Jewish Music out of the Shadows: Hidden Archives, Lost Worlds

Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE, Bristol 

Davar Bristol, The Jewish Cultural Institute in Bristol and the South West

The catastrophes of the twentieth century, most significantly the Shoah, led to the near destruction of the rich musical heritage of Eastern European and Russian Jews. Composers, performers and their art were either lost forever, or else became dispersed and fragmented, leaving only shadowy echoes of a lost world. Stephen Muir will talk about a large international research project, “Performing the Jewish Archive”, which aims to bring some of that music back out of the shadows. Recovered from dusty cellars in Helsinki, abandoned suitcases in Cape Town, and the archive of human testimony held in the memories of survivors and their families, music allows us to glimpse the riches of that lost world, at the same time reminding us that unless they are cherished and recorded with painstaking care and urgency, our archives risk being lost forever along with the world that produced them.

Stephen Muir studied at the University of Birmingham, and is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds. He has published on subjects as diverse as Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas, Dvořák’s piano-vocal arrangements, and South African Jewish music. In 2014 he and other scholars were awarded one of the largest ever grants (£1.8 million) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for “Performing the Jewish Archive” (ptja.leeds.ac.uk).

This event as part of a programme of events for Bristol Holocaust Memorial Day (2017) See their website for more details