This event was made possible by the generous support of the Irene C. Rechnic Holocaust Education Fund.
Presented in partnership with the Mead Witter School of Music
11:00am – Lecture with Patricia Hall
Free | No ticket required
Hamel Music Center – Collins Recital Hall (740 University Ave)
“Performing Foxtrots from Auschwitz-Birkenau”
a lecture by Patricia Hall
(Professor Emerita of Music Theory at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, & Dance)
While many Holocaust survivors have given vivid accounts of the music they heard in Auschwitz, even supplying titles, we really don’t know what this music sounded like. There are photographs and drawings of a few of the ensembles that played in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, but no recordings were ever made.
In this presentation, Professor Hall will explain the process she used in reconstructing music played in Auschwitz from manuscript parts preserved in the Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. These parts were dance band arrangements created by Polish political prisoners from Auschwitz and performed at Sunday concerts for the SS.
We’ll listen to performances of these reconstructions and see how they have been adapted in recent soundtracks like Barry Levinson’s The Survivor and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Finally, and most importantly, she will assess how these reconstructions can educate audiences and performers about the music of Auschwitz, the musicians that performed it, and by extension, the Holocaust.
2:00pm – University Symphony Orchestra Concert
Ticketed Event | $20 general admission, Students free (ticket required)
Purchase tickets
Hamel Music Center – Collins Recital Hall (740 University Ave)
Oriol Sans, conductor
University Symphony Orchestra performs works that were uncovered in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum by Patricia Hall, Professor Emerita of Music Theory at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
For more than forty years, Hall has explored archives all over the world, looking for significant musical manuscripts that have been forgotten, lost, or ignored. In 2016, she went on a somber quest, visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to search its collection for musical manuscripts. One in particular, a foxtrot called “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens,” struck Hall because of the horrible irony of its title, which translates to “the most beautiful time of life.” She learned that the music had been copied by hand and arranged by Polish political prisoners in the Auschwitz I men’s orchestra during World War II.
Music played a role in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, with official prisoner orchestras existing in most camps. The ensembles in Auschwitz, populated by many professional musicians, included a brass band and a symphony orchestra. Members of the ensembles were compelled to play an array of music for a variety of purposes, from background music as prisoners were marched to and from their work assignments to performing concerts for the SS, Hitler’s elite guard unit that ran the camps.
Hall returned to Ann Arbor with scans of the existing copies of the manuscript for that song and embarked on a collaborative effort with SMTD students and faculty–including conductor Oriol Sans, who was at the time an SMTD assistant professor of music–to present it in concert. The project also involved transcribing the handwritten copies into printed notation and creating a recording that closely matches how the song would have sounded as performed in Auschwitz in 1943. The recording, Hall said, was then returned to the museum and made available to researchers.