Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern EuropeAgain and again people turn to music in order to assist them make sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, and Henryk Górecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices--such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis--provide musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from academic professionals in music studies as well as an interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and aesthetic articulations of suffering. |
Contents
Musical Ways of Bearing Witness | 3 |
Collage and Fragmentation as an Expression of Trauma in Alfred Schnittkes Concerto for Piano and Strings | 30 |
Galina Ustvolskayas Piano Sonata No 6 and a Hermeneutic of Pain | 67 |
Arvo Pärts Tabula Rasa as Musical Testimony in Tengiz Abuladzes Repentance | 97 |
Henryk Góreckis Third Symphony and the Politics of Remembering | 133 |
Other editions - View all
Performing Pain:Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe: Music and Trauma in ... Maria Cizmic No preview available - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
Abuladze Abuladze’s aesthetic alberti bass Alfred Schnittke American Psychological Association argues artists Arvo Pärt audience Boobbyer canon Caruth chords composers composition Concerto for Piano contemporary context create cultural trauma describes discourse discussion disruption dissonance emotional experience Felman film music film’s fragments Galina Ustvolskaya glasnost Górecki’s Górecki’s symphony grief HANS SIKORSKI historical memory Holocaust individual’s interpret Ivashkin Keti Keti’s keyboard linear listener loss Mazo melody Merridale minor moral mourning movement music history musical example narrative Nino notes pain Palmer’s Pärt’s music past performance physical pianist Piano and Strings Piano Sonata piece playing Polish political polystylism postmodernism quotations reality regarding relationship Repentance repetition representation resonates response Russian Sandro scene Schmelz Schnittke’s concerto sense serialism Shnitke silence Silentium social socialist realism solo soprano Soviet spirituality Stalinism Stroebe suffering symphony’s Tabula Rasa testimony theme Third Symphony tintinnabuli tion tonal tone clusters traumatic events truth University Press Ustvolskaya’s Ustvolskaya’s sonata Varlam work’s York