Sounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
J. Mackenzie Pierce is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
"A major intellectual history with extraordinary significance as scholars ask how art music in Europe has been a site for the contestation of difference. This beautifully crafted book is a model twentieth-century history that shows how lives in music do not stop and start at the fissures of war."—Andrea F. Bohlman, author of Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland
"This remarkable and pathbreaking volume examines the evolution of the classical music scene in Poland from the 1920s to the height of Stalinism in the early 1950s. It is a moving testimony to the redemptive character of music and to its ability, on occasion, to overcome ethnic and religious difference. Essential reading for all those interested in the tragic fate of Europe in the twentieth century."—Antony Polonsky, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian, Global Education Outreach Project, Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw
"Sounds of Survival demonstrates Mackenzie Pierce's care in attending to silences embedded in narratives of Polish cultural continuity during the Second World War. Drawing on an astounding array of archive and press materials, Pierce challenges readers to recognize the personal and institutional labor that shaped those national narratives, which had a profound effect on Polish musical life for decades afterward."—Lisa Cooper Vest, author of Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music
356 pp.6 x 9Illus: 18 b/w figures, 11 musical examples, 3 maps
9780520405929$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Apr 2025