Irvine hosts `forbidden' music

Forbidden music, once banned as "degenerate," blared loud and clear on campus Wednesday afternoon. That's when several dozen community members and students gathered in Irvine Auditorium's Amado Recital Hall to hear pieces written by Jewish composers that were banned by the Nazis. "This is not an ordinary concert," said Marion Kant, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn, which organized the event. "The occasion today recalls one of the darkest periods in human history." The program -- titled "Entartete Musik" or "Degenerate Music" -- covered pieces composed between the rise of Nazi power and World War II, as well as a more recently composed piece by Raoul Pleskow, a Jewish musician whose family fled to New York from Austria. Nazis held the first exhibition of "Degenerate Music" in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1938. It demonstrated for the German public the type of music that would not be tolerated by the Third Reich. "[They] sat in judgement over what was and was not acceptable in art, music and popular entertainment," said Kant. "The Nazis took art and music seriously. They saw them as powerful ideological instruments and, therefore, intrinsically political." While the Nazis may have stifled the voices of some of those political instruments, other musicians continued to compose. The music, an outgrowth of American jazz, included pieces written for the saxophone and piano. For Wednesday's concert, Temple and La Salle universities' Marshall Taylor played the saxophone, accompanied by Philadelphia Biblical University's Samuel Hsu on the piano. Between the musical pieces, Taylor and Hsu, a visiting scholar at the Center, explained the significance of each composer. Taylor's interest in degenerate music began several years ago. Though Taylor himself is not Jewish, his brother married into a Jewish family, and Taylor was asked to play at a family reunion. In his search for music, he began assembling pieces of degenerate music. "This music is not really played a great deal," Hsu said. The concert's creators hoped to help "rescue from oblivion some of the music of those who were the objects of such hatred, and to celebrate that music and the lives of those who wrote it," according to an excerpt from Taylor in the event's program. "It has been very gratifying and enriching for my life," Hsu said. "It is very heartwarming to know people overcame such great personal tragedies and still wrote such heartfelt work."

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