(Online-)Seminar: »Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust«, J. Mackenzie Pierce; 19.06.2025, (Online)

Seminar: »Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust«, J. Mackenzie Pierce; 19.06.2025, (Online)

The Slavonic and East European Music Study Group (SEEM) is pleased to announce its next Online Seminar. The event will take place online on Zoom, and is open to all. To receive the link for participation, interested participants are kindly asked to email christoph[dot]flamm[at]zegk[dot]uni-heidelberg[dot]de. SEEM online seminars will be conducted in accordance with the policies on participation (see https://www.baseesconference.org/ ) adopted for the BASEES 2024 conference.

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19 June 2025 | 16.30-18.00 UK time

‘SOUNDS OF SURVIVAL: POLISH MUSIC AND THE HOLOCAUST’
A discussion of J. Pierce Mackenzie’s recently published study (University of California Press, 2025)

Prof J. Pierce Mackenzie (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Discussant: Dr Daniel Elphick (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Chair: Christoph Flamm (Heidelberg University)

“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 and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. ‘Sounds of Survival’ not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.

Mackenzie Pierce is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2025). He is a scholar of twentieth-century musical culture in Eastern Europe, with a special focus on Polish-Jewish relations and music during the Holocaust. Active in both the US and Europe, his research has been supported through fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and the Beinecke Foundation.