Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation

Amy Lynn Wlodarski is associate professor of music at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, where she has earned both institutional and national teaching awards. She is the co-editor, with Elaine Kelly, of Art outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture (2011) and was the 2012 recipient of the Irving Lowens Prize for an outstanding musicological article (Society of American Music). Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of Musicology, as well as in select edited volumes. She is the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, including funding from the Harry Starr Fellowship at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, and the Presser Music Foundation. She also offers regular speaking engagements and pre-concert lectures with leading musical ensembles, such as the Los Angeles Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

• Introduction; 1. The composer as witness: Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw; 2. The philosopher as witness: Theodor Adorno's A Survivor from Warsaw; 3. The composer as witness: Hanns Eisler's Nuit et Brouillard; 4. The state as witness: Jüdische Chronik in the German Democratic Republic; 5. The composer as witness: Steve Reich's Different Trains; Epilogue.

'Musicologist Amy Lynn Wlodarski's debut monograph contributes a tremendous intervention to Holocaust witness, memory, and trauma studies. … The strength of this book lies in Wlodarski's generative contextualization and assessment of her archival findings (especially in the case of Reich's Different Trains), as well as her meticulous deconstruction and synthesis of vast and interdisciplinary literature collections. … Despite its deceptively compact nature, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation is formidably detailed and persuasively delivered. It deservedly won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society for most outstanding book. … With its engaging argument about the aesthetics and ethics of musical witness creations, Wlodarski's monograph provides an [indispensable] scholarly model for analyzing the artistic shocks that follow traumatic events.' Samantha M. Cooper, Musica Judaica Online Reviews