cast in four movements and reflects a kind of edgy
neoclassicism, something of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin with greater
dissonance and jazzy syncopation. The two inner movements in this work
present a curious contrast. The “scherzo” stand-in is a marked national
dance, in this case an updating of Smetana’s “Salon” polkas. Though
steeped in a conspicuously dissonant vocabulary, it shares the contemporary
stage with such things as Martinů’s Songs on One Page written several
blocks away in New York at the same time, examples of a turn back to the
homeland for inspiration.
The third movement is something altogether different. In terms of heft,
length, and power, it forms the core of the work. It opens with leaden
weight, funereal chords, chromatic descents in the lower register, gradually
working into higher ranges, always returning to a relentless pounding
(example 1). Unison scalar passages lead to an extended middle section,
featuring an exquisite synthesis of blues and expressionist darkness
(example 2); on repetition, quasi-improvisatory passages illuminate the
darkness like a flash of lightning. If this, somehow, is the world of the exile,
it is a portrait most complex, of acceptance and defiance, of resignation and
dark protest.
Example 1: Jaroslav Ježek, Piano Sonata (1940), 3rd movement, Lento, mm. 1-8

Example 2: Jaroslav Ježek, Piano Sonata (1940), 3rd movement, Lento, mm. 12-14

Of course, the relationship between the third movement and Ježek’s

sense of exile is impossible to demonstrate, and certainly absurd to insist
upon. Once again we find ourselves trapped between two levels of
understanding. If this kind of sonic material is not referential in any way,
why should it have any more power in our imaginations than the design on
an urn? If works of this type, however, refer to something, express
something, why haven’t we in a single case been able to prove it over the
last five hundred years?
In the matter of Ježek, all we are left with is this: if the music is
important, and is somehow evidence of something, or a reflection on some
state, considering when it was written, it is quite likely that Ježek’s Sonata
and its core communicate something profound about exile; a sonic version
of Améry’s question “how much home does a person need?”
The “Arrowhead Trio,” Slow Movement
The last chamber work completed by Zeisl is a trio for harp, flute, and viola
known as the “Arrowhead Trio.” It was composed at Arrowhead Lake,
California in the summer of 1956. The outer movements are neo-Baroque in
style and aim, at least on the surface, for charm and sparkle. The middle
Andante, however, is another matter, and its striking opening has genuine
power. The harp outlines an idyllic and languid sound world, a patter of
open intervals (according to Zeisl’s wife, the harpist complained because
the composer did not employ Debussian arpeggios). Into this world comes
the viola with that unmistakable “musical Semitism,” the descending
augmented second. But no sooner does this gesture strike our ears than it
vanishes, it is “straightened out” with a quicksilver move to another, more
diatonic world (example 3). Have we really heard such a thing at all? Yet it
peeks out again and again, and remains elusive throughout the outer parts of
the movement.
A brief word about Zeisl’s use of “Judaic” materials is relevant here.
When Zeisl was in Paris in the late 1930s he became involved in an artistic
project, a production of Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes (Job, the
Story of a Simple Man) written as a novel in 1930 by Joseph Roth. The
primary theme in the story is that of exile, as the central character, Mendel
Singer, reacts to the events of his time and emigrates to the United States.
For the first time in coming to grips with the material of this text, Zeisl
makes use of marked Judaic material, particularly in such numbers as
“Menuchim’s Song.”

II. ANDANTE
Example 3: Eric Zeisl, “Arrowhead Trio” for Harp, Flute, and Viola (1956), 2nd movement, Andante,
mm. 1-4

As musical metaphors go, what follows is somewhat reductive. But one

thing that seems to happen in the course of the opening is that the weird, the
exotic, the “exile” as it were, appears in the foreground, but is immediately
integrated into the plot, into the musical culture of the piece in much the
same way that Ježek has managed to combine jazz riffs with his avant-garde
style. And yet, if we truly believe in the power of middles, as I do, just as
there is more to the “Arrowhead” than its first and last movement, there is
more to the middle movement than its opening. Indeed, just before the
reprise of the movement’s first idea, there is a striking flute solo
commencing at the lowest range of the instrument that trades almost
entirely in marked exoticisms. Here the intervals and scales sublimated in
the outer regions of the work reign supreme and unchallenged (example 4).
To some extent, we find this in the outer movements as well: the middles of
both offer the same kind of “suppressed vocabulary.” What this means—if
it means anything at all in connection with the themes of this chapter—is
open to interpretation. One could argue that the “Arrowhead Trio”
demonstrates that the “easy” reconciliation between the strangeness of the
exile and the new surroundings heard in the Andante’s opening is a
chimera: once displaced the stranger remains ever so. Or one could view the
placement of the unusual and unstable at the very core of the piece as
evidence of its fundamental value, an acknowledgment, witting or not, that
strangeness itself is the prize of the exile. Or, or . . .
Example 4: Eric Zeisl, “Arrowhead Trio” for Harp, Flute and Viola (1956), 2nd movement, Andante,
mm. 43-48

CONCLUSION: HOW MUCH MUSIC CAN YOU CARRY

WITH YOU?

At the end we may recall the fuller version of Améry’s understanding of

exile and displacement: “If I am permitted already at this point to give a
first and tentative answer to the question of how much home a person
needs, I would say: all the more, the less of it he can carry with him. For
there is, after all, something like a transportable home, or at least an ersatz
for home.”
Both Ježek and Zeisl create final works that suggest both the
strangeness of exile and the value of a home you can carry with you. In his
Sonata, Ježek invents his own fully international synthesis of jazz and New
Music, while also referring to the land of his birth. Zeisl teases out new
meanings by imaginatively playing with the invented category of Judaic
music in the “Arrowhead Trio,” keeping the most displaced part in the
middle.
Améry might say that the spiritual situations of these two composers are
entirely different, that while Ježek’s Czech homeland is merely occupied
and will be cleansed and purified like the highland springs in Martinů’s
Opening of the Wells and returned to him in posterity, Zeisl’s world is gone
forever, and indeed, that it never was his to begin with. It might be
tempting, then, to argue that Ježek achieves a harmonious and confident
synthesis while Zeisl forever struggles to find imaginary homelands. But
with matters of exile and displacement, like with all other areas of activity,
the birds are always flying around above our heads, ready at a moment’s
notice to displace our comfortable understandings.

COMMENTARY ON SOURCES
There is no available primary material on Ježek available in a language
other than Czech. In fact, the last scholarly monograph on the composer is
by Václav Holzknecht (1957). Holzknecht subsequently wrote a “Little
Medallion” book (a Czech collection of short biographies) with solid
information (1982). The most comprehensive online source is in Czech, at
www.musicologica.cz/slovnik/hesla.php?op=heslo&hid=3514. This
contains a short biographical entry, and a complete and useful bibliography
and work list. Information about his time in New York is found in Ježek’s
New York Diary (tiskarna New Yorkskeho Dennika) published in 1942 and
not widely available. A selection of that material is found in Cinger 2006.
Many of Ježek’s songs may be heard and seen online, and there is an
especially rich selection of movie scenes on YouTube.
 As noted, the material on Zeisl is comparatively rich, and much is
available online through the Zeisl website, including a good deal of
recorded sound available at www.schoenberglaw.com/zeisl/mp3/. Apart
from several books on the composer, there is a massive oral history of Zeisl,
consisting of transcriptions of about ten hours of taped interviews between
Malcolm Cole and Gertrude Zeisl available online at
www.schoenberglaw.com/zeisl/ and important material by the composer’s
daughter, Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg, in her essay “The Reception of
Austrian Composers in Los Angeles,” available at
www.schoenberglaw.com/zeis1/composers.html.
The material about Jean Améry and exile comes from At the Mind’s
Limits (1980). The first two chapters, “At the Mind’s Limits” and “Torture,”
are relevant to the discussion of exile, but it is Chapter 3, “How Much
Home Does a Person Need?” that is literally at the center—of the book and
the issue itself. My citations come from this chapter. For a concise
biography and a short bibliography see D. G. Myers’s biographical
introduction (2002).

REFERENCES
Améry, Jean. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Beckerman, Michael. 1998. ‘Brahms, Birdshit and History.’ In Festschrift für Jiři Fukač. Ed.
Stanislav Bohadlo. Hradec Králové: Gaudeamus.
———. 2008. ‘The Dark Blue Exile of Jaroslav Ježek.’ Music & Politics 2.
www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2008-2/

beckerman.pdf (accessed July 2009).

Cinger, František. 2006. Št’astné Blues aneb z deníku Jaroslava Ježka (Happy Blues or From the
Diary of Jaroslav Ježek). Prague: BVD.
Cole, Malcolm and Barbara Barclay. 1984. Armseelchen: The Life and Music of Eric Zeis I.
Westport/London: Greenwood.
Holzknecht, Václav. 1957. Jaroslav Ježek a Osvobozené divadlo (Ježek and the Liberated Theater).
Prague: Arsci.
———. 1982. Jaroslav Ježek. Prague: Horizont.
Ježek, Jaroslav. 1942. Tiskarna New Yorkského Dennika (New York Diary).
Kundera, Milan. 2007. ‘Reflections, “Die Weltliteratur.’ ” The New Yorker, 8 January, 28-35.
Myers, D. G. 2002. ‘Jean Améry: A Biographical Introduction.’ www-
english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/amery.html (accessed July 2009).
Wagner, Karin. 2005. Fremd bin ich ausgezogen, Eric Zeisl-Biographie. Vienna: Czernin.
———. 2008.  .  .  .  es grüsst Dich Erichisrael: Briefe von und an Eric Zeisl, Hilde Spiel, Richard
Stöhr, Ernst Toch, Hans Kafka u.a. Vienna: Czernin.
Wagner, Karin and Michael Haas. 2005. Endstation Schein-Heiligenstadt: Eric Zeisls Flucht nach
Hollywood / Vienna California: Eric Zeisl’s Musical Exile in Hollywood. Vienna: Jüdisches
Museum.
Zeisl-Schoenberg, Barbara. 2009. ‘The Reception of Austrian Composers in Los Angeles.’
www.schoenberglaw.com/zeisl/composers.html (accessed July 2009).
 PART TWO

Displacement and Acculturation

Banu

Poor and needy came we here,

Paupers of the yesterday;

Yet the future has in store

Millions for us by the score.

Dance the Hora, brethren; rout

Shades that girdle us about.

Dance the Hora, do not tire,

Hearts aflame and breasts afire.

Nathan Alterman / Aaron Copland

 CHAPTER 4
The Vision of the East and the Heritage of the
West: Displacement as a Catalyst for the Creation
of Musical Life in the Jewish Community of
Palestine

JEHOASH HIRSHBERG
In March 1933 Moshe Hopenko, the violinist and director of the Shulamit
Music School in Tel Aviv, wrote to composer Joseph Achron: “Boats are
arriving, carrying families from Germany  .  .  .  there are several excellent
musicians who escaped from Germany and are looking for a place for
peaceful life and work” (cited in Hirshberg 1995:110). The new
immigration wave increased the Jewish community of Palestine from
156,000 in 1928 to 445,000 on the eve of World War II. It also reversed the
process of extreme impoverishment of musical life, which followed Joel
Engel’s premature death and Jacob Weinberg’s emigration in 1927. The
immigrants, especially about 90,000 who came from Germany, enriched
Palestine with the conditions essential for musical life of composers,
performers, music teachers, and a perceptive and critical audience. More
than thirty well-trained professional composers immigrated to the country
within six years, until the outbreak of World War II. The intense
immigration caused a unique situation in which the immigrant group was
far larger and better trained than the small receiving community of
musicians. Consequently, the displacement of German Jews during the
Third Reich became the principal catalyst for the creation of viable musical
life in the Jewish community of Palestine and later in the state of Israel. In
the present chapter I will discuss the process of displacement and
resettlement of six representative composers from Germany.

COMPOSITIONAL PROCESSES BETWEEN EAST AND

WEST: INTER-OPUS, INTRA-OPUS, AND CONTRAPUNTAL
DICHOTOMY
For the displaced composers, the semiotics of their music was one of the
principal tools for coping with the trauma of exile and resettlement. As
Philip Bohlman has observed, “The immigrant composers [thereby] had to
adapt Western art music to a new cultural environment. In the course of
adaptation, Western art music demonstrated a wide range of responses, not
unlike those one would expect from other genres” (Bohlman 1989:183).
Their reactions hovered over an imaginary line drawn between two opposite
poles, that of the Vision of the East and the Heritage of the West. This was
expressed in three different though closely related musical processes, which
I term inter-opus dichotomy, intra-opus dichotomy, and contrapuntal
dichotomy.
In the first, the inter-opus dichotomy, the composer uses two contrasting
aggregates of stylistic means and techniques in compositions written in
tight temporal proximity. The second, the intra-opus dichotomy, describes
the composer’s introduction of two contrasting stylistic means and
techniques within the same composition with no attempt at reconciling
them, while the third, termed contrapuntal dichotomy, encourages a
simultaneous dialogue between the two contrasting musical idioms. The
following three examples illustrate manifestations of these processes with
the immigrant composers.

Inter-opus Dichotomy in the Early Works of Haim Alexander

Born in Berlin in 1915, Haim (Heinz) Alexander immigrated to Palestine in
1935. There he resumed his studies with Stefan Wolpe who directed him to
the extreme avant-garde. Following Wolpe’s emigration, Alexander
graduated under Josef Tal and, in 1944, started teaching piano, harpsichord,
and theory at the newly founded Music Academy in Jerusalem. While the
compositions of his student years are not preserved, the first official
composition Alexander wrote in Palestine was Variations for Piano (1947),
based on an extremely chromatic (albeit tonal) chord progression structured
in the manner of a chaconne (see example 1).

Example 1: Haim Alexander, Variations for Piano (1947), chord progression

The short and intense composition is deeply embedded in two aspects of the
Heritage of the West—the early twentieth-century dense and expressionistic
chromaticism countered by the rigorous application of traditional chaconne
technique. Four years later, however, in 1951, Alexander composed Six
Israeli Dances for piano, which he termed folkloristic music (see example
2). The pieces are written in diatonic and rhythmically simple texture,
probably under the influence of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, which was then
very popular in Israel among piano teachers.

Example 2: Haim Alexander, Six Israeli Dances for piano (1951), Allegretto moderato, mm. 1-9

Alexander maintained the inter-opus attitude throughout his long

creative career. For example, in 1988 his longtime friend, soprano Cila
Grossmeier, commissioned from him a song cycle, provided it “would not
be modern,” and he composed the folklike charming Songs of Love and
Nature in simple, diatonic modal harmony. Barely two years later he
completed the cycle Mein blaues Klavier (My Blue Piano) to poems by Else
Lasker-Schüler for eight female voices and percussion for a fine German
ensemble, utilizing the most extreme serial avant-garde devices.

Linear Intra-opus Dichotomy in Jacoby’s Works

Example 3: Hanoch Jacoby, Seven Miniatures for piano (1944), Miniature no. 1, mm. 1-4 and 10-16

Born in Königsberg, Hanoch (Heinrich) Jacoby (1909–1990) studied viola

and composition with Paul Hindemith in Berlin. Settling in Jerusalem in
1934, he became a teacher at the newly founded Conservatory. An
especially intense example of the intra-opus process is the first of his Seven
Miniatures for piano (1944). The Miniature no. 1 starts with a flourish
derived from European Orientalism, before suddenly turning to a middle
section written in strict two-part counterpoint, with the oriental flourish
returning at the end, thus forming a European-type ternary form (see
example 3). Jacoby stresses the unresolved dichotomy of the two styles, the
first representing a yearning for an imaginary Orient, the other well
entrenched in Western counterpoint.

Contrapuntal Dichotomy in Tal’s Works

As a student and young composer in Berlin, Josef Tal (Grünthal; 1910–
2008) was embedded in avant-garde circles. He demonstrated particular
interest in experiments with electronic music, establishing a studio in Berlin
as early as 1927. He immigrated to Palestine in 1935, where he first earned
his living as a photographer and joined Kibbutz Gesher. Thereafter, he
resumed his career as a solo pianist and composer, accepting teaching
positions at the Palestine Conservatory and, later, the Music Academy in
Jerusalem. His first work, completed in August 1936, was Lieder der Ruhe,
a cycle of three songs for voice and piano by Paul Verlaine (in German
translation), George Heim, and Christian Morgenstern. The Lieder fully
belong to the realm of Alban Berg’s extreme chromatic expressionism (see
example 4).
Example 4: Josef Tal, Lieder der Ruhe (1936), Ein grosser schwarzer Traum, mm. 1-6

In the same month he composed 8 Variationen über ein Thema eines

unbekannten Musikers, a virtuoso composition for violin and piano. While
the theme is a simple popular tune in D major, the variations drift back to
complex chromaticism. In November 1936, Tal completed his first vocal
work in Hebrew, veshuv merhav sadot veruah (And Again a Wide Space of
Fields and Wind) for four-part female ensemble. Despite the Hebrew text,
the extreme chromatic style remained the same as in the Lieder and the
technical demands on the performers are very high.
Likewise, Tal’s Piano Sonata of 1952 is a representative example of this
contrapuntal dichotomy. The slow movement is built upon the tune of a
song by Yehudah Sharett, one of Israel’s greatest composers of popular
folklike songs (see example 5). The simple diatonic tune moves within the
space of a fifth and acts as cantus firmus for a set of chromatic, dissonant
harmonies. The intense movement is a semiotic representation of Tal’s
musical and emotional world: his dedication to his past in the Berlin avant-
garde, which he continued to cherish throughout his long compositional
career, his yearning for the simple kibbutz life, where he spent his first
years in Palestine, and his deep commitment to the European heritage as
represented by the cantus firmus technique.

Example 5: Josef Tal, Piano Sonata (1952), slow movement, mm. 1-8
 MIGRATION AND DIVERSITY: FAILED ACCULTURATION,
INTROVERTED RESETTLEMENT, AND HOMECOMING
Most studies, concert reviews, and liner notes about Israeli music have been
dominated by the fundamental attitude of essentialism in its sociocultural
application. One of the worst results of this has been the oft-quoted concept
of Mediterranean music, which is an overblown expansion of a limited
phenomenon.1 This presupposes the existence of a Mediterranean school,
which is wrong and misleading. Klara Moricz has recently disputed this
essentialist position with regard to her discussion of Ernest Bloch’s variable
use of Orientalism, which convincingly contradicts the frequent labeling of
Bloch as an Orientalist (see Móricz 2007). Likewise, an anti-essentialist
methodology prevents any study of the immigrant composers as a group.
Instead, it requires in-depth individual investigations, which might
eventually highlight certain features common to some, or most, of them. I
exemplify this with three case studies, Stefan Wolpe, Erich Walter
Sternberg, and Paul Frankenburger Ben-Haim.

Stefan Wolpe’s Four Tracks of Activity in Palestine

Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972) was the only one of the immigrant composers in
the 1930s whose settlement in Palestine failed. Moreover, he was the only
one of them who was an acute refugee, as defined by Kunz (Kunz
1973:132). Austin Clarkson has observed that “exile was a persistent fact of
Wolpe’s heritage” and also pointed out that Wolpe was a rebel from his
childhood (Clarkson 2003:1; Hirshberg 2003:75-94). Having been ousted
from Nazi Germany as a convinced communist, he fled to Vienna in 1933,
where the police interrogated him the following year about his communist
associations. To avoid Wolpe’s deportation to Nazi Germany, the Romanian
pianist Irma Schoenberg convinced him to settle with her in Jerusalem in
May 1934. Thus Wolpe’s immigration was hardly his own initiative, and it
had more to do with his displacement as a communist than with being
Jewish. As Clarkson puts it, “Wolpe arrived in Palestine not as a Zionist,
but as a stateless refugee” (Clarkson 2003:13). He grabbed the first
occasion to return temporarily to Europe for a conducting course with
Hermann Scherchen in Brussels, from May to July 1935. It was only after
he received psychological help that he became active in his cultural and
social absorption in Palestine. His boisterous activity there proceeded in
four parallel tracks.
The first of these was the kibbutz movement, the network of Jewish
communal settlements in Palestine, which was for Wolpe a dream come
true. He kept traveling from one settlement to another forming and
coaching workers’ choirs, conducting, for example, the May Day
celebrations at Kibbutz Ein Harod in 1937. In a lecture for the Young Men’s
Hebrew Association in New York in 1946, Wolpe stated, “In Palestine there
exists a closer cooperation between the composer and the people. The needs
of the people for song and choral music is the expression and the proof of
an intense collective life” (Hirshberg 2003:85). This track of musical
activities in the kibbutzim was, hence, a continuation of Wolpe’s political
activity among workers in Germany that also manifests itself in his
compositions of the time. For example, his song Give Peace to the Tree
(1937) is a socialist paraphrase of the last blessing of the Amida (Prayer), as
may be illustrated through the second stanza:
Smallest of men, what do you want, what do you ask?
Only a protective wall of labor, the shade of a roof over your head!
That you may willingly fear the enormity of toil,
and resting eat your scant bread.

The musical style is based on that of the homophonic Lutheran chorale,

with the exception of some parallel doubling in the harmony. In fact, the
idiom of an entire group of his songs written in Palestine remained rooted in
his German heritage.
The second track of Wolpe’s activities in Palestine rested upon his
discovery of and interest in Arabic music, which he started to explore with
ethnomusicologists Robert Lachmann (1892–1939) and Edith Gerson-Kiwi
(1908–1992) and with the Iraqi Jewish musician Ezra Aharon, who became
a teacher at the Conservatory in 1936. Initial results of his involvement with
Arabic music reveal themselves in the heterophonic texture of his song If It
Be My Fate (see example 6).
Example 6: Stefan Wolpe, If It Be My Fate, mm. 1-2

The third track, which was most decisive for him, was his composition
in concert forms, in which he was uncompromising in his commitment to
the avant-garde. He commenced composition in Palestine in 1935 with the
Four Studies on Basic Rows op. 23, a study on thirds, tritones, and
expanding and contracting intervals, culminating with the monumental
Passacaglia on an All-Interval Row. While melodically and harmonically
radical, the passacaglia expressed a predetermined organization and order
based on the model of Bach. In so doing Wolpe demonstrated his position
as a loyal follower of Schoenberg and his absolute dedication to German
music.
Wolpe was deeply hurt by the reluctance of the Palestine Orchestra to
perform his music but was unwilling to understand that its director, violinist
Bronislaw Huberman, had requested that the newly founded refugees’
orchestra should establish itself through the canonic classic-romantic
repertory before turning to the avant-garde (Hirshberg 1995:122-45). Wolpe
also ignored the potential of collaboration with musicians close to his world
such as composers Erich Walter Sternberg, Menachem Mahler Kalkstein
(later Avidom), Josef Grünthal-Tal, and the pianist, conductor, and
entrepreneur Franck Polack-Pelleg.
The fourth track of Wolpe’s activities was his regular employment as a
teacher at the Palestine Conservatory. He was appointed in the fall of 1935
and immediately gathered around him a group of seven students,
conducting all lessons in German instead of Hebrew. Wolpe was the only
immigrant composer who had the potential of creating a real school of
composition, similar to that of Schoenberg, yet his work at the
Conservatory soon placed him on a collision course with some of his
colleagues, who could not comprehend his avant-garde style. As a
consequence, the Conservatory Director, Emil Hauser, chose not to renew
Wolpe’s contract in 1938. The Wolpe Archive contains an “Open Letter to
My Colleagues,” dated 12 September 1938. The letter is unfinished and
apparently was never posted, but it reflects Wolpe’s sense of isolation and
frustration both as composer and teacher. An angry encounter with Hauser
terminated their collaboration, and Wolpe emigrated to the USA four
months later.

Erich Walter Sternberg’s Introverted Resettlement

Born in Berlin, Erich Walter Sternberg (1891–1974) earned a law degree
before turning to music in 1918. His early works, chromatic and
expressionistic, were well received in the avant-garde environment of the
Weimar Republic. The Amar Quartet, with Hindemith as viola player,
performed his String Quartet no. 2 (Hirshberg 1995:158). Syncretism
presented itself already in the compositions of his German period when he
incorporated traditional Jewish elements into a dense chromatic polyphony.
A good example is the First String Quartet, where he quoted the Yiddish
song, Bei a teich (The River), and the melodic formula for the prayer Sh’ma
Yisroel. From 1925 onward Sternberg visited Palestine annually, settling
there in October 1931. He soon turned to the task of promoting the principal
music institutions he missed upon his arrival. Assisting Bronislaw
Huberman in his founding of the Palestine Orchestra in December 1936, he
also collaborated with several colleagues in establishing a local branch of
the International Society of Contemporary Music. Nevertheless, his
resettlement turned out to be very traumatic. Sternberg never overcame the
difficulties of the Hebrew language. As the external examiner in my final
oral analysis test at the Tel Aviv Academy in 1958, he was unable to state
any question in Hebrew or to understand my replies, and my teacher,
Alexander U. Boskovich, had to act as interpreter. Sternberg was not a man
of words, and his autobiography, published in the local Hebrew periodical
Tazlil, of 1967 is limited to a page and a half of basic dry data.
In 1938, Sternberg published a brief preview of his large-scale
orchestral variations The Twelve Tribes of Israel (which was premiered only
in 1942) in the only issue of Musica Hebraica, organ of the short-lived
World Centre for Jewish Music (see Bohlman 1992). He wrote:
What is our situation here? Composers from four comers of the world, of different schools,
face a diversified audience each segment of which has its own taste and expectations. It is my
contention that the composer has only one duty. He should not care whether what is required
from him is Palestinian folklore, synagogue chants, or melodies decorated with Russian
embellishments, but should go his own way and speak his own language from within. (quoted
in Bohlman 1992)

Accordingly, the composition is imbued with the late romantic harmonic-

melodic vocabulary, stressed by a salient quote from Brahms’s Fourth
Symphony, as well as with the prophetic, monumental expression of
Mahler’s symphonies. Thus, Sternberg’s initial reaction to his traumatic
immigration was a retraction from his avant-garde disposition to the late-
romantic vocabulary, which was more communicative to the mostly central-
European audience of the Palestine Orchestra.
Equally revealing are two versions of Sternberg’s Lied Mein Volk (My
People), to the poem by Else Lasker-Schüler (1912), which forms part of a
song cycle of the same name (see Kedem 2002). Sternberg had set the poem
in the 1920s in an atonal and dissonant manner (see example 7).

Example 7: Erich Walter Sternberg, Mein Volk (1st version), mm. 1-3

The second version, composed and orchestrated in Palestine, is tonal, albeit

very chromatic in parts (see examples 8a and 8b).
Example 8a: Erich Walter Sternberg, Mein Volk (2nd version), mm. 1-5

This particular Lied as well as the entire cycle acted as a powerful

statement of Sternberg’s attachment to his German roots. After the
Kristallnacht the Jewish community in Palestine boycotted the German
language in public concerts and radio broadcasts, with a few exceptions.
The boycott was fully lifted only in 1963 on the occasion of Robert Stolz’s
visit to Israel (see Hirshberg and Ramot 2006:510-52). Against this
background, it is remarkable that Sternberg composed the cycle in German.
On the other hand, the relatively frequent performances of the cycle soon
after its completion, including two orchestral renditions, evoked no public
protests since the singers were cautious and used a Hebrew translation.
Example 8b: Erich Walter Sternberg, Mein Volk (2nd version), mm. 14-18

Another manifestation of his attachment to German music was his folk-

song arrangements, to which he turned in Palestine. Like Wolpe’s,
Sternberg’s approach represents a continuation of Hindemith’s
Gebrauchsmusik and of Fritz Jöde’s Jugendmusikbewegung. Sternberg’s
process of resettlement thus focused on transplanting and recreating his
German past around him. He held no teaching post in either of the two
academies of music, his output in Israel was small, and his overall attitude
remained introvert.

Homecoming in the Music of Paul Ben-Haim

Paul Frankenburger (1897–1984) was born in Munich. After graduating
from the Staatliche Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich in 1920, he was
appointed Kapellmeister of the Augsburg Opera and enjoyed great
popularity among the audience. His early works were frequently performed
and received good reviews. In 1931, Erich Pabst took over as the new
Intendant of the opera house, and terminated Frankenburger’s contract from
July of the same year on the grounds of the financial crisis that was
gripping Germany at that time. Yet Frankenburger was sure that Pabst’s
motive for his dismissal was linked to the latter’s membership in the Nazi
party, and was indeed substantiated by the fact that all other Jewish
musicians were fired at the same time, leaving the opera with no musical
director.
Frankenburger returned to Munich and focused on the composition of
his monumental oratorio Joram to a book by Rudolf Borchardt (1877–
1945), who wrote it as a modern interpretation of the Book of Job in
Lutheran German (1905, printed 1907). The score marks 24 February 1933
as the completion date, less than a month after Hitler was appointed
German chancellor. It was clear to the composer that his work would not be
performed in Germany. Indeed, it took nearly fifty years until it was first
heard in Israel in May 1979 in the Hebrew translation by David
Frischmann. The first full performance in the original German only took
place in Munich on 8 November 2008, on the eve of the memorial service
for the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht.
The spiritual world of Joram is instructive. In spite of the shock of his
brutal rejection by the German establishment, the oratorio expressed
Frankenburger’s total identification with the German musical heritage. The
Bach passions serve as formal models, whereas the musical styles range all
through German music history from Bach via Mendelssohn to Reger,
Mahler, and Richard Strauss. Given that Frankenburger’s position was far
removed from rabid German nationalism and, next to Bach, he cited
Debussy and Ravel as his closest models, the total dedication to the German
tradition in Joram is a special case, which represented his last, desperate
attempt to cling to his heritage against the threat of Nazism. Joram also
reveals that, alongside many other German Jews, any thought of emigrating
from Germany was far from Frankenburger’s thoughts during the work on
the score, thus suggesting the extreme trauma he went through when he was
forced to make the decision to abandon Germany.
Even when he did consider migrating after the purges against the
German Jews increased and the Nazi Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des
Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Restitution of the Professional Civil
Service), promulgated on 7 April, which prevented all Jews from obtaining
employment in municipal capacities, his first steps were cautious. As a
paradigmatic example of an anticipatory refugee Frankenburger took an
exploratory trip to Palestine in May 1933. At first he knew nobody there,
but he was encouraged by the friendly response from local musicians and
their ability to communicate in German. On 26 June 1933 he wrote from
Palestine to his father: “It is clear that the separation will be difficult. On
the other hand, bearing in mind that I intend to make an annual two-month
visit to Europe—if I don’t, living here will be unbearable—I shall be able to
stand it. Furthermore, my decision to transplant myself here does not
commit me for the rest of my life.” Nonetheless, Frankenburger changed his
last name to the Hebrew Ben-Haim (Heinrich’s son) during his exploratory
visit. He returned to Germany where his Concerto Grosso was premiered
and well received in Chemnitz, a performance resulting from a contract
predating the Nazi takeover that, surprisingly, had not been cancelled (see
Hirshberg 2009). Following the concert, the composer packed his
manuscripts and documents and settled in Palestine in October 1933.
Ben-Haim’s daily life in Tel Aviv motivated my phrase, the Vision of
the East and the Heritage of the West. Although his wife preferred
cosmopolitan Jerusalem, Ben-Haim lived in purely Jewish Tel Aviv. All the
same, his apartment was a transplant of the one in Munich, with the German
grand piano and the shelves exclusively full of German books. Yet, he took
daily private lessons in Hebrew, including reading poetry, and his first
original contribution to the emerging art music in Palestine was the creation
of the Hebrew Lied in April 1938 with three poems to verses from Shir
Hashirim, the “Song of Songs.” Unlike the late-romantic Lieder of his
youth, the first of these songs, Ani Havatzelet Hasharon (I Am the Lily of
the Sharon) is mostly pentatonic, with frequent changes of meter preventing
regular phrasing (see example 9).
Example 9: Paul Ben-Haim, Ani Havatzelet Hasharon (1938), mm. 1-3

In 1940 Ben-Haim composed his First Symphony, the first work in this
genre ever written in Palestine. It was composed during the darkest months
of the war when the Nazis invaded Poland and Western Europe and started
aerial bombardments of Tel Aviv. The work is permeated by meaningful
quotes and paraphrases of Western and Eastern musics, and is thus strongly
autobiographical. For example, while the first movement opens with a
quote from Mahler’s Second Symphony, the beginning of the ensuing slow
movement is a diatonic melody in unison, which concludes with a quote
from the traditional Persian Jewish psalm Essa Einai (I Will Lift Up My
Eyes). Ben-Haim had just arranged this psalm for the Yemenite singer
Bracha Zefira (1910[?]–1990), who had been collecting and performing
traditional songs of Eastern Jewish communities since her youth. His
encounter with Zefira brought him closer to the reality rather than the
Vision of the East, such as her Yemenite voice production. The two
elements of the East-West dichotomy are closely intertwined in the
biographically directional Finale. It starts with a long self-quotation from
the Finale of the first part of the Oratorio Joram, which, meaningfully,
depicts Joram’s homecoming. The slow hymn-like theme of the chorus is
superimposed by the interpolations of a military drum leading to a lively
Israeli horra dance. The Symphony thus constructs the memory of Joram, a
work composed in Munich prior to Ben-Haim’s displacement, not as an
object of nostalgia, but as one of departure, against which the arrival in
Palestine is narrated as a homecoming.
 To conclude, the six cases presented here suggest that the German
immigrant composers never formed any national school in Palestine and
Israel. None of them knew one another prior to their displacement, their
decision to migrate came from a strong push factor with no previous Zionist
motivation, and they were trained in different musical centers and
traditions. The only factor common to them was their position as
anticipatory refugees, defined in Egon Kunz’s seminal essay as a person
who “leaves his home country before the deterioration of the military or
political situation prevents his orderly departure. He arrives in the country
of settlement prepared . . . and he is informed about the ways in which he
can re-enter his trade or profession” (Kunz 1973:132).
More than at any country that received refugee composers from
Germany, the impact of displacement caused by the Nazis on music in the
Jewish community of Palestine and in Israel was decisive in that it created a
new national culture of concert music. Displacement, albeit sparked by the
human catastrophe of Nazism, thus acted as a catalyst for music production.
It was also far-reaching in that the polarity of the Vision of the East and the
Heritage of the West has continued to dominate Israeli art music to the
present day (Hirshberg 2004:173-94).

NOTE
1. The term and its ideological foundations were created by Alexander U. Boskovich (1907–
1964) who realized it especially in his violin and oboe concerti, his Semitic Suite, and his song for
Bracha Zefira, Adonia ro’l (The Lord Is My Shepherd).

