SEPTEMBER 29 • 2022 | 55

P

atricia Hall, professor of music the-
ory at the University of Michigan 
(U-M), has researched music pre-
pared and performed by political prisoners 
at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration 
Camp to be heard in programs for Nazi 
administrators. 
Her work represents visits into the 
archives of what has become a museum to 
recall the conditions surrounding World 
War II. Her research was done in a building 
that had been a prisoners’ barracks.
Hall will tell about her work and play 
examples of the music during a public-in-
vited program, “Music at Auschwitz.
” It will 
be offered in person and digitally by the 
SOAR (Society of Active Retirees) Lifelong 
Learning Institute at 2 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, 
at the Hawk Community Center (formerly 
Harrison High School) in Farmington Hills. 
“I’m going to be talking about the 
experience I went through going to the 
Collections Department at the Auschwitz-
Birkenau State Museum for the first time, 
not fully expecting to find any manuscripts 
and then seeing hundreds of pages of man-
uscripts,
” Hall said. 
As Hall describes her research work 
between the years 2016 and 2019 in Poland, 
she explains that the music and lyrics were 
written by popular German composers out-
side the camp. In the camp, where she did 
her research, prisoners arranged and played 

happy dance music.
“I found 20 handwritten manuscripts 
with multiple parts,
” she explained. 
“Sometimes, there would be 15 different 
instruments and a part written out for each 
instrument for that piece. 
“Some of these compositions were 
incomplete so there were so many parts 
missing that I couldn’t reconstruct the 
pieces. For the 10 pieces that we have per-
formed in concert, they were pretty much 
complete. I was able to simply transcribe 
those parts, and they were ready to play.
”
Since bringing the manuscripts back to 
U-M, Hall has worked with other professors 
to develop a concert, since performed at 
the university, Zekelman Holocaust Center 
in Farmington Hills and the Museum of 
Jewish Heritage in New York. 
The concert performed in Ann Arbor by 
music students was filmed professionally, 
and she will be showing excerpts during 
her SOAR presentation. A piece about her 
range of experiences was written for a jour-
nal, Music Theory Online.
Hall, who earned her doctoral degree 
at Yale University, taught at the University 
of California in Santa Barbara for 25 years 
before coming to U-M. She is the general 
editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music 
Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2017).
“I worked alone in the archive, but when 
I returned to U-M, I collaborated with my 

colleagues here,
” she said, explaining that 
Professor Stephen West (music, voice) 
worked with the male vocal quartet to make 
suggestions about their acting. 
“Our male vocal quartet plays the parts 
of the prisoner copyists so they’re sitting 
around a desk, and they’re standing when 
they need to sing. Sometimes, they walk 
around the group so it’s an organic unity. 
They also recite lines from the testimonies 
by the prisoner musicians describing their 
lives in Auschwitz.
”
Testimonies were added because Hall 
consulted with another colleague, Eugene 
Rogers, director of choral activities and 
associate professor of conducting. He felt 
very strongly that audiences needed some 
kind of context listening to all these happy 
dance band arrangements. 
The group preparing the program bal-
anced their presentation describing what 
musicians went through in their daily lives 
at Auschwitz and provided translations of 
the German lyrics.
 “I have worked in archives with manu-
scripts for my entire academic career, over 
40 years, and I was curious if there might 
be surviving manuscripts in the Auschwitz-
Birkenau State Museum,
” Hall said to 
describe how she entered this project.

 “I’m very experienced working in 
archives and didn’t expect to see all of 
this light music with titles like ‘The Most 
Beautiful Time of Life.
’ It was a tremendous 
surprise reading titles like that in a con-
centration camp. I certainly did not expect 
these pieces to sound as beautiful and 
expressive as they do based on extremely 
unusual instrumentation that they had.
“We are editing and recording these piec-
es in a professional studio so we’re choosing 
the best tapes to create a recording to send 
to the archive. I am also contacting music 
departments in conservatories to see if they 
might be interested in performing this same 
program.
” 

ARTS&LIFE
MUSIC

SOAR hosts U-M professor Oct. 7 
in Farmington Hills.

SOAR hosts U-M professor Oct. 7 
Music at Auschwitz

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Details

SOAR presents “Music at Auschwitz” 
at 2 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, at the Hawk 
Community Center, Third Floor, 29995 
12 Mile, Farmington Hills. $10 members; 
$15 nonmembers. In-person and digital. 
(248) 626-0296. soarcontact@gmail.com.

Patricia 
Hall

