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Turning Points: music by persecuted and exiled composers
The new Turning Points brochure examines 20th century composers whose lives and musical careers were ended by murder or damaged by exile, banishment or suppression.
The mass displacement and murder of millions under National Socialism and Stalinist terror, along with the systematic bombing of cities during World War II, led to the destruction of an immeasurable amount of cultural heritage. Musical careers were interrupted or obliterated, and while the full extent of these losses remains unknowable, lost works and forgotten stories continue to resurface in archives.
Only long after 1945 did a serious reckoning with Nazi barbarism’s impact on music begin. Most exiled composers, already stigmatized because of their origins , faced a new form of exclusion. They did not conform to the doctrine of the rising avant-garde movement in the 1950s, which sought to sever ties with the past, rejecting the artistic traditions of societies it viewed as complicit in Hitler’s war of extermination and the Holocaust (referred to as the Shoah in Hebrew). Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, the attack on composers took the opposite form – branding them symbols of Western decadence.
The Turning Points brochure seeks to explore the complex and still-relevant history of composers caught in the centrifugal forces of exile, banishment and suppression. Many of these artists were pushed into a no-man’s-land in music history – overlooked, displaced, or deliberately erased. They deserve renewed attention.
> View the Turning Points brochure (PDF)
Within the brochure is a sequence of articles by leading researchers and musicians who have spent decades uncovering the immense cultural losses wrought by totalitarian regimes. The recent rediscovery of composers Maria Herz, Julia Kerr and Hans Winterberg remind us that the history of exile and suppression in music is still being written.
Great Britain: Hostility toward ‘Enemy Aliens’
by Michael HaasUSA: Shifting Landscapes for Immigrants
by Frank Harders-WuthenowUSSR: Beyond the Official Doctrine
by Boris YoffeGermany and Austria: Internal Exile and Silent Resistance
by Christoph SchlürenPoland: Message in a Bottle from Hell
by Frank Harders-WuthenowTheresienstadt: Music Before, In and After the Ghetto
by Albrecht DümlingThe Long Road to Those in Exile: A Performing Scholar’s Perspective
by Kolja Lessing
The Turning Points brochure was produced by Boosey & Hawkes | Sikorski and is available in English and German language versions.
> Read Turning Points (English) (PDF)
> Lesen Wendepunkte (Deutsch) (PDF)
> Kaufen Wendepunkte bei Stretta Music (Deutsch)
> Watch the Turning Points video playlist
> Listen to the Turning Points audio playlist