REFERENCES
Bohlman, Philip V. 1989. The Land Where Two Streams Flow: Music in the German-Jewish
Community of Israel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. 1992. The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936–1940: Jewish Musical Life on
the Eve of World War II. Oxford: Clarendon.
Clarkson, Austin. 2003. Introduction. In On the Music of Stefan Wolpe: Essays and Recollections. Ed.
A. Clarkson. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press.
Hirshberg, Jehoash. 1995. Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: A Social History.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2003. ‘A Modernist Composer in an Immigrant Community. The Quest for Status and
National Ideology.’ In On the Music of Stefan Wolpe: Essays and Recollections. Ed. A.
 Clarkson. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 75-94.
———. 2004. ‘Visionen von Osten und westliches Erbe. Ideologische Faktoren bei der
Herausbildung einer israelischen Musik.’ In Jüdische Musik? Ed. E. John and H. Zimmermann.
Cologne: Böhlau, 173-94.
———. 2005. ‘The Vision of the East and the Heritage of the West: Ideological Pressures in the
Yishuv Period and Their Offshoots in Israeli Art Music during the Recent Two Decades.’ Min-
Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online 4. www.biu.ac.il/hu/mu/min-ad (accessed July 2009).
———. 2009 [1989], Paul Ben-Haim, His Life and Works. Revised edition. Jerusalem: Israeli Music
Publications.
Hirshberg, Jehoash, and Na’ama Ramot. 2006. ‘The Tangled Road to Legalization: The Admittance
of the German Language in Musical Performances in Israel.’ The Jewish Quarterly Review
96/4:510-52.
Kedem, Palina. 2002. Erich Walter Sternberg and His Lieder. MA Thesis. Tel-Aviv University.
Kunz, Egon. 1973. ‘The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement.’
International Migration Review 7/2:132.
Móricz, Klára. 2007. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century
Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 CHAPTER 5
Time, Place, and Memory: Songs for a North
African Jewish Pilgrimage

RUTH F. DAVIS
I continue to be fascinated by our fundamental need to create meaningful narratives, ignore
inconsistencies, silence some stories, and elaborate others; by our enormous capacity to forget
and live on, and remember and live on, and take this dual process for granted; by our
inexhaustible efforts to continuously reconstruct our memory of the past between words and
silences, images and void.
(Zerubavel 1995:xvi)

Entering the Old City or medina of Tunis at the Bab el-Bhar (Gate of the
Sea) or, as it came to be known during the French protectorate, the Porte de
France, you have a choice of two ascending routes. To the left, the Rue
Jamaa el-Zitouna takes you to the ancient Mosque of the Olive Tree, dating
from the seventh century. To the right, the Rue de la Kasbah rises to the
Place de la Kasbah flanked on the left by the Dar el-Bey—the palace of the
Ottoman Beys, and on the right, by the walls of the ancient citadel, today
the site of government buildings. On the way, a plethora of narrow, covered
streets wind through the traditional markets, or souks, each named for its
special commodity such as perfume, leather, spices, multi-textured rolls of
cloth, and jewelry of silver and gold. Restaurants appear from nowhere;
doors open onto tiled vestibules of Ottoman palaces; shafts of sunlight
expose residential streets with small grocery stores selling candies and
baguettes. But first, you have to pass through the more overtly touristic
shops down by the entrance, and it was outside one of these, flanked by
pictures of traditional symbols such as the fish and the hand of Fatma, that I
sighted a picture of the eight-branched candelabrum, or menorah—the
Jewish hanukkiyah, and reacted with the same startled surprise as when I
discovered Stars of David decorating the minaret of the great mosque of
Testour, a town to the west of Tunis in the Mejerda valley, founded by
Andalusian refugees. Remarking on the apparent anomaly of the Jewish
symbols on this Muslim place of worship to my companion, a native of the
town, I learnt that they were there because “Jews once lived among us—
they’re part of our history.”
Apparently, not a single Jew lives in Testour today and few live in
Tunis. Yet, according to legend, Jews have lived in Tunisia since
Phoenician times, when traders from Tyre founded the ancient colony of
Carthage on the northernmost tip of Africa. More Jews arrived with the
Romans and more still with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from
Moorish Spain as city after city fell to the Christians. Later, Jews came from
Livorno, on the west coast of Italy, until, by the dawn of the French
protectorate, the Jewish presence in Tunis was such that, in his account of
his travels in Tunisia in the winter of 1887, Guy de Maupassant observed:
“Truly, Tunis is neither a French city, nor an Arab city: it’s a Jewish city.
It’s one of those rare places in the world where the Jew seems to belong, as
though he’s in his own country . . . where he acts almost as though he’s the
master, displaying a calm—if still slightly nervous—assurance” (De
Maupassant 1993:27).1 Maupassant focuses, above all, on the remarkable
appearance of the Jewish women: their strange, harlequin-style dress with
pointed caps, tunics, breeches, and slippers, and the way the sylphlike
maidens are transformed, after being fed a continuous diet of pasta, into
grotesquely voluminous married women, fattened to please their suitors.
Presciently, Maupassant notes that in a few years’ time, the same women
will be fasting and adopting Western dress as the wealthier families leave
the Jewish quarter of the medina to settle in the new French city (De
Maupassant 1993:29-30).
In Maupassant’s Tunis, Jews were at the forefront of professional
musical life and Jewish women would soon emerge, as singers, at the
vanguard of the new commercial musical culture that was about to hit the
capital.2 During the protectorate, the traditional public venues for music-
making such as cafes, bars, and cafechantants where audiences, seated in
rows, watched staged performances while waited on by qahwaji (coffee
servers), were augmented by larger, more formal venues such as theaters,
casinos, and, most lucrative of all, the record industry. In the cosmopolitan
Mediterranean seaport and capital, the new commercial opportunities
coincided with an influx of musicians and musical styles from the wider
Maghreb and Egypt, resulting in a musical culture of unprecedented
richness and diversity. Surveying the Tunisian record catalogs from the first
decade of the twentieth century, the Algerian scholar Bernard Moussali
observed that “the expansion of the record industry, the onslaught of Syrio-
Egyptian productions, the fashion for Tripolitanian and Algerian tunes, the
inflation of musicians’ fees and the struggle to emulate, if not to surpass
them, resulted in a greater variety of choice in the world of Tunisian music,
which was constantly changing” (Moussali 1992:6; see also Davis
2003:129-31). Reacting to the new trends, Jewish musicians “eager to free
themselves of the constraints of traditional modes and scales, and equally
attentive to the acoustical quality of the Western instruments and the extent
of their ambitus, specialised in combining traditional Arab with European
instruments, particularly those of fixed pitch such as the piano, harmonium,
and fretted mandolin” (Moussali 1992:4). The main forum for
experimentation was the popular song genre known as ughniyya (lit. secular
song). Characterized by simple solo/choral strophic and refrain structures,
earthy colloquial language, and themes depicting real-life situations and
emotions, the ughniyya absorbed the cosmopolitan musical trends of the
day, including Western scales and tunings and melodic modes and rhythms
from the neighboring Maghreb and eastern Mediterranean, especially
Egypt.3
It was in this efflorescent musical environment that the two Jewish
brothers Mordechai and Gaston Bsiri, sons of immigrants from Izmir, the
Ottoman city port on the Aegean coast, forged their separate musical
careers at the turn of the twentieth century. Mordechai played the nāy (reed
flute) in the Beylical court, specializing in the Andalusian repertory, or
ma’lūf; Gaston was one of the most prolific ughniyya composers of the day.
Mordechai married a Jewish girl from Sfax, a city port to the south of
Tunis, and settled in Hara Kebira, the larger and more cosmopolitan of the
two Jewish villages on the offshore island of Djerba, less than a mile from
the island’s main port and market town, Houmt Souk. Mordechai’s home
was distinguished by the presence of a harmonium, the first on the island,
which was played by his wife and daughters and eventually, by his young
son Jacob, who learnt to play and sing by imitating his mother and sisters.
As a teenager in the 1920s, Jacob Bsiri set off for Tunis and apprenticed
himself to his uncle Gaston.
 The island of Djerba is famous for its synagogue, known as the Ghriba.
Situated on a gentle hill on the outskirts of the smaller village, Hara Sghira,
about seven kilometers inland from Hara Kebira, the Ghriba is a shrine to
an eponymous female saint, and its foundations are said to contain relics of
the Jerusalem Temple. Every year, in late spring, pilgrims from mainland
Tunisia and beyond gather on Djerba to celebrate the joyous festival of Lag
B’Omer. Traditionally associated with the cessation of a mysterious plague
that raged at the time of the second-century Palestinian Rabbi Akiva, Lag
B’Omer also marks the anniversary of the death of the Cabbalist Rabbi
Shimon Bar Yochai, a student of Rabbi Akiva, who supposedly revealed the
Zohar, the core teaching of the Cabbalah, to his disciples on that day.
Throughout the two days of rituals and music-making, celebrity musicians
from Tunis, including Jacob’s uncle Gaston Bsiri, joined local musicians in
performances of religious songs in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, called
piyyutim, sung to the tunes of the latest popular hits.4 In 1930, Jacob Bsiri
made his debut at the Ghriba, accompanying himself on the harmonium.
The relative stability of Jewish life under the protectorate was
challenged as the nationalist movement, with its specifically Tunisian Arab
identity, gained momentum through the 1930s. The year 1934 saw the
founding of the Neo Destour Party, whose leader, Habib Bourguiba, was to
lead Tunisia to independence in 1956. While some Jews supported the
nationalist movement, even playing leading roles, others were divided in
their allegiances.5 The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and Tunisian
independence in 1956 prompted waves of Jewish emigration; in the 1960s,
discriminatory economic reforms, and anti-Jewish incidents following the
1967 Arab-Israeli war, caused most of the remaining Jews to leave (Sebag
1991:273 ff). As communities throughout Tunisia fragmented, uniquely, the
small Jewish community on the island of Djerba, albeit drastically reduced
in numbers, remained intact. In the early 1960s Muslim migrants from the
mainland, attracted by work opportunities on the island, began to move into
the empty Jewish homes. Around 1970 a mosque was built on the outskirts
of Hara Kebira and, with the development of the coastal zone touristique,
an international airport was built on the island. Yet, amidst all these
upheavals, the remaining Jewish community, while embracing the material
trappings of modernity, adhered tenaciously to their traditional ways of life,
communal structures, values, and mores. So resilient was their distinctive
Djerban Jewish identity and so unbroken its continuity with the past that, as
Abraham Udovitch and Lucette Valensi observed in their extensive
ethnographic study: “While all other Jewish communities of North Africa
disappeared, those of Jerba resisted both assimilation and migration to
become ‘the last Arab Jews’ ” (Udovitch and Valensi 1984:3).
Following independence, the Ghriba celebrations became the focal point
for the annual return of Tunisian Jews from Israel and France. With the
development of tourism on the island and especially the establishment of
the international airport, the pilgrimage was transformed into a tourist
bonanza, with luxury coastal hotels turning kosher for the week. In Israel,
Jews from throughout the world celebrate Lag B’Omer with a pilgrimage to
the actual tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai in Meron, in the Northern
Galilee. Yet Israeli Jews of Tunisian descent, rather than making the simple
journey up the road, prefer instead to undertake the circuitous journey via
Paris, Marseille, Frankfurt, or Istanbul to their diasporic homeland, to
celebrate the hilula of Rabbi Shimon at the shrine of the Ghriba. And,
despite the proliferation of new forms of mass media and the participants’
constant exposure to new Tunisian, pan-Arab, French, and Israeli songs, the
celebrations no longer serve to showcase the latest popular tunes set to new
Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic texts. Instead, the returning pilgrims join their
remaining Tunisian relatives in a nostalgic celebration of diaspora as Jacob
Bsiri and a mixed band of Djerban and Israeli musicians replicate not only
the musical rituals but also the actual musical repertory of the protectorate
past.
In May 2007 I took part in the pilgrimage to the Ghriba for the first time
since my original visit to Djerba in 1978. In this chapter, focusing mostly
on the 2007 celebrations, I explore the symbolic significance of the musical
rituals and their crystallized repertories in terms of time and place, and in
the light of recent attempts to transcend them, for both the returning
pilgrims and for the two Tunisian communities—Muslims and Jews—who
stayed behind.

THE GHRIBA: ITS ORIGINS AND MYTHS

The festival of the Ghriba is a festival of origins: its meaning can only be
fully understood in relation to the complex mythology surrounding the
origins of the synagogue and the community itself. The inhabitants of the
Hara Sghira believe they are descendents of priests, or Cohanim, fleeing
from the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in the sixth
century BC. (A more modest version of the story substitutes the second
Jerusalem Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.) Traveling
westward across North Africa the priests carried with them a door and other
relics from the Temple until, eventually, they landed on the island of Djerba
where they built a synagogue, incorporating the holy relics into its
foundations. They called their settlement Dighet (considered a Berberized
form of Delet, meaning in Hebrew, door). To this day, Hara Sghira is also
informally named Dighet and, until the mass exodus of the Jews in the mid-
twentieth century, almost all its inhabitants were Cohanim (s. Cohen: the
name given to descendents of the priestly caste). Belief in the legendary
antiquity of the Jewish community is shared by Djerba’s Muslims, and the
Jews are generally regarded as the island’s original inhabitants, preceding
the Arabs and even the Berbers.
A second corpus of myths relates specifically to the synagogue. A
mysterious young girl came to live on the outskirts of Hara Sghira, where
she built herself a hut. The villagers were frightened of her strange ways,
and kept their distance. One day, a fire broke out around the hut and,
assuming the girl was working one of her spells, the villagers kept away.
Eventually, the fire consumed the hut, with the girl inside. When finally
they approached, the villagers found the girl dead, her body miraculously
intact, untouched by the flames, and her face serene. Filled with remorse,
they built a synagogue as a shrine for the girl, calling both the girl and the
synagogue Ghriba (Miraculous, Stranger). Venerated by Muslims and Jews,
the Ghriba became the site of an annual pilgrimage, coinciding with the
Festival of Lag B’Omer and the death of the Cabbalist Rabbi Shimon Bar
Yochai.6
The story of the Ghriba resonates with the Jewish concept of the
Shekhina (lit. “Indwelling”) signifying the feminine aspect of God—the
form in which God manifests Herself in the world. The Shekhina is also
identified as the bride of God, thus the Jewish people. In practice, the
Shekhina is understood as a protector and mediator whose overarching role
is to effect reconciliation between God and His people, thus helping them
achieve their longed-for Messianic return to the land of Israel. Interpreted
on a cosmic plane, her role is to reunite the masculine and feminine
principles of God, hence, the Universe itself.
 The concept of the Shekhina is especially developed in the Caballah, the
Jewish book of mysticism, whose central teaching, the Zohar, is
traditionally attributed to the second-century Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai,
who revealed its contents to his closest disciples on his dying day. As he
imparted his revelation a brilliant light radiated from his body, enveloping
him completely, and his house was filled with fire; nor did the sun set until
his revelation was complete. When the light subsided the Rabbi was found
dead, a serene expression on his face, clutching the Torah between his arms.
Rabbi Shimon commanded his disciples to celebrate, not mourn, the
anniversary of his death, marking the reunion of his soul with its Maker.
Thus began the tradition of the annual pilgrimage to his tomb in Meron, in
the Northern Galilee, on the festival of Lag B’Omer, and the custom of
celebrating the day with bonfires and lighting of candles.
There are clearly parallels between the miraculous deaths of the strange
girl, known as the Ghriba, and the Cabbalist Rabbi. Both are associated
with fire and light; both the Rabbi and the young girl die in serenity, their
physical bodies miraculously unharmed; and in both cases, their deaths
signal a divine revelation relating to the feminine principle, or Shekhina. In
Djerba, through a complex web of associations, the stories of the strange
girl, the Cabbalist Rabbi, and the priests from the Temple fuse to create a
direct connection between Djerba, “the antechamber of Jerusalem,” and the
Holy City itself, ascribing to both places pivotal roles in the past, present,
and future destiny of the Jewish people. When Tunisian Jews return from
their present-day homeland, Israel, to their former homeland in Djerba, they
do so, at least in part, to commemorate the mythical Jerusalem of their past
and, through the Shekhina, to renew their faith in their Messianic return to
the utopian Jerusalem of their future.

THE PILGRIMAGE TO THE GHRIBA IN 2007

The Ghriba’s present-day building dates from the nineteenth century when
it was rebuilt after a fire. Approaching the synagogue from the village
beneath, you see two white, flat-roofed buildings separated by a narrow
pedestrian street with an arched entrance. The smaller building to the left is
the synagogue; that to the right, rising above it, is the two-storey funduq, or
pilgrims’ hostel, built in the traditional Arab style around a square
courtyard. The two buildings face each other across the street, the entrance
of the synagogue facing that of the courtyard, about halfway down.
Throughout the celebrations, men, women, and children intermingle
between the spaces, passing seamlessly from one to the other. This casual
mingling of the genders and the prominent role played by women generally
is one of the most striking aspects of the celebrations. On Djerba, women
are normally barred from worshipping in the synagogues, considered the
exclusive domain of men and boys; in both public and private life, men and
women occupy separate spaces: unmarried men and women in particular
are strictly segregated. The Ghriba celebrations thus provide a unique
occasion on which normal gender barriers are removed, and women and
girls are free to come and go as they please, whether in the funduq or in the
Ghriba itself.
The synagogue consists of an outer antechamber and an inner sanctuary
containing the bimah, or platform from which the Torah is read, and the
wall containing the ark of the Torah; beneath the ark is a low door from
which a few shallow steps descend into a grotto, believed to mark the site
where the body of the mysterious girl was found. Throughout the festivities,
the antechamber serves as a general meeting room: women gather there
with their babies and children, men gather informally for blessings over
wine, and both men and women sit silently alone, reading from prayer
books. As they enter the inner sanctuary, the pilgrims remove their shoes;
inside, they light candles in memory of Rabbi Shimon and recite individual
prayers. Young women descend into the grotto, depositing there raw eggs
on which they have written their names, and lighted candles. Eventually the
heat from the candles cooks the eggs. Thus, the women believe, the Ghriba
will help them marry and conceive.
The musical rituals take place through the afternoon in the courtyard of
the funduq, whose sides are lined with stalls selling miscellaneous trinkets
and food-stuffs; some sell goods specific to the occasion such as yarmulkes,
shawls, and CDs of Jewish singers from protectorate times. Framing the
courtyard, the funduq rises in a two-tiered sequence of arches fronting a
veranda below and a balcony above; through the arches, the bright blue
doors of the pilgrims’ quarters remain permanently closed, their rooms
unoccupied. Streamers bearing red and white Tunisian flags and smiling
portraits of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali hang across the courtyard.
Below, the crowd is seated on benches, women with their babies, prams,
and children taking up most of the space. Facing them, on the far side of the
funduq, the musicians are installed behind microphones on a dais draped
with colorful cloths. The violinist, Sasson Cohen, and the ‘ūd player and
lead singer, Houri Kadora, dressed in the traditional Djerban red chechia
(felt cap) and white jalabiyya (long-sleeved gown), have just flown in from
Israel. Sharing the platform, the darbuka (goblet drum) and tār
(tambourine) player, both from Hara Kebira, are dressed casually in dark
trousers and white open-necked shirts, without headgear. Between them, the
ninety-five-year-old Jacob Bsiri, dressed as usual in his red chechia, baggy
gray breeches, and striped gray cape, a bottle of bucha (fig spirits) at his
feet, opens the proceedings with a few solo songs, accompanying himself
on the ‘ūd; his playing is haphazard but his voice, well-oiled by bucha, is
strong and full-bodied. Jacob sings of the Ghriba, Rabbi Shimon, and the
Messianic return to the land of Israel. He begins with the famous song for
the Ghriba by the Jewish cantor from Jerusalem, Asher Mizrahi:7
I am the Ghriba
Whoever visits me is promised a place in Paradise
I am Serah, daughter of Asher
I entered Paradise and my eyes were alive
Whoever visits me is promised a place in Paradise
Father Yacoub promised that the Angel of Death would never touch me
Whoever visits me and prays at my place will never be harmed
I am the Ghriba
Whoever visits me is promised a place in Paradise

The miraculous Serah, daughter of Asher, and granddaughter of Jacob,

first appears in the Book of Genesis as one of the seventy Israelites who
went down to Egypt at the time of Jacob. She reappears, several hundred
years later, in the Book of Numbers as the only woman mentioned in the
much longer census of Israelites who left Egypt with Moses. For Talmudic
rabbis, the long-living Serah Bat Asher became a symbol of immortality, as
one who “never tasted death” and “entered paradise alive”; numerous
legends tell of her wisdom and her miraculous powers to help and protect.
In the Zohar she is assigned pride of place in Paradise; in Djerba, she fuses
with the Ghriba, taking on the attributes of the Shekhina.
The musical rituals center on a five-tiered hexagonal candelabrum, or
menara, mounted on a wagon and covered in multicolored shawls. Each tier
represents a level in the Djerban hierarchy of beings from the twelve tribes
of Israel through famous Tunisian rabbis, biblical patriarchs and matriarchs,
the two mystical Rabbis of Djerban Jewish mythology, Rabbi Meir Ba’al
Hanes and Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, to God, whose name is inscribed
within a Star of David. Crowning the whole are the tablets of the Law. In
the early afternoon, the menara is wheeled out before the crowd and
stationed in front of the dais, beneath the musicians. Waving a shawl the
master of ceremonies, mounted on the wagon, conducts a mock auction in
aid of the Ghriba, its rabbis, and its scholars. At the highest bid the shawl is
thrown onto the wagon and the musicians strike up a tune. After numerous
shawls have been auctioned, the menara, bedecked with shawls, is wheeled
out of the courtyard, followed by the crowd, and led in a procession down
the hill and through the village to the synagogue in Hara Sghira, watched
along the way by the Muslim residents who peer from open doorways and
windows. At various stages, the procession pauses, a chair is pulled out of
the crowd and, seated, Jacob sings a piyyut. When finally they reach the
synagogue the wagon is wheeled into the courtyard where more speeches
are made, prayers recited, and candles lit until the early evening, when the
wagon and its procession return to the Ghriba. The menara is then stripped
of shawls and wheeled into the synagogue, where its candleholders are
filled with burning candles. On the second day the rituals are repeated until
the menara is returned to the synagogue. Then, instead of decorating it with
candles, the pilgrims congregate in the anteroom of the Ghriba for the
closing formalities, which culminate in a speech by the Minister of
Tourism, who pays tribute to the rich contribution made by Jews to Tunisian
culture and society. Jacob closes the proceedings with an unaccompanied
song for the Ghriba:
O Ghriba, our Ghriba
You, who lighten the space within and between us
Beautiful, distinguished, proud, light of our spirit
O Ghriba, pure and honorable
Your joyful face guarding us
Helping us with your power

Reflecting on the rituals surrounding the menara as they experienced

them in 1978, Udovitch and Valensi interpret them in the light of Zoharic
mysticism:
When the menara has been adorned, perfumed, decked with fabrics which veil it from
people’s sight, it resembles a young girl about to be brought to her bridegroom. In fact, it is
called the “arusa,” the bride. The itinerary that it follows from the Ghriba to the various
 yeshivot of Dighet, which are so many masculine spaces, is comparable to the procession
leading the bride from her father’s to her husband’s house. The procession of the Ghriba
celebrates a wedding . . . the symbolic union of the masculine and feminine principles . . . But
there is more. The occasion of this celebration is the death of Rebbi Shem’un which is
designated as a hillula, a wedding, since the master of the Zohar went to meet his God on that
day. One of the major themes of Zoharic mysticism is that of the mystical marriage of the
community with its Lord, through which the hidden meaning of the Divine Word becomes
revealed in its infinite fullness. In Zoharic symbolism, the community represents the feminine
principle, and God the masculine principle. In Jerba, to lead the menara clad in a bride’s
finery in a procession is, in the end, to lead the community to meet its Lord. (Udovitch and
Valensi 1984:131)

SIGNS OF DISPLACEMENT
Djerba is a fertile island, watered by wells from beneath rather than rain
from above. On the rare occasions that rain does fall on the flat terrain, it
has nowhere to run and it was on one of those rare rainy days at the end of
December that I traipsed with my daughter, dressed in our English summer
clothes, through the puddles along the main street of Hara Hebira. We were
visiting my friend Hanna who I first knew as a young mother nearly thirty
years before. It was my first visit in nearly a decade, and my daughter’s
first. Opening the door, Hanna greeted us as though she’d seen us only
yesterday: preoccupied, she ushered us into her tiny kitchen, sat us down in
our dripping clothes, and put a pot on the stove for tea. She pottered
distractedly from one surface to the next. The problem—The drought.
Never before had there been so little rain: it was the end of December, and
not a drop had fallen. The land was parched; the rivers were running dry;
the harvest was ruined; the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) had fallen to its lowest
levels yet. Amazed, we suddenly understood. Physically on Djerba, where
she had lived all her life, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, Hanna was
in Israel.
In her study “Otherness and Homeland in the Case of Djerban, Tunisian
Jewry,” Naomi Stone observes that when, with the creation of the state of
Israel in 1948, their once mythical homeland and place of messianic
longing became a tangible reality, this created for the Djerban Jews “a
shifted conception of home” and a sense of “their own unbelonging in
Djerba” (Stone 2006:4). The resultant rupture with the past, she argues, had
a profound effect on the Djerban Jewish psyche, both among those who left
and those who remained: “Whereas once the Jews had identified Djerba as
home, and felt their belonging within it, in the new paradigm, notions of
home were ascribed more exclusively to Israel.” Tunisia’s emergence in
1956 as an independent state with a specifically Arab character served,
against the backdrop of Israeli-Arab hostilities, only to reinforce the Jewish
community’s sense of alienation and unbelonging. Their diasporic
experience of exile “at one time likely abstractly understood, shifted to a
newly-born, concrete sense of actual displacement within Djerba” (Stone
2006:5).
A physical rupture occurred with the voluntary emigration of the
majority of the community to Israel and the occupation of the formerly
Jewish homes by non-Djerban Muslims. Hara Kebira was officially
renamed As-Sawani (Gardens) and a mosque was erected at the entrance of
the village: in the late 1970s, a crackling recording of the adhan (call to
prayer) penetrated the air five times a day. Intensive construction through
the 1990s has turned the once separate Hara into what is effectively a
suburb of Houmt Souk. Yet the old Jewish quarter, with its traditional
white, single-storied homes interspersed by newer two-storied ones, its
courtyards and synagogues, has remained intact. Today it is still referred to
unofficially, by both Muslims and Jews, as Hara Kebira.
Even on my first visit in 1978, coinciding with Udovitch and Valensi’s,
physical signs of modernity were ubiquitous. The younger generations wore
Western-style dress, men and unmarried girls wore jeans, younger and
middle-aged men wore Israeli-style yarmulkes in place of the traditional red
chéchia, while younger married women in knee-length skirts and dresses
covered their heads with brightly colored scarves, eschewing the red bonnet
and pink ribbons worn by older women. Jewish jewelers from Hara Kebira
had set up boutiques in the tourist hotels springing up along Djerba’s new
coastal zone touristique; at night, young Jewish men rode out on motorbikes
to the bars and discotheques. Newly married couples were building separate
homes fitted with modern kitchens and bathrooms selected from Parisian
catalogs, instead of moving into the paternal family home, as had
previously been the custom. In the late 1970s, virtually every Jewish home
had a television; by the mid-1990s, Jewish households were tuning into
Israeli stations on satellite television and in 2006, a young Jewish
entrepreneur was setting up the first Internet café in the village. Yet in other
respects, notably those of religious significance, nothing seems to have
changed. Women are still barred from synagogue worship, marriages are
still arranged, religious rituals are meticulously observed, and traditions of
gender segregation are rigorously applied.
A comparable dichotomy applies to musical life. Since the 1970s, the
island’s hotels and discotheques have provided continuing exposure to
French, English and American popular music, while radio, television, film,
and other mass media provide contemporary Tunisian and Middle Eastern
sounds. At Jewish weddings, professional singers and musicians, flown in
from mainland Tunisia, France and Israel, perform an eclectic mix of
popular Arabic, Israeli, French, and American styles. Yet none of these new
musical influences appears to have penetrated the community’s sacred
repertory. Apart from the occasional inclusion of imported Ashkenazic
settings, piyyutim continue to be sung, regardless of the occasion, to the
traditional Djerban tunes. Formerly the genre most permeable to new,
secular musical influences, the piyyut has, in recent decades, reverted into a
soundtrack of the past. Nor have the new sounds inspired any other musical
activity. In the late 1970s, Jacob Bsiri, then in his mid-sixties, was the last
Jewish professional musician on the island; with Muslim instrumentalists
making up his band he was the mainstay of every Jewish wedding. At the
Ghriba celebrations, supported by a tār and darbuka player from Hara
Kebira, Jacob reigned alone, his powerful voice carrying him through the
entire celebration. Thirty years later, Jacob still has no successor, and his
performances at weddings are merely token events, briefly interrupting the
main musical entertainment provided by musicians from elsewhere. At the
Ghriba celebrations, Jacob’s scattered solo offerings impart an aura of
authenticity, his exotic presence representing the last, direct link to the
protectorate past as Israeli musicians return to provide the mainstay of the
traditional repertory.
On 11 April 2002, a truck filled with natural gas exploded at the
entrance of the synagogue in a suicide attack linked to Al-Qaeda. Twenty-
one people, mostly German tourists, were killed and many more wounded.
Since then, electronic screening has been introduced and access to the
Ghriba controlled. During the week of the pilgrimage, as planeloads of
Israeli and other foreign tourists descend on the island, checkpoints are
planted at strategic points on the island’s main roads. In the small Jewish
village, armed police lurk ominously around shop entrances and public
arcades; the street leading to the tourist hotel is blocked to traffic, and at the
checkpoint on the road connecting the village to the Ghriba, traffic is
stopped and documents scrutinized. Inside and around the Ghriba
compound, the police maintain a constant and serious presence.
On my visit in 1978 I stayed in one of the pilgrims’ rooms, which were
mostly occupied by devout pilgrims from the mainland. The funduq stayed
alive long after the hours of celebrations: the evenings were filled with
cooking aromas as families took their suppers on tables set out on the
verandas and balconies. As was customary in large public gatherings, there
was a conspicuous police presence; but the police were relaxed, joking with
the participants, clearly enjoying the party. Local Muslims, while unaware
of the specifically Jewish symbolism, participated as though for a public
holiday. The auctioning of the shawls, speeches, and public announcements
were made in the local Tunisian-Arabic dialect with a smattering of French.
Israeli Hebrew was confined to private discourse.
Today, the master of ceremonies, Marco Zaghdoun, originally from
Tunis, now from Paris, conducts the auctioning of shawls in French. Other
announcements and speeches are in French or Israeli Hebrew. Even the
closing speeches, in the presence of the Minister of Tourism and his
entourage, are largely in French. Few, if any, local Muslims are there for the
celebrations alone; all those I spoke to were there in official capacities, as
functionaries in the synagogue, stall holders, or police. In contrast, the
Israeli presence is magnified and overt, Israeli Hebrew and French
displacing Tunisian Arabic as the prevailing public languages. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the musical entertainment, which, in recent years,
has spilled beyond the boundaries of the Ghriba compound to include the
space immediately outside the funduq wall. Throughout the afternoon, as
Jacob and his band accompany the dressing of the menara and the
auctioning of shawls to the traditional songs of protectorate times, a boys’
choir from Jerusalem, Pirhei Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Flowers), consisting
of about a dozen children of North African origin directed by their leader,
Hanan Avital, sings an eclectic mix of Oriental Israeli rock/pop, otherwise
known as musiqa mizrahit (lit. Eastern music), French popular and
Chassidic songs, and classic hits of the iconic Egyptian diva Umm
Kulthum, to a backing track, cheered on by an ecstatic crowd.
Effectively, Pirhei Yerushalayim has added a new celebratory space,
complementing the traditional Tunisian Jewish sound world of the funduq
with the contemporary North African Jewish sound world of present-day
Israel. Stationed at the entrance to the Ghriba compound, the boys’ choir
envelops the rituals inside in an atmosphere of Mizrahi Israeliness,
representing an alternative, more familiar present-day reality—one with
which the Jewish participants can more readily identify and to which they
feel they belong—than that of today’s Tunisian Arab environment,
perceived as alien and potentially hostile.

TIME, PLACE, AND MEMORY

The airplane which takes pilgrims to Jerba [sic] is a machine for going back in time, and Jerba
is the place of reunion. What you find there is yourself, and the membra disjectra of the lost
community. Not only does the Ghriba get the girls married, she also eases the pain of wahsh
wal-ghorba, the homesickness and pain of exile.
(Udovitch and Valensi 1984:130)

Most Djerban Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s settled
in moshavim (co-operative settlements) in the Negev desert, or in new
development towns in the area such as Netivot and Ofakim. Thus unlike
other North African communities, which tended to be dispersed around the
country, the Djerban Jews established relatively homogeneous
communities, even to the extent of reflecting individual village origins.
Reporting from her fieldwork in 2003–2005 Naomi Stone describes the
settlements as “a bit like replicas of the Haras . . . Djerban Jewish Arabic is
the almost exclusive tongue for first generation immigrants. Djerban rituals
are preserved (although not entirely  .  .  .) and local Djerban dishes are
prepared every day.” Subsequent generations, while speaking Hebrew,
“continue to retain many Djerban traditions.” She quotes a woman from
moshav Beit HaGadi: “The atmosphere here is like Djerba. They do the
holidays like in Djerba. The same bread, the same couscous. The moshav
and Djerba are the same.” And a family who immigrated from Djerba only
two years earlier remarked: “It is like Djerba here. The holidays, Shabbat.
The moshav resembles Djerba. In the moshav, everyone is religious, just
like in Djerba” (Stone 2006:102-3).
In 1956, Jews from Djerba built a replica of the Ghriba in Ofakim and
resumed the tradition of the annual pilgrimage there. Later, another replica
Ghriba was built in Netivot. Stone quotes her interviewees in Ofakim: “We
specifically made it to resemble the Ghriba so we could remember the
Ghriba.” “In the synagogue, they have maintained the same rules and the
same tunes of the prayers.” “A large menara is brought in procession
around the town and prayers are auctioned away. People come from all over
the place” (Stone 2006:103-4).
Yet religious symbolism is not the only factor motivating the continuing
annual pilgrimages, whether to Djerba or to the replica Ghribas in Israel.
Indeed, many returning Tunisians I interviewed on Djerba were only
vaguely aware of the symbolic meaning of the rituals or the mythology of
the Ghriba. A lady from Tel Aviv, a retired bookkeeper and grandmother
who had grown up in Tunis, told me that as a child her family never went
on the pilgrimages: she made her first visit to the Ghriba five years ago and
has come every year since. She spoke with deep appreciation of the annual
pilgrimages and the benefit they provide: “I love it; it is good for me.” Yet
she had no knowledge of the story of the mysterious girl, and the idea that
the Ghriba might somehow represent Jerusalem seemed strange to her:
“Jerusalem is Jerusalem, the Ghriba is diaspora.” Rather, for this lady, as for
many other returning Israelis, the pilgrimage to the Ghriba seems to satisfy
a different, no less deeply felt personal need, touching on levels of
communal memory at the very core of their Tunisian Jewish identity. While
presented in Zionist rhetoric as a Return from Exile (“Ingathering of
Exiles”) and perceived as such in the abstract, for many North African
Jews, the reality of immigration to Israel, whether voluntary or forced,
meant not only a physical abandonment of place but a denial of centuries-
old communal lifestyles and traditions—a denial which, even as they sought
to reinvent themselves as Israeli Jews, they experienced as exile and loss.
For these new Tunisian Jewish “exiles,” the annual pilgrimages to the
Ghriba provide opportunities to reconnect with their diasporic roots—to
rediscover themselves, individually and collectively, as Tunisian Jews.
In Israel, following the mass immigration of North African and Middle
Eastern Jews in the 1950s and 1960s, the cult of pilgrimages, whether to the
Ghriba or to different local shrines elsewhere, took on a quasi-political
dimension. In the context of modern Israeli society, with its predominantly
European roots and identity, the pilgrimages embody the collective
resistance of an ethnically and socially marginalized subgroup to Ashkenazi
cultural hegemony. Citing the Israeli sociologists Shlomo Deshen and
Moshe Shokeid (1974), Udovitch and Valensi observe that:
From Israel to Morocco, other commemorative rituals bring together Jews of the same origin,
gathering them around old or new pilgrimage sites  .  .  .  All of them express the same
 aspirations and the same nostalgias. These religious ceremonies are expressions of a social
aspiration: the aspiration of belonging to an integrated group  .  .  .  In Israel, they have also
become . . . a political discourse, a self-rehabilitation, in the context not only of uprootedness,
but also of déclassement and of cultural domination. (Udovitch and Valensi 1984:130)

In Israel, the year 1984 saw the founding of Shas—the political party
that gives voice to religiously observant Mizrahi and Sephardi
communities. The years around 1980 also saw the transformation of musiqa
mizrahit from a neighborhood “cassette” subculture into mainstream Israeli
popular music, and its burgeoning onto the international stage when, in
1983, the Yemenite singer Ofra Haza was selected to represent Israel in the
Eurovision song contest, winning second place with the song “Hay” (Alive)
(Regev and Seroussi 2004:226-29). In Tunisia, the 1980s saw parallel
challenges to unitary nationalist agendas and a concomitant decentralization
of cultural and economic policy. These tendencies were accelerated and
consolidated by the events of 7 November 1987 when, in a bloodless coup,
Habib Bourguiba, who had led the nation to independence in 1956, was
officially declared senile and succeeded by President Zine El Abidine Ben
Ali.8 In the shifting cultural and political landscape, film provided the ideal
medium for exploration, on an international stage, of long-suppressed
aspects of Tunisian culture and society, including its relationship with its
Jewish element.
In 1986, the seventy-four-year-old Djerban Jewish musician Jacob Bsiri
played the character of Levy, a Jewish carpenter and ‘ūd player, in Nouri
Bouzid’s Man of Ashes, a film exploring ideas about masculinity and taboos
surrounding homosexuality and sexual abuse. The sympathetic portrayal of
the old Jew as mentor and friend to whom the protagonist, a young man
who had been sexually abused as a child, turns for advice on the eve of his
wedding, drew criticisms of “Zionism” when the film was selected at the
Cannes Film Festival that year, overshadowing any controversy about the
film’s sexual content. Despite calls for its boycott for its “Zionist”
sympathies, Man of Ashes went on to receive the Gold Tanit at the Carthage
Film Festival. Responding to the accusations, Bouzid protested: “You want
to erase a part of my memory! I will not let you amputate a part of my
culture!” Recalling his motives nearly two decades later Bouzid explained:
“I wanted to pay homage to that old Jewish man who had raised Tunisian
music to new heights . . . I wanted to give life to characters who are almost
like that in reality . . . it’s that forgotten Tunisia that I’m interested in—we
have no right to forget people like that” (Bouzid 2004).
In an article surveying Jewish representations in Tunisian film, the
influential director and critic Ferid Boughedir identifies Man of Ashes and
the controversy it unleashed as a watershed, forcing Tunisians to confront
that “loss of the dimension of themselves” caused by the almost total
departure of the Jews after 1967 (Boughedir 1994:139). He cites subsequent
films by Tunisian Muslims portraying Jewish subjects, including a
documentary by Mounir Baaziz on the Ghriba pilgrimage (1993) and a film
by Selma Baccar about the tragic diva Habiba M’sika (1994), and he
previews his own A Summer in La Goulette (1996), a nostalgic throwback
to the multicultural society of his childhood set in the cosmopolitan port
and suburb of Tunis in the summer of 1966—the last before the departure
of the remaining Catholics and Jews. Boughedir writes poignantly of the
rupture experienced by Tunisian Muslims as a result of that exodus, and the
need to restore not only the Jewish but also other dimensions of Tunisian
cultural memory that had been suppressed by the nationalist movement:
Exile, separation, nostalgia are still, understandably, open wounds for many Jews who left
Tunisia twenty or thirty years ago and who are today half French. But they are not the only
ones to have been affected. Many Tunisian Muslims, among them intellectuals and men of
culture, feel orphaned since our separation—even if they don’t care to admit it openly . . . We
are living through very important times: we are in the process of rewriting part of our history,
the true history of Tunisia. In the narrative of one-party states, history is too often distorted by
leaving bits out, not only those concerning the Jewish community, but everything relating to
the taboos and prejudices of the time. It’s a question of being capable, at one point or another,
of re-instating the truth. I feel this is what we’re doing now . . . It is only by speaking of the
wounds—all the things that tore the two Tunisian communities—Muslims and Jews—apart,
that we’ll be able to transcend them. (Boughedir 1994:139-40)

In the current era of radical, entrenched, and opposing ideologies

unleashed on a global scale by the attacks of 9/11, Boughedir’s message of
pragmatic idealism, born of a conviction rooted in personal if not as yet
collective memory, seems as remote as the era (that of the Oslo Accords and
the beginning of the Israel-Palestine “peace process”) in which it was
conceived. Yet it remains all the more compelling. In the wake of the 2002
attack on the Ghriba approximately one thousand Jews remain on Djerba,
mostly in the big village. Each year, as thousands more Tunisian Jews
return from France and Israel to reenact the rituals of the Ghriba, parading
the menara, dressed as a bride, through the streets of the once Jewish Hara
Sghira (today’s Muslim Al-Riadh) to the tunes of protectorate times, they
give voice to the silent testimony of the six-pointed stars on the minaret of
Testour and the image of the menorah in the medina of Tunis not only that
Jews once lived in Tunisia but that a few still do so, and the shared cultural
memory of Tunisia’s Muslim and Jewish past lives on in the present.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My research on Djerba in 2006–2007 was supported by the AHRC research
leave scheme and grants from the University of Cambridge Travel Fund and
the Faculty of Music. I wish to thank my friends on Djerba, particularly
Jacob Bsiri and his family, for their time, hospitality, and engaging
discussions during this and my previous visits. The biographical
information on Jacob Bsiri and his family derive from my discussions with
Jacob in Hara Kebira in December 2006. Since Jewish women of Djerba
generally prefer not to be identified, Hanna is not my friend’s real name. I
am grateful to Emma Ainsley, Philip V. Bohlman, Nicholas Cook, Abigail
Wood, and the volume editors for their comments and suggestions on drafts
of this chapter, and to Habib Gouja of Houmt Souk, Djerba, and Itzhik
Na’aman of Omer, Israel, for their help in transcribing and translating the
Judeo-Arabic texts of the Ghriba songs.

NOTES
1. Maupassant’s observations relate more to the striking impression made by the Jewish
community than its relative size. According to the first attempted census of Tunisia’s population in
1921 (considered to grossly underrepresent the Muslim population), Jews numbered a mere 48,436
out of a total Tunisian population of 2,093,939. About 19,000 Jews lived in Tunis itself, and a further
3,600 in the suburbs (Sebag 1991:186).
2. Music was generally considered an undesirable occupation in Tunisian urban society at the
time. Although Jewish society tended to be more permissive than Muslim society, the music
profession was nevertheless regarded with considerable ambivalence, especially for women (see
Abassi 2000:13 and Davis 2009a: 195-96). See Abassi 2000:6-13 for biographical information and
recordings of some of the more famous examples of female Jewish singers.
3. See Davis 2004:94-96 and Davis 2009a: 194-96 for further discussion of this formative period
in Tunisian popular song and the role played by Jews. Jafran L. Jones discusses women, including
Jews, as musicians during the protectorate period (Jones 1987:72-76). Sadok Rizgui’s Al-Aghani al-
Tunisiyya, including transcriptions of about thirty popular songs, is the most authoritative
contemporary study, compiled in the early 1930s but not published until 1967.
4. See Idelsohn 1973:124 and Shiloach 1992:122ff. for discussions of the widespread practice in
Judaism of adapting tunes of popular songs in the vernacular to sacred texts in Hebrew. For examples
from Tunisia see Davis 1986, 2002, and 2009b.
5. The much-cited example is Andre Barouch, a wealthy Jewish textile merchant and militant
member of Habib Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour Party, who in 1952 was arrested and exiled by the
French for his nationalist activities. In 1956, Barouch was appointed Minister of Reconstruction and
Planning in Bourguiba’s first cabinet. However, he was dropped after the first cabinet reshuffle in
1957, and the gesture of having a Jew in the government was henceforth abandoned.
6. The pilgrimage to the Ghriba has parallels in other Jewish communities of North Africa and
the Middle East who commemorate the deaths of famous rabbis with pilgrimages to their tombs,
often coinciding with the pilgrimage for Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. The Jewish practice corresponds
to the Muslim cult of marabout, prevalent in North Africa, involving pilgrimages to the shrines of
holy men (and occasionally women).
7. Born in Jerusalem in 1890, the son of a well-known Torah scholar and teacher, Asher Mizrahi
found refuge in Tunis after escaping the Ottoman draft during the Balkan War (1912–13). He
returned to Palestine in 1919, when the country was under British control. When the Arab riots broke
out in 1929 he escaped to Tunis once more, this time staying for nearly forty years and establishing
himself as one of Tunisia’s most popular composers. He returned to Jerusalem in 1967, after the six-
day Arab-Israeli war, and died there that year. For a fuller biography see the Online Thesaurus of the
Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, available online at
www.jewishmusic.huji.ac.il/thesaurus.asp?cat=9&in=0&id=703&act=view (accessed August 2009).
8. For the effects of the cultural reforms on Tunisian music, see Davis 2004:105ff. and 2009a:
198ff.

