A three-year project led by the Royal College of Music (RCM) will explore and celebrate the UK work of migrant composers, including many Jewish musicians who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s.
“Music, Migration and Mobility” — recently awarded £900,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council — will feature workshops, performances and recordings that highlight the trans-national nature of the composers and their work.
Jewish composers featuring in the project will include Hans Gál, Egon Wellesz, Franz Reizenstein, Matyas Seiber, Roberto Gerard, Bertold Goldschmidt and Robert Kahn, as well as many violinists, conductors, singers and teachers who fled the Nazis.
Prof Nils Grosch at Salzburg University will gather information in archives in the UK, Germany and Austria to re-trace their lives and work, and a team of human geographers led by Prof Peter Adey at Royal Holloway, University of London, will create maps to visualise their journeys and networks.
Lead researcher Norbert Meyn, a historian and Royal College of Music vocal professor, said: “Many of these musical migrants, to use this modern term, are still warmly remembered among the RCM community, and there is hardly a professor who was not at some stage taught or influenced by one of them.”
“In 2016 I founded Ensemble Émigré and since then we have given over 30 concerts of songs and chamber music by émigré composers. However, performing their music, for example ‘English’ songs by the Schönberg pupil Karl Rankl, has revealed a problem. We still tend to think of music in national ‘boxes’, and their music does not fit into them.
“This project will put the music of migrants centre stage and aim to recognise and celebrate it as such.”
Ensemble Émigré will perform at the New North London Synagogue on Nov 10 at 7.30pm