Book Launch – Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day
The Wiener Library, in association with the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, hosted the launch of Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day, Yearbook 22 of the RCGAES (Brill 2023).
Co-editors Dr Malcolm Miller and Dr. Jutta Raab Hansen introduced the Yearbook, delving into its international scope, tracing refugee musicians in Europe, the USA, Australia, and Shanghai. They explored in detail the lives and legacies of three outstanding émigré British musicians: Ferdinand Rauter, pianist and founder of the Anglo-Austrian Music Society, the conductor-composer Peter Gellhorn and composer-pianist Franz Reizenstein.
Contributing to the discussion we were delighted to welcome their children Andrea Rauter, Mary Gellhorn and John Reizenstein, as well as the singer Norbert Meyn FRCM, Principle Investigator of the ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ project at the Royal College of Music, and a contributor to the volume. Refreshments will be served.
About the speakers
Malcolm Miller is Honorary Associate and Associate Lecturer in Music at the Open University, UK. He has published widely on Beethoven, Wagner and contemporary music. His essay ‘Music as Memory: British Émigré Composers and their Wartime Experience’ appeared in The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century Music (ed. Erik Levi, Böhlau Verlag, 2014).
Jutta Raab Hansen studied musicology at Berlin Humboldt University and, in 1988, joined Peter Petersen’s exile music research group at Hamburg University, resulting in her PhD thesis NS-verfolgte Musiker in England: Spuren deutscher und österreichischer Flüchtlinge in der britischen Musikkultur (Hamburg, 1996). Research in the UK, Australia and Jerusalem (2003–11) included a contribution to ORT’s ‘Music and the Holocaust’ project, followed by her translation and edition of émigré singer Elena Gerhardt’s 1953 memoirs (Altenburg, 2012). She worked as a music therapist, between 2012–18 in Thuringia, Germany.