The Transfer and Reconfiguration of Memory through Music

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Music begins its existence temporally; the moment it has passed through our ears it no longer exists as sound but becomes memory. It is the lived experience of music that makes it such an exceptional conduit for memory, and the momentary experience of sound is alive with context: feeling, interpretation, meaning, history, community. This panel explores music’s ability to transfer and transform memory through sounding and resounding experience. Jamie Blake discusses the transfer and reconfiguration of cultural meaning through dance, as Bronislava Nijinska’s famed 1923 ballet Les Noces, a quintessential reflection of its historical, cultural, and artistic moment, barely escapes extinction, only to reemerge bearing new cultural, intergenerational, and transnational meaning. Nicolette van den Bogerd explores how Szymon Laks’s art song “Elegia żydowskich miasteczek,” based on Antoni Słonimski’s poem with the same name, engages with Poland's postwar Holocaust memory politics of the 1960s. Finally, Karen Uslin interrogates the intergenerational transfer of memory through traumatic commemoration, examining the musical pilgrimage the Nazareth Academy High School Chorale to envoice the traumatic Holocaust martyrdom of eleven Catholic nuns. In all three papers, music presents a site at which memories can be recalled, shared, and emerge transformed. Music both creates continuity and recontextualizes memory; neither the memory nor the music is fixed, but together they serve as a site for discourse that can cross temporal, geographic, and generational boundaries, redefining the parameters of historical narrative.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Alina Nowobilska, Independent Scholar

Papers

• Remaking the Wedding: Bronislava Nijinska’s 'Les Noces' and the Politics of Revival - Jamie Blake, Capital U

• Musical Recollections from Paris: Szymon Laks' Postwar Testimonies to Polish Jewish History - Nicolette van den Bogerd, Indiana U Bloomington

• At the Crossroads: Music, Memory, and Transference in the Context of Catholic Victims of the Holocaust - Karen Lin Uslin, Stockton U / Defiant Requiem Foundation

Discussant

• Alina Nowobilska, Independent Scholar