‘I CANNOT remember everything.’ The first words of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw make for perplexing listening, prefacing, as they do, the narrator's attempt precisely to remember. On some level, paradoxes such as this one are characteristic of Survivor. For example, the brevity of the work contrasts with its density and expressiveness, while the crudeness of diction of the perpetrator's language as remembered by the imagined survivor contrasts with the sophisticated dodecaphonic idiom. The narrative itself, too, seems paradoxical. The last sung words of the victims, uvkumecho (rise up), as they intone the Sh’ma Yisrael, ‘collide directly with a forbidding signal from the trumpets’, as Steven J. Cahn has put it, rendering the victims morally superior to their murderers while simultaneously signalling their deaths. Of greatest interest, perhaps, is the extent to which Survivor explores the dialectic of history and memory. While Schoenberg claimed to have partly based the libretto on witness accounts of survivors and set it during the dissolution of the Warsaw ghetto in April and May 1943, thus suggesting a sense of historical accuracy, the fictitious narrator conjures up an imaginary scene from memory. As Amy Wlodarski has put it, the work witnesses Schoenberg's response ‘to the fact of the Holocaust through a personalized theory of musical memory’. Wlodarski’s emphasis on memory is crucial. Indeed, it has been the complex processes in which collective, cultural memory arguably supersedes the historical event that have provided the main point of discussion in the literature on Survivor. When Richard Taruskin, in his well-known critique, praised Steve Reich's Different Trains but dismissed Survivor as ‘kitsch-triumphalism’, he effectively pointed towards Schoenberg's strategy to de-prioritise the banal cruelty of historical facts. But such facts are not the prime concern. Instead, Survivor ‘probes the workings of memory’, as James Schmidt has argued.

The dangers of aesthetic approaches that prioritise historical accuracy and documentation have been debated almost continuously since Adorno famously called on art's necessity to act as the world's ‘unconscious historiography’. Rather than attempt to represent history objectively, artists must navigate the aporia posed by the Holocaust in works in which ‘the utter horror still trembles’. James Young has similarly cautioned against art that conjures up a pretence ‘rhetoric of fact’ and reminded us that any narrative inevitably fictionalises ‘real’ past events.

FOR twentieth-century music in the global West, institutions matter. They act as mediators and distributors of music, as commissioning bodies and as enablers of musical production. The economic power as well as cultural and socio-political capital afforded to and by musical institutions has widely been acknowledged by musicologists. Many studies respond to, or are based on, implicitly or explicitly, the pioneering work of scholars like Georgina Born, who has contributed perhaps the most powerfully formulated and in-depth assessment of musical institutions. As Born reminds us, institutions function as crucial actors in Western cultural organisation, re-inscribing and maintaining genre boundaries and seeking to legitimise their own cultural production, intent on preserving their status. Institutions, then, are not only enablers. They are also gatekeepers. They represent hubs of culture which artists who seek to promote their creativity must negotiate.

If cultural institutions matter for musical life in general, they certainly do so for migrants. For immigrant artists, especially those arriving in a country as refugees or displaced persons, gaining a foothold in artistic circles is as vital as it is urgent. Migrant musicians rely on institutions not just for employment and economic opportunity. In aiding dissemination of their music, for example, cultural organisations can also be entry points for gaining social capital and acceptance. Nadia Kiwan and Ulrike Meinhof have emphasised the importance of hubs for migrants, which have the potential to provide fixed points along the network of migrant flows, creating a nexus of transnational and transcultural migration. Kiwan and Meinhof differentiate between spatial, human, and accidental hubs, encompassing key locations of departure and arrival such as capital cities, established international migrant networks and local migrant communities, and those created as a side effect of migration research itself. Of most interest for this chapter is the category of strategic hubs – concert organisers, non-governmental organisations, and cultural institutions – which, according to Kiwan and Meinhof, play a crucial role in helping migrant voices to be heard.

