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Outline

Music and Memory at Liberation

2016

Abstract

How do we receive personal musical memories emerging out of the Holocaust experience? My question is addressed to that moment of individual hearing: to the intimate point where we encounter experiences shared with us, where we are positioned as listener and witness. This article draws on a series of oral history interviews made in 2008 in Sydney with Jewish Holocaust survivors who participated in a project of documenting and preserving private musical experiences and memories during the Nazi era. In presenting these cases, I am arguing for two considerations. First, I wish to advocate a scholarly model of care, of attentive listening to a wide variety of archival material, including living musical testimony of survivors. It is fairly uncontroversial to acknowledge that sonic experiences remain in memory and travel with us throughout our lives, providing moments of nostalgia, evocations of past connections, ties to culture, friends and family, frames of reference. Is it confrontational to extend this ability of our sonorous bodies to imagine that musical memories of dark, distant and difficult times continue to be embodied within and around us? Second, and more specifically , I wish to draw attention to the diversity of experiences at the point of liberation. The resonance of a musical memory awakens the fragility of an aporetic moment between oppression and freedom, where the testifier may allow themselves the space for doubt, uncertainty, questioning and absurdity.

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