REFERENCES
Abassi, Hamadi. 2000. Tunis Chant et danse 1900–1950. Tunis: Alif—Les Éditions de la
Mediterranée et les Éditions du Layeur.
Boughedir, Férid. 1994. ‘La communauté juive dans le cinéma Tunisien.’ Confluences Mediterranee
10:139-44.
Bouzid, Nouri. 2004. ‘Poupées d’argile: entretien avec Nouzi Bouzid.’ Le Monde libertaire 1369, 30
September-6 October, http://ml.federation-anarchiste.org/article2984.html (accessed August
2009).
Davis, Ruth. 1986. ‘Some Relations between Three Piyyutim from Djerba and Three Arab Songs.’
The Maghreb Review 11/2:134-44.
———. 2002. ‘Music of the Jews of Jerba, Tunisia.’ In The Middle East. The Garland Encyclopedia
of World Music 6. Ed. V. Danielson, S. Marcus, and D. Reynolds. New York: Routledge, 523-31.
———. 2003. ‘New Sounds, Old Tunes: Tunisian Media Starts Reinterpret the Ma’luf.’ In
Mediterranean Mosaic. Ed. G. Plastino. New York: Routledge, 121-42.
———. 2004. Ma’luf. Reflections on the Arab-Andalusian Music of Tunisia. Lanham MD:
Scarecrow Press.
———. 2009a. ‘Jews, Women and the Power to Be Heard. Charting the Early Tunisian Ughniyya to
the Present Day.’ In Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central
Asia. Ed. L. Nooshin. SOAS Musicology Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 187-206.
———. 2009b. ‘Time, Place, and Jewish Music: Mapping the Multiple Journeys of “Andik bahriyya,
ya rais.” ’ In The Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean. In Memory of Tullia Magrini. Ed.
Philip V. Bohlman and Marcello Sorce Keller with Loris Azzaroni. Bologna: Clueb, 47-58.
De Maupassant, Guy. 1993. De Tunis a Kairouan. Ed. Mohammed Yalaoui. Tunis: Editions Ibn
Charaf. Originally published as Guy de Maupassant. 1890. La Vie Errante. Paris: Paul
Ollendorff.
Deshen, Shlomo, and M. Shokeid. 1974. The Predicament of Homecoming: Cultural and Social Life
of North African Immigrants in Israel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Idelsohn, A. Z. 1973. Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies. Vols. I-III. Philadelphia: Ktav
Publishing House.
Jones, L. Jafran. 1987. ‘A Sociohistorical Perspective on Tunisian Women as Professional
Musicians.’ In Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ed. E. Koskoff. New York:
Greenwood, 69-78.
Moussali, Bernard. 1992. ‘Les Premiers enregistrements de musique tunisienne par les compagnies
discographiques.’ Unpublished paper read at the colloquium Liens et interactions entre les
musiques arabes et mediterranéennes—Programme d’inauguration du Centre des Musiques
Arabes et Mediterranéennes. Hôtel Abou Nawas, Gamarth, Tunisia, 9–12 November.
Regev, M., and E. Seroussi. 2004. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel. Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Rizgui, Sadok. 1967. Al-Aghani al-Tunisiyya (Les chants tunisiens). Tunis: al-dar al-tunisiyya li’l-
nasr.
Sebag, Paul. 1991. Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie: des origines a nos jours. Paris: Harmattan.
Shiloach, Amnon. 1992. Jewish Musical Traditions. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Stone, Naomi. 2006. ‘Bilad Al Haqaniya? Otherness and Homeland in the Case of Djerban, Tunisian
Jewry.’ M.Phil. Thesis in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, St. Antony’s College, University of
Oxford.
Udovitch, Abraham L., and Lucette Valensi. 1984. The Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba,
Tunisia. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National
Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 CHAPTER 6
Displaced Sounds: Popular Music-Making among
the Irish Diaspora in England

SEAN CAMPBELL
The dominant forms of popular music in most contemporary societies have,
according to Simon Frith, “originated at the social margins,” among “the
migrant, the rootless,” the displaced (1996:122). This has certainly been the
case in Britain where, as one high-profile music magazine put it, “a potent
shebeen of home-grown music” has been ensured only by “a multi-ethnic
mix” in which “the immigrant Irish have proved most crucial” (Maconie et
al. 2000:83-84). The vital role played by musicians of Irish descent in the
history of British pop is as enduring as it is diverse, spanning such notable
figures as Lonnie Donegan, McCartney and Lennon, Dusty Springfield
(Mary O’Brien), John Lydon, Kate Bush, Elvis Costello (Declan
McManus), Kevin Rowland, Shane MacGowan, Boy George (George
O’Dowd), Noel Gallagher, and The Smiths.
Despite the longevity and diversity of this strand of second-generation
Irish music-making, it has received very little attention in accounts of
popular music in Britain (for a discussion of this point, see Campbell
1998:165-74). This is not to say that these musicians have been overlooked
in academic or journalistic work, for a vast bulk of literature has been
published on the figures cited above. However, what has been absent in this
work is any consideration of the musicians’ Irishness, so that issues of
difference and displacement have not yet been brought to bear on their
work. Indeed, many of the musicians cited above have, perhaps ironically,
been construed as quintessentially English (see, e.g., Campbell 2002:117-36
and 2007). Hence, when journalists and scholars have written about
Englishness in popular music, they tend to gravitate to figures such as John
Lydon, Oasis, and The Smiths, often without considering the fact that they
were the immediate descendants of postwar Irish Catholic labor migrants
(see Campbell 2002 and 2007).
In stark contrast, this chapter explores the particular ways in which
issues of difference and displacement have been evoked in “Irish-English”
rock music, noting how such themes might pertain to a migrant context.
The chapter focuses primarily on the work of The Smiths, while making
reference to other musicians. Before I present my account of this band, I
will outline the particular context from which they emerged, beginning with
the group’s founding member, Johnny Marr.

LOCATING THE SMITHS

Marr’s parents left their home in Athy, County Kildare in the early 1960s,
before settling among an extended Irish family on two adjacent streets in
the Ardwick district of Manchester (see Rogan 1992:112-14 and 1998; see
also Marr 2006). Marr has explained that during his formative years, he was
“surrounded by Irish culture,” not least during weekly music sessions at his
parents’ house (cited in Goddard 2006:52; see also Marr 2001). This aspect
of Marr’s upbringing was underscored by his family’s frequent trips to
Ireland, where a guitar-playing uncle taught him traditional Irish ballads
and popular songs (see Gore 1990:71, McIlheney 1985:33, and Rogan
1992:114).
Marr’s awareness of Irish difference was reinforced, he says, by his
experience of anti-Irish prejudice. In this context, the guitarist explains that
he “became accustomed to being branded an ‘Irish pig’ at school and on the
terraced streets of his native Ardwick” (cited in Dalton 1999:52). As he puts
it: “I had to put up with an awful lot of snide remarks and false media
reports about the Irish in England. I certainly did feel very different from
the rest of my friends” (cited in Boyd 1999a:6).
In the light of this remark, it seems significant that when Marr
assembled a songwriting partnership in the early 1980s, he first turned to
another second-generation Irish-Mancunian, Steven Morrissey. Morrissey’s
parents had left Dublin for Manchester in the mid-1950s, where the singer
was raised in an extended Irish family of uncles, aunts, and grandparents all
living on the same street (see Rogan 1994:10-15). “I grew up in a strong
Irish community [and we] were quite happy to ghettoize ourselves.” This
Irish dimension steeped into everything he knew growing up. As he has
said: “I was very aware of being Irish and we were told that we were quite
separate from the  .  .  .  kids around us—we were different to them.” Like
Marr, Morrissey also faced anti-Irish sentiment, not least being hailed as
“Paddy” at a time when “it was a bitter and malevolent slur” (cited in Boyd
1999b:5). The derogatory notion of Irishness that is evoked in the “Paddy”
stereotype drew on a long-standing discourse of anti-Irish prejudice that, for
L. P. Curtis, is “one of the largest secular trends in English cultural history”
(1971:27). Public expressions of such prejudice became especially
prevalent during the early 1980s, the period immediately prior to The
Smiths.

IRISHNESS, POP, AND POLITICS IN EARLY 1980S BRITAIN

Questions of nation and ethnicity had acquired a pressing significance at
this time, not least via the widespread “race” riots of 1981, but also
Britain’s military ventures in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, which
effected a conspicuous increase in patriotic sentiment in popular discourses
(see Gilroy 1987:51-59 and 72-113). In a major interview at this time, the
(Irish-descended) rock musician Elvis Costello drew connections between
the (then) current crisis about “race” and the experience of the Irish in
England:
You can point fingers and say, “These are the people who are the source of all your problems:
it’s the black people” . . . I’m English, but my ancestry is Irish, and they used to say the same
about the Irish as well. My wife’s Irish. Sooner or later, we’ll probably have to leave England
—because I’m sure the people of England will try and send the Irish back. (cited in Marcus
1982:15)

While Costello’s words were undoubtedly overblown, it is clear that issues

of Irishness had come into sharp relief, with a succession of IRA bomb
attacks on English cities, as well as the deaths of ten IRA hunger strikers,
dramatically focusing attention on this fraught period in Irish affairs (for a
discussion see Coogan 2000:486-501 and 513-14).
The ensuing expressions of anti-Irish sentiment made little attempt to
distinguish between Irish-born migrants and their English-born children. An
Irish mother living in Britain thus explained to a survey on migrant housing
conditions that, in the immediate aftermath of IRA attacks, her children had
not been able to “play outside the house” as they were likely to be “attacked
by British children and beaten” (cited in Whelan and Hughes 1976:43-44).
Similarly, the sociologist John Gabriel records that second-generation Irish
people became “the object of attacks” in English schools both “during and
after IRA bombing campaigns” (Gabriel 1994:85).
In this fraught context, the historic visit of the Pope to Britain in 1982 at
least served to increase the profile of Roman Catholics in England, the
majority of whom were—as was made clear at the time—of Irish descent
(see, e.g., Morris 1982:15; see also Eagleton 2001:11). However, this did
little to quell popular expressions of anti-Irish sentiment, with even the
liberal Guardian newspaper attacking the “un-English” character of the
Catholic reception, alleging that it smacked “of strange proceedings over in
Ireland, a country that no one can understand” (Anonymous 1982a).
Meanwhile, the right-wing Sun denounced the Irish, in this same period, as
“treacherous” (Anonymous 1982b), before the London Evening Standard
issued an especially noxious cartoon (a mock film poster advertising “The
Irish: The Ultimate in Psychopathic Horror” [Jak 1982]) that went on to
gain, as Martin McLoone points out, “a degree of notoriety among the Irish
communities in Britain [for] exacerbating the anti-Irish prejudice with
which they were already trying to cope” (McLoone 2000:60). Similar
caricatures of the Irish also emerged in the popular music milieu with which
this chapter is concerned. The high-profile rock paper, Sounds, for example
had—despite its self-proclaimed antiracist stance—published a plethora of
Irish jokes, printing sketches of an “Irish” skateboard (with square wheels),
expressing overt antipathy to Irish people en masse, and mocking the
country’s best-known rock musicians as (variously) “Bog Trotters” and
“Mad Paddies.” An especially telling review of Dublin punk band The
Radiators from Space in the music magazine Sounds scoffed at the very
notion of Irish people performing popular music, inquiring: “Irish punks?
Will it start ‘One, tree, faw, two’?” (Lewis 1977; for Sounds’ support of
antiracism, see Sutcliffe et al. 1978; for examples of anti-Irish humor see
Anonymous 1977, Robertson 1977, Katz 1977, Anonymous 1978).
It is significant that one of the most high-profile interventions that were
made against this mood of anti-Irishness came from a second-generation
musician, Kevin Rowland, the front man and lead singer with Dexys
Midnight Runners. This group’s debut single, “Dance Stance” (1979), had
been a riposte to the myth of the “thick Paddy” that prevailed at the time
(this Irish caricature was, as scholars noted at the time, the “most pervasive
humor theme in Britain” [Chapman et al. 1977:147], with the titular
“Paddy” serving less as a figure of fun than as “an object of contempt
merging into deep hostility” [Leach 1979:vii-ix]). In response, Rowland’s
song supplied an inventory of well-known Irish writers (such as Wilde,
Behan, O’Casey, and Shaw) in an attempt to offset ideas of Irish idiocy with
examples of Irish erudition. His simple litany of Irish artists—which was
punctuated with briskly delivered spoken-sung interjections (“They never
talk about . . .”; “They don’t know about . . .”; “They don’t care about . . .”)
—chastised people, says Simon Reynolds, “who tell jokes about stupid
Irishmen but don’t know about Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Brendan
Behan and the rest” (2005:296). This point was underlined in press
interviews in which Rowland explained that the song was “about how
everybody in England talks about the Irish like they’re not human” (cited in
Green 1980), adding that the country was “saturated with all these
comedians telling jokes about thick Irishmen. . . . It’s supposed to be light-
hearted, but underneath the surface, it’s not” (cited in Stokes 1980).
Rowland would go on, throughout the early 1980s, to offer a series of
similar interventionist gestures, with even his most lightweight and
commercial project, the Too-Rye-Ay album (1982), being born of a wish to
show English audiences that there were other aspects to Irish culture,
beyond the noxious ones that circulated in the British media. “I had a need,
in me, to find a way of saying that ‘I’m Irish and I’m not shit’ ” (in BBC2
2000). Meanwhile, the final Dexys album, Don’t Stand Me Down (1985),
was born in part of Rowland’s feeling of being (what he called)
“misplaced” (Dexys Midnight Runners 1996:sleeve notes) with critics
noting its stress “on heritage, on roots, on Irishness” (Stokes 1985; his
emphasis).
Also at this time, another second-generation musician, Shane
MacGowan, began to engage with Irish sounds and styles in his band, The
Pogues. And if Rowland had sought to mediate between Irish and English
cultures, then MacGowan served to express the lived experience of being
both Irish and English, presenting himself as irreducibly London-Irish,
while drawing on Irish folk and English punk in equal measures (see
Campbell and Smyth 2005:97). This unusual fusion made for a compelling
new aesthetic, with the band’s assimilation of folk and punk offering, for
Philip Chevron, “an expression of what it was to be second-generation Irish
at that time in England” (cited in Ferguson 2007). This point is confirmed
by Cait O’Riordan, the band’s bass player, who explains that prior to The
Pogues, “no-one talked about us [the second-generation],” and
consequently “You didn’t know how to articulate what your life was like”
(in Udell 2004), referring to the “very difficult [experience of] growing up
London-Irish in the 1970s, having this funny name and parents who had this
funny accent, with bombs going off  .  .  .” (cited in Simpson 2004). What
The Pogues’ songs offered, in this context, was the outlook of “a displaced
person” (Clerk 2006:90), with their oeuvre being “steeped in the language
of the outsider” (O’Hagan 1988).
Alongside this development emerged The Smiths (who performed their
debut show on exactly the same evening as that of The Pogues [cf. Rogan
1992:313 and Scanlon 1988:9]). And though it appears to have been a
coincidence that Marr assembled, in The Smiths, a group of second-
generation Irish Catholics, the band members have explained that their
shared background was a crucial point of group commonality about which
they were highly conscious. “We had an absolute affinity because of our
Irishness,” explains Mike Joyce, the group’s drummer (cited in Purden
2007b). This context would also, Marr relates, go on to shape certain
aspects of The Smiths’ oeuvre (see Male 2006).
What I want to consider, then, is how this experience of displacement—
of feeling out of place—was evoked in the group’s work. For although the
band would signal their Irishness in a variety of ways (for example in press
interviews and on vinyl “run-out” grooves, as well as through their
extensive Irish tours), The Smiths would largely eschew orthodox Irish
sounds and styles for an eclectic venture in the terrain of “independent”
guitar-based rock (for interviews in which the band’s Irishness is cited see
Worrall 1983, McCormick 1984, Adams 1984, McIlheney 1985, Darling
1987, Du Noyer 1987; for details of The Smiths’ Irish tours, see Rogan
1992:316-29; see also the reference to “Eire” on the “runoff” groove
message of Hatful of Hollow [1984]).

THE SOUND OF THE SMITHS

There were certainly stylistic traces of musical forms associated with the
Irish in postwar England, most notably folk (and, to a lesser extent, country
and western), such as Marr’s guitar riff in the opening moments of “Girl
Afraid” on The Smiths’ 1984 record Hatful of Hollow (for a discussion of
the “Country and Irish” music popular among the Irish in England see
Stokes 1994:3). Indeed, for Julian Stringer “the all-engulfing sound of folk-
rock [was] everywhere apparent” (1992) in The Smiths, a characteristic of
the group’s music that was undoubtedly enhanced by Marr’s use of “folk”
guitar tunings (see Gore 1990; for the use of “folk” guitar tunings in Irish
traditional music, see Vallely 1999:161-62), as well as by the mandolin solo
that appeared in “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” the
music for which Marr conceived while reflecting on his early Irish migrant
milieu (see Marr 2001).
But even in light of these considerations, it is clear that the aesthetic of
The Smiths was located within a particular rock idiom. It was certainly not
the group’s project, for example, to hybridize “traditional” Irish styles in the
manner of Shane MacGowan or Kevin Rowland. Eschewing such an
ostentatious display of Irishness, the principal musical codes that the group
mobilized were derived from an eclectic range of sources. These included
the “neo-folk” of 1960s American West Coast bands like The Byrds (in
“This Charming Man”), “folk revival” guitarists such as Bert Jansch and
Martin Carthy (“Back to the Old House,” “Reel Around the Fountain”),
1950s rock and roll (“Nowhere Fast,” “Shakespeare’s Sister”), the rhythm
and blues templates of 1960s rock bands such as the Rolling Stones (“I
Want the One I Can’t Have”), the funk techniques of bands like Chic
(“Barbarism Begins at Home”), and the fusing of standard rock patterns
with jazz (“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”) and high-life inflections
(“Ask”), influences that Marr would openly discuss (see Granada Television
1985, McIlheney 1985, and Gore 1990).
Despite such eclecticism, Marr typically concocted an unmistakably
“clean” and “bright” guitar sound (there was, for instance, little of the
distortion effect typically associated with post-punk and new wave bands),
but one that was nevertheless heavily laden with chorusing and
reverberation, and characterized (on record) by the multilayered textures of
numerous (electric and acoustic) guitar overdubs. In terms of his particular
style, Marr endeavored to perform both lead and rhythm parts
simultaneously, so rather than simply strumming a succession of power
chords, he instead tended toward the plucking of individual strings,
arpeggiating passing and auxiliary notes. However, while Marr’s guitar-
playing was customarily marked by high register quasi-soloist phrasing
(“This Charming Man,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Ask”), he
performed very few conventional guitar “breaks,” a trait that sprang in part
from The Smiths’ critique of rock machismo (see Mueller 1989; for an
account of machismo in rock, see Frith and McRobbie 1978/79).
Marr’s guitar tracks, which were usually tuned a couple of semitones
higher than concert pitch (see Gore 1990:73), were accompanied by
Rourke’s (conventionally tuned) bass parts, which tended toward
independent melodic lines (most pronounced in tracks like “This Charming
Man,” “Rusholme Ruffians,” and “Barbarism Begins at Home”), that were
untypical of post-punk, new wave, and “indie” bands, and perhaps owed
something to his previous involvement with funk and dance music.
Meanwhile, Joyce largely adhered to what Moore has called “the ‘standard
rock beat’ ” (Moore 1993:36) on a basic drum kit. Nevertheless, Joyce has
claimed that his drumming for The Smiths developed contrapuntally with
Rourke’s bass playing, suggesting that this was a key factor in the
distinctiveness of the group’s sound: “I’d always be going against what
Andy would be playing . . . It’s considered wrong to play against the bass
player, but that was what people first latched on to. It made The Smiths
sound different from other groups” (cited in Rogan 1992:155).
A more prominent aspect of The Smiths’ sound was, of course,
Morrissey’s vocal performance, which tended toward the “studied
ordinariness lacking in range and resonance” that Moore discerns in “indie”
vocalists, and was often characterized by a low to middle register “spoken-
sung” form of delivery (Moore 1993:133). Perhaps the most salient aspect
of Morrissey’s vocal, though, was its straining, as Stringer has put it, “for
‘correct’ [and] clear English diction” (1992:19), a feature that has certainly
not been an inevitable preference among English rock vocalists, nor indeed
for second-generation Irish singers. MacGowan, for example, at precisely
the same time, was developing an identifiably Irish form of enunciation.
Morrissey’s gravitation toward a specifically English singing voice is likely
to have been informed, at least to some degree, by his previous engagement
as a fan, critic, and musician with late 1970s punk music, which had been
marked by a proliferation of “local” voices (see Laing 1985:57-58 and Frith
1988:127). As Dave Laing points out, “[prior] to punk rock, British accents
in British rock music had been in a small minority” (1985:57-58). However,
despite this apparent adherence to the punk aesthetic, the “emotive
connotations” of Morrissey’s vocal tone were markedly different from those
of, say, John Lydon; the former delivered the bulk of his song words in a
manner that was characterized by “restraint and calm” (Stringer 1992:19-
20).1
Morrissey was also responsible for writing the lyrics that he delivered in
The Smiths’ songs, and it is worth noting that his words were clearly
foregrounded in the group’s performance (see Stringer 1992:16). In terms of
lyrical themes and images, Hubbs has discerned in The Smiths’ songs a
recurring engagement with, among other things, the tropes of “despair” and
“alienation,” as well as “self-mockery and -deprecation” (Hubbs 1996:272-
73). For his part, Morrissey has claimed that the principal sources from
which he drew included the works of Oscar Wilde and the (Salford-Irish)
playwright Shelagh Delaney (see Channel Four 1984, ITV 1987, Hoskyns
1984; for an inventory of references to Wilde and Delaney in Morrissey’s
song lyrics see Goddard 2004). Indeed, Terry Eagleton sees Delaney as
evidence of the “Irish émigré influence” on Salford (2001:54).
In this regard, then, the group’s work displayed little fidelity to
conventional modes of Irish musical expression. However, The Smiths’
oeuvre would arguably resonate, in often quite striking ways, with the
particular experience of the second-generation Irish in England, and
particularly with the trope of ambivalence that has emerged in accounts of
this generation. The first major survey of this generation, which was
conducted in the 1980s, pointed to the ambivalent status contained in the
everyday lives of the second generation, placing them at the meeting point
of two social and cultural worlds. The study also claimed that a particular
source of this ambivalence was “the job of assimilating conflicting demands
on their allegiances to both English and Irish cultures” (Ullah 1985:319). In
this context, it is interesting that this theme of ambivalence has also
emerged in the work of second-generation Irish writers. In an account of
Irish-English literary texts, Aidan Arrowsmith points to the ambivalence,
uncertainty, and confusion that has marked this body of work. Indeed, he
suggests that the theme that is most prevalent across the literature of the
second-generation Irish is “the sheer confusion of identity.” He thus
discerns a “disorientating and contradictory relationship to any sense of
identity,” alongside the “figuration of  .  .  .  confused identity through the
indeterminacy or absence of ‘home’ ” (1998:214-37).
Such tropes have also been discerned in the work of second-generation
Irish rock musicians. Jon Savage, for instance, suggests that an ambivalence
toward their roots is present in the work of both The Smiths and Oasis. He
points in particular to “an aspirant will to succeed, to move on up and out,
to go further than their parents were allowed to go, allied to a fierce pride
and anger about their background” (1995). Similarly, Rogan notes in The
Smiths “a peculiar sense of longing . . . which betrayed the ambivalence of
first generation immigrant sons caught between present and past”
(1994:10). Elsewhere, a certain homing desire—an outlook associated with
the displaced subject (see, e.g., Brah 1996)—was observed in The Smiths’
work, with Simon Reynolds hearing in the band a “yearning . . . to belong
somewhere [or a] pining for a home” (1988). Such comments provide a
useful point of departure from which to assess The Smiths’ work, not least
because the band’s address to notions of home and subjectivity was marked
by such uncertainty. Thus, while the group’s work was concerned with
notions of home, place, belonging, and origins, their address to these
themes was not marked by a sentimental wish to restore some kind of fixed
or stable origin, nor by a desire to abandon one’s roots or provenance.
Instead, it was consistently shot through with the tropes of ambivalence and
unease.

AMBIVALENCE AND UNEASE IN THE SMITHS

“Back to the Old House” (1983), for example, is a sparsely arranged slow-
paced lament, in which Morrissey’s plaintive spoken-sung vocal is matched
only by Marr’s delicately picked acoustic guitar (which conveys a sort of
folk sensibility).2 In the opening bars of the song, the first-person speaker
repeatedly insists: “I would rather not go / Back to the old house,” before
alluding, in the higher register of the bridge, to the “too many bad memories
there.” Throughout the track, however, this negation of home sits
incongruously with the song’s harmonic form, with the folksy style of
Marr’s guitar being more usually associated with a yearning or desire for
home. The quietly contrapuntal relationship that this sets up between the
song lyrics and their musical setting is momentarily resolved, however, in
the song’s final verse, when Morrissey emits a lyrical volte-face, unveiling
a previously unexpressed desire for return: “I would love to go / Back to the
old house / But I never will.” And if this suggests ambivalence rather than
closure, it is only underscored by Marr’s unresolved coda, which restores
the song’s opening segment, but only to fade on an unresolved major
seventh chord, thus evoking melancholy, which Marr has often discussed
(see, e.g., Goddard 2006, Marr 2006).
Similar sentiments can be found elsewhere in The Smiths’ work. A song
like “Is It Really So Strange?” for instance, offers a first-person account of
a ceaseless geographical journey between an intended destination and an
original point of departure. The opening lines of each verse thus signal the
direction in which the subject is heading (“I left the North / I travelled
South”; “I left the South / I travelled North”; “I left the North again / I
travelled South again”). In the course of the song the respective sites of
home and away are steadily conflated, until the narrating subject (who
becomes increasingly confused) openly refutes, in the closing bars, the very
notion of return to a stable home (“I realised, I realised / That I could never
/ I could never, never go back home again. No.”). The only stable
conclusion that the subject is able to reach is a stuttering acceptance of the
fact that home is a place that cannot be restored. In other words, that there
is, quite literally, no place like home. To complicate matters further, this
lyrical sentiment coincides with a straightforward instance of resolution at
the harmonic rather than the thematic level of the song. For just as
Morrissey is making the point that he can never, never go back home again,
Johnny Marr robustly closes the song on its tonic, the “home chord” on
which the song is built (in this case a ringing open E chord). As Sheila
Whiteley has explained, such chords have “strong connotations of home-
centredness” (1992:125). And in this context, the harmonic restoration of
the tonic appears to contradict the coinciding negation of home in the song
lyrics. Once again, this theme of home and return is rendered ambivalent or
uncertain.
A similar dichotomy takes shape in “London” (1986). Here, Marr’s
unusually repetitive guitar riff on a single low register note (bottom E tuned
to F#) works, with Joyce’s snare drum shuffle, to evoke the rail journey
related by Morrissey’s narrating subject.3 Stressing the anxiety of a home-
leaving addressee, the theme of uncertainty is invoked by the recurrent
lyrical hook (“Do you think you’ve made / The right decision this time?”)
that marks the end of each verse, as well as, crucially, the singer’s finale.
This theme is embellished, moreover, by Morrissey’s serial groans and the
guitar’s incessant stuttering. Yet it is also tempered by the sheer exuberance
of the band’s fast pace, connoting the visceral joys of departure, a point
that, in turn, is evoked by the subject’s noting of “the Jealousy in the eyes /
Of the ones who had to stay behind”—a grieving family unit whose cloying
domesticity is matched by the flattened, compacted sound of Marr’s
unusually dry guitar.
The implied desire to leave is subsequently rendered uncertain,
however, by the track’s solemn and cyclical coda, in which Marr’s ceaseless
succession of minor chords refutes any possible harmonic closure. An
accelerated shift in tempo during the final bars only serves to exacerbate
this further, effecting a frustratingly circular denouement that matched the
melodic contours of Morrissey’s vocal. As Nadine Hubbs has explained, the
latter’s singing sets “its own narrow confines and paces back and forth
within them  .  .  .  retracing its own path” (1996:280). Unable to resolve its
own conflicting urges, the song is forced to fade. Thus, while “the musical
scale  .  .  .  with its intervals, progressions and modulations [is] capable of
creating impressions of home [and] travel,” a song such as “London”
displays a reluctance to restore the “key which constitutes its ‘home’ ”
(Smyth 2001:160), rendering the narrating subject’s journey always
unfinished or incomplete.
The ambivalence evinced in such songs, which convey a sense of living
between different spaces (of being pulled “this way and that way, this way
and that way,” as Morrissey sings in “Stretch Out and Wait”), was
something about which Marr was highly conscious. He confirms the songs’
sense of ambivalence, and suggests that this was born, at least for him, of
the tension he felt between, on the one hand, an excitement about being in
England and the sense of adventure (and opportunity) that this entailed
while, on the other, feeling a certain yearning for an (absent) Ireland that
was evoked in innumerable ways in his early migrant milieu. Marr clearly
feels that the homology implied here—between a certain migrant mindset
and a specific musical mood—is valid (see Marr 2006). Thus, while
Morrissey was encouraged by his parents to be “very pro-Manchester [and
to] appreciate the opportunities we were being given in Manchester,” he at
the same time was immersed in Irish culture, not least via the iconography
of his parents’ home, which was decorated with harps, shamrocks, and Irish
flags, as well as other “strong Irish Catholic symbols” (cited in Purden
2007a). In this context, the young Marr felt a certain “schizophrenia” (cited
in Robb 2009:207), viewing himself and his second-generation Irish peers
as part of “a floating generation” (cited in Purden 2007a), located between
two antithetical national frames. He also claims that this was a quality that
he shared with Morrissey. Referring to the excitement that he felt while
writing for The Smiths, he explains that “balanced with this [sense of
excitement] was this sensibility that has always been tuned to melancholia
—which wasn’t that difficult because me and Morrissey had that disposition
in us. It was a strange thing: we were ecstatic about what was happening to
us and we had the melancholy” (cited in Robb 2009:207). Reflecting on this
point, Marr continues to suggest that this was “an Irish thing, . . . a weird
schizophrenic disposition,” adding that “the two of us were harnessing that
melancholy and putting it into our music” (cited in Robb 2009:207).
Whether or not this was the case, it seems clear that the work of The
Smiths, rather than seeking to resolve the ambivalence of the displaced
figure by asserting an excessive ethnicity (in the manner of, say, The
Pogues), or striving to pass as native (which Morrissey briefly did in his
solo career) offered instead an evocation of this ambivalence itself.
The examples that I have offered so far have all addressed the notion of
home in fairly abstract terms, and have failed to locate a specific Irish-
English context in which this theme of displacement might be staged.
However, as Arrowsmith (1998:237-38) has explained, engagements with
Irishness in second-generation texts often bear the traces of other discourses
(such as region and class), and thus if some of The Smiths’ songs cited
above are ostensibly concerned with, say, the absence of a former physical
home, or travel between a north-south English divide, the sentiments
engaged in such songs might nevertheless serve as an index of the band’s
general stance on issues of origins and “home” (whether in terms of
Irishness or, for instance, Northernness). Moreover, at key points in The
Smiths’ career, Morrissey made it clear that his lyrical ideas had been
shaped by the marginality he had experienced as a second-generation Irish
youth. The opening lines of the song “Never Had No-One Ever,” “When
you walk without ease / On these / Streets where you were raised,” are a
case in point. Over the drum kit’s disruptive riff, Morrissey’s singing is
marked by the kind of “blue” or “dirty” notes that he usually studiously
avoids (see Stringer 1992:19). His lyrical theme of unease is, moreover,
compounded by Marr’s circular sequence of minor seventh chords in 12/8
time (see Day 1988:13). Morrissey’s lyrics, meanwhile, were born of a very
particular experience:
It was the frustration I felt at the age of 20 when I still didn’t feel easy walking around the
streets on which I’d been born, where all my family had lived—they’re originally from
Ireland but had been [here in England] since the Fifties. It was a constant confusion to me
why I never really felt “This is my patch. This is my home. I know these people. I can do
what I like, because this is mine.” It never was. I could never walk easily. (cited in Owen
1986)

Such comments, when considered alongside the tracks discussed here,

appear to suggest that the narrating subject in The Smiths’ songs is denied
access not only to an absent home, which is somehow rendered
irrecoverable, but also to an immediate host milieu, which is simultaneously
out of reach. And clearly this sort of double-bind is highly typical of the
second-generation dilemma, in which the individual feels, on the one hand,
dispossessed from an ancestral home, and, on the other, marginalized from
the host culture.
What is especially interesting about The Smiths’ response to this is their
refusal to adopt a clear-cut subject position on either side of the
Irish/English binary, with the band instead developing a highly elusive
subjectivity that was very difficult to pin down. In song lyrics and
interviews, Morrissey typically refused to make clear his particular subject
position. Thus, in the opening moments of “How Soon Is Now?,” The
Smiths’ most famous song, he reveals himself as “the son and the
heir  .  .  .  of nothing in particular.” At the same time, the singer playfully
mocks the very notion of fixed origins, hence the allusion to “the Eskimo
blood in my veins” in “Stretch Out and Wait,” or the discovery, in “The
Queen Is Dead,” that he is “the 18th pale descendant / Of some old queen or
other.” And crucially, when he is faced, in “Cemetry Gates,” with a choice
between an English poet (Keats) and an Irish one (Yeats), the singer rejects
both and affiliates himself instead with a figure (Oscar Wilde) who has
occupied ambiguous terrain between these national frames (see Eagleton
1989).4 Such gestures of ambiguity were underlined by the “happy/sad”
music that Marr claims characterized The Smiths. Marr explains that this
mixture of vibrancy and melancholia was born of certain aspects of his
early Irish milieu, not least the migrant music around which he grew up,
and to which he was very much drawn. Once again, this relates, he says, to
the “schizophrenia” of his early migrant milieu, which he claims has shaped
his musical character (Marr 2006; see also Roach 1994:317).
For Marr, then, the dynamic interplay of these contrary poles was a
crucial aspect of The Smiths’ oeuvre. This issue also points to the heart of
the band’s stance on displacement. When asked to specify their national
affiliation, the band members are unambiguous. “I don’t consider myself to
be either [Irish or English],” Marr explains. “I hate nationalism of any kind.
I feel absolutely nothing when I see the Union Jack, except
repulsion  .  .  .  and I don’t feel Irish either. I’m Mancunian-Irish” (2001).
Morrissey, meanwhile, has said that he “had the best of both places [Dublin
and Manchester] and the best of both countries [Ireland and England]. I’m
‘one of us’ on both sides” (cited in Boyd 1999b:5). What such comments
point to is a strand of Irish-English music-making that has not been
constrained by either Irish ethnicity or English assimilation. Recognition of
this point offers a means by which we can map the diverse musical routes
traversed by the Irish diaspora in England, illuminating the variegated
aesthetic forms mobilized by the Irish-English in their negotiation of the
complex relationship between “where you’re at” and “where you’re from.”5

NOTES
1. Gino Stefani’s notion of “emotive connotations” refers, as Richard Middleton explains, to “the
agreed affective implications of musical events.” Thus, “punk is associated with aggression,” while
“singer-songwriters” are equated “with confessional intimacy” (Middleton 1990:232). Morrissey’s
vocal certainly appeared to gravitate toward the latter. Indeed, Morrissey tended to utilize the kind of
“confidential and ‘gentle’ vocal tone” that, for Laing, was fundamentally disavowed by most punk
vocalists (Laing 1985:116).
2. The first recording of this track was originally broadcast as part of a radio session for the John
Peel Show (BBC Radio One, 21 September 1983), and this is the version that I discuss here.
3. While rock musicians have often used acoustic, “folksy” styles to convey a nostalgic yearning
for “home,” they have conversely, Moore suggests, deployed “riff-based rock” to connote movement
to urban centers (see Moore 1993:92).
4. “It would be ironic,” explains Bracewell, “that Wilde and Morrissey, both Anglo-Irishmen,
would be England’s underground analysts at either end of the century” (1997:226).
5. I take these terms from Paul Gilroy’s allusion to rap artist Rakim (1991:3-15).

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 CHAPTER 7
On Taking Leave: Mahler, Jewishness, and Jazz in
Uri Caine’s Urlicht/Primal Light

BJÖRN HEILE
The beginning of Uri Caine’s rendition of the first movement funeral march
from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on the opening track of his Urlicht/Primal
Light (Winter & Winter 910 004-2) could hardly be less conspicuous: Dave
Douglas plays the trumpet fanfare much like an orchestral trumpeter would.
Only when the other instruments enter do we notice anything unusual.
Instead of the polished symphonic grandeur of the original, we are
confronted with the sparse and edgy sound of a chamber ensemble. But
nothing too untoward is happening: the musicians are playing an
accomplished and for the most part faithful arrangement of the original.
Caine clearly prefers to use the same instruments or instruments from the
same family as in the original whenever he can. At the same time he likes to
change instrumental roles instead of assigning instruments to parts in a
fixed manner, which leads to some more adventurous solutions. On the
whole, the instrumentation is not unlike, for instance, Schoenberg’s
arrangements for his Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen—his
reduction of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen springs to mind.
The chamber arrangement makes for exciting music-making. Where the
orchestral behemoth of the original often creates a blurry and woolly sound,
the agility of the Uri Caine ensemble makes sparks fly, at a fairly
conventional tempo. But this electric tension is the result not only of the
arrangement but also of the playing itself. The musicians are alert but
relaxed and their playing is—with exceptions such as the fudged first
trombone entry—precise but not metronomic. Although there is no stylistic
allusion, the jazz background of the performers is arguably detectable from
the nature of the musicianship. Nevertheless, if there is anything unusual
about the music, it is its faithfulness in both spirit and letter to the original.
One might be forgiven for expecting a jazz musician not to take the music
that literally—until, that is, the actual funeral march theme appears (bar
35/figure 2 with upbeat). Mark Feldman launches into this theme in the
style of a Yiddish fiddler, to the oom-pah of the other instruments (which
Mahler was too polite to score even though his bass suggests one). Apart
from such minor changes, the ensemble sticks closely to Mahler’s score.
But it is fair to say that we have never heard it like this before!