There is no doubt that the most influential institution for music in Britain in the mid-twentieth century was the British Broadcasting Corporation. No musicological study on music in Britain over the last century or so is complete without paying at least some attention to the role of the BBC, an assessment that transcends boundaries of genre, class, and race.

REFLECTING on exile, Edward Said performs a rhetorical and strategic shift. While his opening emphasises migration as a phenomenon that defines our age, conjuring up images of mass displacement and streams of refugees, his prose moves increasingly away from collective namelessness and towards a focus of individual migrants, such as James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Auerbach, and others, instead. This strategy of envoicement foregrounds Said’s call to empower the migrant as a central figure in modernity. But he goes further, enacting a move from a dystopian world of homelessness and uprootedness towards an almost utopian vision that imagines migration as not only a central experience of the human condition, but as essential for socio-cultural progress more widely. In so doing, however, Said is cautious of being overly celebratory, interspersing his prose with continuous reminders of the other place of the migrants, the heterotopia of migratory culture. This dialectic between the collective and the individual on the one hand and the interplay between dystopia and utopia on the other permeates much of migration studies and scholarship concerned with the mobility of people. As scholars negotiate between individual and collective migratory identities, methodologies range from biographical approaches that often focus on elite individuals to those that emphasise a sense, however heterogeneous, of diasporic community. On occasion, such different methodologies run parallel to sub-disciplinary boundaries, with studies on Western art music tending to favour biographical approaches, while ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars sometimes incline towards methods that employ case studies as a means for foregrounding broader identity politics.

The dialectics of biographical specificity versus the collective extend well beyond musicology and migration studies. Benedict Anderson's influential concept of the imagined community, for example, which, according to him, arises when numerous individuals, who may not know each other personally, identify with one another, reverberates in Rebecca Mitchell's concept of aesthetic communities. Conversely, migration studies scholars have increasingly offered critiques of notions that rely on assumptions of imagined communities. For example, in her review of Alejandro L. Madrid's Transnational Encounters, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco has pointed to the extent to which studies that seek to foreground diversity and complexity unwittingly essentialise large numbers of people along imagined ethnic boundaries. Ayşe Cağlar and Nina Glick Schiller go further and deconstruct the underlying hypothesis of a migrant–native divide as inherently flawed and counterproductive to notions of heterogeneity and diversity.

THE nation and the migrant seem to form an uneasy relationship. Edward Said constructs the migrant as the other to the nation, suggesting that the nation ‘fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages’. Migration studies are frequently anxious about the nation and nationalism as a concept. Nina Glick Schiller and Ulrike Meinhof, for example, advocate a paradigm shift away from what they call methodological nationalism towards transnational approaches that blur the migrant–native divide. In a similar vein, Homi Bhabha has called for ‘a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities’. As I have argued elsewhere, studies focusing on individual migrants or migrant communities tend to eschew engagement with the (host) nation and stress concepts such as diaspora and exile instead. The story of the refugees from fascism has been increasingly well documented, with studies usually seeking to highlight the exilic or diasporic status of the displaced. Conversely, as Thomas Nail has identified, history continues to prioritise places and is narrated foregrounding national borders, thus excluding the migrant as ahistorical. Mainstream music studies, too, afford the nation a central role and struggle to integrate migrants into historicisations of national musics. Scholarship on British twentieth-century music, for example, frequently ignores migrant voices or mentions them only in passing. Where they are included, authors often isolate their stories from the main narrative, placing them in separate chapters and emphasising their exilic status and their non-belonging.

While nationalist historiographical approaches to music fixated on place are ill-equipped for addressing creative responses of musical migrants, narratives that dispense with the national altogether fail to grasp the complex nexus of identity politics at play. For migrants constantly encounter nations, perhaps more than those who do not move. On an everyday level, migrants deal with the nation as it manifests itself bureaucratically, from the moment of border- crossing to the applications for work permits, visas, residence, and so on. (The next chapter addresses some of these workings, focusing on how national institutions such as the BBC treated migrants.) On a less mundane but equally obvious level, it is the very existence of nations and their insistence on borders that have created transnational migrants, certainly during the period covered in this book. Modernity is marked by the increase in border structures that go beyond physical objects that follow a line on a map.

