Sonic Shatterzones: Hearing the Intertwined Spaces
Please join the Harriman Institute for a Director’s Seminar with Alexandra Birch. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
The history of the Soviet Union can be defined by periods of atrocity, genocide, and warfare. 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. Music and sound provide an instant, humanizing, and immersive understanding of these atrocities. In four case studies, Birch will provide examples of how we can hear the Holocaust, the Gulag, Terror, and exile. She will discuss Weinberg’s sonic fragment’s taken to Tashkent and covertly buried in his violin sonata during a peak of Soviet antisemitism in 1948, sonically describe the Gulag between field recordings of Karlag and the recovered music of Nosyrev and Zaderatsky, look at the overlap between Nazi and Soviet occupation of indigenous space and present Saami recordings as reassertion against epistemicide, and discuss how we can hear the Holocaust in the Soviet context both with recovered music (Tyrmand, Leyvand) and through sound. Finally, where do we go from here? In the wake of renewed Russian expansion and aggression, how do composers like Khanon, Gubaidulina, and Stolyar provide a sonic and intellectual intervention against terror? Rather than an intellectualized view of political violence, music and sound connect us to impossible catastrophe and create an emotional and evocative response to historical events.
You MUST register by 4pm on November 14, 2024 in order to attend this event.