IRONY, “BANALITY,” AND THE MUSICAL

REPRESENTATION OF OTHERNESS: A BAKHTINIAN
PERSPECTIVE
It is well known that Mahler’s music references other voices, the musics he
heard around him: from military signals to Moravian, or more often
Bohemian, folk music. However, this aspect of his music was often viewed
with suspicion, as something slightly disreputable, or at least as in need of
explanation. This is not the place to review the extensive literature on this
aspect of Mahler’s work, but what emerges is that those critics, who do not
simply charge Mahler with triviality or banality, tend to explain these
offending passages away with recourse to the critic’s easiest cop-out: irony
or parody (see the critique of Mahler scholarship in Karbusicky 1999; cf.
also Karbusicky 1978, an earlier and equally excellent study of the
folkloristic influences in Mahler’s music). Probably the most sophisticated
discussion of the use of folkloristic material appears in Adorno’s Mahler
monograph (1960). Adorno comes back to the use of “trivial” or “banal”
material, as he calls it, time and again, and regards it dialectically:
Thanks to arrangements of this kind [rhythmic variations, such as in the Andante of the Sixth
Symphony, the Scherzo of the Fourth and the Kindertotenlieder], Mahler’s themes lose the
trace of banality that someone so disposed could criticize in some successions of intervals;
usually in Mahler the charge of banality dogmatically isolates individual dimensions, blind to
the fact that in him character, “originality,” are defined not by single dimensions but only by
their relationships to each other. That Mahler’s procedure is exempted by its
multidimensionality from the reproach of banality in no way denies the existence of banal
 elements or their function in the construction of the whole. What artifices such as these
metrical devices bring about in banal musical material is the very refraction that integrates the
banal into the art-work, which needs it as an autonomous agent, as an element of immediacy
in the musical totality. Even the category of the banal is dynamic in Mahler; it appears in
order to be paralyzed, not dissolved in the musical process without residue. (Adorno
1992:107-8)

This is undeniably a thought-provoking passage, but one thing is clear:

what we are not allowed to do, what is unmentionable, even unthinkable, is
to actually enjoy these so-called banal passages. And this is how Mahler is
usually performed: priority is given to what one might call the Germanic
symphonism, which seems to act as the neutral frame in which other voices
are subsumed. Using the terminology of Bakhtinian dialogics, one could
argue that Mahler captured the heteroglossia of his musical universe in the
stylistic polyphony of his music, in which the Germanic symphonic
tradition is the authorial discourse and folkloristic materials appear as
represented discourses (see Bakhtin 1968, 1984, and 1992 on Bakhtinian
dialogics; for an introduction to musical applications of Bakhtin’s theories
see, e.g., Heile 2004a and 2004b, Hatten 1994, and Korsyn 1999).
The advantage of a Bakhtinian perspective lies in the fact that it does
not recognize immanent hierarchies. While represented discourses often
appear to be subordinated to the authorial discourse, this is a question of
interpretation. The carnivalistic (another Bakhtinian term) performance of
the Uri Caine ensemble is a case in point, for it subverts the established
hierarchy between symphonic discourse and folkloristic material in
Mahler’s music and turns it upside down. While the musicians perform the
symphonic music with obvious enthusiasm, they demonstrate a particularly
keen ear for the representation of otherness in Mahler’s music, and they
specifically value these voices within his discourse that are so often
regarded with suspicion or disdain. In doing so, they seek to restore them to
something like their former glory, to recapture the original quality of the
music that has been lost in Mahler’s classical stylization and/or typical
performances of his music. In other words, the musicians’ relish does
justice to musics that Mahler was unable to. For we can speculate that the
“thrice homeless” Mahler was torn between, on the one hand, an instinctual
love for forms of music-making that expressed a perhaps diffuse feeling of
belonging, and, on the other, his classical training and his professional
position as conductor which required an absolute identification with the
official canon.1 By that time, of course, the gulf between high and low
culture had become unbridgeable, a point with which Adorno concurs.
It is this radical reinterpretation that makes Caine’s approach so
fascinating, particularly compared to the often-reified understanding of
classical music among jazz musicians who tend to regard it as a generalized
cipher for high-cultural prestige (for the role of classical music in jazz see,
e.g., Cooke 2002 and Joyner 2000). Caine enables us to listen to the original
in new ways, to discover new aspects that change its very nature. That,
surely, is the measure of a successful re-composition. As the following
quotation by Caine demonstrates, the rediscovery of the voices contained in
Mahler’s music is deliberate: “I used to listen to Mahler’s music in concerts
by the Philadelphia Orchestra. And sometimes I thought: If you played this
passage like that at a Jewish wedding, they would throw you out!” (see
Schaal 2000:63; my translation).

MAHLER, CAINE, AND THE QUESTION OF JEWISH MUSIC

But why the “Jewish wedding”? That Mahler was Jewish (at least until his
conversion to Catholicism in order to be eligible for the directorship of the
Vienna Hofoper) is well known (see, e.g., Kravitt 2002 and Painter 2005).
Mark Feldman’s performance of the funeral march theme clearly
emphasizes this aspect; both Caine and Feldman are Jewish, although not
all members of the Caine ensemble are. The clarinetist Don Byron, for
instance, whose klezmer playing is so vital to Caine’s Mahler projects, is
African American.2 Yet, whether Mahler’s music contains Jewish elements
is more debatable. There are basically two schools of thought, one
emphasizing Mahler’s position within the Austro-German symphonic
tradition and hence denying detectable Jewish influences in his music, and
another insisting that such influences are essential for Mahler’s music (see
Karbusicky 1999). The Uri Caine ensemble’s position within this debate is
obvious: never before has Mahler sounded so Yiddish—he is (re)claimed as
a Jewish voice. It is rather debatable, however, whether the funeral march
theme from the Fifth Symphony is of Jewish origin—assuming that this is a
clearly definable concept. Yet, Uri Caine is not proposing an archaeological
reconstruction of the models to Mahler’s music, but is responding to it
creatively. His music has at least as much to do with the fictional and
imaginary as with the historically factual, and its fascination is not least to
be found in the hypostatization of possible musics. In other words, it is to a
certain extent a simulacrum. Nevertheless, I would argue that his
construction of a Jewish identity as represented by Mahler is a political act.
Whatever the identity of the funeral march theme, the case of the trio
from another funeral march, although a famously mocking one, the third
movement of the First Symphony, is much clearer. This is Leonard
Bernstein’s chief example for his claim of Mahler’s musical Judaism, and
Vladimir Karbusicky presents sound evidence that it is indeed of Jewish—
specifically Hassidic—origin (see Bernstein 1960 and Karbusicky 1999).
Again, Uri Caine’s interpretation of this music is striking. The framing
canon on the minor variant of Frère Jacques is already a rather raucous
rendition (what with the murmuring by the cantor Aaron Bensoussan, the
up-beat glissandi on the electric guitar, the uncanny electronic samples, the
substitution of the original timpani by drums and generally coarse playing)
of what was a far from balanced and polished symphonic sound even in
Mahler’s original. But the real revelation is the trio (rehearsal numbers 5 to
8). Where Mahler adds a sentimental and humorous note in a gently
folkloristic idiom, Caine and his musicians embark on a full-scale Jewish
wedding dance. Once again, though, the notes are from the score, although
the musicians continue the klezmer idioms in instrumental solos.
Needless to say, the question of the Jewish origin or otherwise of
musical material is a fraught one. Mahler’s music, in particular, seems
forever transitional, in between, located in a luminal space, a borderland
claimed by various parties: between modernism and romanticism; between
Christian Western Europe and its variously rural, East-European or Jewish
other; between a Central-European legacy and an American claim for
inheritance (implicit, for instance, in the oft-repeated, but largely
unfounded, claim that the rediscovery of Mahler is due to Leonard
Bernstein). In fact, the more emphasis that is laid on the Jewish legacy in
Mahler’s music, the more legitimacy is granted to an American inheritance.
Hence, by referring to Mahler’s music and emphasizing its Jewish qualities,
Caine not only situates Mahler in the disputed territory of fin-de-siècle
Central Europe, but also writes himself into a history of Jewish music. In
interviews he has likewise made it clear that he identifies with his parents’
deep commitment to a (mostly secular) Jewish and specifically Hebrew
culture, and he names Israeli music as among his first musical influences
(personal e-mail dated 6 June 2006; for Caine’s parents see Schirmer 2006).
This concern for specifically Jewish musical traditions, particularly in
the context of jazz, can be found throughout Caine’s work. For instance, he
collaborated on a CD of Jewish music entitled Zohar Keter (1999), and on
his The Sidewalks of New York (1999), he embarks on a quest for the people
behind Tin Pan Alley, many of whom were Jewish—the title track is by the
Russian-Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin. Needless to say, the Tin Pan Alley
repertoire supplies a good part of the so-called jazz standards and was thus
instrumental in the shaping of American music—one need only mention
George Gershwin. Thus, Caine’s Mahler re-compositions have to be seen in
the context of his construction of a Jewish tradition within jazz. This is not
to suggest that Caine belittles the overwhelming contribution of African
Americans to the genre. Like most jazz musicians, his first two albums
Sphere Music (1993) and Toys (1995) include compositions by African
American jazz greats Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock, respectively,
and he regularly returns to these roots. The Sidewalks of New York similarly
contains pieces by such pioneering African American composers as W. C.
Handy, Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake. Yet, in view of recent attempts to
reduce jazz to an exclusively African American tradition, Caine’s claim for
co-ownership is unmistakable (for a summary of these developments see
Nicholson 2005; cf. also Ake 2002:146-64). This concerns not only his
engagement with Jewish elements, but also his fascination with classical
music more generally (a long-standing tradition within jazz) as well as with
samba/bossa nova, electronic dance, and many other musics. The history of
jazz that Caine constructs is that of a pluralist, hybrid discourse, not that of
a direct, linear cultural transmission from New Orleans to Bebop. That
Mahler’s music is similarly anti-essentialist and likewise marked by
syncretism and hybridity is only fitting.
In constructing a Jewish tradition within jazz, Caine is by no means
alone. The pioneer in this respect is John Zorn who, with his label Tzadik
and his various bands, among them Masada (named after a hilltop fortress
where Jewish rebels committed suicide rather than surrender to Roman
conquerors), propagated the idea of what he called “radical Jewish culture.”
Significantly, Zorn was at the center of the scene at the Knitting Factory, the
home of the Manhattan avant-garde (see Kennedy 2006, Wilson 2006, and
Nicholson 2002). The venue stood and still stands for eclectic
experimentation in which Jewish traits played an important part. The
importance of the Knitting Factory for Caine’s career is therefore no
surprise, as is the fact that most of his collaborators are drawn from this
circle and, indeed, Zorn’s outfits.
In contrast to the occasionally purist and essentialist Zorn, Caine is
careful to construct a dialogical and inclusive Jewish identity. The klezmer
and cantorial elements are complemented by other idioms such as
samba/bossa nova, funk, electronic dance music, or more traditional jazz
elements. His second album devoted to Mahler’s music, Dark Flame
(2003), also contains a track on which Caine reflects upon the Chinese
origin of the lyrics to Der Einsame im Herbst (The Lonely One in Autumn)
from Das Lied von der Erde by having Qian Qi’s original poem recited to
Mahler’s music transcribed for a duet of yangquin (a hammered dulcimer)
and dizi (a transverse flute). Caine’s numerous other projects carry further
this stylistic diversity of the Mahler CDs. Accordingly, when I asked him
about the role of a Jewish legacy in his music, he replied, “There are
certainly aspects of the Mahler project that definitely try to tie in Mahler’s
Jewish heritage with klezmer and cantorial versions of his music but I
would not want to be limited to this because I love so much other music!”
He also distanced himself from “narrow racial stereotyping” (personal e-
mail dated 6 June 2006).
Following the first Mahler project, Caine has also engaged with the
music of Wagner, Bach, Schumann, Beethoven, and most recently, Mozart.
Yet, the fact that the Jewish references in Caine’s music are not isolated but
are complemented by elements from other cultural backgrounds does not
make them any less significant. Furthermore, I would argue that there is
something special about Caine’s Mahler re-compositions. While his work
on other classical composers may not be less brilliant, it seems to be less
personal. It sounds as if Caine found a kindred spirit in Mahler. After all, he
also returned to him for a second album (not to mention Mahler in Toblach
[1999], a further live double-CD with the same material as on Primal
Light), something he has yet to do with any other composer.

DER ABSCHIED
The intersections between Mahler, Judaism, and jazz find their richest
expression in Der Abschied (The Farewell) from Das Lied von der Erde on
Urlicht/Primal Light. The piece is a veritable tour de force. In his Mahler
projects Caine tends to concentrate on relatively short pieces. His
arrangements of longer symphonic movements usually restrict themselves
to excerpts. In this context, one should not forget that the sophisticated
combination of fully notated music with various types of improvisation is
difficult to sustain over longer periods with structurally complex music,
particularly in live performance (although the Uri Caine Ensemble have
apparently performed arrangements of the Third and Sixth Symphonies
live; see personal e-mail dated 6 June 2006). Mahler’s original, however, is
around thirty minutes long, of which a little more than a third remains in
Caine’s version. Presumably on account of the song’s expressive force,
Caine was not prepared to follow his usual practice and use only a fragment
of the piece. Instead, he chose representative sections that, in succession,
capture some of the formal architecture as well as the emotional trajectory
of the original. In common with his usual practice, he also restricted himself
to sections in C minor or major, the overall tonic. Mahler’s original, by
contrast, modulates widely and establishes a secondary tonal center on A
minor. Within the selected fragments, Caine sticks even more closely to
Mahler’s original than usual. There are no instrumental solos, either added
horizontally to Mahler’s music or inserted vertically in between sections
from the original. The only noticeable deviations are the cantor’s
recitations, but these also replace Mahler’s recitatives with structurally and
functionally analogous passages and leave his harmonies largely intact (see
figure 1).
Figure 1: Tabular overview of Der Abschied (following Mitchell): shading refers to sections used by
Caine; small letters stand for minor, capitals for major keys.

Nevertheless, the result is quite fundamentally different from Mahler,

and the reason is to be found in the lyrics. As is his usual practice with
Mahler’s songs, Caine excises all the original lyrics, mostly giving the
vocal line to instruments. More confusingly, in Der Abschied, some
instrumental lines are conversely assigned to the cantor, whose employment
Caine justifies with reference to Mahler’s appreciation of cantorial chant
(see Schaal 2000). In keeping with cantorial practice, the new lyrics are of a
liturgical nature and are sung in Hebrew. In association with the new text,
the music acquires a radically different, new meaning—a meaning it could
not have had for Mahler, but one that nonetheless seems appropriate. This
demonstrates that Caine’s reinterpretations position themselves as
reflections and commentaries on Mahler, consciously from the perspective
of a later age, rather than as neutral renderings of his music.
The original lyrics of Der Abschied are a curious combination of two
poems by different authors, which in Mahler’s source, Hans Bethge’s
collection Die chinesische Flöte, are printed side by side: In Erwartung des
Freundes (In Expectation of a Friend) by Mong-Kao-Jen and Der Abschied
des Freundes (The Friend’s Farewell) by Wang-Wei. The link between the
poems, which Bethge established and Mahler seized upon, is friendship and
absence. In the first poem, the expected friend fails to arrive, and in the
second he departs. As has often been pointed out, departure here has to be
understood in metaphorical terms, and the friend seems to be none other
than Freund Hain—death itself. Incidentally, these chthonic signifiers were
entirely absent in the original Chinese lyrics, but are enlarged in every stage
of the cultural transmission. Although Bethge did not know Chinese, they
first appeared allusively in the translations he worked with. They are given
unequivocal expression by him and are subsequently seized on by Mahler
(cf. Mitchell 1985:157-500; see also Hefling 2000:28-53). In order to close
the cycle of the seasons, which shapes Das Lied von der Erde as a whole,
Mahler finishes with an evocation of spring that is of his own making.
While this on the one hand confirms the cyclical structure of nature, on the
other the work as a whole evokes that there is of course a certain finality to
the spring of rebirth—in essence, you do not really expect another autumn
and re-death to follow. This, together with the closing apotheosis on ewig
(eternal), seems to be beholden to a fundamentally Christian idea of
transcendence—the glorious apotheosis in C major may confirm this
reading. Caine magnifies the eschatological elements in the song even
further in two ways—musically by focusing heavily on the funeral march as
well as on the recitatives, and textually by raising the references to death
and the afterlife to the level of formal liturgy. In the course of this, the
question of whose departure we are mourning becomes rather more
existential.
Caine’s arrangement begins on a truly astounding note. The oboe’s turn
figure, the most basic motive in Mahler’s song, which seems so
quintessentially instrumental, is given to the cantor, and one notes with
surprise how well it is suited to a cantorial idiom. The Hebrew text used
here is the fifth verse from Psalm 118. In the King James version the words
are, “I called upon the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me, and set me
in a large place [i.e., free].”3 The solemnity of this opening can hardly be
overstated; however, the text is about liberation, not mourning, thus
establishing from the start the element of transcendence that in Mahler has
yet to be achieved. The cantor remains silent until we reach the recitative,
another moment of breathtaking intensity. While the cantor stuck to
Mahler’s original melody before, he engages in improvisatory melodic
flights on the original underlying harmony. As may be guessed from the
heightened emotional temperature here, the text is now more unequivocally
concerned with death, quoting El male rahamim (the prayer for the dead) in
its entirety.
God full of compassion
Who dwells over us
Grant perfect rest
Under the wing of the holy spirit
In spheres of the holy and the pure
They glow like the glow of heaven
The souls of the righteous men and women
Who went to their eternal world
For the charity of me mentioning their names
They will rest in the garden of Eden
And you will gather their souls with the souls of the eternal living
And they shall rest in peace where they lie
And we shall say amen.

The flexible framework of the recitative allowed Caine and Bensoussan to

fit the music to the words, and not the other way around, as they had to do
with the other sections.
This is followed shortly after by the only section of original vocal
melody that Caine kept intact, but that is now given over to verse six from
Psalm 118: “the Lord is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto
me?” So, once again, there is a message of hope and overcoming—
overcoming, however, in the face of terrible adversity. At this point, Caine
makes his biggest cut, a whole succession of arias—in Mitchell’s
terminology—orchestral interludes and another recitative (in A minor),
amounting to the main body of the piece. He rejoins the Mahler on the
varied restatement of the opening funeral march. This is followed up to the
recitative, which again is given over to the cantor. The text is made up of
the first four lines of Psalm 121:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

Once again, the theme here is overcoming adversity with the help of the
Lord. Significantly, the fourth verse shifts the perspective from the
individual to the collective—or rather it reminds the individual of his or her
collective identity. Again, Caine cuts the following sections which
reintroduce some of the earlier vocal material, and goes straight to the coda
in C major, with the trumpet carrying the vocal line. Overall, only the
beginning, two of the recitatives, the ending, and, above all else, the funeral
marches are kept—the main body of the vocal material has been cut. In this
way, the emphasis on death and mourning is even stronger than in Mahler’s
original. This is emphasized by the lyrics, which are appropriate for funeral
services. Perhaps funeral services of a special kind, however: the heavy
emphasis on the sonic emblems of European Jewry, of which Mahler was
such a prominent representative, and the piece’s overwhelming associations
with death on every level, which seem out of proportion for an individual,
together with the reference to the collective in the texts, seem to render the
piece a lament for the victims of the Holocaust.
This may explain why the Uri Caine Ensemble takes such pains to
emphasize the audibly Jewish aspects of Mahler’s music. The music
obviously acquired this symbolic meaning only after the Holocaust. It could
not have had the same associations for Mahler. Nevertheless, this is clearly
a justifiable approach to the music, one that reflects the historical
associations of the musical material prior to and after Mahler. Mahler is
thus depicted as a chain in a larger tradition—a tradition ostentatiously
taken up by Uri Caine. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to refer to the message
of overcoming contained in the liturgical texts, as well as in Mahler’s
original and, for that matter, the instrumental coda in Caine’s version. For
with his work, Caine contributes—as one of many—to the further
development of Jewish culture. But it is significant that Caine is referring to
the geographical as well as historical gap between the music and culture of
Mahler and himself. In other words, the music is audibly displaced. Caine is
reacting to Mahler as a late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century
American jazz musician, and he is appropriating Central-European Jewish
elements for jazz, not least in order to create a space for his own identity
within jazz. As in Mahler’s case, the Jewish elements are incorporated in a
wider cultural context, without necessarily losing their specificity. Yet
again, as with Mahler, they are not always appreciated within their new
context.

NOTES
 1. Mahler famously described himself as “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as
an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world—always an intruder, never welcomed”
(Mahler 1975:109). One could of course also say that he was multiply displaced.
2. For Uri Caine’s biography see Gilbert 2006b. There are numerous Internet resources with basic
biographical information on Caine, including his own site www.uricaine.com (accessed July 2006).
The arguably most comprehensive and informative source is Schirmer 2006. There are no significant
deviations between different sources (which are presumably all based on Caine’s own testimony).
Caine has confirmed certain aspects in a personal e-mail dated 6 June 2006. For Don Byron see
Gilbert 2006a.
3. I would like to thank Naomi Tadmor who helped me with the Hebrew.

REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor W. 1992 [1960]. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. Trans. Edmund Jephcott.
Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Ake, David. 2002. Jazz Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bakhtin, Mikahil. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introduction by
Wayne C. Booth. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
———. 1992. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bernstein, Leonard. 1960. ‘Who Is Gustav Mahler?’ Facsimile edited typescript for ‘Young People’s
Concert,’ given 7 February 1960. The Leonard Bernstein Collection, ca. 1920–1989. American
Memory. Music Division, Library of Congress,
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lbhtml/lbhome.html (accessed July 2006).
Caine, Uri. 1993. Sphere Music. CD. JMT.
———. 1995. Toys. CD. JMT.
———. 1997. Urlicht/Primal Light. CD. Winter & Winter.
———. 2003. Dark Flame. CD. Winter & Winter.
Caine, Uri, and Aaron Bensoussan. 1999. Zohar / Keter. CD. Knitting Factory.
Cooke, Mervyn. 2002. ‘Jazz among the Classics, and the Case of Duke Ellington.’ In Cambridge
Companion to Jazz. Ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 153-73.
Gilbert, Mark. 2006a. ‘Byron, Don.’ In Grove Music Online. Ed. Lara Macy. www.grovemusic.com
(accessed July 2006).
———. 2006b. ‘Caine, Uri.’ In Grove Music Online. Ed. Lara Macy. www.grovemusic.com
(accessed July 2006).
Hatten, Robert. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hefling, Stephen E. 2000. Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heile, Björn. 2004a. “ ‘Transcending Quotation”: Cross-cultural Musical Representation in Mauricio
Kagel’s Die Stücke der Windrose für Salonorchester.’ Music Analysis 23/1:57-85.
———. 2004b. ‘Kagel, Bachtin und eine dialogische Theorie musikalischer Intertextualität.’ In
Musiktheorie zwischen Historie und Systematik: 1. Kongreß der deutschen Gesellschaft für
Musiktheorie. Ed. Felix Diergarten, Ludwig Holtmeier and Michael Polt. Saarbrücken: Wißner,
62-69.
Joyner, David. 2000. ‘Analyzing Third Stream.’ Contemporary Music Review 19/1, 63-87.
Karbusicky, Vladimir. 1978. Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
———. 1999. ‘Gustav Mahlers musikalisches Judentum.’ Hamburger Jahrbuch für
Musikwissenschaft 16, 179-207; English translation: ‘Gustav Mahler’s Musical Jewishness.’ In
Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. Ed. Jeremy Barham. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, 195-217.
Kennedy, Gary W. 2006. ‘Zorn, John [Jazz].’ Grove Music Online. Ed. L. Macy,
www.grovemusic.com (accessed July 2006).
Korsyn, Kevin. 1999. ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue.’ In
Rethinking Music. Ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 55-
72.
Kravitt, Edward F. 2002. ‘Mahler, Victim of the “New” Anti-Semitism.’ Journal of the Royal Musical
Association 127:72-94.
Mahler, Alma. 1975. Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters. Ed. Donald Mitchell. Seattle: University
of Washington Press.
Mitchell, Donald. 1985. Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations
and Annotations. London: Faber and Faber.
Nicholson, Stuart. 2002. ‘Fusions and Crossovers.’ In Cambridge Companion to Jazz. Ed. Mervyn
Cooke and David Horn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217-52.
——. 2005. Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address). New York: Routledge.
Painter, Karen. 2005. ‘Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitic Critique in the Austro-German Reception of
Mahler, 1900–1945.’ In Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. Ed. Jeremy Barham. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 175-94.
Schaal, Hans-Jürgen. 2000. ‘ “Wie können Sie das Mahler antun?” Hans-Jürgen Schaal im Gespräch
mit Uri Caine.’ Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 161/4:62-64.
Schirmer, Vic. 2006. ‘Meet Uri Caine.’ In All about Jazz,
www.allaboutjazz.com/iviews/ucaine_1.htm (accessed July 2006).
Uri Caine Ensemble. 1999. Gustav Mahler in Toblach. I Went Out This Morning Over the
Countryside. CD. Winter & Winter.
———. 1999. The Sidewalks of New York. Tin Pan Alley. CD. Winter & Winter.
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www.grovemusic.com (accessed July 2006).
 PART THREE

Theories and/of Displacement

A philosophy of emigration is yet to be written. Its categories are still

unclear and blurred. But it should be written, because it would not only

be of importance for actual émigrés, but also for virtual ones.

Vilém Flusser
 CHAPTER 8
“THE SPLINTER IN YOUR EYE”: UNCOMFORTABLE
LEGACIES AND GERMAN EXILE STUDIES

FLORIAN SCHEDING
Almost immediately after the Nazi takeover in 1933, displaced intellectuals
began to theorize their situation. For example, in 1937, Erich Stern, a
psychoanalyst, philosopher, and pedagogue émigré living in Paris,
published the book-length study, Die Emigration als psychologisches
Problem (Emigration as a Psychological Problem). Two years later, Klaus
Mann’s Der Vulkan (The Volcano) was published in Amsterdam and came
to be regarded as one of the first major novels explicitly to address
emigration. After World War II, the first two empirical studies concerning
displacement from Nazi Germany were written by Walter Berendsohn
(1946) and Franz Weiskopf (1947), both émigrés who remained abroad.
Indeed, the biographies of several seminal figures on the Western
intellectual landscape that have contemplated displacement and discussed
its causes and consequences—Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W.
Adorno, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Edward W. Said, to name but
a few—are all marked by diverse experiences of migration. Having fled
Nazi Germany, Arendt, Adorno, and Brecht sought refuge in the United
States only to return after the German capitulation (Arendt and Adorno to
West Germany, Brecht to East Germany). Camus and Derrida were born of
French parentage but spent their early lives in colonial Algeria until the
families eventually returned to France. Said, the son of Palestinian parents,
was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Cairo, and, for the majority of his life,
worked and lived in the United States. This common familiarity with
displacement provides a natural explanation for their shared interests: the
attempt to process, on an intellectual level, the personal and emotional
distress of a fundamentally life-changing and painful experience. To put it
bluntly, what concerns you is on your mind. Adorno eloquently described
this painful self-awareness of his own situation during his American exile in
what one may be tempted to term a motto for the intellectuals named above:
“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass” (1951:80; all
translations are mine).
Such examples also illustrate that the topic of displacement for a long
time seems to have been almost entirely reserved for insiders, the émigrés
themselves. In spite of the colossal magnitude especially of German-
speaking migration during the Third Reich, those Germans unaffected
personally by displacement did not become interested in the issue until
some time later. It is this “discovery” of displacement in Germany since
1945 that forms the basis for this chapter.

EAST VERSUS WEST

Any postwar history of Germany is, in reality, a history of two Germanys. I
therefore start by considering the similarities and differences with regard to
the issue of displacement between East and West. My intention is to reveal
the extent to which two very different and, in many ways, opposite
ideologies initially resisted dealing with the past, and how they eventually
revised their positions.
Article 5 of the West German Grundgesetz, the constitution, declares
that art should be free from political interference, at least as long as it
abides by the political order set out by the constitution.1 Accordingly,
postwar society in the West by and large favored (or constructed)
autonomous and apolitical artists with libertarian rather than extremist
political views. “The path of autonomous and self-referential art,” as
Helmut Kohl, German chancellor from 1982 to 1998, put it, “was of course
also a form of resistance to all artistic dictatorship” (1986). At the time of
the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and early 1960s,
West Germans tended to praise artists and intellectuals whose viewpoints
accorded with the new system of soziale Marktwirtschaft (market
economy), of which the young Federal Republic was so proud.
 How did the numerous German intellectuals who had been forced into
exile during the Nazi years fit into this picture? Naturally, not all of them
had radical political views, and many of those who did, abandoned their
extremist attitudes during their years of exile, notably the former members
of the Bauhaus movement in the arts and architecture and, to a lesser extent,
those of the Frankfurt School. Before sketching the background of
widespread West German reluctance to discuss émigrés at all, let alone their
extremist or radical attitudes, it is worth noting that the views of those who
embraced the market-orientated system and opposed communist ideals were
praised to a disproportional extent. Many intellectuals in the young Federal
Republic lauded scientific methods and methodologies generally associated
with Anglo-American academia, such as positivism and empiricism, as well
as the émigrés associated with these ideas. Under the spell of the Marshall
Plan, “anti-utopianism, skepticism about planning, a sober adoption of
allegedly value-neutral American social-scientific techniques,” in Martin
Jay’s words, “were all attributes of the émigrés most admired in the initial
West German reading of their legacy” (1997:328). Accordingly, much of
the émigrés’ skepticism about these methods (Adorno springs to mind; see
Max Paddison’s chapter in this volume) was ignored in the immediate
postwar years. Instead of discussing the complexity of the émigrés’ past and
intellectual history and, thereby, facing Germany’s very own collective past,
Germans in the West sought to legitimize the economic-political model of
their new society through the émigrés.
Beside this “West German narrative of émigré de-radicalization,” as Jay
terms it, the issue of displacement as such was largely avoided. When it was
not, titles of cultural events such as the exhibition Ausgewanderte Maler
(Expatriate Painters, Leverkusen, 1955) lacked references to the political
reasons for the migration. Translating “expatriate” rather than “exiled,”
“expelled,” or “displaced painters,” the exhibition title implied that the
émigrés had left voluntarily (see Nungesser 1986:27). In fact, many West
Germans were explicitly hostile to the émigrés. The prominent conservative
politician and former German army officer Franz-Josef Strauss spoke the
mind of many when, in the West German 1961 parliamentary elections
campaign, he called former émigré Willy Brandt a traitor to his country, a
deserter who had abandoned Germany rather than defending it against its
enemies. He failed to clarify whether his comments referred to internal or
foreign enemies. Brandt had taken on the nationality of his host country,
Norway, and returned to Berlin in 1947 as a soldier in the Norwegian army.
Likewise, the attitudes toward émigrés in East Germany on some levels
reveal more about the observers than the émigrés themselves, for the
émigrés were seen through the East German political lens. Again, the
ideological attitude of the Cold War determined most viewpoints and led to
a politicization of the émigrés’ legacy. Their celebrity status was used to
legitimize the new social and political system. While those with alleged
libertarian capitalist views were lauded in the West, the East praised and
highlighted those it deemed the forerunners of socialism and the
Communist cause. On the other hand, the intellectuals principally
sympathetic to communism or Marxism, especially illustrious names such
as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others of the Frankfurt
School that chose to immigrate back to the Western enemy instead of
helping construct the Socialist society in the East, were pilloried, ignored,
or simply forgotten. Not surprisingly, those who had become victims of
Stalin’s regime during their exile in the Soviet Union (the actress Carola
Neher, for example) were ignored, since any comprehensive account of the
Nazi refugees “in Soviet Russia could hardly have concealed the depressing
fate of many émigrés inside Stalin’s machinery of terror” (John 1999:104).
Intellectual discussions in East and West largely reflected the unease of
dealing with the Nazi past. This is maybe most obvious with regards to the
issue of anti-Semitism. In the East, for example, the somewhat dubious
opinion prevailed that the writings of Jewish émigrés should be categorized
as “emigration literature” as opposed to “exile literature,” because the Jews
had not been politically, but ethnically persecuted. As Peter Petersen notes
in this volume, the prestigious East German encyclopedia, Kunst und
Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil (Art and Literature in Antifascist Exile),
for example, excluded most of the Jewish refugees, instead restricting its
focus to “those German artists and writers that pursued the liberation of
their fatherland from the fascist yoke in their exile” (Mittenzwei et al.
1979–1981, vol. 1:1). One factor for this Eastern denial of the centrality of
anti-Semitism was born out of the ideological aim of Realsozialismus
(Socialist Realism) to exclude the role of religious beliefs or institutions.
Peter Petersen observes that “only exiled communists mattered; social-
democratic, conservative, or, indeed, apolitical (Jewish) victims of
persecution, however, were deemed beyond interest” (1999:27).
 Conversely, the Eastern narrative of neglecting the importance of anti-
Semitism in the Nazi ideology was, and still is, diametrically opposed in the
West where the stress on the Jewish victims of the Third Reich sometimes
overshadows the significant numbers of those persecuted for other
“reasons” than being Jewish. The Holocaust cannot be underestimated as a
turning point in modern history. Nonetheless, the recently erected Holocaust
Memorial in Berlin, for example, with its official title Denkmal für die
ermordeten Juden Europas (Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe,
dedicated in 2005), seems to downplay the notion that the Nazi terror was a
crime not against any particular religion or people, but against humanity.
Albeit unintentionally, the Holocaust Memorial on one level offers a
striking reminder that there exists no monument of similar prestige or on a
comparable scale dedicated to the memory of the non-Jewish victims—
Roma, gays and lesbians, or political enemies—of one of the darkest
chapters in the history of humankind.
In the immediate postwar years, two different and often-conflicting
interpretations of German immigration and emigration had been employed
on either side of the Iron Curtain. Yet, both interpretations served to
legitimize the two hastily constructed states and their respective social
models while largely disregarding critical émigré voices. In 1968, for
example, the West German constitutional court banned the recent
publication of Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto on the grounds that it breached
the personal freedom of the actor Gustav Gründgens, even though
Gründgens had died five years earlier. Mephisto describes the rise to fame
and association with the Nazis of Gründgens, thinly disguising him as the
character Hendrik Höfgen. Completed in 1936, the novel had first been
published in the same year by Querido in Amsterdam, but did not find a
West German publisher until 1965. The heritage of Gründgens, who had
stayed in Nazi Germany as a collaborator, was evidently considered more
worthy of institutional protection than the artistic critique of the émigré,
Klaus Mann.
In spite of the Mephisto affair, the émigrés’ legacy was exploited less
blatantly in both the East and the West from the late 1960s onwards, even
though the reading of their history continued to be politicized. The student
protests in 1968 and the policy of rapprochement of Willy Brandt’s West
German government in particular supported an environment more open to
ideas critical of the social and political agendas of the young Federal
Republic. This development was paralleled in the East by an increasing
interest in the theorists that had remained in, or re-migrated to, the West. At
the same time, West German students and intellectuals broke the silence
and, mostly from the political left, began to question the role the previous
generation had played in the Nazi state and hierarchy. From that moment
on, everybody and everything was scrutinized for their possible
entanglements with the Third Reich, and, in fact, any fascist ideology.2
This ongoing self-reflection of the German people, who, some twenty
years earlier, had turned from fascists to democrats overnight, led in turn to
another politicization of the émigrés’ legacy. The leftist West German 68er
Generation, as it is now called, rediscovered virtually forgotten and
neglected émigrés such as Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who, after
having immigrated to the East in 1949, swapped sides and immigrated to
the West after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The theories of the
Frankfurt School in particular were used to back up attempts to criticize,
rethink, and restructure, sometimes radically, the very basis of the Federal
Republic. The fact that some of the former émigrés themselves, especially
Adorno and Horkheimer, were reluctant to spearhead the intended
revolution and were sometimes hostile to the (ab)use of their ideas did not
seem to matter. For the most part, the same prominent intellectuals who had
previously been pilloried as dissident Marxists—above all Adorno and
Walter Benjamin—were also rediscovered in the German Democratic
Republic. “As the flabby humanist pieties of Popular Front cultural politics
lost their hegemonic status,” to use Martin Jay’s words, “it was possible to
appreciate the virtues of writers who did more than compose exemplary
historical narratives in a socialist or critical realist style” (1997:329).

EXILFORSCHUNG IN THE ACADEMY

In this intense ideological Cold War context, there was, as witnessed by
surviving evidence, little effort to address the issue of displacement on a
scholarly or academic level. Indeed, it was mainly writers from non-
university backgrounds who dedicated themselves to researching the
émigrés’ stories. Pioneers, such as the German artist Hans-Albert Walter,
who first aimed to unite the isolated case studies in one discipline, became
the founders of what has since been called Exilforschung, exile studies (see
Walter 1974). In many cases, the lack of institutional support might account
for the relatively moderate number of publications before and during the
1970s. Then as now, no institutional support meant little chance of public
research money. Moreover, it paints a disturbing picture of institutionalized
unease with the émigré issue and, hence, the institutions’ and their faculties’
own pasts. With its efforts to restore Martin Heidegger to full professorial
status, for example, the University of Freiburg for many years displayed
little energy or enthusiasm to support projects of any significance
addressing its own history or that of its displaced faculty members. Even
today, the Walter-A.-Berendsohn-Forschungsstelle fur Exilliteratur in
Hamburg, founded in 1971, remains the only research center dedicated to
the topic at a German university.
The first academic congresses and symposia on the subject in the late
1960s and early 1970s were indeed held outside Germany, often co-
organized by German-speaking émigrés and usually conducted in German.
Two notable conferences in Stockholm in 1969 and Copenhagen in 1972,
for example, were coordinated by émigré Helmut Müssener following the
suggestion of émigré Walter Berendsohn. They even had German
conference names, Deutsche Literatur der Flüchtlinge aus dem Dritten
Reich (German Literature by Refugees from the Third Reich) and II.
Internationales Symposium zur Erforschung des deutschsprachigen Exils
nach 1933 (2nd International Symposium for the Study of German-
Language Exile after 1933). On the occasion of the second conference, the
Stockholmer Koordinationsstelle zur Erforschung der deutschsprachigen
Exil-Literatur (Stockholm Center for the Co-ordination of Research into
German-Language Exile Literature) was founded. In the United States, it
was also a European immigrant, Laura Fermi, who produced one of the first
publications in the area, the book-length study Illustrious Immigrants
(1968; rev. ed. 1971). It must have caused a stir there, for the 1970s
witnessed a sudden accumulation of conferences and symposia addressing
the Nazi émigrés. Like the Stockholm and Copenhagen symposia, these
American conferences were organized almost exclusively by Germans or
German-speaking émigrés, with papers and proceedings published in
German.3
Only in the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s did the study of exile
meet with broader academic and institutional attention inside Germany.
Since 1983, the Berlin-based Gesellschaft für Exilforschung (Society for
Exile Studies) has published substantial annual yearbooks and newsletters.
This academic society emerged in 1979 from the Research Seminar on
German Literature, a group organized in 1968 in New York by the Modern
Language Association (MLA). In 1981, Joachim Koch founded the
periodical Exil. Like these publications, the Sammlung Exil-Literatur 1933–
1945 at the former East German national library in Leipzig and the
Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945 at the former West German national
library in Frankfurt are all mainly concerned with the collection of
biographical and bibliographic data from literature.
Most publications (e.g., the encyclopedic Biographisches Handbuch der
deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 and the Handbuch des
deutschsprachigen Exiltheaters 1933–1945) endeavor to present their
meticulously gathered facts as objectively as possible. Still, they are
dominated by the aim of highlighting the victim status of the émigrés.
“Émigré” and “victim” are often rendered synonymous. “It is about people
expelled and eliminated from society by the Nazis,” Peter Petersen writes
(1999:31). By presenting all émigrés as antifascist victims, scholars who
had not left Germany could also present themselves as antifascist by
implication. This simplistic strategy contrasts with the diverse attitudes
toward Nazi Germany of the émigrés themselves, particularly of those
refusing to be called victims (e.g., the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy). The
émigrés’ viewpoints ranged from those with apolitical approaches who
opposed the politicization of their works and biographies to those who first
tried to compromise with the Nazis before being forced into migration—
and, of course, there were those without a clear position. Given the German
past, the position of German-speaking Exilforschung is of course
understandable: Exilforschung, like Holocaust studies, sought to play its
role in defining an antifascist political identity. Naturally, historical
disciplines are as embedded in historical circumstances as the very topics
they study. Still, monolithic antifascist proclamations are as one-sided as
those in favor of fascism because a strict negation mirrors the negated
object and, hence, affirms it. Today, the time might be ripe to de-politicize
this historiographic approach to the Nazi past, or at least to be aware of its
politicized dimension. It is not my aim, however, to drown in the waves of
the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Quarrel) here, for other authors have
discussed it with greater skill and insight than I could claim for myself.4
 MUSICOLOGY AND EXILFORSCHUNG
At first sight, it would seem that several factors should have encouraged an
active scholarly engagement after 1945 with musical displacement. More
than anything else, there is the sheer scale and prominence of musical
migration from Nazi Germany, which included figures who were
constructed as the predecessors of the avant-gardes in East and West,
notably Hanns Eisler and Arnold Schoenberg. In late 1940s and 1950s West
Germany, for example, the postwar focus on the Schoenberg Circle in
particular at (re)established festivals such as Darmstadt and
Donaueschingen suggest that efforts were made “to rehabilitate what the
Nazis had called degenerate art” (Eckmann 1997:31). Musical migration,
nonetheless, has received relatively little attention until comparatively
recently. Instead, the vast majority of scholarly work during the infant years
of Exilforschung focused on the displacement of literary émigrés, for
example Georg Heintz’s series (1972–1976) and John Spalek’s coedited
volumes on exile literature in the United States (1976–2005).
Peter Petersen has argued convincingly that the doyens of German
postwar musicology—he mentions in particular Friedrich Blume in West
Germany and Walter Vetter in the East—intentionally avoided the topic,
because it could have revealed their own entanglement in the Nazi ideology
and hierarchy (see Petersen 1999:27-28). Although one might agree with
this view, it does not explain the initial lack of interest in the topic of
musical displacement outside Germany.
The first musicological book-length study in the West came out in 1980,
a study of Ernst Křenek’s life and work in exile by Claudia Maurer Zenck.
In East Germany, Jürgen Schebera had authored a book entitled Hanns
Eisler im USA-Exil (Hanns Eisler in American Exile; 1978) two years
earlier, based on his doctoral dissertation of the same title submitted at the
University of Leipzig in 1976. Competition between East and West was
fierce. Maurer Zenck pointed out with a jealous undertone that Schebera’s
publication “cannot actually be described as a product of Exilforschung
because it neither reflects upon the implications of the term, nor does it
attempt to grasp them analytically. [Schebera] does not include detailed
analyses and confines himself to occasional comments of a rather
journalistic style” (1980:2fn). Already in attack mode, she discredited East
German Exilforschung as a whole, on the grounds that it presupposed
continuity of creative production rather than investigating possible changes
(see Maurer Zenck 1980:34).
A more recent publication, coedited by Hanns-Werner Heister, Maurer
Zenck, and Petersen, is particularly representative of German musicology’s
approach to displacement. Including biographies of musicians, describing
their exile in a number of host countries, and analyzing selected works by
elite composers from the viewpoint of exile, Musik im Exil (Music in Exile,
1993) was the first volume to attempt an overview of all aspects of German
musicological Exilforschung. While commendable in the ambition and
overall quality of its contributions, Musik im Exil followed a
methodological trend set by earlier articles. Most contributors concentrated
on biographical sketches of stellar composers such as Paul Dessau, Ernst
Křenek, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill. A logical extension of this
biographically centered approach reached its culmination in 1994, when
musicology followed literature studies to produce its own encyclopedia of
German-speaking displacement during the Third Reich (Stompor 1994).
More recently, in 2005, Petersen, Maurer Zenck, and Sophie Fetthauer
started the biographical Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der
NS-Zeit (Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians during the Nazi Period,
available online at www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de). This self-referential
tendency to avoid critical methodological debates in musicological
Exilforschung highlights a wider problem, namely the significant lack of
international collaboration in research between German-speaking and
international scholars. Addressing the German musical past, so the evidence
suggests, has long been considered a purely German affair.
One and a half decades after Musik im Exil, thus, musicological
Exilforschung remains in its infancy. In 2003, Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt has
polemically asked, “how should one refer to exile considering that these
lines will be published in a musicological journal?” (2003:57), and the
Gesellschaft fur Exilforschung only dedicated their most recent volume, the
twenty-sixth in the series, to music (Krohn et al. 2008). Alas, other
disciplines, in particular literature studies, realized the importance of the
topic and of international collaboration earlier, thus re-affirming
musicology’s oft-lamented characteristic to follow other disciplines rather
than inspire them. Maurer Zenck has argued that, as a latecomer,
musicology at least has the chance to learn from the errors committed by
others before (see Maurer Zenck 1999:4), but we must call into question
whether music scholars have taken this advantage thus far.

