Sonic Shatterzones: The Intertwined Spaces, Sounds, and Music of Nazi and Soviet Atrocity
Douglas Chalmers Graduate Student Lecture by Alexandra Birch, Mellon Teaching Fellow at the Harriman Institute and Lecturer in History
The Soviet Gulag, the Holocaust, and the civilian and military engagement in World War Two produced unfathomable mass death in sites across the entire USSR for a half-century. The recovery of music and its performance allows us to hear these composers as they envisioned themselves professionally, rather than exclusively as victims, and provides an instant, immersive, and humanizing understanding of atrocity. My unique background in both performance and academia allows me to recover and perform the works that I find and to capture remote soundscapes as sonic snapshots of former camps. I speak primarily about my work with recovered music, the mythologies of music which filtered into Nazi statecraft, and the intersections between Nazi and Soviet atrocity. I will perform examples of recovered music, highlighting the function of music as testimony, and finally show how sound and music separately give us different affective understandings of the same site through a case study of Auschwitz. I look forward to sharing recovered music from a lost world.
Dr. Alexandra Birch is a professional violinist and historian who works comparatively on the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet mass atrocity, including the Gulag through the lens of music and sound. She holds a PhD in History from the University of California Santa Barbara, and a BM, MM, and DMA from Arizona State University in violin performance. Previously, she was a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wilson Center, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, where she released CDs of recovered music and finished her first book Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe. Her current project “Sonic Shatterzones, The Intertwined Spaces, Sound and Music of Nazi and Soviet Atrocity,” investigates eight case studies of the Holocaust in the USSR and Gulag, including indigenous interactions with Solovki, new recordings of Weinberg’s compositions from his time in Tashkent, sound recordings of the Gulag in Kazakhstan and of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and post-Soviet world premiere compositions, creating a humanizing look at incomprehensible violence.
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