Free | No ticket required

This event was made possible by the generous support of the Irene C. Rechnic Holocaust Education Fund.

Presented in partnership with the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies.

“Performing Foxtrots from Auschwitz-Birkenau”
By Patricia Hall, Professor Emerita of Music Theory at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance

While many Holocaust survivors have given vivid accounts of the music they heard in Auschwitz, even supplying titles, we really don’t know what this music sounded like. There are photographs and drawings of a few of the ensembles that played in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, but no recordings were ever made.

In this presentation, Professor Hall will explain the process she used in reconstructing music played in Auschwitz from manuscript parts preserved in the Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.  These parts were dance band arrangements created by Polish political prisoners from Auschwitz I and performed at Sunday concerts for the SS.

We’ll listen to performances of these reconstructions and see how they have been adapted in recent soundtracks like Barry Levinson’s “The Survivor” and Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” Finally, and most importantly, she will assess how these reconstructions can educate audiences and performers about the music of Auschwitz, the musicians that performed it, and by extension, the Holocaust.

$20 general admission
Students free (ticket required)

October 5, 2025 at 2 pm
Collins Recital Hall
Hamel Music Center

Oriol Sans, conductor

University Symphony Orchestra performs works that were uncovered in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum by Professor Hall.
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Patricia Hall is the author of A View of Berg’s Lulu Through the Autograph Sources (University of California Press, 1997, winner of the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award) and Berg’s Wozzeck (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is co-editor, with Friedemann Sallis, of A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and general editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Hall founded the online journal Music & Politics and was editor from 2007 to 2017. She served as the president of the Society for Music Theory from 2019 through 2021. She has been researching manuscripts at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for the last eight years and was recently interviewed on PBS News Hour. Performances of the Music from Auschwitz manuscripts took place in January 2025 for International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Wigmore Hall, London; Music of Remembrance, Seattle; and at the Auschwitz and Dachau Memorials.