EUROCENTRISM
The debate on whether exile began prior to or in 1933, and whether it ended
in 1945 or later, exemplifies a disturbing characteristic of German
musicology. More than other disciplines, it has thus far only rarely
considered that musical displacement happened and continues to happen
outside Central Europe. Given the overwhelming scale of migration during
the Third Reich and musicology’s canonical focus on German-speaking
composers, this does not seem surprising. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of
exile is naturally not confined to Hitler’s fascism. Friedrich Geiger’s notion
expressed in the 1995 article “ ‘Exilmusik’—ein Gegenstand der
Musikforschung” (Exile Music—A Subject for Musical Research) that
“many among the exiled musicians born around the turn of the century were
on the brink of promising careers at the time when the Nazis seized power”
(1995:232) might be reasonable. Yet, he implicitly ignores displacement
and exile elsewhere, especially with a publication that attempts to define the
aims and suggest the methods of musicological Exilforschung in general.
Internal European displacement prior to 1933, for example the wielka
emigracja (great emigration) of six thousand Polish resistance fighters to
France and tens of thousands of civilians (most prominently in music,
Chopin) following the uprising of 1830 and 1863, the migration in the wake
of and during the Russian revolution and civil war that affected between
nine hundred thousand and two million Russians (Rachmaninoff and
Stravinsky among them), or several cases of migration during the Cold War
(Ligeti and Panufnik spring to mind), let alone migration outside Europe,
each with unique underlying principles and reactions, are as yet waiting to
be examined with detailed intellectual scrutiny. Instead, German
musicology places a particular stress on case studies of German-speaking
musicians and composers. Such focus not only ignores non-German-
speaking migration, it also hinders the establishment of different
methodological approaches in response to displacement.
One discussion in particular highlights the self-imposed Germano-
centric restriction to the Third Reich. In 1991, Ernst Loewy wrote of a
paradigmatic change in Exilforschung (see Loewy 1991). Other authors,
such as Wulf Koepke and Jorg Thunecke, make the same point: “The
transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century is tantamount to a
caesura in Exilforschung because it resulted in a paradigm change. The time
when this field of research was dominated by surviving witnesses has come
to an end, even though several of them still live among us today” (Koepke
and Thunecke 2004). The displaced are obviously the center of attention for
the discipline. Announcing a methodical change because of the decreasing
numbers of surviving witnesses, however, implies that Exilforschung
deliberately limits its scope. The discipline hence ignores displacement,
abduction, enforced migration, and exile as phenomena that permeate the
whole of human history and has by no means to be “historical . . . as it is
dominated by the perspective of generations born later” (Koepke and
Thunecke 2004).
Ironically, this chronological and Eurocentric limitation of
Exilforschung is contrasted by political responses to displacement and those
of humanitarian organizations. The numerous governmental,
intergovernmental, and nongovernmental institutions dedicating all or part
of their attention to the victims of displacement worldwide soon abandoned
their initial focus on migration inside or out of the European continent,
despite having been founded as a direct response to the European refugee
crisis of the first half of the twentieth century. The main international
organization dealing with all kinds of displacement, the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was founded in 1921 by the
League of Nations to deal with one and a half million Russians that had fled
several successive revolutions, more than half a million people escaping
from Ottoman territories, and countless others displaced because they
“suddenly found themselves in isolated minorities in one of the fiercely
nationalist successor states” of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the
aftermath of World War I (Smyser 1987:5).
After World War II with its estimated twenty-seven million refugees, the
UNHCR in 1951 produced a basic convention relating to the status of
refugees. Crucially, in 1967 the UNHCR went global and removed a
European geographic limitation. The 1951 document had defined refugees
as persons unable to return to their country “as a result of events occurring
[in Europe] before 1 January 1951” (Smyser 1987:11). Yet, despite all these
historical developments, German Exilforschung remains Eurocentric even
today.

A WORD ON TERMINOLOGY
Paradoxically, even a glance at Exilforschung reveals a surprising
reluctance to define the word that is so basic to the discipline, Exil.
Etymologically, things are straightforward enough. The German Exil (like
the English exile) can be traced back to the old Latin exsilium and exsul,
glossed as banishment and a banished man, respectively. The negative
connotation is even stronger in later shifts in the meaning of the word, as in
the Old French exilier or essilier (to ravage, to devastate) or in the
contemporary English exterminate, meaning literally to drive beyond
boundaries (see Brooke-Rose 1998:9). Etymologically, hence, Exil means
displacement in the narrower sense of the word, that is, enforced and
involuntary movement from one place to another.
Attempts at clarifying the term, nonetheless, have sometimes led to
confusing results. As mentioned above, East German academia labeled the
writings of Jewish émigrés “emigration literature” as opposed to “exile
literature,” because the Jews had not been politically, but ethnically
persecuted. The same level of confusion permeates Peter Laemmle’s
differentiation between emigration as “the event of involuntary
expatriation” and exile as “the state of banishment” (1973:510)—a slightly
pointless notion, for both definitions refer to being expelled and displaced.
The methodological preset to narrate displacement biographically, from
the viewpoint of the émigrés, had created a conundrum, for it implied that
any definition should ultimately depend on the self-perceptions of the
émigrés, some of whom considered themselves exiles despite their
voluntary expatriation (e.g., James Joyce), whereas others refused to be
called exiles even though they had been forced to leave their country (e.g.,
Walter Gropius). Bertolt Brecht “always found the name false that we were
given: émigrés” (2000:264) and, in 1971, Laura Fermi argued, “the word
‘refugee’ is out; ‘exile’ and ‘expatriate’ do not apply to those who intended
to become American citizens; and ‘émigré’ is awkward.  .  .  .  There is, in
conclusion, not a single word descriptive of a group whose motivations and
intentions were as varied as those of the European-born intellectuals, who
came here” (1971:15). Troubled by these diverse self-descriptions, some
writers have resorted to doubting the possibility of any terminological
definition. Referring to exile, emigration, migration, travel, and flight,
Sabine Eckmann writes, “in practice . . . such definitions are not of much
use” (1997:31).
Matters became even more confusing when, in August 1945, only
months after the German capitulation, Frank Thiess coined the term “inner
emigration.” Following Thomas Mann’s attack on all those who had
remained in Germany during the Third Reich as implicit collaborators,
Thiess and others were keen to narrate their sojourn in Nazi Germany as a
form of passive resistance (see Grosser 1963). In fact, Thiess’s own
passivity was markedly active. He wrote and published several novels in the
Third Reich, some of them to great public acclaim (Neapolitanische
Legende [Neapolitan Legend], 1942). Censorship of his work seems to have
been limited, for the Nazis banned only one novel, Das Reich der Dämonen
(The Empire of Demons), in 1941. During the West German antifascist
scrutiny of the 1960s, the “non-displaced” felt increasing pressure to relieve
themselves of the Nazi stigma and sought proximity in spirit to the émigrés.
Karl Amadeus Hartmann, for example, had remained in Germany
throughout the Third Reich but not participated in public life. Yet, rather
than employing terms such as self-imposed societal or political recluse,
Hartmann described himself as having been “part of the inner emigration in
Germany” (1965:14).

TOWARD A HISTORY OF DISPLACEMENT

Historical disciplines, including historical musicology, usually deal with the
past rather than the present. This retrospective condition might be one
reason why displacement and its influence on the Western world have only
come to broader academic attention in Germany in the last forty years or so,
several decades after the two world wars had sparked historically
unprecedented numbers of European migrants. A much more
straightforward and less philosophical reason for the reluctance to address
the issue of displacement in the two postwar Germanys was the general
unease of dealing with the Nazi years in the first place. Even after German
reunification, embittered feelings toward the émigrés persisted. As late as
1992, there was significant opposition to the last will and testament of
Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich had emigrated never to return to Germany
permanently, but desired to be buried in Berlin, next to her mother. The
word Vaterlandsverräter (fatherland traitor) circulated in the press, the
Berlin Senate canceled the planned homage, and protesting groups at the
gates of the cemetery accompanied the burial itself (see Kulpok 2001:1).
What does seem certain is that the émigré issue in the two Germanys after
1945 and during the Cold War period is marked by remarkably monolithic
and politicized readings of migration, especially up to the late 1960s.
Since migration has come into academic focus in Germany, the history
of Exilforschung is that of a discipline addressing its topics through a
looking glass. The sheer weight of twenty-seven million refugees during
World War II and the human catastrophe of the Third Reich accounts partly
for that fact. On one hand, scholars and historians tend to examine
displacement solely from the German perspective, and usually restrict their
research on migration caused by the Third Reich, with the lion’s share of
publications emphasizing German-speaking migration to the United States.
On the other, the prevailing focus lies on biographical case studies of
illustrious individuals. While the biographies of the first authors dealing
with exile, by and large displaced by the Third Reich themselves, are surely
the main reasons for the geographic limitation on the diaspora of European
intellectuals, biographical case studies might have special resonance for
scholars because they can “so easily identify with them” (Jay 1997:326).
Even at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with
regard to methodology and focus, German-speaking Exilforschung by and
large refrains from analyzing displacement at a particular place and time as
a mass phenomenon, or discussing the reasons for and consequences of the
phenomenon of displacement as such in order to determine patterns as a
whole. By zooming in and sharpening its focus on the migration of
German-speaking elite intellectuals during the Third Reich, Exilforschung
has allowed the wider picture to fade. Yet, the phenomenon of displacement
is not restricted temporarily to the duration of the Third Reich and its
consequences, or geographically to German-speaking migration to the
United States. Likewise, while biographical studies are important tools as
they gather data that are basic to the discipline, they do not illuminate or
discuss the phenomenon of displacement as such or trace displacement in
the creative works of the artists among the migrants. Even though forced
migration is made up of individuals, the phenomenon as a whole is greater
than the sum of the life-stories of the individuals who constitute it. The
causes as well as the consequences of displacement originate in and affect
societies as complex entities rather than individuals isolated and removed
from them.
Conditioned by persecution, displacement is inextricably linked to the
political and, hence, socio-historical dimensions of its time. Displacement is
not private, but political; it is not textual, but contextual. The sheer quantity
of migrants, refugees, exiles, and émigrés even during the Third Reich
alone contradicts any simplistic attempt to generalize “the bewildering
tangle of individual stories—some triumphant, others tragic—that make up
the migration” (Jay 1997:326). Maybe the only generalization possible is
that displacement must be understood as a complex and heterogeneous
mass phenomenon. Empirical research projects must of course continue, be
it with the collection of material such as interviews with firsthand witnesses
and Nachlässe (estates) in research centers or with regard to the
presentation of biographical data in encyclopedias. Yet, the time is now
upon us to analyze displacement in its social, cultural, and historical context
rather than as a biographical subtext of the artist in exile; to investigate
patterns in the whole; and to discuss, in an interdisciplinary manner, the
consequences and influences of displacement on both contemporaneous and
contemporary art and thought. The time has arrived to shift our paradigms
from Exilforschung to the study of displacement. For if we fail to take
displacement seriously—if we displace displacement from our
consciousness of history—it will become a splinter in our own eyes.

NOTES
1. Article 5/III reads: “Art and science, research and teaching are free. Freedom of teaching does
not absolve from loyalty to the constitution.”
2. Despite the doubtless sensible intentions, this scrutiny has sometimes led to grotesque results.
The German company Degussa, for example, has an exemplary record in examining its wartime past.
In 2000, Degussa helped create the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,
which raised millions of dollars for a special fund to be distributed to victims of concentration camps
and slave labor during the Nazi period. Yet, in 2003, its sponsorship of the building of the Holocaust
Memorial in Berlin was suspended because an affiliate company had supplied part of the gas for the
Nazi death camps.
3. Examples in the 1970s and 1980s include Lexington, Ky., 1971 (see Colloquia Germanica 1,
1971), Madison, Wis., 1972 (Grimm and Hermand 1972), St. Louis, Mo., 1973 (Hohendahl and
Schwarz 1973), Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1975 (Bell et al. 1979), Columbia, S.C., 1976, 1977, and 1979
(Elfe 1977, 1979, and 1981), Riverside, Calif., 1980, 1981 (Daviau and Fischer, 1982 and 1985),
Houston, Tex., 1982 (Koepke and Winkler 1984), Los Angeles, 1983 (Stephan and Wagener 1985),
Durham, N.H., 1985 (Pfanner 1986), Gainesville, Fla., 1988 (Stephan 1990), and Lincoln, Neb., 1989
(Pfanner 1991).
4. Led by left-wing and right-wing intellectuals between 1986 and 1989, the “quarrel” centered
on the questions as to whether the Holocaust should be regarded as a uniquely evil event in history or
whether it ought to be compared to other crimes, particularly those of Stalin’s Soviet Russia, other
genocides, such as the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, or even the suffering of those Germans
displaced as a result of WWII. Initially played out between the philosophers Ernst Nolte and Jurgen
Habermas, in the national West German press, the debate soon attracted widespread interest and was
characterized by a highly aggressive tone and frequent personal attacks on either side. The dispute is
summarized and documented in Augstein 1987.

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1933–1945. Exhibition catalog. Ed. Hartmut Krug and Michael Nungesser. Berlin: Fröhlich und
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Missbrauch. Ed. Frank Geißler and Marion Demuth. Altenburg: Kamprad, 26-46.
Pfanner, Helmut (ed.). 1986. Kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen im Exil. Bonn: Bouvier.
———(ed.). 1991. Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Exilanten. Bonn: Bouvier.
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Walter, Hans-Albert. 1974. ‘Zur Situation der Exil-Literatur-Forschung.’ In Deutsche Literatur im
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1947. Berlin: Dietz.
 CHAPTER 9
Adorno and Exile: Some Thoughts on
Displacement and What It Means to Be German

MAX PADDISON
As much as I recognize that intellectual individuality itself can only develop through
processes of adjustment and socialization, I also consider it the obligation and the proof of
individuation that it transcends adjustment.
(Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of

a European Scholar in America” 1998b:215)

The past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled. Earlier it was the warrant of arrest, today it
is intellectual experience, that is declared non-transferable and unnaturalizable.
(Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia 1974:46-47)

I
Theodor Adorno left Germany a year after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933,
first for England and then for the United States. His experience of exile in
the fifteen years between 1934 and 1949 can be seen as a paradigm case for
the effects of emigration, displacement, and the pressure to fit in and adjust
to an alien cultural environment. Much has been written about it, not least
by Adorno himself.1 Indeed, it was only through exile, so he later claimed,
that he became critically aware of the extent to which his whole way of
thinking and philosophizing had been dependent on a sense of place,
cultural context, and the idiosyncrasies of the language with which he had
grown up. There can be no doubt that this experience changed him
fundamentally and left a stress mark that ran right through his work,
becoming in due course a permanent and conscious feature of his
philosophical method. The perpetual sense of uncertainty and transience
that characterized Adorno’s emigration years led him to a philosophical
position that refused the security of absolutes and which is expressed in one
of the fragments in his Minima Moralia: “it is part of morality not to be at
home in one’s home” (1974:39).
Germany and its intellectual life, and in particular its traditions of
literature, music, and philosophy, were bound up for Adorno with the
peculiar possibilities offered by the German language to articulate an idea
of Geist so intrinsic to German culture and yet so impossible to transfer to
any other linguistic environment. His distress at having to leave Germany,
and the disorientation and humiliation he experienced in the first stages of
his exile in England, where he was unable to find work as a university
lecturer and had to become a student again, were compounded by the
indifference he encountered in British academic circles toward German
philosophy after Kant. He hoped initially, nevertheless, that he might adapt
to English culture sufficiently to be able to get an academic post, and even
gain British nationality. When these hopes faded, and he left England for
work in the United States, a further shock for Adorno was the confrontation
in America with a way of thinking shaped by mass culture and market
values, and where the dominant mode of theory was a form of positivism
within which Adorno’s inherited conceptual world had no meaning at all.
Under the circumstances, he might have been expected nevertheless to
adapt to the new culture simply in order to survive, in the way that
countless other newcomers to the United States over the years had had no
choice but to. Indeed, the expectation for all immigrants arriving in
America had always been one of adaptation to the American way of life. As
Adorno put it: “Adaptation [Anpassung] was still a magic word, especially
to someone fleeing persecution in Europe and from whom it was expected
that he would prove himself in the new country and that he would not
arrogantly insist on remaining the way he was” (1998b:225-26).
The experience of exile and emigration raises many issues in relation to
Adorno’s subsequent development as a thinker. It can be convincingly
argued that all the important elements of his philosophy and his aesthetics
and sociology of music were already in place before he left Germany in
1934, and all that happened subsequently was a matter of nuance and fine
tuning. Indeed, conceptually speaking this is undoubtedly the case (see
Grenz 1975:12 and Paddison 1993:21). Nevertheless, what is equally clear
is that exile forced him to confront much of what he had previously been
able to take for granted in Germany and which he was subsequently
compelled to question, leading to significant changes of emphasis in his
work, to a deepening of his understanding, and to a refocusing of his style
of writing, as old certainties crumbled and the need to encompass
uncertainty, contradiction, and non-identity became a matter of urgency.
The conditions that led to his departure from Germany and his exile in
England and America are already well enough known, and will only be
sketched briefly in what follows in order to provide necessary historical
context. My main interest concerns changes of emphasis in Adorno’s
philosophy brought about by the experience of emigration, and specifically
what it meant to him to be German in the light of the intense critical
reflection forced upon him by displacement, on the one hand, and on the
other by the terrible things that were happening in the name of German
culture in Germany itself at that time. For Adorno, the personal, the
political, and the philosophical were always closely intertwined, so it would
have been surprising if such a fundamental experience as exile had not
manifested its effects in all three areas. I argue here that this becomes
particularly evident when we consider what were for him such central
concepts as autonomy, individuation, and the refusal of instrumental
rationality as what, in effect, was the kind of Utilitarianism he found to be
the dominant way of thinking in Britain and America. But at the same time
Adorno was becoming painfully aware that aspects of his own
philosophical worldview were also deeply embedded in German culture as
a whole, and that a considerable critical effort would be required in order to
sustain a sense of conceptual continuity with, in particular, the German
Idealist philosophical tradition and the Austro-German musical heritage,
both of which the Nazis were in the process of systematically assimilating
and compromising as part of their larger totalitarian project.

II
Adorno’s reaction to the Nazi triumph in 1933 in Germany was one of
horror. He was half Jewish (see Wilcock 2000) and he felt instantly
vulnerable as what the Nazis categorized as a “Mischling”—his father was
Jewish and his mother Catholic, and he himself had been baptized a
Catholic. He was also a left-wing intellectual, and had plenty of reasons to
be concerned about his own safety, given his association, albeit
semidetached at that time, with the Marxist-orientated Institut fur
Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. At first, however, he seemed unable to act
decisively. One of his biographers, Stefan Muller-Doohm, writes:
“Overwhelmed by shame at his impotence in the face of the bestial events
unfolding before him, Adorno felt paralyzed” (2006:169). Then, on 8
September 1933, Adorno had the venia legendi—the right to teach in
German universities—removed, and he lost his position as Privatdozent (an
independent and unsalaried lectureship) in the Philosophy Department at
Frankfurt University, just seventeen months after he had first taken up the
teaching post in May 1931. At the same time his freedom to publish was
also severely curtailed. Naïvely, as it turned out, Adorno persisted in
believing that the situation could only be temporary, and that it was just a
matter of overwintering until things returned to normal. He decided he
could work as a music critic for the time being, in particular for the
previously liberal paper the Vossische Zeitung, but quickly found that the
pressure to conform to Nazi Party expectations created further problems for
him. After the Vossische Zeitung was closed down, and possibilities for
work became scarce, Adorno began seriously to contemplate leaving
Germany.
Because of family connections in England (Adorno’s uncle had an
engineering factory in London, as was uncovered by Evelyn Wilcock in her
research into Adorno’s period in Oxford [see Wilcock 1996a, 1996b,
1997a]), and through initial inquiries made by his Anglophile father, Oskar
Wiesengrund, into the possibilities of working at Oxford, Adorno decided
to move to England. Even though this had the immediate advantage that to
start with he could stay with his uncle and family in London, the
combination of his rudimentary English at this stage and the complexities of
English cultural and academic life were nevertheless alienating, and made
him acutely aware of his rootedness in German culture and the German
language, something he reflects on later in the fragment “English spoken”
in Minima Moralia (see Adorno 1974:47). As Evelyn Wilcock observes:
Adorno’s Minima Moralia deals directly with the relationship between philosophy and
personal life. Here in a significant exploration of problems that greatly occupied him, the
nature and limitations of linguistic communication and the specificity of cultures, Adorno
reveals that, as a child, he had an uncle with a factory in London. It is no accident that Adorno
 uses his childhood connection with England to illustrate a highly complex treatment of
questions relating to German culture and what it means to be German. (Wilcock 1996b:325)

He was accepted as a doctoral candidate at Merton College in 1934. He

had been advised that, in order for him to be considered for an academic
post in England, he would need to do a British doctorate, even though he
had already been through the German academic system of the initial
doctorate (Promotion) and the second, higher doctorate (Habilitation)
required to gain permission to teach in German universities. Adorno
remained at Oxford until early 1938, but during these four years, when he
was working on Husserl with Gilbert Ryle, he frequently returned to
Germany to visit his parents and friends there. Indeed, because Adorno was
in effect a postgraduate student he was required to “keep terms,” which
meant that, bizarrely, he was expected to leave Oxford at the end of each
term, as Stefan Müller-Doohm has pointed out, and spend his vacations in
Germany—something he did gladly, particularly for financial reasons,
although such visits became increasingly difficult for him (see Muller-
Doohm 2006:529). Also during these years he made some journeys to Paris
to visit Walter Benjamin, who was in exile there and was working on his
Baudelaire project. But while all this hardly fulfils the stereotype of the
Jewish philosopher in exile from the Nazis, Adorno’s period in England
was nevertheless fraught with difficulties, uncertainties, and frustrated
aspirations.
Adorno found it impossible to penetrate the tightly knit English
establishment, and in particular the Oxbridge “system.” When he arrived in
England he was a complete unknown, his achievements up to this point,
such as they were, had no standing at all at Oxford, and he seemed quite
unaware of the deep-seated function performed by the English old boy
network in oiling the wheels of influence in British society. Evelyn Wilcock
tells, without further comment, a story that says much about the reasons for
Adorno’s marginal existence at Oxford. She recounts how, while pursuing
her research into Adorno in England, she interviewed Isaiah Berlin, who,
even though some six years younger than Adorno, had already been
teaching at Oxford in the mid-1930s during Adorno’s time there. Berlin had
been at St. Paul’s School with Bernard Wingfield, Adorno’s cousin, who
had been born English and whose family name, Wiesengrund, had been
changed to Wingfield during the 1914–1918 war, but had offered no support
for Adorno. Evelyn Wilcock writes:
 There is no evidence that Adorno understood the public school/Oxbridge networking system
or that he ever exploited his Wingfield cousins’ school or university connections for his own
benefit. Perhaps he was afraid of embarrassing them. Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was at St. Paul’s
with the Wingfield boys, has confirmed that he had been quite unaware of the Wingfield
connection. Adorno introduced himself as Teddie Wiesengrund and made contact with Berlin
because the latter was then writing his book on Karl Marx. (Wilcock 1996b:335-36)

Before leaving Germany, Adorno had written in 1933 to one of the most
internationally minded musicologists in Britain for support—Edward Dent,
Professor of Music at Cambridge. Adorno’s letter was also followed up by a
very strong letter of recommendation from Alban Berg to Dent (who was
one of Berg’s strongest advocates in Britain through his role in the ISCM).
Berg praised Adorno in the strongest possible terms, describing him as “a
former pupil and very good friend” and writing: “I am deeply convinced
that what we are talking about here is someone who has an exceptionally
fine mind and who is able to bring to any kind of (philosophical-aesthetic)
position whatever is required to the highest possible degree” (cited in
Wilcock 1997b:367). Berg goes on to say that Adorno is also talented at a
practical level, and that he is a sensitive composer. Dent replied to Berg in a
long letter in German on 21 November 1933. In it he paints a bleak picture
of the possibilities in England for Jewish refugees, pointing out that there
were almost no opportunities for teaching aesthetics at Cambridge or
Oxford, and that, due to the large numbers of German and Austrian Jewish
musicians seeking work after having to leave Germany because of the
Nazis, there were few opportunities in music either (see Letter, “Edward
Dent an Alban Berg, 21.11.1933,” in Adorno and Berg 1997:354-60).
Dent’s uncompromisingly blunt letter regarding Adorno’s chances in
Britain turned out to be accurate, and no real opportunities presented
themselves over the period of nearly four years that Adorno spent there. He
published a number of short articles in German, Austrian, and Czech
journals, and very little in English. His most significant publications were
some articles for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (including articles on
Sibelius, and the essay “Über Jazz”) and a number of essays on Berg. His
resident’s permit did not allow him to work, so he remained dependent on
money from his father in Frankfurt. All things considered, the prospects
were not encouraging, although Adorno continued his work on Husserl,
even completing the typescript of a book on the theory of knowledge, and
doggedly carried on to serve the required number of years to enable him to
apply for British citizenship.
 III
Then Adorno received a call from Max Horkheimer from New York in
October 1937 asking him to join the relocated Institute for Social Research
there. Furthermore, he was also offered the possibility of funded work on
the Princeton Radio Research Project, led by the Austrian sociologist Paul
Lazarsfeld. Given his thwarted plans for life in England, Adorno needed
little encouragement to accept the invitation to go to America, and he and
Gretel Karplus (they had got married in London in September 1937)2 sailed
to New York in February 1938. In spite of the disappointments and setbacks
in his life as an émigré thus far, it could be said that Adorno’s experience
was in some respects relatively genteel, even if disorientating—at least
when compared to many other more dramatic examples of exile. It was not
life-threatening; it was, as far as these things can be, planned; and it was to
some extent gradual, in that Adorno did not immediately have to leave
Germany outright in 1933, and had also had time to make careful
arrangements for the move to America. The accommodation found for them
in New York and later in Los Angeles was comfortable, if modest. In many
other respects, however, his experience of exile was also one of extreme
intellectual and cultural displacement. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl has put it:
It would be difficult to describe Theodor W. Adorno’s connection to America . . . as a happy
or successful relationship. In fact, most commentators have rightly stressed its highly
problematic nature, either by pointing out how unable and unwilling Adorno was to adjust to
the American way of life or by emphasizing how the United States failed to receive and
integrate the persona and work of the German-Jewish philosopher. . . . there is no doubt that
he never felt at home in America; he always remained—and self-consciously so—the exile
waiting to be allowed to return home. (Hohendahl 1995:21)

Adorno’s work on the Princeton Radio Research Project with Paul

Lazarsfeld involved the necessity for him to familiarize himself with the
techniques of empirical social science—techniques toward which he found
himself inherently hostile. He describes the encounter in the following
terms:
The direction marked out for me through my first thirty-four years was thoroughly
speculative, in the simple prephilosophical sense of the word, though in my case inseparable
from philosophical intentions. I thought it suited me personally and was objectively necessary
to interpret phenomena, not to ascertain, organize, and classify facts, let alone to make them
available as information, not only in philosophy but also in sociology. To the present day I
 have never rigorously separated the two disciplines, though I well know that here as well as
over there specialization cannot be reversed by a mere act of will. (Adorno 1998b:216)

In this same passage, Adorno goes on to cite his extended essay “On the
Social Situation of Music” (1978), which he had published in the Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung in 1932 when he was still a Privatdozent at Frankfurt
University. It is this essay that provides a systematic account of the
predicament—both social and political—of music at that time, so he argues,
and it is the essay to which all his subsequent writings on music relate. He
claims that it “already had a thoroughly theoretical orientation, founded on
the idea of an inherently antagonistic totality that also ‘appears’ in art and
by which art is to be interpreted” (1998b:216). But as has often been
recounted, Adorno’s idiosyncratic attempt to bring empirical social theory
together with speculative critical theory failed quite spectacularly, and
funding for the Princeton Radio Research Project was not renewed by the
Rockefeller Foundation.
Even though he settled into life in America well enough, took on a
number of other research projects (largely sociological) at this period,
continued to try as best he could to orient himself within the dominant
empiricism that was required for his work, and kept a relatively low profile,
Adorno compromised remarkably little in his resolve to keep a sense of
continuity with the continental European intellectual tradition from which
he had come, and which was in danger of disappearing in Europe itself. It
was precisely this line of continuity through which contact had been kept
with a sense of a critical German intellectual and cultural identity
untarnished by the effects of the Nazi period that made Adorno and the
Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School so important for the
reestablishment of German society after the war in the new Bundesrepublik.
Looking back on his time in America in a radio broadcast for Hessischer
Rundfunk in 1968, Adorno said: “I have never denied that I have
considered myself a European from the first to the last. That I would
maintain this intellectual continuity seemed self-evident to me, as I fully
realized quickly enough in America” (1998b:215).
At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that Adorno’s reaction to
what he found in the United States must have been both mystifying and
irritating to those who came into contact with him. There is undoubtedly an
element of stubborn and even self-defensive provincialism as well as
elitism about Adorno’s refusal to absorb and be absorbed by this new and
disturbing but potentially liberating experience of mass culture—a culture
that was also paradoxically the product of a deeply ingrained and
individualistic sense of democracy. While Martin Jay in his article “Adorno
in America” (1984a) has identified many of the negative aspects of
Adorno’s time in the United States, and the contradictions they reveal in his
character, he also sees two important positive aspects of what Adorno
derived from the experience, and which he brought back with him to
Germany after the war. First, Jay argues that it was in America that Adorno
initially began to have doubts about “the redeeming power of high culture.”
Stripped of his naivety about culture and the peculiarly German notion of
Geist, he was for the first time able to recognize the ideological character of
this aspect of his thinking, and was thereby able to gain a certain distance
and objectivity in relation to his own cultural assumptions. Second, Jay
suggests that Adorno also recognized the deep roots of democracy in
American life, and took back with him to Europe in the 1950s a
determination to play his part in the education of Germany toward
democracy. Jay summarizes his view as follows:
.  .  .  although it might be said that while in America, Adorno tended to interpret his new
surroundings through the lens of his earlier experience, once back home, he saw Germany
with the eyes of someone who had been deeply affected by his years in exile. Negatively, this
meant an increased watchfulness for the signs of an American-style culture industry in
Europe. Positively, it meant a wariness of elitist defenses of high culture for its own sake, a
new respect for the value of democratic politics, a grudging recognition of the emancipatory
potential in certain empirical techniques, and a keen appreciation of the need for a
psychological dimension in pedagogy. (Jay 1984a: 165)

It is all too easy to exaggerate the extent to which Adorno failed to

adapt in America. In fact, he did take on American empirical methodology,
and also took it back to Germany with him after the war and employed it for
research teams at the newly reconstituted and rebuilt Institut für
Sozialforschung, even though he came to be critical of it once more by the
later 1950s (something to be seen even in his criticism of “positivism” in
relation to musical analysis [see Paddison 2002:218-22]). At the same time,
however, his conviction that he had accurately and systematically diagnosed
the dilemma of music and its relation to its social and political context in
his pre-emigration essay “On the Social Situation of Music” (1932) led to a
division within his theoretical and scientific work in America. On the one
hand there were a number of empirical projects in which he was involved
and which had a public face. These included, perhaps most importantly but
also atypically, the famous study of prejudice and authoritarian attitudes,
The Authoritarian Personality (1950), on which Adorno worked as part of a
research team which included Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson,
and R. Nevitt Sanford and which was funded by the American Jewish
Committee, and resulted in the celebrated “F-scale” as a tool for gauging
authoritarian tendencies in society. Then, as already discussed, there was
the Princeton Radio Research Project, his first American research project,
where he collaborated with Paul Lazarsfeld and had the assistance of
George Simpson. The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation,
but was never completed (the fragments, some published previously, most
not, have now been published in English translation as part of the Adorno
Nachlass as Current of Music in 2009, with a detailed contextualizing
introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor). Finally, worth mentioning for its
musical interest as well as its contribution to film studies, there is the
collaboration with Hanns Eisler on film music that was also funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation and resulted in the publication by Oxford
University Press of the book Composing for the Films (1947).3 On the other
hand there were his philosophical works, like Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1947) and Philosophy of New Music (1949)—works that were done in
private, without research teams and research funding, and which allowed
him and Horkheimer to return to their shared speculative approach.
Included with these must also be his collection of moral philosophical
aphorisms written over the whole period of his emigration years in England
and America. It was collected together at the end of his time in America,
and published in 1951 under the title Minima Moralia, the “Little Ethics,”
his deliberate inversion of the title of the famous work attributed to
Aristotle, Magna Moralia, the “Great Ethics,” and an example of his
favorite stylistic device, the chiasmus.

