Abby Anderton

This collection of articles proposes a theoretical model for understanding and analysing the persistence of music making as a response to urban catastrophe. In the Introduction, the authors present an overview of recent humanistic literature on ruin aesthetics, positioning music as a vital yet overlooked dimension of aesthetic responses to disaster. The forum delves into the moral and ethical complexities of performing in ruins from second-century Jerusalem to contemporary Haiti. By tracing the sound of music in and about ruins, this forum offers a timely reflection on the nature of post-catastrophic music making, proposing new directions for analysing the relationships between music, traumatic memory, and spaces of performance.

This collection of articles proposes a theoretical model for understanding and analysing the persistence of music making as a response to urban catastrophe. In the Introduction, the authors present an overview of recent humanistic literature on ruin aesthetics, positioning music as a vital yet overlooked dimension of aesthetic responses to disaster. The forum delves into the moral and ethical complexities of performing in ruins from second-century Jerusalem to contemporary Haiti. By tracing the sound of music in and about ruins, this forum offers a timely reflection on the nature of postcatastrophic music making, proposing new directions for analysing the relationships between music, traumatic memory, and spaces of performance. The Syrian pianist Aeham Ahmad (b. 1988) opens his memoir with a reflection on the aesthetics of destruction:

During his 1947 visit to Berlin, American pianist Webster Aitken was shocked to find the Kroll Opera reduced to 'tangles of twisted girders, resembling empty bird cages. Beyond the Brandenburger Tor, the blocks seem to be made of brown sugar that has gone hard in lumps and streaks'. Aitken was one of dozens of artists invited by the American Military Government to concertize throughout postwar Germany to demonstrate the strength of American musical achievement. Between 1945 and 1949, American musicians visited the ruins of the Third Reich to perform for German audiences, and this article explores the efficacy their postwar concerts had for the reeducation programme. American cultural officers believed music could play a redemptive role in the service of Democracy to promote racial and religious tolerance among German audiences.

On a warm summer afternoon in late May 1945, eight recently liberated Jewish Holocaust survivors gave their first concert on the hospital lawn of Bavaria's St. Ottilien Monastery. After accepting seven new members, the ensemble soon became known as the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra, concertizing throughout the American Zone of Germany between 1945 and 1949. Crafting their performances around the experience of forced displacement by wearing concentration camp uniforms, the musicians performed at the very sites of their trauma, including former concentration camps and Wehrmacht barracks. Through their performances , the Orchestra managed to negotiate the ruined postwar landscape by creating a community of survivors bound by common experiences and traumas. On a warm summer afternoon on May 27, 1945, eight recently liberated Jewish Holocaust survivors gave their first concert on the hospital lawn of Bavaria's St. Ottilien Monastery. Standing on a makeshift stage covered by a canopy of sheets and repurposed parachute fabric, the musicians—dressed in striped concentration camp uniforms—opened the performance with the four national anthems of the Allied powers before playing arrangements of music by Bizet and Grieg. The event was much more than a liberation concert: The orchestra's performance was also remarkable for its symbolic meaning––Holocaust survivors appearing in Germany's public sphere less than three weeks after the Nazi surrender. As disenfranchised and stateless refugees, their music created a liminal space of empowerment. 1 Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at