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MIT
Directions &
The series is sponsored in part by the Goethe-Institut Boston |
Exiled
to Hollywood: The Boston Chamber Music Society (BCMS) and MIT's Music and Theater Arts Faculty jointly present Exiled to Hollywood: Outcast Artists in Southern California on Saturday, January 21 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. The concert, which starts at 4:00 p.m. and is preceded by a public forum at 1:30 p.m., features music by composers who fled tyranny in Europe before and during the Nazi era and settled in Hollywood. The contributions of these composers to American concert and film music, and to the teaching of great music to the American public, are a small part of a larger story about the growth of all the arts in America before, during, and after World War II. The story is especially relevant to our local community: two important books1 were assembled by scholars and published here; members of our intellectual community have lived this history; a leading scholar of film music teaches at MIT; and the program known as Music at MIT was founded by one of those émigrés, Klaus Liepmann (1907-1990), albeit not via Hollywood. So significant is the chamber music produced by this cohort that BCMS has decided to anticipate and follow up the January events with the performances of Anton Webern’s piano quintet arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 9 in December at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, and Ingolf Dahl’s Concerto a tre in February at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. Both pieces have been performed several times on the BCMS series and will have new meaning in this context. 1. A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigrés and Exiles in Southern California (2009) by Cambridge author Dorothy Lamb Crawford, published by Yale U. Press; Driven into Paradise (1999), a collection of essays compiled by Harvard University professors Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolfe, published by Harvard U. Press |