‘MODERN Western culture’, Edward Said has famously argued, ‘is in large part the work of exiles, emigres, refugees.’ Said references Hannah Arendt's point that those on the most marginal fringes of societies, refugees, occupy a paradoxical centrality and suggests that migration, as a human condition, influences, reflects, and can be traced in the arts, for example. Indeed, it seems to be a truism that music dealing with migration, speaking of it, performing it, or bearing traces of it abounds. With Homer's Odyssey, the dawn of European literature breaks with the story of a migrant, and that of music, too, for the Odyssey was recited. And it seems safe to assume that migrants, or those who experience exile or some sort of displacement, whether physical or virtual, might be driven to reflect on their situation creatively. But it is equally obvious that it would be too simplistic to label every work by a migrant composer migratory music, just as it is clear that conceptual engagements with migration, exile, and diaspora are not the sole domain of migrants. How, then, does migration manifest itself in music? How, if at all, can it be traced, and what are the premises for tracing it? As I have argued elsewhere, much writing engaging with the music of migrants or diasporic communities takes the migratory premise for granted and sometimes fetishises it. Besides the implicit danger of thus disempowering artists as human beings unable to rise beyond their migratory status, assuming music to be diasporic because its author is or was a migrant at the time of the creation of the work (and consequently arguing that it confirms the author's migratory status) is problematic logically. It takes the outcome of analysis for the process of analysis.

Even though such a debate may appear old hat, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss the relation between a migrant composer's biography and the analysis of their works on a theoretical level to form a methodological basis for this chapter, before focusing on some specific compositions. Given the well-established premise of contextuality and performativity in musicological discourses over the last thirty years or so, musical analysis has more and more turned to addressing the existence or appearance of music within its performative contexts, frequently positing hybridities and cautioning against essentialisations. Much of musicology has shifted from ontological to phenomenological approaches.

IN the summer of 1941, Hanns Eisler was busy composing in the small town of Woodbury, Connecticut. Eisler had decided to stay there with friends, fellow migrants Sylvia and Joachim Schumacher, in no small part for financial reasons, to escape expensive rent and urban life in New York. His wife, Louise, meanwhile, was earning money as a governess in Vermont. The Schumachers organised a room with an out-of-tune piano, rented from a gardener, who got on well with Eisler and enjoyed the composer's renditions of American folksongs. The peace and quiet of the countryside, alongside stimulating conversations with the Schumachers, resulted in a productive spell of compositions, which included the Woodbury Songbook, the film music to A Child Went Forth, and work on Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain. Eisler also wrote a set of piano variations there, which, as Christoph Keller has noted, he composed without a specific reason such as a commission or performance, unlike the other three works. Instead, it seems that the impulse for the work, written for Eisler's own instrument, the piano, can be located nearer to home, so to speak, in Eisler’s biography.

Keller speculates that discussions with the Schumachers about Beethoven’s variation technique, prompted by Sylvia Schumacher's practising of Beethoven’s C minor Variations, may have inspired Eisler to write his own set of variations. Indeed, Keller points out that the work follows compositional principles, which Eisler had discovered in Beethoven's variations. But the composition is not merely an exercise in invoking Beethoven. Instead, Eisler's commitment to the dodecaphonic technique of his erstwhile teacher, Schoenberg, is a hallmark of the work, while the recurrent first theme is itself based on the quintet from the first act of Mozart's Magic Flute, in which Papageno cannot speak because of a padlock that has been placed over his mouth. The compositional history of the work, too, is less than straightforward, and maps out how the musical-historical reference points intermingle with personal semantic layers. Later in the same year, 1941, Eisler added a second coda, later renamed the first finale, as a funeral music for his friend Grete Steffin, who had died in Moscow on 4 June while fleeing the Nazis.