Learning from the past ~ lessons for today - Holocaust Education ...

Holocaust Memorial Day 2009
The Holocaust as an inspiration for music…
Melanie Brown, musician and composer
I was born and raised within the Jewish community in
Ireland, and the Holocaust became a part of my
perception of the world earlier than for my non-Jewish
contemporaries. The grief, pain, anger and lack of
comprehension that it engenders for me, together with a
need to observe rituals associated with remembrance, are
caused by shared experiences of ethnicity and culture with
those who perished.
It would appear to me that the Holocaust is regarded in
numerous ways in modern Ireland. To the young, it is a
disaster which happened to an unfamiliar ethnic group in
a different century. However, I am aware of many
teachers, either with a genius for history or with genuine
compassion for tragedy, who have presented the
Holocaust in a visceral style, forcing students to identify it
not just as another set of statistics, but also as a human
calamity which saw western civilisation metamorphose
into a demonic culture of aggressors, tormentors and
innocents.
Among adults, I note various perspectives. There are those
who mourn, and those who express guilt. There are those
who regard the Holocaust as a prism through which they
view all Jews and find it impossible to dissociate one from
the other. There are also those who regard the Holocaust
as one more massive loss of life, a far-off event, part of a
lengthening list of famines and ethnic cleansing. There
are even those who would assign a species of reflexivity to
the Middle East situation, characterising Israelis (and
therefore Jews) as Nazis, and everybody else as
beleaguered victims.
A need and a duty to remind performers and audiences of
the past initially motivated me to deal with the Holocaust
in my work. This became more urgent when, in my early
twenties, I attended a concert featuring a composition by
Gideon Klein, who had written this work while imprisoned
at Terezín and who was killed at Auschwitz shortly
afterwards. Klein’s upbringing and educational
background were not dissimilar to my own, but he died at
the age I had reached then. I assumed the task of
representing Klein and others like him in their preferred
medium to contemporary audiences, and believe that art
has a responsibility to respond to such things. A
correllation exists between art and the human condition.
Art is created with
either a conscious or
unconscious need to
communicate, but the
existence of art itself
requires this need for
communication in order
to perpetuate itself.
Human history has imposed circumstances upon itself
which forbid us to ignore or forget.
Music is, in my opinion, the ideal way to memorialise
events of the past, because the different constituents of
music (harmony, melody, sonority, rhythm) operate on so
many different levels and are prone to be interpreted in
infinitely different ways. When the listener hears a piece of
music that explores a particular subject, then that listener
becomes obliged to engage with the subject in his or her
unique way with an immediacy not often present in other
art forms. This is due to the ephemeral nature of music: we
hear it and it is gone, unlike those media which can be
presented visually and examined at leisure.
Melanie Brown Holocaust-related works include:
Three Blessings (1995)
choir; orchestra
I Have Not Seen a Butterfly Around Here (1996)
piano; cello; flute
Chanting (1997)
a capella choir
The Holocaust: A One-Act Opera (1997)
soloists; chorus; orchestra
The Miraculous Light (1998)
solo tenor; choir; piano
The Tomb (2001)
solo piano
I am currently engaged in a new project, inspired by
paintings and woodcuts, a legacy of men and women who
died in the concentration camps. This will be premiered in
February 2009.
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