IV
These three books, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophy of New Music,
and Minima Moralia, are without doubt the most important to have come
out of Adorno’s exile in America. They share common themes and terms of
reference, and Adorno saw Philosophy of New Music as what he called “a
detailed excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment,” acknowledging
Horkheimer’s considerable theoretical and methodological influence on
both projects (1997:5), while Minima Moralia is dedicated to Horkheimer.
It is to these writings that we must look in order to achieve a full
understanding of his work as a result of his emigration, and in particular to
see Adorno involved in a process of critical philosophical reflection upon
his experience of exile. In the light of my brief historical account of
Adorno’s emigration years, I should now like to focus on a key
philosophical area of Adorno’s thinking, the concept of autonomy, with the
implications this had in the aesthetic, ethical, and political spheres.
The concept of autonomy is fundamental to Adorno’s philosophical
terms of reference from the period of his youthful Kantian studies with
Siegfried Kracauer. Particularly germane here is Kant’s famous essay “An
Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). In this essay
Kant defines Enlightenment as the “attainment of human autonomy”—not
just at an individual level, but also at an epochal level, as the epoch “freeing
itself from the chains of the past.” Kant argues that Enlightenment must, by
definition, be universal, that it affects all spheres of life, that it involves
“coming of age” and taking responsibility for our actions and their
consequences. To summarize Paul Connerton on this, from his book The
Tragedy of Enlightenment: it is the task of a philosophy of history to
elaborate this claim to autonomy, to demonstrate that it is man himself who
makes his world (see Connerton 1980:116). The implications of this
position, as an account of humanity’s self-reflexive stance at the start of the
Modern age, are still being worked through today. What is inescapable in
this process, given the thrust of the Enlightenment as identified by Kant, is
the application of reason, the control of nature, and the destruction of myth.
I have revisited the idea of autonomy in relation to its origins in the
Enlightenment here because, in spite of the often complacent dismissal of
Enlightenment values as an unfashionable humanism these days,
particularly following postmodernist critiques of the Enlightenment and its
underlying assumptions as “grand narratives,” Adorno’s development
cannot really be made sense of without an autonomy concept—especially as
he and Horkheimer go on to offer during their American exile what is
probably the most famous of all Enlightenment critiques in their joint book
Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Central to Adorno’s position is the conviction that, just as the promise
of the Enlightenment as the triumph of reason over myth has turned into its
opposite—that is to say, reason has turned against itself in the service of
unreason—so autonomy, the necessary outcome of reason, has become
contingent and illusory in the grip of a totalizing instrumental rationality. In
a nutshell, the argument put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer in
Dialectic of Enlightenment was that the Enlightenment contains the seeds of
its own destruction; rationality becomes repressive in the absence of critical
reflection; historical progress as Enlightenment becomes regression to a
state of nature (i.e., reified “second nature,” unable to question itself);
Enlightenment reverts to mythology and becomes ideology. Adorno and
Horkheimer claim that:
In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at
liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened Earth
radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of
the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for
fancy.  .  .  .  Ruthlessly, in spite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its
own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is
ultimately self-destructive.  .  .  .  Power and knowledge are synonymous. (Adorno and
Horkheimer 1979:3-4)

And they continue: “the instrument by means of which the bourgeoisie

came to power, the liberation of forces, universal freedom, self-
determination—in short, the Enlightenment, itself turned against the
bourgeoisie once, as a system of domination, it had recourse to
suppression” (1979:93).
And yet, Adorno argues, it is only through autonomy that any hope is to
be found. Such a concept of autonomy is not only important in an
overarching sense, but also down to the smallest details of Adorno’s
thinking. Autonomy has to do with identity, the sense of who one is, and
also at another level with issues of cultural identity (this is particularly
brought out in Adorno’s essay “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’ ”
[1998a]). And when understood in the context of the artwork, the values
associated with autonomous art as opposed to functional art, art designed
for social use, also take one interestingly toward problems of art for art’s
sake and toward formalism, as well as, in Adorno’s case, toward the
breakdown of autonomous art and the shattering of the idea of the
autonomous work itself. He argues that the tendencies of the social totality
are mediated within the structure of the autonomous work of art, and that it
is the task of a critical aesthetics and sociology of music to decipher the
social content of autonomous artworks. This is the substance of Philosophy
of New Music, and Adorno anticipates criticism of it on account of its
methodology and its focus, and also its relevance at such a time—that is to
say, how can a focus on mere works of art, and especially music, and with
such an esoteric methodology, be justified at a period when Europe itself
was in chaos? What Adorno has to say in reply to these hypothetical
questions says much about his view of Europe, and in particular Germany,
its music and its philosophy, seen from his exile. Along the lines of his and
Horkheimer’s Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno writes in
his Preface to Philosophy of New Music:
The author has no wish to disguise the provocative features of his study. It must appear
cynical after what has happened in Europe, and what continues to threaten, to lavish time and
mental energy on the deciphering of esoteric questions on the technique of modern
composition. Moreover, the obstinate artistic disputes of the text often enough appear as if
they directly address a reality that is uninterested in them. But perhaps an eccentric
undertaking will shed light on a situation still masked solely by its familiar manifestations,
and where protest is heard only when the public accord suspects some divergence from it.
(Adorno 1997:4-5)

And then he writes, in a passage which sums up not only his experience of
exile, of the effects of the war, and of his philosophy of new music and its
social mediation, but in fact his entire life’s work, brought into an intensity
of focus it had never achieved before his enforced emigration and seldom
did again with such concision:
This is only music; how must a world be made in which even questions of counterpoint bear
witness to irreconcilable conflicts? How fundamentally disturbed life is today if its trembling
and its rigidity are reflected even where no empirical need reaches, in a sphere that people
suppose provides sanctuary from the pressures of the harrowing norm, and that indeed only
redeems its promise by refusing what they expect of it. (Adorno 1997:5)

V
Adorno and Horkheimer were working on Dialectic of Enlightenment
before reports of Auschwitz began to appear in the USA. Nevertheless, the
book is obviously provoked by the barbarism that had swept Europe and
which had originated in one of the most apparently civilized, sophisticated,
and cultivated societies of the old world, using such systematic and
rationalized means to repress and eliminate millions of its own citizens as
well as those of much of the rest of Europe, and which had led to world
war. And yet they also argued that the results of the same impulse—the
systematic application of unreflective reason—were manifest even in those
societies that had not so far succumbed to Fascism, and contained the seeds
of their destruction. This was in part, they maintained, through the
domination of positivism in the social sciences and in part through the
domination of consciousness by the culture industry. It was in this sense
that they had understood from Kant, it could be argued, that all spheres of
life are affected by the process of Enlightenment and, importantly, by the
Enlightenment’s lack of critical consciousness. As with the Leibnizian
monad, the whole is contained in the hermetically sealed part, but the part is
unaware of its relation to the whole.
The effect of Adorno and Horkheimer’s joint reading of the crisis of
Enlightenment as a catastrophic failure of civilization colored everything
that Adorno subsequently did, even though all the elements of such a
reading were already firmly in place in his philosophy prior to his
emigration. What has to be recognized is that, not only was the crisis of
Enlightenment thrown into focus by the rise of authoritarian regimes in
Europe beginning in the 1920s and culminating in the Nazi takeover of
Germany and all that followed, but that for Adorno, even in exile in
America, where ostensibly he was safe and in a free and democratic culture
that was itself a celebration of Enlightenment values, the seeds of
authoritarianism and the threat to the autonomy of the individual sphere
remained part of the same demise of self-reflecting reason. Indeed, the rise
of McCarthyism in America after the war, provoked by the perceived threat
from Stalin’s Soviet Union, could be said to support this reading.
Nevertheless, it was hardly surprising that such a view of American society
was regarded as hurtful by Americans themselves, at a loss to recognize
anything other than ingratitude and willful misinterpretation in such a
reading. Because of his sympathies and his German origins, Adorno, like
the rest of the Frankfurt School in the United States, was kept under
surveillance by the FBI. But in spite of this, according to David Jenemann
in his book Adorno in America, the files now available show that “Adorno
emerges as someone who, despite his reservations about his exile home,
deeply and genuinely loved America” (Jenemann 2007:182; see also Rubin
2002).
The threat to autonomy remained a complex issue for Adorno. On the
one hand he regarded the idea of autonomy as an aspiration, not yet
realized, toward the survival of the individual as self-reflective Subject. At
the same time it also represented for him the insistence on a particularly
extreme version of the autonomy doctrine, what he calls pure “for-its-own-
sakeness” in the face of the triumph of the Utilitarianism of a commercial
and industrial culture that is total. It was this rejection of utilitarian values
that was in many respects such an appealing feature of German culture,
even in the context of the highly industrialized twentieth century—that is,
hostility to the commercialization of culture. Reflecting on the situation that
gave rise to the Holocaust many years later, in 1969, after his return to
Germany, Adorno wrote in his essay “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’
”:
The great German conceptions in which autonomy and the pure for-its-own-sake are so
exuberantly glorified were without exception also available for the deification of the
state  .  .  .  The urge towards boundless domination accompanied the boundlessness of the
“idea”—the one did not exist without the other. To this day history proves its nexus of
complicity in that the highest forces of production, the supreme manifestation of spirit, are in
league with the worst. (Adorno 1998a:208)

Adorno’s essay “On the Question: ‘What Is German’?” plays ironically,

of course, with the title of one of Wagner’s own essays: “What Is German?”
(1865/78), and it also makes loose reference, as Henry Pickford has pointed
out (see Pickford, “Translator’s Notes,” in Adorno 1998a:367), to Wagner’s
answer to his own question in a related essay, “German Art and German
Policy” (1867):
[W]hat German is: to wit, the thing one does for its own sake, for the very joy of doing it;
whereas Utilitarianism, namely the principle whereby a thing is done for sake of some
personal end, ulterior to the thing itself, was shewn to be un-German. The German virtue
herein expressed thus coincided with the highest principle of aesthetics, through it perceived,
according to which the “objectless” (das Zwecklose) alone is beautiful, because being an end
(Zweck, purpose) in itself, in revealing its nature as lifted high above all vulgar ends it reveals
at like time that to reach whose sight and knowledge alone makes ends of life worth
following; whereas everything that serves an end is hideous, because neither its fashioner nor
its onlooker can have aught before him save a disquieting conglomerate of fragmentary
material, which is first to gain its meaning and elucidation from its employment for some
vulgar need.—None but a great nation, confiding with tranquil stateliness in its unshakable
might, could ripen such a principle within itself, and bring it into application for the happiness
of all the world. (Wagner 1995b: 107)

Wagner is clearly drawing on the Third Moment of Kant’s “Analytic of the

Beautiful” in the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), and
in particular the formulation inferred from it that occurs at the end of § 17,
where Kant writes: “Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as
it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose”
(1987:84). The fundamental characteristic of the aesthetic experience, as
formulated here in his Third Moment by Kant, is therefore that of
“purposiveness without a purpose” (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck). For
Wagner, such a notion is tied up with the idea of the autonomous, integrated
artwork, but at the same time, as is quite evident in the above passage from
his essay “German Art and German Policy” (even in William Ashton Ellis’s
notoriously stilted translation), Wagner also universalizes the concept not
only as a quality particularly characteristic of the German people, but also
as a principle to be applied to the ordered German state. He wrote that “it
was the duty of the political powers to found that order in this lofty, world-
redeeming sense” (1995b: 108).
The autonomy principle is thus seen by Adorno to have strongly
conflicting aspects. On the one hand he interprets it as having the capacity
for a monstrous invasion and transformation of the public sphere when
pursued as an abstract principle, as the Absolute Idea, which is what
Adorno accuses a whole strand of German culture of in the period up to the
Second World War. On the other hand, as the Kantian “purposiveness
without a purpose,” it is also seen to offer the sole point of respite and hope
in a world totally dominated by the “for otherness” of the instrumental
rationality criticized by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of
Enlightenment. The same notion of autonomy and “for its own sakeness”
can therefore be made to serve at many levels, from the political macro-
level to the micro-level of the autonomous musical work. It seems to me to
be this that Adorno had honed in private, and in the personal aphorisms of
Minima Moralia. At one extreme, during the period of exile when Adorno
felt impotent in the face of world events, it certainly appeared to mean a
retreat from the public sphere, and the necessity to lie low for the time
being. This comes across powerfully when he writes: “The only responsible
course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and
for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and
unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the
shame of still having air to breathe in hell” (1974:27-28).

VI
As we have seen, the experience of the Nazi period and of the exile that
followed led in two very different directions for Adorno. On the one hand
the empirical approach to the social sciences continued even when Adorno
had returned to Germany after 1949 to take up his old post at Frankfurt
University and to become in due course Horkheimer’s successor as director
of the Institut fur Sozialforschung, and in fact Adorno saw it as a duty to
contribute to the process of creating a responsible democratic society in
postwar Germany. On the other hand, in the spheres of philosophy and in
particular in aesthetics, which continued to occupy all Adorno’s spare time
in the 1950s and 1960s, he went on to develop an even more elliptical and
densely formulated style of expression founded on the conviction that the
integrity—for which read “autonomy”—of the work of art persisted even in
the decline and disintegration of art itself. This was something that not only
occupied the subject matter of his aesthetic projects at this time—most of
them were to remain unfinished, like Aesthetic Theory, Beethoven: The
Philosophy of Music, and Toward a Theory of Musical Reproduction—but
which also became fundamental to the structure of the writings themselves.
The experience of exile did not lead to Adorno changing his basic terms
of reference in any fundamental sense. In fact, as I have already suggested,
the evidence is that those terms of reference were already largely formed
before he left Germany at the age of thirty-one, and that they remained
intact for the rest of his life. Instead, what emerged in his work after he
returned from exile were distinct changes of emphasis, tone, and
expression, and also of the structure of his thinking, changes that were
nevertheless highly significant, and caused the Nietzschean tendency of his
writing to come to the fore. This tendency manifested as an inclination
toward aphorism, incorporating the fragment as a structural element—
something that is very evident in the book that came most directly from his
exile, Minima Moralia, with its highly significant subsidiary title
Reflections from Damaged Life. Displacement had compelled him to
reassess his assumptions, faced with the fragmentation of a worldview he
had previously taken for granted, but without relinquishing, as he put it in
the essay “On the Question ‘What Is German?’ ”, “a sense of continuity and
loyalty to one’s own past” (1998a:205). The result by the 1960s, the period
of his greatest influence during his lifetime, and the period when he had the
ear of a whole generation of German radical students, was a philosophy
(Negative Dialectics, 1966), an aesthetics (Aesthetic Theory4), and one
could also say, if perhaps more cautiously, a music theory (for example
“Vers une musique informelle,” 1961) that made the attempt to operate in a
world without givens or absolutes, and to engage fragmentation without
succumbing to relativism.5
This leaves, as ever, the problem faced by all Adorno commentators: did
Adorno’s work simply end up as a self-referential formalism, the result of
the failure of radical political philosophy itself to engage effectively with
and intervene in the society of its period? I have not attempted a direct
answer to this question here. What I have considered, however, are these
issues in relation to a number of central concepts that get thrown into sharp
relief for Adorno at this time: the idea of autonomy and the survival of the
self-reflecting subject as individual; adaptation and conformity in the face
of authority and domination, whether that of totalitarianism or of the
standardization of the culture industry; and the discontinuity and
fragmentation of modern society in a state of crisis. Adorno sought to
remain constant to his view not only of the autonomy of the authentic work
of art, but also the autonomy of the self-reflecting and critical Subject, in
spite of the impotence he clearly felt during his years in America. He did
not betray his idea of the critical and radical work of art in the age of its
disintegration, even though he did not consider that art itself could do
anything except bear witness to the possibility of something better. Writing
from the perspective of his last years, Adorno wrote: “the True, the Better
in every people is surely that which does not integrate itself into the
collective subject and if possible resists it” (1998a:205).
This still leaves the question whether Adorno’s work constitutes a
coherent and consistent philosophy in its own terms, given its resistance to
integration, unity, and totality. Before his emigration he had come to regard
his large-scale essay “On the Social Situation of Music,” published two
years before he left Germany in 1934, as the most complete theoretical
statement of his position to date. Adorno intended it to act as the conceptual
framework for the Princeton Radio Research Project, Current of Music,
when he left for America in 1938. What gradually became clear to him,
however, was that this combination would not work, to the extent that he
could not satisfactorily bridge the gap between his pre-emigration
speculative Marxian model and the strict requirements of his American
empirical methodology. Furthermore, it also became evident that many of
his earlier strongly held theoretical convictions could not survive the
profound feeling of displacement that he experienced in his exile because
the cultural context that had previously sustained them did not exist in
America. There is a sense in which the very experience of displacement
became itself an enforced way of seeing for Adorno. One might say that the
unreconciled contradictions revealed in his own position became for him
the model for an unreconciled world. Martin Jay has made the illuminating
connection with Adorno’s favored device, that of the chiasmus: “Adorno
employed chiasmus to indicate the unreconciled and unsublated relationship
between two elements that nonetheless are inextricably intertwined. It is
appropriate to call his peculiar status as a thinker tensely suspended
between his native land and his émigré home a form of chiasmus”
(1984a:181-82). This is certainly an apt metaphor for his situation as a
philosopher, of “not being at home in one’s home” (Adorno 1974:39), to
rephrase my quotation from Minima Moralia at the start of this chapter. But
it should not suggest a static condition of suspension, caught between the
irreconcilability of two contradictory worlds, unable to move. On the
contrary, the engine that drives the dynamic motion of Adorno’s thought is
contradiction itself in the absence of any resting place. On his return to
Germany in the 1950s Adorno took up again his research on Husserl, on
which he had been working at Oxford with Ryle, and in 1957 published a
book he had completed twenty years earlier in England in 1937, Zur
Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistemology: A Metakritik).
This was a stage toward rethinking his philosophy of non-identity toward an
anti-systematic theory of knowledge, which he published in 1966 as
Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics). He described it as a “logic of
disintegration” (Logik des Zerfalls), and wrote in his Introduction to the
book: “Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity. It does not begin
by taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by its own inevitable
insufficiency” (1973:5). If this philosophy of disintegration did not actually
originate in Adorno’s exile, it certainly received its validation and its
decisive expression from it.

NOTES
1. See Martin Jay (1973, 1984a, 1984b), Rolf Wiggershaus (1986, 1987), Hartmut Scheible
(1989), Peter Uwe Hohendahl (1995), and the extensive biography by Stefan Müller-Doohm (2006).
For the Oxford years, there is the painstaking research into this period by Evelyn Wilcock (1996a,
1996b, 1997a, 2000). More recently, there are Andrew Rubin (2002) and David Jenemann (2007),
which contain much interesting historical detail using information contained in the FBI files on
Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School during their time in the USA. Among Adorno’s
own writings it is especially his fragmentary and aphoristic book Minima Moralia (1951), and the
essay “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America” (1969), that are most insightful and
revealing of his own reflections on his emigration experience.
2. Evelyn Wilcock writes: “Under the Nuremberg Laws of November 1935, Grade 1 ‘Mischlinge’
could marry only ‘Mischlinge’ like themselves. Adorno had intended to marry Gretel Karplus, who
was not a ‘Mischling’ but Jewish, as soon as he could afford to support a wife. This marriage would
have been against the law in Germany. They were married instead at Marylebone Registry Office,
London, in September 1937 and celebrated with a lunch at Magdalen College. Gretel’s widowed
stepmother and Adorno’s parents all came to the wedding and the lunch” (1996b:328).
3. Composing for the Films was originally published in the United States in 1947 by Oxford
University Press under Hanns Eisler’s name alone. A British edition followed in 1951 published by
Dennis Dobson. An edition in German was published in East Berlin in 1949 by Verlag Bruno
Henschel under Eisler’s name again, and an edition under both Eisler’s and Adorno’s names was
published in 1969 in Munich by Verlag Rogner & Bernhard. This latter version appears as part of
Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 15, in 1976 from Suhrkamp Verlag. A new English edition
under both authors’ names appeared in 1994 from the Athlone Press, with a new Introduction by
Graham McCann.
4. While Ästhetische Theorie itself was not completed and was only published posthumously in a
heavily edited edition in 1970, the year after the author’s death, Adorno was working on it
throughout the 1960s, and gave lecture series using material from it—for example, typescripts of the
1967–68 series were circulated at the time, and were available in unofficial editions, like one
published later in the early 1970s as Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik 1967–
68 (Zurich: H. Mayer Nachfolger, 1973).
5. I have attempted to address the problem of relativism versus absolutism, and how I consider
Adorno deals with this, in Section I: “Absolutismus, Relativismus und die Dialektik” in my chapter
“Die vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit der Musik: Zum Vermittlungsbegriff in der Adornoschen
Musikästhetik” (2007:175-86).

REFERENCES
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Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp. English translation: (i) Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Christian
Lenhardt. London: Routledge, 1984. (ii) Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor.
London: Athlone Press, 1997.
———. 1973 [1966]. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul. Translation of Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 6. Ed.
Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, 7-412.
———. 1974 [1951]. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso/NLB. Translation of
Minima Moralia. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 4. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt / Main:
Suhrkamp, 1980.
———. 1978. ‘On the Social Situation of Music.’ Trans. Wesley Blomster. Telos 35 (Spring):128-64.
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———. 1993. Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp.
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———. 1997 [1949]. Philosophy of New Music. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone
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Schriften vol. 12. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1975.
———. 1998a. ‘On the Question: “What Is German?’ ” in Critical Models: Interventions and
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University Press, 215-42. Translation of ‘Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika,’ In
Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2: Gesammelte Schriften vol. 10.2. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann.
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Hessischer Rundfunk, “Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in den USA,” broadcast on 31 January
1968.
———. 2001. Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt / Main:
Suhrkamp. English translation: Toward a Theory of Musical Reproduction. Ed. Henri Lonitz,
trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
———. 2002. Essays on Music. Selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard
Leppert, with new translations by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
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———. 2009. Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Ed. with introduction by Robert
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 CHAPTER 10
Places of the Body: Corporal Displacements,
Misplacements, and Replacements in Music and
Dance Research

SYDNEY HUTCHINSON
In Western Europe and North America, many music researchers continue to
take the separation between mind and body and between music and dance
as a given, a fact barely meriting comment. While apparently on its way out
under the onslaught of body-oriented cultural research, this attitude is
nonetheless so long standing that it has produced a body of musicological
research in which the musicians appear to have no body at all, and one in
which music and dance occur in entirely separate realms.
As both a musician and dancer since early childhood, I experienced
these two parts of my life as so different as to be impossible to combine,
and as an undergraduate piano major, I felt a continual pressure to choose
one sphere over another. At the same time I experienced the way my
teacher, Nohema Fernández, connected piano phrasing to the breath and the
mobility of the waist and wrists as revelatory. I also saw how other
performers could make me breathe with them, establishing a bodily
connection between us; as an accompanist, I could do the same to ensure
synchronicity with my fellow musicians; and as a soloist, it was only
through bodily repetition—“muscle memory,” a telling phrase connecting
mind and body—that I could ensure the clean production of technically
difficult passages.
Separating mind and body, and music and dance, is thus in no way a
common-sense means of organizing or understanding culture. Once one
recognizes the worldwide prevalence of dance as a means of music
consumption, and the human tendency to respond physically to music,
surely the body and its motions cannot be left out of music studies. Once
one recognizes that the voice emanates from the body and that the musician
can play no instrument without adapting her body and movements to it, one
must acknowledge the centrality of bodily movement to the production of
music. And once one looks beyond the surface of things, one can see that
mind and bodywork are actually not so very different.
Many music researchers have, of course, recognized these points, and
therefore I may be preaching to the choir. At the same time, as an
ethnomusicologist who frequently conducts dance research, I cannot avoid
commenting on the continued marginalization of dance studies within the
academy, a fact clearly related to the traditional absence of the body in
music studies and other fields. The problem runs far deeper and broader
even than a look at academic research would suggest. Susan McClary
writes, “The tendency to deny the body and to identify with pure mind
underlies virtually every aspect of patriarchal Western culture” (2002:54).
Perhaps it is then no surprise to note that the overall quantity of musical
research relating to the body is still quite small. Thus, it is still beneficial to
remind music researchers about the valuable contributions body- and
movement-related research can offer to the field. A look at the root causes
for this general neglect may help to question assumptions, suggest
corrections, and spur others to push this area of inquiry in new directions.
While I cannot pretend to do justice to such a large topic as this in such
a short chapter, I would like to provide historical background to the
problem, outline some important recent trends in brief, and provide
examples of recent work on music and the body. I primarily speak of bodily
displacement in an abstract way, attempting to answer two questions: first,
why the body has for so long been omitted, or displaced, from music
research, and second, what we can gain if we reintroduce, or replace, the
body into music research. I conclude by relating my answers to issues of
real, physical bodies and their displacements through movement.

DISPLACING THE BODY

The omission of the body and the marginalization of dance and movement
studies have often been attributed to Cartesian mind-body dualism (e.g.,
Thomas and Ahmed 2004:3), a concept at the heart of much Western
thought for the past four centuries. Indeed, binarism in general has played a
prominent role in Western thinking, and the fact that the two members of
each pair are differently valued helps explain why the body, movement, and
dance have been left out or marginalized in academic settings for so long.
The mind-body division was, however, nothing new in Descartes’ time.
In Timaeus, Plato wrote, “but the god made soul prior to body and more
venerable in birth and excellence, to be the body’s mistress and governor”
(Plato and Cornford 2000:59). In addition, for Plato reason was a power
possessed only by the soul, and thus only present in bodies possessing
souls. A body without a soul could not be reasonable, but reason could exist
outside the body, since for Plato it was a divine and immortal quality (39).
In Phaedo, Plato quotes Socrates’ argument that “the soul reasons best
when it is free of the senses and the body, and hence the best state for a soul
is to be disembodied—in other words, dead” (Dardis 2008:12). Aristotle,
however, disagreed, viewing body and soul as inextricably linked. He
famously mocked those who saw the two as separate. For him, this view
was as ridiculous as “saying that carpentry gets inserted into flutes” (Dardis
2008:23).
Later, Descartes would echo Plato, not Aristotle, in many respects in
describing body and soul as separate and distinct entities. In Meditation II,
for example, Descartes defines the body in detail, assigning characteristics
such as the occupation of space, the possibility of being perceived by the
senses, and the ability to be moved by something other than itself.
Thinking, feeling, and self-movement were not at first essential parts of
bodily nature to him, he confesses (Martinich et al. 2007:93). But when
Descartes stops to consider these bodily characteristics, he finds that none
of them are as essential. While the fact that he can eat, walk, and feel seems
to indicate that he has a body, he notices that he perceives himself doing the
same things while asleep, only to awaken and find they haven’t happened at
all. Thought, then, is the only essential attribute, and it might even be
possible that when he is not thinking, he ceases to exist. External bodies are
equally untrustworthy: a piece of wax, for instance, has different forms
before, during, and after burning, so only the abstract concept is constant.
Because Descartes cannot trust his senses, or his body, he arrives at the
counter-intuitive conclusion that only the immaterial is real, and the
material subordinate to it—possibly even a creation of the immaterial soul’s
imagination. In Meditation VI, he goes so far as to say the body is only an
“extended and unthinking thing,” while the soul, the “I,” “can exist without
it” (Martinich et al. 2007:117). Thus, bodies can be defined by their
occupation of space, minds by their thinking abilities. Correspondingly,
bodies cannot think on their own, and neither do minds have a place in
space (Dardis 2008:29).
Descartes was not the only writer of the era espousing such a view.
Religious philosophies must also be taken into account, especially in the
United States. Writing at about the same time, Puritans held some radical
ideas about the body. For them, “the body was the most vulnerable part of a
person’s total being, its Achilles’ heel. . . . It was the primary battleground
in the struggle between the devil and the individual soul” (Reis 1997:96).
While both parts were essential to the person, the soul was superior and
should govern the body. Thus it is somewhat paradoxical that Puritans also
believed the body protected the soul, and so a strong body helped guard the
soul against Satan’s machinations. Ill health was a punishment for sin, and
dance most often appeared in tales of evil women dancing with the devil. In
one treatise Increase Mather urged New Englanders not to participate in
“promiscuous” (mixed-gender) dances and decried Maypoles and funeral
dancing (Wagner 1997:47-52). In Europe, Calvinists and other Protestant
reformers expressed similar views before, during, and after Mather’s time
(Wagner 1997:19-46).
The mind/body division espoused by Plato, Descartes, and the Puritans
may be, however, not a cause but a symptom of a larger problem: the
tendency to view the world in general in terms of binary pairs: good/evil,
black/white, male/female. We all know the world is more complicated, but
many persist in dividing things up into pairs anyway. Nonetheless, the
effects of Descartes’ specific kind of binary thinking, his conception of the
dualism of the individual and the body’s absolute subordination to the mind,
have been wide-ranging and of long duration. The ensuing Enlightenment
privileged the logical functions of the mind over the sensuality of the body
(the personal lives of composers and artists of the time notwithstanding).
This, in turn, influenced the development of Western academic disciplines,
in which, as in the larger society, mental and physical labors are divided, the
former having a higher status than the latter.
One outcome of academia’s prioritization of the mind is the fact that
music is generally supported over dance, the latter being seen as less serious
or intellectually rigorous than the former.1 Dance is a specific kind of
knowledge, but because the normative idea of knowledge in the Western
academy is that it can only be gained through reason (the mind) and
accessed through language, dance, as bodily knowledge, can only be a
“negation of modern knowledge” (Klein 2007:29). Such a view contributes
to the continuing isolation of dancers and dance scholars from the rest of
the academy, a separation to some extent self-enforced by dancers who
bring dance to a near-mythical status as a kind of “authentic knowledge that
has been buried by civilization” (Klein 2007). Here we can see that even
some dancers subscribe to the body as a pre-rational entity opposed to the
mental or civilized.
Another outcome has been the reduction of music to audible forms.
Eduard Hanslick, for instance, found that the “scientific investigation” of
music must look only at the aesthetic, never at the emotional or physical
(1986 [1854]:67). He acknowledged the effects of music upon the body, as
in the “twitching of the body, especially in the feet, of young people whose
natural disposition is not entirely inhibited by the constraints of
civilization” (54), but concluded that such emotional and physiological
responses are the domain of “savages” and ought to be eliminated through
greater musical understanding and mental strength (63). Guido Adler’s
classic formulation of the discipline of musicology, while more open-
minded than Hanslick’s, sees music as simply an artifact whose notation,
forms, and “laws” are to be investigated aesthetically and historically, while
any bodies, including the performers and composers themselves, are to be
strictly excluded (1981 [1885]:7-8).2 Such thinking is detrimental to current
scholarship, particularly on the musical practices of cultures for which
music and dance are inextricably linked, and it omits contextual information
today considered essential in any ethnographic work.

The Capitalist Workforce

The denial of the body in the West may also be tied to the need of
capitalism for a docile and self-regulating workforce (Wolff 1998:85). Marx
himself writes only indirectly of the body, but his ideas about labor have
larger implications. Because workers don’t own the means of production,
Marx explains, they must sell their labor, or rather, their bodies. He
discusses this process and its results in Das Kapital. Money is converted
into capital through consumption of commodities. The only commodity that
creates, rather than simply possesses, value is labor-power, which he
defines as “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing
in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of
any description” (Marx 1996 [1867]:135). This type of capital can only
appear when “the labourer  .  .  .  must be obliged to offer for sale as a
commodity that very labour-power, which exists only in his living self”
(136). Labor-power or the capacity for work thus resides in the body, which
thereby acquires value. Such an exchange is made possible by the fact that,
in a capitalist society, some people own the means of production, and others
only their own bodies. As workers become alienated from their own labor,
by extension, they are also alienated from their own bodies.
Marxist analysis has played an important role in both music and dance
studies. John Blacking wrote, “The mind-body dichotomy can be partly
explained as a cultural phenomenon, as an artefact of certain modes of
production and social formations, reflecting the division of manual and
mental labour in production,” as well as the “lopsided use of the body” in a
society in which mental and bodily labor are “falsely evaluated.” Thus,
while dance and music, even painting and sculpture, are really kinds of
“manual labor,” in his opinion, they are evaluated in Western society as if
they were mental labor, thus reinforcing the bourgeois view of class
difference as being rooted in the need for one class to perform manual labor
in order to free others up for more elevated mental labors (Blacking
1977:18). While Blacking seems here to mistake consequence for cause,
since, as we have seen, the mind-body dichotomy is much older than are
capitalist production practices, such modes of production may indeed have
contributed to the tendency to separate mental and bodily labors and assign
them to different social classes.
Dance analysts have pointed out that in a capitalist society where the
working classes’ only possession of value is their own body, and when they
are forced to sell their bodily labor daily, dance takes on a special role as
something that is not only a leisure-time activity but one which allows
participants to reclaim their bodies. Marxist music analysis also often views
working-class music as resistance (e.g., Peña 1985, Keil 1985).
This argument becomes particularly important in the case of African
American dance, since, Thomas DeFrantz writes, “The black man’s body
entered American consciousness as a powerful exotic commodity: a slave.”
Understood as a commodity with “enormous labor capacity” and
simultaneously a “repressible, docile, passive” individual, the black dancing
body became associated with rebellion and was therefore carefully
regulated (1996:107). Slaves in many locations therefore focused on dance
as a means of self-expression, social cohesion, and resistance to a
dehumanizing economic system, although this practice was often
misunderstood by whites. As Edinha Diniz writes of Brazil, “the
innumerable accusations of sensuality” of black dances “make us suspect
that the use of the body in this case could be understood as an expression of
slave rebelliousness.  .  .  .  More than a characteristic element of black
culture, the fact that slaves maintain enormous corporeal flexibility in their
dances could indicate the necessity of liberating their bodies, property of
the master . . .” (in Quintero 2009:10; my translation).
Marxism offers a compelling argument for why we often persist in
separating mind from body, but it is only one of many reasons. The body
has been displaced from musical research, and from academic production in
general, because it was viewed as separate from and less valuable than the
mind, and because the capitalist system demanded the separation of mental
and physical labors.

MISPLACING THE BODY

The mind-body pair is just one of many binaries organizing Western
thought. The related pairs of nature-culture and civilization-barbarism have
similarly combined to push the body from its place at the center of human
experience and to make it appear as though disembodied minds were the
source of all human endeavor. But differently from Cartesian thought, these
later polarities also had implications for European and North American
thinking about race, gender, and politics. Centuries of binary and
hierarchical thinking have resulted in the body getting lost, or misplaced,
somewhere along the way, and in other matters taking its place.

Nature / Culture
In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau provided somewhat
different answers to mind-body questions. Similar to Descartes, the vicar in
The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, a part of Emile, understands
himself to be the union of a physical body to a free will (which here
replaces Descartes’ soul) not subjected to physical laws. When asked how
his physical body could be moved by something so immaterial as a will, the
vicar answers, “I cannot tell, but I perceive that it does so in myself; I will
to do something and I do it; I will to move my body and it moves, but if an
inanimate body, when at rest, should begin to move itself, the thing is
incomprehensible and without precedent. The will is known to me in its
action, not in its nature” (Rousseau 2006 [1762]:236). In this passage, we
can see how mind/body dualism came to produce another kind of binary:
that of nature and culture, a theme of much of Rousseau’s work. He thought
that music arose from speech and prose from poetry, in a gradual evolution
from the sounds of need (hunger, anger, desire, etc.) toward the less
practical, more aesthetic sounds of music (in Taylor 1949:235). Thus,
reason came to dominate passion only through the influence of culture.
Other Enlightenment thinkers thought likewise. Kant, for example in his
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), pointed to
“animality” as humanity’s “original” state, one in which we were dominated
by nature. Later, our consciousness came under the control of reason thanks
to the influence of culture (see Wood and O’Neill 1998), in what seems to
be an early form of cultural evolutionism. The nature/culture divide played
an important role in Western thought for the next two centuries, as a
perhaps inevitable outcome of the mind/body division. It has persisted to
the present time, perhaps most notably in the ongoing if outdated
nature/nurture debates.
The nature/culture divide has affected musical research in at least two
ways. First is the tendency of Western music theorists and historians to
posit music, at least their own music, as a rational system, a product of
culture—notably, of high culture. The musics of other peoples—whether
internal peasants and minorities or external others like Africans or Native
Americans—are, in this scheme, seen as closer to “nature,” often because
they lack a verbalized music theory. This view has separated musical
research into two camps, often kept separate from one another: those who
deal with Western music, and those who deal with everything else. For a
long time, it also prevented researchers from viewing other peoples’ music
as elaborately developed systems in their own right.
 The second point concerns the view of culture as equated with the mind
and nature with the body, combined with the northern European
predilection for melody and the fact that rhythms are felt in the body. This
led to these concepts’ attachment to another binary, melody/rhythm.
Rousseau, for instance, demoted rhythm to a minor and almost insignificant
role in comparison to melody (Taylor 1949: 235-36). He considered melody
a “natural” outcome of speech, but did not remark upon the seemingly
equally natural human impulse to create and respond to rhythms, or note
rhythm’s effects on the body. Melody would later come to be seen as more
of a mental activity than it was in Rousseau’s view, thus producing the pair
melody/rhythm as a correlate of culture/nature, a point of view that would
have racist implications, as I discuss below.

Civilization / Barbarism
“Primitive,” “barbaric,” “savage,” or “tribal” were terms used for
nonindustrial peoples until the latter half of the twentieth century. The most
frequently used pairing was that of barbarism and civilization, as in the
work of John Stuart Mill, who examined what he saw as the evolution of
societies—and individuals—along a path from the first to the second (Levin
2004:2). For Freud, civilization’s job was to override instincts, but this
process produced discontented individuals, a view equating civilization
with reason and the mind, and barbarism with instinct and the body. He
believed that many mental disorders arose from this denial of primal
instincts, so that the task of psychoanalysis was to liberate human nature
from the impositions of civilization, or culture (Dallmayr 1993:252).
The fundamental conflict this pair represents for people of colonized
nations, particularly for intellectuals, was recognized early on. Already in
1845, Argentine writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento described his divided
loyalties, torn between a desire to participate in European “civilization” and
in the unruliness of the “barbaric” Americas (Stavans 1998:xiv), a conflict
observable in his simultaneous extolling and condemnation of the
presumably barbaric gaucho (xvii). His conclusions, however, are
unsatisfying and elitist. Producing yet another binary model, he sees a
conflict between urban and rural as parallel to that between civilization and
barbarism, and thus the only solution is further immigration, settlement, and
growth of cities (xv). A more thorough critique of colonialist civilization
models did not emerge until Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961),
which described colonized peoples’ internalization of the
civilization/barbarism binary, a factor contributing to the continuing
oppression of many in former colonies. Edward Said’s description of
Orientalism (1978) continues in this vein, showing how views of the East
were produced by a West in need of a “backward” Other to justify its own
imperialist aims. Thus, West/East was another mutually constitutive
Western binary.
“Primitive” dance and music, cultural expressions of “barbaric” or
“savage” peoples, were topics of interest to many ethnographers. The idea
of such peoples as being closer to nature than their civilized counterparts,
who were led by reason, was persistent. In his World History of the Dance
(1933, translation 1937), the foundational comparative musicologist Curt
Sachs describes how different dance types correspond to different types of
societies. For instance, mixed-gender dances are not found in “basic
cultures” and only infrequently in “tribal cultures” (174). He believes
“primitive” peoples’ closeness to nature is reflected in their dancing,
explaining that while all dances can and do produce ecstasy,
How much more intense [is] the reaction of primitive man, whose unburdened mind offers so
little resistance to every stimulus and whose body, unstunted and undisciplined, responds to
this stimulus without restraint to an extent that is foreign to us. (Sachs 1937:49-50)

Here mind/body, culture/nature, and civilized/primitive distinctions are

conjoined. “Primitives” react bodily to stimuli with the mind playing no
mediating role in the creation of their dances, while “we” (presumably,
educated, “civilized” northern Europeans) are more restrained in our
movements, due to the influence of our logical, reasonable, unemotional
minds.
Remarkably, Sachs’s views on dance remained in current use for four
decades (see Youngerman 1974). Still in 1977, dance anthropologist
Roderyk Lange claimed that tribal people with no interest in “mechanical
discipline” were still able to realize “the primary potential of human
movement as revealed directly through the body.” He saw change in dance
as being correlated with changes in production. A group of people
originally live in harmony with nature, then become alienated from their
bodies through a change in production. Mechani-zation caused them to
dance mechanically, using codified “steps” that actually inhibited the
natural tendency of humans to release emotion and tension through
movement (Lange 1977:248-50). In this view, civilization clearly contrasts
with “tribal” life in a parallel way to culture/nature, just as in colonial times.
In contrast with earlier writings, however, civilization is not necessarily a
superior state.
Contesting the still-dominant views of “primitive” dance, Joanna
Kealiinohomoku, in 1977, writes of descriptions that characterize it,
regardless of the particular people being examined, as an unconscious and
unchanging activity with no technique. She suggests that such a simplistic
view is a strategy for maintaining the uniqueness of our own (European,
civilized) cultural expressions (1983:536). As a countermeasure,
Kealiinohomoku systematically dismantles the myths by providing
examples from her fieldwork among Hopis and her experience as a dancer
of ballet, then (as now) often considered the apogee of Western civilized
dance. Post-colonial studies have further helped to dispel this binary, yet the
danger of falling into such thinking remains. It can be seen in the “new
barbarism” view of Arabs as “backwards” terrorists whom politicians
frequently contrast with superior Western “civilization” (Tuastad 2003:592,
after Paul Richards). It can be seen even in the continuing division between
musicology and ethnomusicology, a survival in the present of the West/rest
paradigm.

Black / White
An extension of the previous two dyads, the typical North American and
European division of people into just two racial groupings also often
parallels nature/culture and barbaric/civilized divisions. Most perniciously,
if we follow this chain back in time, we find whiteness equated with the
mind and reason, blackness with the body and irrationality. In colonialist
literature, Africans and African descendants are described as savages whose
behaviors are based in nature, while Europeans and their descendants are
described as civilized, cultured, rational. For instance, Susan McClary and
Robert Walser see the devaluation of the body in Western thought reflected
in the warped reactions Westerners often had to African or African
American music and dance. Seeing black dancing bodies as romantically
“primordial” or “freed” from the constraints of civilization, a common trope
even today, ignores the fact that these dances are “highly disciplined”—if
differently disciplined—“set[s] of practices” within their cultural contexts
(1994:76).
Today the correlation between nature and race is still notable in
everyday talk about music, dance, and identity. For example, Desmond
notes that bodily discourses such as dance are particularly vulnerable to
essentialization, leading to simplistic categorizations of dance as “black” or
“white,” sometimes “Latin” or “white” (1997:36). Such distinctions
continue to be important in popular discourse about music, dance, and
identity, as anyone can note by reading descriptions of the latest dance
crazes in popular magazines. Anna Beatrice Scott adds that world music
marketing typically focuses on the perceived racial authenticity of the
performer, an authenticity located in their bodies (1998:263).
The ascription of particular ways of moving and making music to a
supposedly biological factor, such as race, is clearly problematic. Most of
us view dance and music as cultural expressions—they have to be learned
from others. Nonetheless, biological explanations are easy to fall into (see
Radano and Bohlman 2000 for an overview). “Having rhythm” and being
able to move well are abilities popularly attributed to Others—particularly
blacks and Latinos. Such discourse lumps together attributes like
nationality, race, and genetics while ignoring other factors such as class,
and is based on “an implicit division between moving and thinking, mind
and body” (Desmond 1997:41). When, for example, Latinos are stereotyped
as romantic, sensual, and “hot” by virtue of their music and dance styles,
“the unstated equation is that Latins are how they dance, and they dance
how they are” (1997:43). As Scott puts it, when a dancing body is black or
Latino, it “cites the belief of racial blood memory” (1998:264). In other
words, many still believe dance and the body are nature, not culture, an
unconscious expression of biological fact.
It is also obvious that not everyone can be easily put into the boxes of
black and white. Deborah Wong has noted that, in the U.S. tendency to
categorize race binarily into black and white, Asian Americans become
invisible. Performance thus becomes an important means for not only
becoming visible but also engaging with this discourse of race. She argues
that many Asian American performers choose to perform genres associated
with African Americans, like jazz and rap, thus reconfiguring race
(2000:89).
 Binary racial categories, indeed the very idea of race, are dangerous
because they essentialize. These essentializations serve to maintain racialist
thinking and they ignore the uniqueness of individuals. They produce
distorted scholarship that interrogates neither cultural context nor individual
decisions and abilities. They also apply a framework clearly inappropriate
to many parts of the world, as in much of Latin America where notions of
cultural and racial mixing (creolité, mulatismo, mestizaje) have long
predominated.3 It is no surprise, then, that writing on music and race, like
that on “primitive” and “civilized” dance, often takes on qualities of the
self/other binary.

Male / Female
Male/female is another pair that ties in with self/other, as well as with
nature/culture. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, suggested that in Western
Europe the Self was imagined as male and transcendent, the Other as
female and trapped in bodily functions. Self was mind, but women were
trapped in their bodies because of the biology of childbirth. Man’s drive to
civilize is a drive to transform and tame nature, something that also, for
them, includes women and their supposedly “natural” bodies. “He thinks of
his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he
believes he apprehends objectively.” Women, on the other hand, were
incapable of this objectivity (Beauvoir in Conboy et al. 1997:2). Here is
another binary that has persisted in the sciences: that of
subjective/objective, here equated with “female” and “male” ways of
thinking.
Judith Butler’s more recent analysis also ties the male/female binary to
self/other and nature/culture. Society associated gender with “natural” sex
because of its aims of reproduction, not because there was a necessary
relationship between the two; one side effect was the naturalization of
heterosexuality (Foucault, in Butler 1997:408). Building on this viewpoint,
Butler contends that gender is interpreted as nature because of its
association with bodily performances (postures, gestures, movements,
voice, etc.) that combine to produce the illusion that nature is responsible
for them, rather than that they are culturally learned behaviors (1997:411).
The consequences of the naturalization of binary gender, and the related
body/mind division, are many. On an individual level, many who do not
strongly identify with either of the two gender categories, or who
biologically cannot be clearly assigned to either, are forced—sometimes
violently—into performing a role that is in no way natural to them.
For music researchers, one result of this type of thinking has been the
absence of women and their musical practices from the literature, as well as
from public musical life. If women could only be nonmental, nonobjective,
biologically limited creatures, there was little space for them to participate
in supposedly rational, objective, and cerebral Western classical music.
McClary points out, for example, that over the centuries men have resisted
claims of musical “effeminacy” either by emphasizing its rational qualities
or by prohibiting women from participating (2002:17). The dominance of
male composers and performers in the West, and the very fact of the
Western division of music-making practice into these roles, long led
researchers into other musical cultures also to ignore female music-making
activities, much to the detriment of the literature.

REPLACING THE BODY

In the conventional sense of “replacing,” the body may be seen as having
been replaced with the mind in musical research. The view of music as
logical and intellectual still dominates in classical music and can often be
seen in music marketing, as in musical products promoted to boost mind
power, such as Bach for Babies and Mozart for Your Mind. (Bartók for Your
Body has not yet been produced.) Such views of classical music uphold the
old Cartesian mind/body division, and the fact that they appear to be
common sense even to some musicians shows the persistence of dualism
and binary thinking even in the face of numerous philosophical
counterattacks, arguments which aim to “re-place” the body back into
music.

Thinking Beyond Mind / Body Dualism

Binaries can generally be broken down with even minimal interrogation,
and, in fact, these binaries were questioned right from the beginning. For
instance, in Phaedo, Simmias is not persuaded by Socrates’ view of the
separability of soul and body. He gives the example of a lyre: while the
harmony it produces is recognized to be an ideal form, it does not continue
to exist if the musical instrument is destroyed. Thus, perhaps the mind, like
harmony, also has physical properties (Dardis 2008:13).
Irresolvable problems were also seen in Descartes’ dualism during his
lifetime. Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, for example, doubted Descartes’
description of the soul (Martinich et al. 2007:142). How should the mind
cause the body to move if it is not a physical thing, she wondered. And how
can bodily illnesses cause us to lose our capacity to reason, if the mind is
not physically connected to the body (Dardis 2008:31)?
In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche also found mind-body
dualism, particularly the idea that the mind was in control of the body, a
foolish view:
The awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is
only a word for something in the body. . . . You say “I” and you are proud of this word. But
greater than this—although you will not believe in it—is your body and its great intelligence,
which does not say “I” but performs “I.” (1961:61-62)

Nietzsche sees in human nature a dialectical relationship between mind and

body. As one commentator explains, “These are not discrete realities, but
modulations and complications of each other”; they overlap and shape one
another (Roberts 1998:91). Such a view prefigures more recent writing on
the performance of the self through the body. Freud, too, while subscribing
to binary thinking in other ways, disagreed with dualistic concepts of the
individual. In fact, psychology itself was developed to counter the mind-
body division by applying findings from physics and natural sciences to the
psyche (Dallmayr 1993:236).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Phenomenology of Perception is yet
another work credited with returning attention to the body. For this
philosopher, the body is a special way of being in and relating to the world.
Self and world are intricately interrelated through the activity of the sense
organs; we can discover nothing about the world without the mediation of
the body (Moran 2000:423-25). Unlike Descartes, who felt he could only
trust thought, Merleau-Ponty found that one idea common to humans was
an “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world common to us” (in Moran
2000:429), adding, “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I
think’ but of ‘I can’ ” (431). In other words, the body’s potential to act is
the very foundation of the mind.
 Interest in the body in the social sciences has resurged since the 1970s.
On the one hand, this development was an obvious result of the long
overdominance of the mind, and was influenced by philosophers like those
mentioned. On the other, feminist, black power, and gay rights movements
also all played a role (Thomas and Ahmed 2004:4). Popular interest in the
1960s in Eastern philosophies, which do not separate mind and body in a
dualistic fashion, as well as new directions in the arts, such as performance
art, experimental music, and contact improvisation, were further reasons for
which many reconsidered the mind-body relationship. Each of these
movements also helped to break down the other binaries examined here in a
way that pushed social scientists to reconsider the way they worked.
Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known conception of habitus, an expansion of
Mauss’s use of the same term in discussing techniques of the body forty
years earlier (2007 [1935]), is one example, which appears to have
developed from his concern with breaking down the subjective/objective
divide in the social sciences. He explains that there are three modes of
theoretical knowledge: phenomenological, concerned with subjective
experience; objective, concerned with external structures; and doxic, related
to taken-for-granted principles according to which practices are generated, a
mode he proposes to both break from and include the first two (1977:3).
Habitus, unconscious “dispositions” resulting from history and cultural
competence that condition our actions, is one kind of doxic knowledge, and
it is principally transmitted not verbally but physically: “the ‘book’ from
which the children learn their vision of the world is read with the body,” he
says (1977:90).
The body is also a focal point in the writings of Michel Foucault. For
instance, Foucault sees sexuality not as an innate quality of the body but as
arising through specific power relations in order to structure social life
(McNay 1991:125, 131). Furthermore, the body is at the center of all kinds
of power struggles, he finds, as in the “disciplining” of bodies through
regulatory entities like armies, schools, hospitals, and prisons (Foucault
1995 [1975]: 136). This disciplining arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries as power relations came to be enacted not through money but
service, turning attention to means of controlling bodies. Sex played a role
here, too, in that “sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline
of the body and the control of the population” (Foucault 1984:67),
evidenced by the numerous forms of social control on sexuality.
 The term “embodiment” has grown prominent in more recent work.
Related to the philosophical theory of embodied cognition that contests
Cartesian dualism by proposing that thought and the mind are determined
by the form of the body, embodiment theory in the social sciences posits the
body not as a biological given, but as a product of culture. Thus, the body is
to embodiment as sex is to gender. Bourdieu, for instance, writes of the
interactions between body and culturally structured space as being a means
for the “em-bodying [sic] of the structures of the world” (89). He does not
discuss physical aspects of the body, but it is easy to see that culture does
influence the body when we observe how the body’s physical
characteristics actually change as a result of practices clearly cultural in
nature, such as ballet dance (compare, for example, the trained ballet
dancer’s body with that of a gymnast or football player).
Dancers were working in similar directions simultaneously. For
example, Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull characterizes the female ballet dancer as
being, paradoxically, “disembodied” through the emphasis placed on a
diminutive, almost boyish frame and an aesthetic of weightlessness or
ethereality. Reacting, in part, to dances like ballet that exhibited a gendered
division of labor, a focus on the visual, and competitive individualism,
some 1970s dancers developed contact improvisation as a more egalitarian
and touch-oriented alternative, one in which “the sense of self becomes
located in the body” through its practice (1998:283). This form of dance
also helped to break down the mental/physical division of labor inherent in
ballet, in which dancers do the physical labor of fulfilling the
choreographer’s mental work. A similar breakdown of this division might
be seen in the use of chance or improvisatory elements in music or theater,
trends of approximately the same period.

Thinking Beyond the Binary

Thinking critically about the body involves making an effort to overcome
the various dualisms I have mentioned in this chapter and, particularly, the
hierarchies inherent in them. The philosophers, theorists, and social
scientists I have mentioned have done much to advance body research. But
erasing the boundaries between such long-standing binaries as mind/body,
nature/culture, civilization/barbarism, and even male/female is no easy task.
As noted, binaries often chain together so that nature/culture leads us to
civilization/barbarism, at least in colonial writings, to male/female, to
self/other and its reflections, such as West/rest and black/white, and each
pair influences our understanding of the others.
In the 1960s, Levi-Strauss gave special attention to the nature/culture
pair, one of many “binary structures” he believed to be universally human.
In The Raw and the Cooked (1969/1964), he examines how cooking
transforms the natural into the cultural, and how the manner of cooking
produces multiple binaries, which may be differently valued in different
cultural contexts. This particular binary structure turned out to be less
durable than supposed, however, so that in the following decade Blacking
saw the nature/culture divide as breaking down. He believed it no longer
made sense to divide anthropology into physical and cultural subdisciplines:
“it has become clear that the shape of the human body has been influenced
by culture, and an apparently cultural phenomenon such as language is
biologically based.” In addition, some had suggested that culture was a
human genetic capacity, further blurring the boundary (1977:2-3).
The nature/culture divide also relates to the concept of gender, and
gender studies have helped us to further question this binary. For instance,
various feminist scholars have pointed out that the idea of nature as a blank
is in fact a modern construct tied to the emergence of industrialism.
“Nature” has a cultural history of its own and because nature is often
equated with the feminine, seeing nature as prerational configures women
in the same way (Butler 1993:5). Judith Butler is perhaps the theorist who
has worked most diligently to deconstruct our notions of sex and gender.
For her, binary sex is a category that works in a circular way. People believe
it to be a natural and unalterable fact that human bodies must fit into these
two categories, but it is simultaneously a “regulatory practice that produces
the bodies it governs” by pushing people to continually reenact cultural
expectations, including bodily techniques, for those sex categories (1993:1).
The fact that male/female body categories are not natural but are taken for
granted can easily be seen in the extreme difficulty North American society
has in assimilating intersexuals (hermaphrodites), to the point that most are
surgically altered at their parents’ wishes.
Since recognizing the constructedness of sex, researchers have turned
instead to the category of gender, thus recognizing the cultural and
historical specificity of masculinity and femininity. Yet Butler points out
two problems with this new focus. First, if gender is what the sexed body
means in a cultural context, and it is determined through culturally based
actions and their equally culture-dependent interpretation, it again becomes
impossible to separate gender from sex within the terms of that culture. It
remains equally impossible to separate nature and culture, since within that
context gender is interpreted as nature (1997:407).
Secondly, Butler notes that this change often, paradoxically, leads to the
body being left out. She therefore suggests we take the body’s physical
presence into account even while examining how that body is discursively
constructed and interpreted (1993:30). The task, then, is to examine how the
“criteria of intelligible sex”—i.e., our masculine/feminine binary—
constitute what we understand to be bodies, who these criteria leave out,
and how they regulate bodies through rules and prohibitions (1993:55).
Butler believes gender is constructed specifically through bodily
performance like movement and gesture, and calls for the study of
“corporeal acts” in order to better understand this construction process
(1997:402-3). However, recognizing that gender and bodily performance
are always social and cultural, as well as individual (1997:409), she leaves
the description of these specific behaviors to others with more ethnographic
grounding.
These new perspectives have had a clear effect on music scholarship.
For instance, Susan McClary contends that it is precisely the introduction of
gender issues into musicology that has made serious body research possible,
since before this time, feelings and bodies were considered exclusively
“feminine” matters (2002:xvii). Increasing interest in emotion, expression,
and gender construction through music is evident from a look through
current journals and conference themes.4
Black/white binarism also presents a serious problem to music and
dance researchers. It has long been a kind of habitus unconsciously
structuring our scholarship. North Americans and Europeans, at least, have
a “commonsense opinion that what distinguishes the musically racial from
the not-racial is as simple as telling the difference between black and white”
(Radano and Bohlman 2000:1). This opinion makes possible the everyday
—and clearly oversimplified—lay discourse separating “black” musical
characteristics (syncopated, rhythmic, danceable) from “white” ones
(straight rhythms, melodic, intellectual), which often seeps over into
scholarship. Racial thinking is also bodily thinking, it must be noted, as race
is usually interpreted through physical characteristics and movement
patterns.
Various corrections have been proposed. Desmond suggests we instead
aim for a “grey scale” that would allow a more nuanced view of race,
particularly of how dances travel between groups, as when hip hop and rap
moved from black urban communities to white suburban ones. Binary
thinking would view this as simple appropriation, ignoring the
transformation from a symbol of black culture to one of youth culture the
genre underwent in the process, as well as the issues of class and locality
that also have come into play (1997:39-40).
Racial thinking may also result in a lack of critical distance or cultural
relativism. Gottschild notes that dance criticism (as well as music criticism)
often disempowers minority or foreign artists by “measuring] them by a
standard which ignores their chosen aesthetic frame of reference,” by a
yardstick taken from a different cultural context. She recommends we
correct our perspective by using reversals and inversions: what if that were
a man, not a woman, a white person instead of black (1998:171-72)?
A reliance on stereotypes must also be avoided in determining research
topics. For instance, it is clear that movement is a critical part of music-
making for many Sub-Saharan Africans and their overseas descendants, and
the body and dance therefore cannot be left out of research on such styles
(Wilson 1985:10-11). Yet black musics also have a highly intellectual side,
and as I have already noted, body movement plays a role in European
music-making even when unacknowledged. McClary and Walser therefore
suggest we combat stereotypes of both African and European musics by
working to “reveal the ways both mind and body are drawn upon in each
repertory” (1994:77).
Getting beyond binary thinking also entails overcoming the
subjective/objective divide. Ted Polhemus, echoing Bourdieu, writes of
how the onslaught of bodily research aids in dismantling this binary by
demonstrating “how subjective and objective, individual and collective
experiences are integrated in everyday reality” (1978:27). Thus, the body
can be a tool for moving beyond binaries. Likewise, the eradication of
binary thinking falls within the gamut of post-colonial studies, since in
many former colonies such logic was imposed on cultures for which it
made little sense. Puerto Rican scholar Angel Quintero Rivera, for one, sees
a turn to dance and body research as a decolonization project enabling
better understanding of African American expressive culture. His recent
book thus “analyzes how the decentered character of Afro-American
musicality facilitated the reunion of song and dance that the mind-body
separation of ‘Western’ modernity had launched on different courses”
(2009:26; my translation).
Therefore, although I have focused on Western theorists’ contribution, it
is also useful to look to other cultures for alternatives to dualistic thinking.
Bull sees Ghanaian dance as one such alternative since it privileges neither
sight nor sound but both in interaction with one another, neither the
individual nor society but both in conjunction, so that its performance is
“consonant with an assumption of mind/body/spirit/society as
interconnected and not separable” (1998:284). And Browning notes that
while she sees the roles of dancer and scholar as separate, the Brazilians of
whom she writes see bodies as themselves intelligent, thereby negating the
mind/body divide (1995:xi). In Japan, where mind and body are not as
rigidly separated, Tomie Hahn notes that Zen practices stress training the
mind by putting the body into particular positions: “the body itself is seen to
locate the deeper meaning of the practice” (2007:44).

Music and the Body

Researchers in various fields have examined questions of how music affects
the body and vice versa. While dance had been a focus of
ethnomusicological research, if an often-overlooked one, since the
beginning of the discipline (see Hutchinson 2009b), the role of the body in
music performance began to be studied only in the early 1960s. Then, John
Blacking noted that Butemba flute melodies were constructed through the
repetition of fingering patterns altered through overblowing, and likewise
that variations in Nsenga kalimba (mbira, or lamellaphone) music were
based on fingering, not melody. He thus suggested that music often
developed through “spatial properties” of instruments and through physical
movement, finding this true even of Western art music, because of the
“physical pleasure” to be had in certain passages of Chopin or Liszt (Baily
1995:11-12).
John Baily, a student of Blacking, carried this work further,
demonstrating how some music is shaped by instruments and how the
human body can relate to those instruments. “The greater the compatibility
between movement and morphology, the nearer the music comes to being a
transformation of the human body” (1977:275-76). In other words, when
people choose to adapt their music to the shape, qualities, and capabilities
of a particular instrument, the result is a clear translation of bodily
movement into sound. In particular, he shows how motor structures
“generate ‘grammatically’ correct novel sequences with a minimum of
conscious planning by the player” in Afghani dutar playing (329).
Similarly, we might think of sequences in baroque keyboard music, where
musical sounds result from transferring a particular finger movement
pattern up or down the keyboard. While the same concept might be
“borrowed” into other contexts (like choral music), it might be understood
as having been originally generated by human body movement. Conversely,
one might note how musical instruments shape the body. Allen Roda
(2008), for instance, explains how tabla playing has altered his musculature
and posture, enabling him to sit for long periods in a cross-legged position.
The movements used in music-making are also a product of culture, as
Janet Sturman shows in her study of Tohono O’odham waila music in
southern Arizona. Comparing Native American and Mexican American
accordionists and guitarists, as well as Native, Mexican, and Anglo
audience responses to music through dance, she shows how Tohono
O’odham cultural values are expressed and maintained even in musical
styles considered nontraditional (1997). Judy van Zile (1988) offers a model
for how this type of study can be carried out in any cultural context.
Popular music scholars have also attended to the body. For instance,
Kay Dickinson concurs with Lucy Green that, for many more female pop
stars than males, “the body is their instrument, a condition which helps
promote the age-old rooting of women in the ‘natural’ and the anti-
technological” (original emphasis). But, Dickinson adds, women like Laurie
Anderson or Cher who use vocoders to alter their vocal instrument disrupt
this “naturalism” by confusing the listener as to the voice’s source and
possible (in)authenticity (2001:337). Vocoders and other musical
technologies also disrupt other binaries, such as organic/inorganic and
human/mechanical (Dickinson 2001:338-39).
Theo Cateforis shows how the group Devo also explored ideas about the
body, particularly white male North American bodies, by presenting
themselves as “dehumanized” and “robotic” (2004:565), an effect achieved
not only by clothing but also, perhaps primarily, through body movement
and the voice (Devo also used voice filters in songs like their cover of
“Satisfaction”). Robotic dancing had already emerged in the mid-1970s on
the British punk scene and in the early 1970s among early African
American break-dancers. One may also note similar tendencies in the
German group Kraftwerk, who in the same period combined robotic
movement with voice alteration in “Die Roboter.” When popularized by
Devo, such dancing served as an antidote to the excesses of disco and also
highlighted dancers’ whiteness by displaying the white-identified cultural
ideal of “mind over matter” (566-68). Devo’s work questioned the
naturalness of racialized bodies as well as the inevitability of mind-body
dualism. Along with other New Wave bands, they made music both for
dancing and for thinking (583).
Dance scholars contribute additional information to the dialogue, which
can be useful to music researchers. Desmond states that studying dance can
reveal important information regarding how the body is constituted
historically at specific moments and in specific places, how bodies are
marked and how they relate, how different social groups use the body, and
how particular groups view the use of time and space (1997:32). In
addition, the body must play a role in cultural analysis because it plays such
an important one in our everyday discourse about identity. Race and gender,
in particular, are equated with bodily difference (49).
Research on the body also has the potential to bring together researchers
in the social and natural sciences. Blacking and Baily pointed the way to
further research in this direction, noting that, because music-making often
arose from the discovery of symmetrical or comfortable bodily movements,
“the intrinsic modes of operation of the sensorimotor system can [therefore]
influence the shapes of musical structures” (Blacking in Baily 1995:28).
Furthermore, Blacking believed that music and dance were both “primary
adaptations to the environment” and provided clues to the “origins of
culture” (Grau 1995:57). Thus, if music (and dance) developed prior to
language, then “musical intelligence” modeled many nonmusical activities,
from architecture to mathematics (Baily 1995:27).
If bodily movement was the source of musical development, and many
other human endeavors were based upon musical development, it follows
that bodily movement should be an important focus area of evolutionary
investigation. In fact, current researchers in the natural sciences are taking
this topic seriously. Recent work on the origins of music (and dance) speaks
to the relationship between music and body, as well as mind and body.
Steven Mithen, for example, contends that “neither music nor language can
be usefully divorced from movement. Hence we must consider the whole of
human anatomy in order to understand their evolution.” He suggests it was
in fact a bodily change, not one in brain structure, which led humans to
create music. Bipedalism caused the larynx to move, thus both enabling
musical vocalizations and necessitating the rhythmic coordination of limbs
(2005:149-50). Neuroscientists have recently also connected entrainment,
the ability to move to a beat, to the related ability to imitate sounds vocally
through research into birds that seem to dance (Patel et al. 2008). In this
way, some scientists tie the mind’s development—and that of music and
dance—inextricably to that of the body. Much work remains to be done, but
these suggestive findings help not only to open up new areas of inquiry but
also, perhaps, even to overcome the science/art divide, a binary structure of
academia.
Numerous obstacles remain to be overcome in research on music,
dance, and the body. For example, the turn to body research has, oddly, not
brought increased attention to its movements (Desmond 1997:30). This
problem is often one of methodology, as movement analysis and notation is
infrequently taught, and dance and movement are seldom discussed in
graduate anthropology or (ethno)musicology seminars. Moreover, McClary
suggests that the body has not been studied because it is so complex to
grasp. For instance, it is very difficult to explain music’s “uncanny ability to
make us experience our bodies in accordance with its gestures and rhythms.
Yet this aspect is also what makes music so compelling” (2002:23).
Currently, researchers in a variety of fields are turning their attention to
questions of music, emotion, creativity, and cognition in order to better
address this theoretical and methodological difficulty. This difficulty is
related to the problem of bridging the disciplinary gap between the natural
and social sciences. The representation, interpretation, and regulation of
bodies is bound up with multiple factors which interact and can thus affect
our research in complicated ways, including gender, race, class, sexual
orientation, and age (see Conboy et al. 1997:4-5). Choosing a theoretical
orientation can also be problematic. While many have found
phenomenological orientations useful in recognizing bodily experience as a
way of gaining knowledge, Sally Ann Ness contends that such an approach
usually leaves out the cultural aspects of such experience, seeing it as
merely a latterly imposed and thus superficial framework, rather than the
fundamental one most ethnographers believe it to be (2004:125).
It bears repeating that the body of work on music and the body,
particularly on movement, is still very small. But in spite of the difficulties
mentioned, many rewards await those who choose to work in this area.
Bourdieu suggests the body can help establish a mediating level of analysis
between the phenomenological experience of the individual and a structural
view of society. Brandstetter finds that dance research can help to
“challenge  .  .  .  our established concepts of knowledge and science”
(2007:42, 45). Body research also points the way toward the topics of
emotion and affect, areas of current interest for both social and natural
scientists. For Blacking, feeling was the “mediator” between mind and body
(1977:4), providing another intermediary level of analysis. And Ted
Polhemus wrote of the potential of body research to unify disparate fields of
study, including the various strands of anthropology, phenomenology,
semiotics, sociology, and biology (1978:27), a potential just now beginning
to be realized.

CONCLUSION
The mass displacement of groups of people all around the world is a
characteristic of the times we live in. Yet, we must not forget that migration
is also a bodily movement, and the simple fact of these bodies in motion has
real consequences. When migrants arrive in host countries, they are often
readily distinguishable from other residents by bodily characteristics and
are discriminated against on this basis. Economic migrants constitute a
labor force and thus acquire value as laboring bodies, as described by Marx.
Such bodies are in a sense bought and sold, usually at a low price, securing
privileged First Worlders cheap labor and the cheap goods thereby produced
by employing threats of deportation or violence (see, for example, Dunn
1996). Refugees bring with them bodies marked by the violence of war,
rape, and torture, bodies whose suffering has forever altered the minds of
those who possess them.
On the flip side of this coin, displacement and difference may engender
desire, either sexual or more abstract. First Worlders seem to have an
endless appetite for “exotic” products from food to music, consumed either
in situ, often in “ethnic” restaurants run by migrants, or by the voluntary
displacements of tourism. While in one sense this “consumption” of the
Other is disempowering, the Other may also be able to leverage this desire
in their own favor.
Blacking believed that because dance played an important role in
defining humans as humans, as well as in uniting their societies through
aesthetic and cooperative behavior, the neglect or negation of dance could
have dire effects, including the violent abuse of bodies (Grau 1995:47).
While many may find Blacking’s predictions overblown, in fact we do find
a lack of acceptance of bodies in Western societies today, societies that have
in large part relegated the practice of dance to a select few and in which
bodily disorders are rampant. In this world, then, bodies are no trivial
matter. Let us try not to forget them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to thank Maurice Mengel for comments on earlier
versions of this chapter, as well as for his suggestions of reading material.

NOTES
1. For more on the role of dance in the history of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and folklore
studies, as well as the continued lack of support for dance research programs in universities and
publication on dance, see Hutchinson 2009b.
2. Interestingly, however, under the topics to be studied in systematic musicology Adler places
rhythm, including “the absolute musical rhythm in relation to the dynamics of all bodies” (1981:10).
Elsewhere in the article he uses Körper [bodies] to refer to musical instruments, but does not seem to
mean the same thing here; his meaning is unclear.
3. These racial ideologies have problems of their own, of course. See Hutchinson 2009a for
further discussion of mestizaje, nationalism, and dance in a Mexican context.
4. For instance, in 2009, Durham University, UK, offered a conference on music and emotion and
the University of Geneva offered one on “affective sciences and music.” In 2007, the University of
Sheffield held a meeting on gender and musical performance, and the Hochschule fur Musik in
Cologne held another on heavy metal and gender in 2009. One theme for the Society for
Ethnomusicology’s annual conference in 2006 was “music, sexuality, and the body,” while in 2009
the International Council for Traditional Music’s conference featured “emotion, spirituality, and
experience.”
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 CHAPTER 11
Little Stories from the Balkans

JIM SAMSON

FOUR CASE STUDIES

These reflections on music, place, and history are based on four case studies
of displacement: four “little stories.” All are drawn from Southeast Europe,
and they range across sacred music, traditional music, and popular music. A
focus on displacement, on the migration or forced expulsions of people, is
the common thread running through them, but in other respects they are
really very different. The following synopses place them on a time line.

Little Jerusalem
The first story concerns the transfer of music all the way from the western
to the eastern rim of Europe. In 1492, following an expulsion edict by the
Catholic Monarchs, the Jews left Spain, and four years later they were also
forced to leave Portugal. Some went to what would become the Protestant
North, some to the Maghreb, some to Italy, but the majority traveled to the
European territories of the Ottoman Empire, in a word to the Balkans. One
study goes so far as to describe the Jewish world of the Ottoman Balkans as
a “transplanted Sepharad” (Benbassa and Rodrigue 1993:xvii), as Iberian
cultural forms entered the Ottoman ecumene.
Within this context, my research is largely confined to Sephardic
romances and canciones in Sarajevo (the “little Jerusalem” of the western
Balkans). Of particular interest here is the impact of modernity on that
culture, especially at the point when the Habsburg Empire took over from
the Ottomans. But there was of course a much wider resonance, not least
because the Jews have been commonly regarded as the very embodiment of
displacement, bequeathing to European nationalism such resonant ideas as
the “Holy Land” and the “chosen people.”
The contact with modernity inaugurated a process of self-reflection
among the Sephardim of Sarajevo, culminating in agendas of what one
might call Sephardic nationalism, though that is perhaps not quite the right
term. Notable here was the appearance of institutions such as the influential
charitable foundation La Benevolencia in 1892, and the (admittedly short-
lived) Judeo-Spanish magazine La Alborado, founded by Abraham Kapon
in 1900. The necessary foil for this process was not so much the Habsburg
administrators themselves as the Ashkenazi Jews who accompanied them
and who established their own community in Sarajevo. The Sephardim
defined themselves against the Ashkenazim, who had a different lifestyle
and a different political agenda, in the main Zionist. The dialogue between
the two communities of Jewry in Bosnia was even given cultural
articulation, for example in the short story Tardi di vjarnis [Friday
Afternoon] published in Jevrejski Glas [The Jewish Voice] (see Nezirović
1992:56). But for present purposes the key point is that this climate
promoted the kind of identity-defining collections of oral culture that were
common in nationalist movements more generally at that time, including
secular songs.1 The songs were usually performed by women, who were
largely excluded from public life, and quite a few of the texts can be traced
to Hispanic origins. As it happens, some of the earliest recordings we have
of Sephardic music were made in Sarajevo in 1907, and copies are extant
(see Pennanen 2003).
This little story of self-definition fits into the grand narrative of
European modernity. In particular it speaks of the firming up of borders, in
what might be called modernity’s categorical quest (see Yack 1997). Thus it
was modernist thought stemming from the Enlightenment, and including
ideas of nationhood, that created the so-called minorities—religious and
linguistic—whose ontology we discuss so glibly in relation to the Balkans.
It is hard to unpick this process: something is assigned; something
experienced; but maybe experienced only because assigned. There are
similar social technologies at work with centers and peripheries, clearly a
key theme for anyone who works in the Balkans. Wherever I am is—has to
be—the center. Yet others may disagree, and I may be persuaded by the
others. The tension generated by the coexistence of these two states—
centered and decentered at the same time—can result in highly defensive
self-representations. We may be sidelined by the center but at the same time
we mimic it.
The Sephardim’s response to modernity, I suggest, was not to reclaim
their culture, but rather to promote practices that had previously lacked any
such mediation as a culture—and that too speaks into the grand narrative.
Daniele Conversi writes very perceptively of the “modern re-enactment of a
pre-modern idea” which is an apt description of how the Enlightenment
spawned both cultural modernism and a nationalist ideology (see Conversi
2007). Moreover it invokes yet another by-product of modernity, the
nostalgia that follows innovation. Nostalgia was a palpable part of
Sephardic self-definition in response to modernity, as Ankica Petrović’s
film about the Sarajevo-born Sephardic singer Flory Jagoda demonstrates
(Petrović and Livingstone 2000). Svetlana Boym (2001) has argued that
such nostalgia was typically a second-generation phenomenon (an idea
rather familiar in exile studies). Indeed, it was among the second generation
of Sephardic collectors that we encounter a longing to reconnect. The key
figure was Alberto Hemsi, who collected Sephardic melodies in the 1920s
and 1930s, and also arranged them for voice and piano.2 Significantly, the
traditional melodies are here contextualized in a highly specific, Spanish-
influenced manner, with accompaniments that sound more than anything
like Granados or Albeniz.
It is well known that a living Sephardic culture was all but extinguished
in the Balkans during World War II. Yet the music has had an afterlife
outside the region and a series of appropriations: folk revivals in the ’60s,
symphonic music (Osvaldo Golijov, for example), jazz idioms (John Zorn’s
“radical Jewish music”), and of course world music. These days, however,
the construction of nostalgia sounds very different from Hemsi’s piano
accompaniments. One of the leading present-day exponents, Israeli singer-
songwriter Yasmin Levy, spent three months in Spain learning flamenco.
Here nostalgia has become a studied project in popular culture, to which I
return in my later case studies.

Migrations
My second story unfolds in Serbia in 1690. In that year many thousands of
Serbs made their way northward into Habsburg territories, following failed
rebellions against the Ottomans, a journey sometimes known as the Great
Migration. For the most part the Serbs fled into what we now call
Vojvodina, which was then part of the so-called military border established
by the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century, a kind of buffer zone separating
them from the Ottomans. However, the Serbs were, in the words of the
novelist Ivo Andrić (though used in a different context), “at war with both
these warring worlds” (see Andrić 2003). Like most of the eastern and
southern Balkans they belonged culturally to Orthodox Eastern Europe.
Especially through the migrations, they also established close connections
with a more distant Orthodox place, Russia. In some quarters this amounted
to the kind of mystical Russophilia that is perfectly captured in one of the
great Serbian novels, called simply Seobe [Migrations], by Milos
Crnjanski.3 Admittedly this can be overstressed (Tim Juddah is right to
caution us against idealizing the Russian-Serb connection [see Juddah
1997:52]), but Russophilia was undoubtedly a reality, even if there was no
lack of mutual suspicion.
The migrations represented, then, yet another of those historic meeting
points of Ottoman and Habsburg dynasties, not unlike the occupation of
Bosnia discussed in relation to the Sephardic Jews. It is no exaggeration to
claim that the ideology of modern Serbian nationalism was forged by the
mix of influences at work on the Vojvodina Serbs, who were largely
responsible for constructing the canonic narratives of Serbia’s national
history. As Tatjana Marković has noted, one of the key attributes of Serbian
intellectual history in general is that its driving forces have often been
communities of Serbs living beyond the national frontiers, in Buda, Prague,
and above all Vienna, rather than those in the homeland (see Marković
2005). In a way theirs is a history of displacement writ large. The military
border was a crucible of change, where the Ottoman East receded, the West
advanced, and Russia was embraced.
One could discuss the beginnings of European art music in Serbia at this
point, but I will restrict my focus to church music. The grand narrative
lurking in the background here is one of European nationalism, more
commonly associated with quite different kinds of repertory. The story
unfolds in Sremski Karlovci, a Vojvodina town, Austrian Baroque in
character, and at that time the seat of an independent archbishopric for the
Orthodox population. The Habsburgs had reluctantly granted autonomy to
the Serbian Orthodox Church following the Treaty of Sremski Karlovci
[Carlowitz] in 1699, and it was partly in defense of this autonomy that links
with religious centers in Kiev were cultivated. During the eighteenth
century, Russian financial support, Russian liturgical books, and Russian
teachers were all made available to the Vojvodina Serbs. The Russians also
established the so-called Slavonic-Latin School in 1726, and scholarships
were offered for study in Russia. In a word, a community of interest
developed around Orthodoxy, and where music was concerned this played
its part in a major transformation of the chant.
The oral tradition of monophonic chant in Serbia was very similar to
Greek, post-Byzantine traditions, but adapted to Old Church Slavonic.
What happened in Sremski Karlovci is that the Kievan [Mohyla] Academy,
where the chant had already been westernized (with staff notation and
harmony) infiltrated this Serbian practice. The change had a substantial
resonance, theological as well as musical. One should emphasize, however,
that it was Russian influence that helped to drive a wedge between Greek
and Serbian traditions. It thus prepared the way for the notations and
polyphonic settings of Kornelji Stanković and later Stevan Mokranjac, the
father figures of Serbian art music, and of the new church music.
Mokranjac in particular removed ornamental and microtonal elements of
the chant, harmonized it and made something unique, which to some extent
separates Serbian church music from other Orthodox traditions.
It was the link with Russia, in other words, that helped establish a
national church music for Serbia, stressing its differentiation from a parent
Byzantine tradition. For Serbs this particular form of harmonized chant
became “our music,” imbued with nationalist values. This remains the case
today. One need only think of the crescendo of Serbian ethnic nationalism
during the Milošević years, when the prevailing ideology was reinforced by
a sequence of big public commemorations in which the Church marked the
place, while Orthodox repertories enriched it with a kind of symbolic
density. There was in truth a war of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches
(Serbian and Croatian) that shadowed and even catalyzed the war of the
nations; and church music was very much harnessed to the cause.4
What really happened with the displacement of the Serbs in the late
seventeenth century is that a subordinate group was brought into direct
contact with two politically dominant groups, instigating a transcultural
process that took a very long time to work itself through to synthesis (for an
account of transculturation see Pratt 1992). It was largely thanks to the
migrations—to displacement—that windows were opened both to the
Habsburg west and to Russia, in due course enabling exchanges between
the Military Border and Serbia proper. Crudely put, goods were transferred
in one direction and ideas in the other. The ideas proved the more durable.

Trading Places
The third story takes us to 1923, when the governments of Turkey and
Greece, sponsored by the international community, contrived an exchange
of religious minorities to resolve their recent hostilities. Greek Christians
were displaced from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland, and Turkish
Muslims in the opposite direction. Bruce Clark’s book, Twice a Stranger
(2006), gives some sense of the complexity of response engendered by this
exchange, as members of plural societies, harboring antipathies but equally
nurturing shared experiences, were forced either side of the line (see also
Hirschon 1993).5 Where music is concerned this exchange of minorities
was quickly hijacked by an ideology of Greek nationalism (see Pennanen
2004). One very clear example would be the appropriation of the Black Sea
idioms of Pontic dance music once it had been transferred from Asia Minor
to Greece. What is conveniently ignored here are the transparent affinities
between these Pontic repertories and Georgian Lazi music, as well as with
local Bektashi/Alevi traditions in Turkey. It is one of those cases where
people select the past they want and need.
However, my main concern here is with how the exchange of
populations accelerated processes of stylistic synthesis that were already
under way in urban music. These involved synergies between Ottoman café
music traditions (found everywhere, though variously inflected, in the
major Ottoman cities of the Balkans) and certain types of Greek popular
music that were associated with the Piraeus-Athens underworld,
crystallizing in the syncretic style known as rebetiko (see, for example,
Holst-Warhaft 1975 and Pennanen 1999). Through rebetika we can register
dialogues of displacement in a precise technical sense, as a discourse
between two musical systems. In this respect, Pennanen’s work has been
pioneering in its attempt to make technical sense of processes of
Westernization in Greek music, and in its nuanced understanding of the
intertwining of different systems of musical thought. The bigger point here
concerns the nature of transitional states. What we get in Greek popular
music after 1923 is a complex process of adaptation and compromise, a
form of transition between Asia Minor and Europe, and notably between
makamlar or makam traces and European chordal harmony. As Pennanen
has remarked, rebetiko “is a mixture of Eastern and Western elements, and
sometimes it is difficult to say if the fusion is more Eastern than Western, or
vice versa” (Pennanen 1999:65).
To make a complicated story very simple, we could say that the
subsequent history of rebetiko swung back and forth between Europe and
Asia Minor, largely in response to ideological change. Thus during the
Metaxas dictatorship in the late 1930s, rebetika were roundly condemned as
orientalist and therefore morally dubious, in the tradition of an ancient
trope. After the Civil War (1946–1949), especially in Aegean Macedonia,
the oriental idiom was given a new lease of life, at least as a subgenre. In
the 1950s and 1960s, following a seminal lecture by Manos Hadzidakis,
rebetika acquired a new accommodation to bourgeois taste, through
appropriations by Theodorakis and Hadzidakis in so-called popular-art
songs, raising incidentally interesting questions of strategic hybridity: how
to appeal to and cut across different strata in Greek society. It was a highly
successful formula, and in the late 1960s, when Theodorakis was in exile,
this idiom became a symbol of resistance against the Colonels. It
increasingly came to be perceived as a Greek national style in music,
assuming in some ways the role formerly assigned to art music associated
with the Kalomiris circle.
More recently, in the 1990s, oriental idioms made a further
reappearance, this time as part of a complex renegotiation of identities on
the part of youth culture. This was a wider Balkan rather than a specifically
Greek phenomenon, but in Greece it came to represent a kind of third way,
enabling some measure of separation both from tourist stereotypes of Greek
popular music and from Western pop (see Kallimopoulou 2006). It was at
once modern and enticingly different, invoking rather particular connotative
values, associated above all with a culture of nostalgia for Asia Minor.
There was a sense that things might be expressed through popular culture—
music in particular—that cannot be articulated through official channels.
After all, the reconnection is not just with Anatolia, but with a shared
Ottoman inheritance. Furthermore, it is apparent not just in the music itself,
but in the concert rituals associated with it. More recently, it is also
prominent in other forms of popular culture, notably film and TV soap.

