Fourth Sibelius Academy symposium on music history, 1-3 June 2016, Helsinki, Finland

Type	International conference
Date	1st June 2016 - 3rd June 2016

Performing the Jewish Archives researchers Dr Simo Muir, Dr Joseph Toltz and Daniel Tooke presented papers in a panel called '"Rootless Cosmopolitans": Jewish Musicians and displacement in the mid-20th century'. Prof Patrick Zuk facilitated as a commentator. 

Panel abstract:

The displacement of Jewish artists in the years leading up to and including WWII had a profound affect on personal aesthetic output and material fragility of works and reputations. This session brings together academics collaborating on an Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK) large grant, “Performing the Jewish Archive”, to discuss the impact of displacement and the labelling of cosmopolitan to artists of that time. Just as the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ maybe considered in an ethical light today, its historical nomenclature during the turbulent years of the 1930s and 1940s carries a very particular meaning. If cosmopolitan can be transformed into a new way of reading ‘post-national understandings of the social in the musical past’, then this session will explore the way in which it was co-opted in ways to classify, suppress and marginalise a particular group of artists at a particular era in the 20th century, how those artists chose to respond to such a label at that time and afterwards, and how their aesthetic may have been influenced by ideas of ‘the cosmopolitan’.

Image: (from left) Daniel Tooke, Joseph Toltz, Patrick Zuk and Simo Muir.