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University of California Press

About the Book

Sounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish-Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, were persecuted during the Nazi occupation, and attempted to establish a renewed musical culture from the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Attending to these musicians from the 1920s into the 1950s, the book is a rigorous examination of Jewishness within twentieth-century Polish classical music, and the first to examine how the Holocaust was a defining event for the country's musical culture. J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite the nearly unimaginable violence experienced by these musicians, many of their projects and ideals were reinvited and preserved across war and genocide. Thus, he rejects the common assumption that World War II and the Holocaust were epoch-defining ruptures in Polish, Jewish, and European culture, instead showing that the midcentury was a period of fervent reinvention and cultural development in response to trauma.
 

About the Author

J. Mackenzie Pierce is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Reviews

"Sounds of Survival demonstrates Mackenzie Pierce's care in attending to silences embedded in narratives of Polish cultural continuity during the Second World War. Drawing on an astounding array of archive and press materials, Pierce challenges readers to recognize the personal and institutional labor that shaped those national narratives, which had a profound effect on Polish musical life for decades afterward."—Lisa Cooper Vest, author of Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music

"A major intellectual history with extraordinary significance as scholars ask how art music in Europe has been a site for the contestation of difference. This beautifully crafted book is a model twentieth-century history that shows how lives in music do not stop and start at the fissures of war."—Andrea F. Bohlman, author of Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland

"This remarkable and pathbreaking volume examines the evolution of the classical music scene in Poland from the 1920s to the height of Stalinism in the early 1950s. It is a moving testimony to the redemptive character of music and to its ability, on occasion, to overcome ethnic and religious difference. Essential reading for all those interested in the tragic fate of Europe in the twentieth century."—Antony Polonsky, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian, Global Education Outreach Project, Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw