Table Of ContentRevised Pages
Performing Commemoration
Revised Pages
music and social justice
Series Editors: William Cheng and Andrew Dell’Antonio
From Plato to Public Enemy, people have debated the relationship be-
tween music and justice—rarely arriving at much consensus over the
art form’s ethics and aesthetics, uses and abuses, virtues and vices. So
what roles can music and musicians play in agendas of justice? And what
should musicians and music scholars do if—during moments of upheav-
al, complacency, ennui—music ends up seemingly drained of its beauty,
power, and even relevance?
Created by editors William Cheng and Andrew Dell’Antonio, this
endeavor welcomes projects that shine new light on familiar subjects
such as protest songs, humanitarian artists, war and peace, community
formation, cultural diplomacy, globalization, and political resistance.
Simultaneously, the series invites authors to critique and expand on what
qualifes as justice—or, for that matter, music—in the frst place.
Titles in the Series
Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma
Annegret Fauser and Michael A. Figueroa, Editors
Sounding Dissent: Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism
Stephen R. Millar
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Performing
Commemoration
Musical Reenactment and the
Politics of Trauma
Annegret Fauser and Michael A. Figueroa,
Editors
University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor
Revised Pages
Copyright © 2020 by Annegret Fauser and Michael A. Figueroa
All rights reserved
For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected]
Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid- free paper
First published October 2020
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for.
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 07466- 2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 05466-4 (paper: alk. paper)
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12721- 4 (e- book)
Cover Image: Rita Ezrati, Hurler (2015): Ink on paper 17x12 cm.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Annegret FAuser And MichAel A. FigueroA
Trauma, Survival, and Musical Commemoration
1. Ensounding Trauma, Performing Commemoration:
Western Music in Time of War and Tumults 19
Annegret FAuser
2. Commemorating Performance, the Cabaretesque,
and History Inside Out 41
PhiliP V. BohlMAn
3. Music Commemorating the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki Bombings 68
noriko MAnABe
Mediation, Memory, and Musical Reenactment
4. An Anthem for the AMIA Cause:
León Gieco’s “La Memoria” and Public Assembly
in the Beneft Music Video from Argentina 97
lilliAn M. Wohl
5. Musical Memory, Animated Amnesia:
The Soundtrack of Exoneration in Waltz with Bashir 121
MichAel A. FigueroA
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vi Contents
6. Say Her Name:
Invocation, Remembrance, and Gendered Trauma
in Black Lives Matter 142
ImanI DanIelle mosley
Possibilities and Impossibilities of Commemoration:
Trauma’s Persistence and the Politics of Reenactment
7. S ongs of Flight:
War and Genocide Reenactment on the Refugee Route 165
Vanessa agnew
8. O verwriting Sound:
Polish Commemoration in Concert 193
anDrea F. Bohlman
9. M usic and the Mediation of Remembrance:
Refections on the Commemoration of the Centennial
of the Armenian Genocide 219
sylVIa angelIque alajajI
10. T he Accidental Archivists:
Memory, Resonance, and Decay in Kivu 240
ChérIe rIVers nDalIko
Afterword:
Musical Commemoration and the Imagination
of the Future 263
kay kauFman shelemay
Bibliography 269
Contributors 287
Index 293
Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum
platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/
mpub.11560559
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Acknowledgments
This project started over lunch, one spring afternoon, in the main
atrium of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina. Our conversation turned to an upcoming concert of the
Defant Requiem by two of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s
student ensembles, Carolina Choir and the UNC Symphony Orchestra.
This show, brainchild of the conductor Murry Sidlin, would involve a
reenactment of performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem (the Catholic
mass of the dead) by Jewish internees in Terezín for other inmates as
well as for their Nazi captors between 1942 and 1944. The sponsoring
organization, the Defant Requiem Foundation, controls the mediation
of these historical events through a performance of Verdi’s work, framed
by flm clips and readings. Who framed a musical reenactment such
as the Defant Requiem, we asked ourselves, and how does it connect to
broader issues of commemorative performance? What role does music
itself play in such a context? In order to cultivate a critical conversation
on the topic, we organized a meeting of scholars with a view to generat-
ing discussion between the participants prior to publishing their fnd-
ings in what has become the present volume. In April 2017, many of the
contributors to this volume gathered at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill to share their research and insights about musical reen-
actment of past trauma and its politics. Galvanized by the powerful indi-
vidual contributions of the meeting, our contributors took an active role
in shaping and framing the volume, thus creating its coherence across
geographical and historical expanses. To them, frst and foremost, we
express our deepest respect and gratitude.
Given the crucial role of the conference in the genesis of the book,
we would like to acknowledge the sponsors of the event: the Carolina
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viii Acknowledgments
Asia Center, UNC College of Arts and Sciences, Carolina Center for
Jewish Studies, UNC Department of Music, UNC Institute for Arts and
Humanities, and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and
History. We are particularly grateful to Stefan Litwin, our co- organizer of
the conference, for his invaluable intellectual and artistic engagement
with the topic. As an artist whose work bears traces of his biography as
the child of Holocaust survivors, he ofered vital insights in the entan-
gled nexus of memory, performance, and reenactment that shaped the
confguration both of the conference and of the book.
As the book crystallized into its current form, a number of careful
editors helped to sharpen its many facets into a coherent whole. We are
deeply grateful for the insightful comments and vital encouragement of
the editorial director of the University of Michigan Press, Mary Francis,
and the two editors of the Music and Social Justice series who welcomed
our volume, William Cheng and Andrew Dell’Antonio. As the manu-
script wound its way from conception to production, our two research
assistants, Christopher Campo-B owen and Megan Ross, contributed sig-
nifcantly to its present quality by checking references, working through
the bibliography, and adding the index. We are also very grateful to the
production team at the University of Michigan Press and to our copy
editor, Richard Isomaki. We further acknowledge with deep gratitude
the generosity of the Canadian artist Rita Ezrati for her permission to
reproduce Hurler (ink on paper, 2015) on the book’s cover.
Finally, we thank our respective spouses, Tim Carter and Monica
Figueroa, for supporting the project through the past three years so gen-
erously, both intellectually and in everyday life. We are all too aware that
we would not have mustered the creative energy nor met our various
deadlines if we had not been able to prioritize this volume at critical
moments of its genesis.
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Introduction
Annegret FAuser And MichAel A. FigueroA
The essays in Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the
Politics of Trauma began as responses to a deceptively straightforward
question: what is it to perform commemoration? By foreground-
ing reenactment as a principal, though not the only, commemorative
mode, the ethnomusicologists and musicologists contributing to this
volume interrogate the enmeshments of performed reenactment and
the politics of trauma as embodied forms of musical commemoration.
Commemorative performance can reenact past trauma, seek justice, lay
claim to territory, mark the passage of sacred time, and perform many
other social functions around the world. Nations such as Poland and
India use hymns, anthems, and folk songs to commemorate political
milestones on the road to independence. Suf Muslims from Senegal
to Indonesia center their religious practice on zikr: a musical ritual of
remembrance invoking the names of Allah. Israeli flm and television,
aided by musical soundtracking, serve as powerful media for reenacting
and/or memorializing wars and other traumatic events. In the streets
and on social media, US resistance movements such as Black Lives
Matter and Say Her Name performatively place (silent) hands in the air
to reenact deadly encounters with law enforcement, rendering visceral
the realities of everyday violence and commemorating the last moments
of victims’ lives.
Performing commemoration is closely intertwined with both the
fght for, and the denial of, social justice. The ritual calling of women’s
names in Say Her Name, for instance, forms an interconnected part
of a painful and diachronic web of the high-s takes fght over memory