Talava Rules?
The final story refers to the first cycle of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in
1999. More than a million Kosovar Albanians were driven from their
homes, many of them settling in neighboring Macedonia, where there was
already a large Albanian population.6 They brought their music with them,
including the genre known as Talava. Typically this was the preserve of
Aškalije (Albanian-speaking Roma or gypsies). As elsewhere in the
Balkans, the Roma of Kosovo were of low social status and subject to
discrimination by Serbs and Albanians alike, but they were highly valued as
musicians. They played for both Serbs and Albanians, changing musics,
dances, and even costumes to suit the occasion. However, the mounting
ethnic tensions of the 1980s and 1990s created something of a tightrope for
the Roma, who traditionally made no claim on territory and avoided
ethnonationalist conflict.7 It may well have been their attempt to preserve
this traditional ethos that led them to cultivate Talava, an Albanian-
language genre that was transformed into a distinctive, oriental-sounding
popular music idiom.
Talava developed from a genre of so-called female music and could be
described as minimalist in idiom, with a single repetitive rhythm applied to
very simple, largely unchanging, harmonies in a manner akin to some disco
(see Pettan 1996b). Over this accompaniment the soloist improvises, often
for very long periods, in an oriental idiom that is often more similar to
Indian than to Arabic traditions. It is performed mainly at weddings, with
improvised lyrics directed to the particular occasion in an entirely
spontaneous way, peppered with topical references. As a music that
remained entirely separate from the political agendas of partisan groups in
Kosovo, Talava marked out a unique territory for the Aškalije.
Following the events of 1999, the genre became virtually extinct in
Kosovo. Yet in diaspora it lives on today, especially in Macedonia, even
though most ethnic (and Orthodox) Macedonians know little of it. As a low-
status music, Talava has no access to official cultural channels. It is of
course frequently played on the independent Rom radio and TV stations,
but is mainly known through live wedding performances and privately
produced compact discs or cassettes, marketed on the streets. Trying to
understand its significance in Macedonia today, one notes a double
appropriation. Although it was originally associated with the Aškalije
community in Kosovo, and welded to the Albanian language, Talava has
now been adopted as a Rom genre by non-Albanian-speaking Roma in
Macedonia (many of them settled in Shutka, a large Muslim Rom
municipality just outside Skopje, built just after the earthquake in 1967),
and Rom musicians now regularly perform it in dialects of Romany. Yet at
the same time its Albanian credentials have ensured its wider acceptance
among non-Rom Albanian communities not just in Macedonia, but
increasingly in Albania itself and throughout the widespread communities
of the Albanian diaspora.
The effects of displacement are complex but with clear subcultural
characteristics. Here, in the early twenty-first century, a genre that was
conspicuously apolitical and boundary-crossing in inception has been
transformed through displacement into an embodiment of liminality. It
functions today partly as an underground music, but not in the familiar
sense that it carries explicit and subversive political messages. Rather
Talava in Macedonia has been a means of forging and consolidating the
identities of ethno-religious minorities in a society and a culture which
struggles to transcend such categories. To its credit, official policy in
Macedonia accords equal rights to Albanian and Rom minorities within the
state. If that goal were really to be achieved, in practice there might be no
need for Talava.

REFLECTING ON PLACE
In practice, history and geography are constantly in dialogue in our
discussions of music. As Božidar Jezernik remarks, “there is no history
without a place, and no place without a history” (see 2006:23-31). But
methodologically history has tended to have the upper hand, at least for
musicologists, providing them with the basic conceptual models, as well as
many of the specific tools, of their trade. The story is perhaps rather
different in ethnomusicology, where there has been greater focus on place,
and where history can be somewhat problematical. In any event, scholars in
several disciplines, including musicology, are increasingly alive to the
explanatory value of place these days. For at least one philosopher, Alain
Badiou, there are even formal arguments for its existential power, in the
sense that being there distinguishes existence from being (Badiou [2006]
argues that the fundamental problem is to distinguish being as such, being
qua being, and existence, as a category which precisely is not reducible to
that of being). Yet as Edward Casey reminds us, in his book The Fate of
Place (1997), the earlier history of ideas followed a contrary trajectory, one
in which place increasingly yielded to space, until by the late eighteenth
century enlightened Europe had all but excluded place from its reasoning if
not from its sensory experience. Another way of saying the same thing, or
something like it, would be to argue that civilized society lost its capacity
for the historical memory that is imbued in place (perhaps just as it
developed an enthusiasm for the writing of history), so that this conjunction
has had to be rediscovered, or reclaimed.
It is after all widely recognized that a sense of place—of “being
there”—is a prerequisite of subjectivity, or at least so deeply rooted in
subjectivity that it is crucial for our identity formation. As Denise Von
Glahn has suggested, it is one way we organize our experiences and order
our memories: a way of telling us who we are (see Von Glahn 2004). For
the more experiential aspect of this process some cultural geographers have
used the term landscape, which might be understood as a subset of place,
rather as place is a subset of space. Thus a landscape is defined by our
entire experience of a place, and that includes conceptualizing it and
dwelling in it, in a Heideggerian sense (see Heidegger 1971). A landscape
thus becomes a kind of cultural image, and since it operates partly in an
imaginative realm it is open to contestation. Music may be constitutive of
such a cultural image, and through its associative power it can help weld the
landscape to history, to collective social and even national identities. We are
really discussing borders, insides and outsides, since definitions of a
musical landscape inevitably depend on negations and exclusions, on
constructions of difference. Constructing an identity and constructing an
environment for it are in the end inseparable activities; the one defines the
other in a symbiotic process. And that brings us to displacement.
My first case study, the Sephardic exodus, identifies two hypothetical
narratives about place, one depicting a transplanted Sepharad and the other
a process of acculturation within Ottoman territories. At the root of the first
narrative lies the philosophical assumption that everyone has a proper place.
We may not be there, but we should be, so we define our identity by
constructing our proper place in our present place, which is tantamount to
constructing the past in the present (see Smith et al. 1998). Music can
facilitate this. It is a ritual of remembrance, and as such can haunt the
landscape, a bit like Echo in Classical mythology.
At the root of the second narrative is the assumption that we are
creatures of the places we inhabit, shaped more by our present than our
imagined past. As the Arab proverb has it, “people resemble their times
more than they resemble their fathers” (quoted in Boia 2001:47). Here
music might enchant rather than haunt the landscape, giving it a kind of
symbolic density and significance (on the enchantment of place see Eliade
1961, especially 20-26). While this foregrounds presence rather than
absence, it can also involve a kind of strategic amnesia. In this narrative,
part of the process of defining our identities might involve silencing certain
historical voices, or deciding not to hear them. Elsewhere I have argued that
for the Sephardim both narratives were in play, but that the tendency of
subsequent commentators—modernist storytellers in the main—has been to
make a choice (see Samson 2008).
In the terms suggested by these two narratives, the story of the Serbian
migrations seems unambiguously to be one of acculturation and
modernization. More recently, basically since the 1990s, however, the other
narrative has unexpectedly asserted itself. Nostalgia follows trauma as well
as innovation. Precisely because of the nationalist values imbued in the
Mokranjac model of church music, the “back to the roots” movement that is
common to all Orthodox traditions these days has been especially explosive
in Serbia. There are currently fierce debates, in which so-called neo-
Byzantines are trying to return to a pre-Mokranjac chant, and they look here
especially to the practice preserved in the Serbian Hilandar monastery on
Mount Athos. It is hardly necessary to add that “back to the roots” has a
theological and political, as well as a musical, resonance (see Milin 2000).
Obviously, displacement depends on emplacement. It occurs, after all,
when people argue over a place, having first invested that place with
ideological meaning, whether religious, ethnonational, or both. In fact,
those displaced are not usually those who made the investment. If we mark
a place for consciousness, we inevitably bring “now” and “then,” presence
and absence, into conjunction. Music can contribute—forcefully or
expressively—to this marking, or essentialization, of place, and to investing
it with power. Music is one mode of emplacement, and even of
territorialization, to use a term suggestive of just such a power-impregnated
space from the system of Deleuze and Guattari (see Deleuze and Guattari
1987). It is a way of drawing a line around ourselves with sound. That
metaphor actually describes rather well how music was used as a boundary
by the Sephardim of the Balkans. It marked their places, and it separated
them from others. The circle of stones surrounding them, compacting their
myths and symbols, excluded the world beyond.
The Kosovan holy places, or Medugorje, could be considered in rather
similar terms. Yet these latter examples suggest that drawing lines around
ourselves, whether with sound or by any other means, is not always a
benign activity. When the sacred place is invested with national meanings,
when the circle of stones functions as an analogue for a national border or
would-be border, it can be turned into a site of conflict. Characteristically
the institutions and resources of both church and state will then be used to
give authority to particular meanings and concepts associated with place,
and at the same time to prevent competing meanings from being articulated.
There are many examples in the Balkans. One might cite, really very
synoptically, just two further cases of such border-drawing in action,
characteristic breeding grounds for the politics of displacement on
minoritarian grounds, respectively religious and linguistic. One concerns
the intervention of political ideology in the world of South Slavic epic
songs in the nineteenth century, transforming religion into a mark of alterity
and Muslims into minorities. Another case would be the intervention of
politics in the songs of Grecophone and Vlachophone communities in north
Pindus, again creating a minority, this time linguistic, and leading to heavily
politicized readings of ethnic and linguistic origins, by Greek, Romanian,
and Albanian polities alike. Both cases illustrate how people can become
victims of ideology.
A key point about displacement is that two existing worlds establish a
dialogue, presupposing the kind of self-consciousness that is less
conspicuous in stable, relatively self-defined, places. The dialogue may take
many forms—an absent culture may be studiously preserved or
inadvertently caricatured, usually through idealization. A host culture may
be a source of creative transformation or an object of facile imitation, but it
remains a dialogue, an “awareness of simultaneous dimensions,” as Edward
Said expressed it (see Said 2000:173-86). Svetlana Boym uses a more
graphic cinematic metaphor, referring to “a super-imposition of two images
—home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life  .  .  .  The
moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns
the surface” (Boym 2001:xiv). Nuances abound in all of this. “Identity is a
quest that is always open,” according to Claudio Magris, who argues that an
obsessive defense of origins is as much a form of slavery as willing
submission to displacement (Magris 2001:43).
In articulating these nuances, the world of imaginative culture,
especially music, has the double advantage that it can mediate between
individual and collective experiences of displacement, and that it can help
reconnect the Kristevan Semiotic and the Symbolic (for Julia Kristeva, the
Semiotic is closely related to the infantile state in Lacan and Freud, at once
opposed to and influencing the Symbolic, the social code, akin to a status
quo [see Kristeva 1984]). It goes without saying that the realities of
displacement and exile bear on entire communities. Yet Kristeva reminds us
that the division and separation involved in displacement may well tap into
much deeper psychic realms in the lives of individuals. My Greek-Turkish
story is perhaps especially germane to this. Through music, more tellingly
than through explicit articulations, the Kristevan Semiotic can break
through the symbolic barrier of language, and perhaps reawaken the tragic
moment of separation. It can express both an individual and a collective
longing to reconnect. Carolyn Abbate has thoughts on the mechanism at
work here. As she suggests in her influential article, “Music—Drastic or
Gnostic?,” it is not that music knows best (the hermeneutic position), nor
that it clothes the message in beauty, but rather that words and actions know
one thing and music knows another (see Abbate 2004).
My Greek-Turkish story illustrates yet another dimension of place: its
capacity to function as a site of transition. Homi Bhabha quotes Heidegger
on the bridge: “the bridge gathers as a passage that crosses,” a phrase that
positively invites us to invest in transition (Bhabha 1994:7; his emphasis).
As a post-colonialist, Bhabha would no doubt balk at anything quite so
crude as a transition between East and West; that has all the mark of the
modernist script. To be fair, commentators on so-called Balkanism
(Todorova, Bakić-Hayden, Fleming) also fight shy of blatant binaries. They
seek rather to do justice to the complexity, infinite variety, and multiple
transitions of minoritarian identities on the shifting sands of history and
culture. Nonetheless they remain interested in the sense of this wider region
as peripheral to two geo-cultural worlds, which paradoxically makes it
central. Within these discourses it is partly ideas of transition and liminality
that according to Todorova distinguish Balkanism from Orientalism. As
Fleming argues, it is precisely the power of historical dichotomies that has
given the region its homogeneity (see Fleming 2000).

A POSTSCRIPT ON HISTORY
The trauma of displacement as articulated by both Kristeva and Boym
provides a useful framework for some concluding comments on historical
method. This might be approached by way of a familiar debate in the social
sciences: the competing claims of structures and agencies. These categories
need not be mutually exclusive, but they undoubtedly tend in different
directions, and this has implications for the ways to represent the dynamics
of historical change. A reaction against methodological individualism led
many distinguished historians of the last century, including music
historians, to seek the underlying plots of history rather than to focus on the
actors on its stage. This is still an option for today. A history of music may,
for instance, follow Carl Dahlhaus in understanding successive stages of
historical evolution by means of a kairos (a culminating point or “point of
perfection”), which generates a kind of essence that is then presumed to
characterize that stage as a whole (see Dahlhaus 1983). The kairos in a
history of Sephardic music might be represented notionally as the point of
maximum integration between two separate musical cultures. It thus allows
us to understand the essential underlying dynamic of that history in the
terms of a transitional state (on transitional states see Schwartz-Salant and
Stein 1993). Understood in this way, the Sephardic story might serve as a
paradigm for many other such meeting points of styles in Balkan music
history, reinforcing the discourses of Balkanism noted earlier.
Yet the trauma of displacement points to some of the inadequacies of
this approach. It perhaps directs us instead to the literary critic Derek
Attridge and at a greater distance the philosopher Alain Badiou by allowing
for the new directions, the alternative visions, even the explosive
transformative innovations that become possible through human agency,
very often in direct response to what these writers call “events” (see
Attridge 2004 and Badiou 1988). Events involve some sort of exceptional
rupture with the status quo, usually occurring in a context where prevailing
values have been at least temporarily neutralized. The flow is arrested and
in the space left available (Badiou’s “evental site”) new worlds become
possible. In light of this, music history is not just about works, institutions,
and structures. It is also about agency, about actions occurring within a
practice, and often diverging from the ethos of the practice, just as, on
another level, the interests of practices may diverge from those of the
institutions that house them (for a discussion of the practice as a category
see MacIntyre 1981). I have argued elsewhere that music histories seldom
address the relationship between practices (which have their own setting,
history, tradition, values, ideals, and ethos) and institutions, which are
usually structured in terms of power and status (see Samson 2002). Reading
Sephardic music history in terms of events and agencies in this way, it is not
difficult to single out the key transformative events, even to the point of
identifying an origin and a telos.
Again such ideas transfer effectively to the larger Balkan canvas.
Consider the Kosovan story. It is one of many comparable instances of
violence and war in the recent political history of this region. Taken
together these eruptions might be understood as part of an event series that
has been directly interventionist in music history, impinging on the beliefs,
options, and actions of musicians, and transforming their understanding of
their practice. With characteristic insight (and typically ugly wordplay),
Homi Bhabha remarks that “the state of emergency” is also “a state of
emergence” (Bhabha 1994:59). Alain Badiou takes this further as for him
events are prerequisites for subjectivity. There cannot really be a subject
without events.
It might be tempting to describe these two approaches as modernist and
postmodernist, respectively, even if it is rather hard to find an
accommodation between them. There seems to be an enforced choice
between what are on the face of it two very different ways of punctuating
history. The kairos and the event (the point of perfection and the
transformative moment) are after all very differently placed in any given
historical sequence. At this point, Jacques Derrida provides an alternative
perspective. He warns against just this kind of reductionism, against the
excesses of an either/or mentality. Nor is he solely a deconstructive voice.
By unraveling the complex hinterland to “events” (as part of an explicitly
political attack on the excesses of triumphalist Neo-Con philosophy in the
wake of the fall of communism), he offers us a possible way to reconcile
our two historiographical perspectives (see Derrida 1994). He achieves this
by embedding events within mini-histories—their hidden and intertwining
backgrounds—and by viewing them as simultaneously reactive and
proactive. It is an approach that is very sympathetic to the ambiguities of
little stories, which have a way of constantly taking detours from the simple
characterizations offered by grand narratives. The four case studies of
displacement I mentioned at the outset have been classified here as little
stories. They allow us to see around the edges of the grand narratives,
lighting them up in various ways; they can instantiate them, critique them,
revise them. Then again, my little stories are really big stories. They are just
not very widely reported.

NOTES
1. Among the major figures here was Manuel Manrique de Lara, who collected in Sarajevo in
1911.
2. He described these arrangements as a “triple process of reproduction, reconstruction and re-
creation” (Hemsi 1995:46).
3. The only English translation is the one by Michael Henry Heim (see Tsernianski 1994).
4. One could also tell this story from a Croatian angle, involving Marian hymns, the Medugorje
pilgrimages, and so on (see Perica 2002, especially 89-108).
5. There were exceptions to the exchange: the Greek Christians in Constantinople and Muslim
villagers in Thrace and Macedonia.
6. The basic story has been told many times, ranging from sober analyses by scholars such as
Noel Malcolm (2002), harrowing first-hand reports by journalists like Janine di Giovanni (2004), and
accounts that lie somewhere in between, such as that by James Pettifer (2005).
7. There are numerous studies by Svanibor Pettan. See, for example, Pettan 1996a and his video
Kosovo Through the Eyes of Local Rom (Gypsy) Musicians (1999).

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 INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook.
Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the
terms that appear in the print index are listed below

Abassi, Harnadi
Abbate, Carolyn
Abraham, Paul
acculturation
Achron, Joseph
Adams, Nick
Adler, Guido
Adler, H. G.
Adorno, Theodor W.
Aesthetic Theory
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music
Composing for the Films
Current of Music
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Minima Moralia
Negative Dialectics
“On the Question: ‘What Is German?’ ”
“On the Social Situation of Music”
Philosophy of New Music
“Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America”
The Authoritarian Personality
Toward a Theory of Musical Reproduction
Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie
Aharon, Ezra
Ahmed, Jamilah
Ake, David
Akiva, Rabbi
Albania
Albeniz, Isaac
Alexander, Haim
Algeria
Aly, Götz
Améry, Jean (Mayer, Hans)
Anders, Günther
Anderson, Laurie
Andrić, Ivo
anti-Semitism
Apitz, Bruno
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
Amim, Ludwig Achim von
Arrowsmith, Aidan
Ashkenazim
Ashton-Ellis, William
Attridge, Derek
Augstein, Rudolf
Auschwitz
Ausgewanderte Maler
Austria
Avital, Hanan

Ba’al Hanes, Rebbi Meir

Baaziz, Mounir
Baccar, Selma
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Badiou, Alain
Baily, John
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich
Bakić-Hayden, Milica
Balkans
Balkanism
Barclay, Barbara
Bartók, Béla
Barouch, Andre
Bar Yochai, Rebbi Shimon (Rebbi Shem’un)
Baudelaire, Charles
Beauvoir, Simone de
Becerra-Schmidt, Gustavo
Beckerman, Michael
Beckett, Samuel
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Behan, Brendan
Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine
Benatzky, Ralph
Benbassa, Esther
Ben-Haim, Paul
Benjamin, Walter
Bensoussan, Aaron
Benz, Wolfgang
Berendsohn, Walter
Berg, Alban
Berlin
Berlin, Irving
Berlin, Isaiah
Bernstein, Leonard
Bethge, Hans
Bhabha, Homi
Binarism
Blacking, John
Blake, Eubie
Bloch, Ernest
Bloch, Ernst
Blume, Friedrich
Bohlman, Philip
Boia, Lucian
Bor, Josef
Borchardt, Rudolf
Boskovich, Alexander U.
Boughedir, Férid
Bourdieu, Pierre
Bourguiba, Habib
Bouzid, Nouri
Boy George
Boyd, Brian
Boym, Svetlana
Bracewell, Michael
Brah, Avtar
Brahms, Johannes
Brandstetter, Gabriele
Brandt, Willy
Brazil
Brecht, Bertolt
Brentano, Clemens
Brinkmann, Reinhold
Britain
Broder, Henryk
Brooke-Rose, Christine
Browning, Barbara
Bsiri, Gaston
Bsiri, Jacob
Bsiri, Mordechai
Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen
Bush, Kate
Butler, Judith
The Byrds
Byron, Don

Caine, Uri
Campbell, Sean
Camus, Albert
Carthy, Martin
Casey, Edward
Cateforis, Theo
Celan, Paul
Chapman, Anthony
Cher
Chevron, Philip
Chic
Chopin, Fryderyk
Clark, Bruce
Clarkson, Austin
Clerk, Carol
Cohen, Sasson
Cole, Malcolm
Conboy, Katie
Conversi, Daniele
Coogan, Tim Pat
Cooke, Mervyn
communism
communist
Connerton, Paul
Comford, Francis Macdonald
Costello, Elvis
Crnjanski, Milos
Curtis, L. P.
Czechoslovakia

Dahlhaus, Carl
Dallmayr, Fred
Dalton, Stephen
Damen, Jan
Dardis, Anthony
Darling, Cary
Davis, Ruth F.
Day, R.
Debussy, Claude
DeFrantz, Thomas
Degussa
Delaney, Shelagh
Deleuze, Gilles
Dent, Edward
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, René
Deshen, Shlomo
Desmond, Jane C.
Dessau, Paul
Deutsches Miserere
Devo
Dexys Midnight Runners
diaspora
Albanian
Irish
 Jewish
Dickinson, Kay
Dietrich, Marlene
Di Giovanni, Janine
Diniz, Edinha
Djerba
Donegan, Lonnie
Douglas, Dave
Dunn, Timothy J.
Du Noyer, Paul

Eagleton, Terry
Eckmann, Sabine
Eisler, Hanns
Deutsche Symphonie
Eliade, Mircea
Engel, Joel
England
Enlightenment
exile studies. See also Exilforschung
Exilforschung

Fall, Richard
Fanon, Frantz
Federspiel, Luise and Mina
Feldman, Mark
Ferguson, Neil
Fermi, Laura
Fernández, Nohema
Fetthauer, Sophie
Firkušný, Rudolf
Fleming, Kathryn E.
Flusser, Vilém
Foucault, Michel
Frankenburger, Paul. See Ben-Haim, Paul
Frenkel-Brunswik, Else
Freud, Siegmund
Friedlander, Saul
Friedman, Michel
Frischmann, David
Frith, Simon
Furtwängler, Wilhelm

Gabriel, John
Gallagher, Noel
Gebrüder Wolf
Geiger, Friedrich
Geisel, Eike
Germany
East Germany (GDR)
 Nazi Germany
West Germany (FRG)
globalization
Grenz, Friedemann
Gershwin, George
Gerson-Kiwi, Edith
Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums
Ghriba
Gilbert, Mark
Gilroy, Paul
Gobineau, Arthur de
Goddard, Simon
Goldhagen, Daniel
Golijov, Osvaldo
Gore, Joe
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon
Granados, Enrique
Grau, Andree
Greece
Green, Jim
Green, Lucy
Grenz, Friedemann
Gropius, Walter
Grosser, Johannes
Grossmeier, Cila
Gründgens, Gustav
Grundgesetz
Grünthal, Josef. See Tal, Josef
Guattari, Félix

Habermas, Jürgen
Habitus
Hadzidakis, Manos
Hahn, Tomie
Hancock, Herbie
Handy, W. C.
Hanslick, Eduard
Hara Kebira
Hartmann, Karl Amadeus
Hatten, Robert
Haubenstock-Ramati, Roman
Hauser, Emil
Haza, Ofra
Hefling, Stephan E.
Heidegger, Martin
Heile, Björn
Heim, Georg
Heim, Michael Henry
Heintz, Georg
Heister, Hanns-Werner
Hemsi, Alberto
Hilberg, Raul
Hindemith, Paul
Hirschon, Renée
Hirshberg, Jehoash
Hitler, Adolf
Hoffmann, Ludwig
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe
Holländer, Friedrich
Holocaust
Holst-Warhaft, Gail
Holzknecht, Václav
Homer
Hopenko, Moshe
Horkheimer, Max
Hoskyns, Barney
Huberman, Bronislaw
Hubbs, Nadine
Hughes, J. G.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert
Husserl, Edmund
Hutchinson, Sydney

Idelsohn, A.Z.
Institute for Social Research. See also Institut für Sozialforschung
Institut für Sozialforschung. See also Institute for Social Research
Ireland
Irish Republican Army (IRA)
Israel

Jäckel, Eberhard
Jacoby, Hanoch
Jagoda, Flory
Jak (Raymond Allen Jackson)
Janouch, Gustav
Jansch, Bert
Jay, Martin
Jenemann, David
Jerusalem
Jezernik, Božidar
Jevrejski Glas
Ježek, Jaroslav
Jöde, Fritz
John, Eckhard
Jones, Jafran
Joplin, Scott
Joyce, James
Joyce, Mike
Joyner, David
Juddah, Tim
Jüdischer Kulturbund

Kadora, Houri
Kalkstein, Menachem Mahler (Avidom)
Kallimopoulou, Eleni
Kálmán, Emmerich
Kalomiris, Manolis
Kant, Immanuel
Kapon, Abraham
Karbusicky, Vladimir
Karplus, Gretel
Katz, Robin
Kealiinohomoku, Joanna
Keats, John
Keil, Charles
Kennedy, Gary W.
Kertész, Imre
Keys, Ivor
Klein, Gabrielle
Klemperer, Viktor
Koch, Joachim
Koepke, Wulf
Kohl, Helmut
Korngold, Erich Wolfgang
Korsyn, Kevin
Kosovo
Kracauer, Siegfried
Kraftwerk
Kravitt, Edward
Krenek, Ernst
Kristeva, Julia
Krohn, Claus-Dieter
Kundera, Milan
Kulpok, Alexander
Kulthum, Umm
Kunz, Egon

La Alborado
La Benevolencia
Lacan, Jacques
Lachmann, Robert
Laemmle, Peter
Laing, Dave
Lange, Roderyk
Lara, Manuel Manrique de
Lasker-Schüler, Else
Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita
Lazarsfeld, Paul
Leach, Edmund
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
Lennon, John
Levi, Erik
Levi, Primo
Levin, Michael
Levinson, Daniel J.
Levi-Strauss, Claude
Levy, Yasmin
Lewis, Alan
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS Zeit
Ligeti, György
Lindenbaum, Walter
Liszt, Franz
Livingstone, Mischa
Loewy, Ernst
Longerich, Peter
Lydon, John

Macedonia
MacGowan, Shane
MacIntyre, Alasdair
Maconie, Stuart
Magris, Claudio
Mahler, Gustav
Das Lied von der Erde
Kindertotenlieder
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Symphony No.
Symphony No.
Symphony No.
Symphony No.
Symphony No.
Malcolm, Noel
Male, Andrew
Mann, Klaus
Mann, Thomas
Marcus, Greil
Marković, Tatjana
Marr, Johnny
Marshall Plan
Martin, Frank
Martinich, Aloysius
Martinů, Bohuslav
Marx, Karl
Marxism
Mather, Increase
Maupassant, Guy de
Maurer Zenck, Claudia
Mauss, Marcel
Mayer, Hans. See Améry, Jean
McCann, Graham
McCarthyism
McCartney, Paul
McClary, Susan
McCormick, Neil
McIlheney, Barry
McLoone, Martin
McRobbie, Angela
Mendelssohn, Felix
Mengele, Josef
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Mexico
Meyer, Henry
Meyerbeer, Giacomo
Middleton, Richard
Milhaud, Darius
Milin, Melita
Mill, John Stuart
Milošević, Slobodan
Mitchell, Donald
Mithen, Steven
Mittenzwei, Werner
Mizrahi, Asher
Mizrahim
musiqa mizrahit
Mokranjac, Stevan
Mong-Kao-Jen
Monk, Thelonious
Moore, Allan F.
Moran, Dermot
Morgenstern, Christian
Móricz, Klára
Morria, Terence
Morrissey, Steven
Moussali, Bernard
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mueller, Andrew
Müller-Doohm, Stephan
Müssener, Helmut
Myers, D. G.

nationalism
Nazism
Neher, Carola
Némirovsky, Irène
Ness, Sally Ann
Nevitt Sanford, R.
New York
Nezirović, Muhamed
Nicholson, Stuart
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nolte, Eernst
NS-Forschung
Nungesser, Michael

Oasis
O’Casey, Sean
Offenbach, Jacques
O’Hagan, Sean
O’Neill, Onara
O’Riordan, Cait
Owen, Frank

Pabst, Erich
Paddison, Max
Painter, Karen
Palestine
Panufnik, Andrzej
Patel, Aniruddh D.
Peña, Manuel
Pennanen, Risto Pekka
Perica, Vjekoslav
Petersen, Peter
Petrović, Ankica
Pettan, Svanibor
Pettifer, James
Pickford, Henry
Plato
The Pogues
Polack-Pelleg, Franck
Polhemus, Ted
Pratt, Mary Louise
Princeton Radio Music Project
Purden, Richard

Qian Qi
Quintero Rivera, Ángel G.

Rachmaninoff, Serge
racism
Radano, Ronald
The Radiators from Space
Rakim
Rapée, Ernö
Ravel, Maurice
Raymond, Fred(y)
rebetiko
Reger, Max
Regev, M.
Reis, Elizabeth
Reynolds, Simon
Richards, Paul
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Rizgui, Sadok
Roach, Martin
Robb, John
Roberts, Tyler T.
Robertson, Sandy
Rockefeller Foundation
Roda, Allen
Röder, Werner
Rodrigue, Aron
Rogan, Johnny
Rolling Stones
Roth, Joseph
Rourke, Andy
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Rowland, Kevin
Rubin, Andrew
Rushdie, Salman
Ryle, Gilbert

Sachs, Curt
Said, Edward W.
Sakom, Jakob
Samson, Jim
Sarajevo
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino
Savage, Jon
Scanlon, Ann
Schaal, Hans Jürgen
Schebera, Jürgen
Scheding, Florian
Scheible, Hartmut
Scherchen, Hermann
Schirmer, Vic
Schoenberg, Arnold
A Survivor from Warsaw
Schoenberg, Irma
Schoeps, Julius H.
Schumann, Clara
Schumann, Robert
Schwartz-Salant, Nathan
Scott, Anna Beatrice
Sebag, Paul
Sebald, W. G.
Segher, Anna
Sephardim
Serbia
Seroussi, E.
Sharett, Yehudah
Shas
Shaw, George Bernard
Shiloach, Amnon
Shokeid, Moshe
Shutka
Sibelius, Jean
Simmias
Simpson, Dave
Simpson, George
Smetana, Bedřich
Smith, Jonathan M.
The Smiths
Ask
Back to the Old House
Barbarism Begins at Home
Cemetry Gates
Eire
Girl Afraid
Hatful of Hollow
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
How Soon Is Now?
Is It Really So Strange?
London
Never Had No-One Ever
Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want
Rusholme Ruffians
Stretch Out and Wait
The Queen Is Dead
This Charming Man
Smyser, William
Smyth, Gerry
Socrates
Spain
Spalek, John
Springfield, Dusty
Sremski Karlovci (Carlowitz)
Stanković, Kornelji
Stavans, Ilan
Stefani, Gino
Stein, Murray
Steiner, Rudolf
Stem, Erich
Sternberg, Erich Walter
Stokes, Dermot
Stokes, Martin
Stolz, Robert
Stompor, Stephan
Stone, Naomi
Strauss, Franz-Josef
Strauss, Herbert A.
Strauss, Richard
Stravinsky, Igor
Stringer, Julian
Sturman, Janet
Sutcliffe, Phil

Tadmor, Naomi
Tal, Josef
Talava
Tanguy, Yves
Taylor, Eric
Terezin/Theresienstadt
Theodorakis, Mikis
Thiess, Frank
Thomas, Helen
Thunecke, Jörg
Todorova, Maria
Tsernianski, Milos
Tuastad, Dag
Tunis
Tunisia
Turkey

Udell, Phil
Udovitch, Abraham
Ullah, Philip
Ullmann, Viktor
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)
United States of America

Valensi, Lucette
Vallely, Fintan
Van Zile, Judy
Verlaine, Paul
Vetter, Walter
Von Glahn, Denise
Vossische Zeitung

Wagner, Ann Louise

Wagner, Richard
Walser, Robert
Walter, Hans-Albert
Wander, Fred
Wang-Wei
Weill, Kurt
Weinberg, Jacob
Weiskopf, Franz
Whelan, B. J.
Whiteley, Sheila
Wiesengrund, Oskar
Wiggershaus, Rolf
Wilcock, Evelyn
Wilde, Oscar
Wilson, Olly
Wingfield, Bernard
Wilson, Peter Niklas
Wolff, Christoph
Wolff, Janet
Wolpe, Stefan
Wong, Deborah
Wood, Allen W.
Worrall, Frank
Wulf, Joseph

Yack, Bernard
Yeats, W. B.
Youngerman, Suzanne

Zaghdoun, Marco
Zefira, Bracha
Zeisl, Eric
Arrowhead Trio
Zeisl-Schoenberg, Barbara
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
Zemlinsky, Alexander
Zionism
Zorn, John
 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Beckerman has written articles on Mozart, Sullivan, Vaughan

Williams, Schubert, Brahms, film music, and “Gypsy” topics in addition to
studies dealing with a range of Czech subjects, from the pursuit of
“Czechness” to Janáček’s theoretical works. His most recent books are New
Worlds of Dvořák (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003) and Martinů’s
Mysterious Accident (Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2007). He is currently writing a
book and making a documentary film about the last piece composed in
Terezín, Gideon Klein’s String Trio. He is Professor and Chair of Music at
New York University.

Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor

of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago, and Honorar-
professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover. Among his
most recent publications are Jüdische Volksmusik—Eine mitteleuropäische
Geistesgeschichte (Vienna: Böhlau, 2005) and Jewish Music and Modernity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). He is the artistic director of the
cabaret ensemble New Budapest Orpheum Society, which has released three
CDs, most recently Jewish Cabaret in Exile (Cedille, 2009). He is a
Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him the
2007 Derek Allen Prize for The Music of European Nationalism (2nd ed.,
New York: Routledge, 2010).

Sean Campbell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Media

at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He is the coauthor (with Gerry
Smyth) of Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock (Dublin: Atrium, 2005)
and is currently writing a book on second-generation Irish musicians in
England (Cork University Press, forthcoming). He is also coediting a book
on The Smiths (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

Ruth F. Davis is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Cambridge

University and Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Corpus Christi
College. She has published and broadcast extensively on music of the
Mediterranean and Middle East. Her book Ma ’luf: Reflections on the Arab
Andalusian Music of Tunisia was published by Scarecrow Press in 2004,
and her critical edition of Robert Lachmann’s “Oriental Music” Archive in
Mandatory Palestine is forthcoming with A-R Editions. In 2008 she
organized the first international ICTM conference on Jewish music, “Al-
Andalus and Its Jewish Diasporas: Music Exodus,” at Corpus Christi
College and she is currently editing a volume on this theme for the Europea
series, Scarecrow Press.

Björn Heile is Senior Lecturer in Music and Head of Department at the

University of Sussex. He is the author of The Music of Mauricio Kagel
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) as well as numerous other publications mostly
on new music, experimental music theater, and contemporary jazz. Most
recently, he has edited The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

Jehoash Hirshberg was born in Tel Aviv. He received his PhD in

Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1971 until his
retirement he was Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University,
Jerusalem. His research fields have included the music of the fourteenth
century, the Vivaldian solo concerto, and, recently, Romantic Italian Opera.
In the field of history and sociology of Israeli art music he published Music
in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), a monograph on Paul Ben Haim (a revised version
of which will be published by the Israeli Music Institute in the fall of 2009),
and, together with Herzl Shmueli, a monograph on Alexander U.
Boskovich.

Sydney Hutchinson received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from New York

University with a dissertation on transnationalism and gender roles in
Dominican merengue típico. Currently a Humboldt Fellow at the Berlin
Phonogramm-Archiv, Ethnological Museum, Hutchinson is also the author
of From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth
Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), as well as articles in
Ethnomusicology, the Journal of American Folklore, Folklore Forum, and
Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. In 2010, she will
join the faculty of Syracuse University as Assistant Professor of
Ethnomusicology. She yodels in her spare time.

Erik Levi is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Author of the books Music in the Third Reich (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1994) and Mozart and the Nazis (New Haven: Yale University Press,
forthcoming), he has written numerous articles on German music between
1919 and 1945 and on Shostakovich, and has edited the complete piano
works of Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (Zürich: Hug, 2005). An
experienced broadcaster and regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine,
he has also worked as a professional accompanist appearing most recently
on the two-disc set Continental Britons (Nimbus NI5730-1, 2004) in music
by Gál, Goldschmidt, Rankl, and Wellesz.

Max Paddison is Professor of Music Aesthetics at Durham University. He

did research on Adorno’s philosophy and sociology of music at the
Universities of Exeter and Frankfurt and also studied performance and
composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music. He has published
widely on the aesthetics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, the
avant-garde, and rock music, and has written two books on critical theory:
Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993) and Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture (London: Kahn & Averill,
1996, rev. ed. 2004). He is also joint editor of a volume of essays with Irène
Deliège, Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

Peter Petersen, born in 1940 in Hamburg, received his PhD in 1970 and
his habilitation in 1981. Since 1985, he has been Professor of Music at the
University of Hamburg. In 2005 he cofounded the Hamburger Jahrbuch für
Musikwissenschaft. He is the founder and director of the “Arbeitsgruppe
Exilmusik” and editor of the series Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil.
He has been honored by Festschrifts for his sixtieth and sixty-fifth birthdays
(Komposition als Kommunikation. Zur Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts
[Frankfurt: Lang, 2000] and Fokus Deutsches Miserere von Paul Dessau
und Bertolt Brecht [Hamburg: von Bockel, 2005]). A list of his numerous
publications can be found at www.saitenspiel.org.

Jim Samson is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of

London. He has published widely (including seven single-authored books
and seven edited books) on the music of Chopin and on analytical and
aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. In 1989 he was
awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture, and in
2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his recent
publications are The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Virtuosity and the Musical
Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), awarded the Royal Philharmonic Book Prize in
2004, and (with J. P. E. Harper-Scott) the textbook Introduction to Music
Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Florian Scheding is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton.

He has studied at the Universities of Hamburg and Salamanca, and at Royal
Holloway, University of London, where he received his PhD in 2008. In
2007 he was a postdoctoral fellow with the European Network of
Musicological Research at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has published
articles on the composer Mátyás Seiber, film music, and composers in exile
during World War II. He is currently preparing a book on avant-garde music
in exile.