# Home and away: Chamber music composers in exile (well, away)



## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

I used to think that my taste could be defined by favourites...like Myaskovsky and Shebalin from the former now dismembered Soviet Union, Szymanowski and Brudowicz from Poland etc.

Perhaps nationality shapes a composer's life; like for instance, Australia and Antartica have released very few string quartets as a nation (however that is all changing this month, with an Australian composer's new disc out).

Thumbing through my CDs...I realise that I listen to a lot of chamber music composers who lived in exile...like Ernest Toch who settled in the United States for one. Even Szymanowski lived outside of his own home for a period when Poland went through it's uncertainty.

This guy who hasn't received much mention deserves an honourable one:










I don't know the ensemble at all apart from this disc. He emigrated from Germany via France to England via Australia (in need of some nautical guidance then lol). His last string quartet No.V is very Hindemith inspired...written in 1990 I was surprised to discover that he taught near where I used to work although had long passed. String quartet No. IV is less successful, being notable alyrical and marked by rather serialist tendencies, although perhaps others will make more if it than I can. Written in 1987, it strikes me as being a left over remnant of a Maggie Thatcher bad hair day with Neil Kinnock at a belated union strike meeting.

Any other exiled or displaced composers on your check list?


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

World War II displaced many a European, musician and other, Jewish or other.

Neither Stravinsky or Hindemith were Jewish, and both ended up in America, Stravinsky being first officially French after the Russian Revolution, then later an American. I think you will find many of that generation who are 'expat' something or other, the historic events the catalyst.

[Later, we have many a Slavic east European from the Soviet (or former) Union emigrating to, again, any western country who would have them.]

The particulars of your composer's emigration saga is not atypical - nations were receiving so many emigrants, almost acting as temporary safe stations in the ultimate bureaucratic tangle that was immigration for many who fled; _many people ended up, simply, "where they could get in,"_ often going through a series of host countries until being allowed to permanently settle.

For many of those emigrating, with only so many available slots available to apply to be allowed into country A or B, it was not so much a matter of choice as much as their ending up living in 'whichever came in first.' Very much like having where the rest of your life will be determined by the flip of a coin.

I attach to matter of so many of that generation being emigrant as being WWII circumstantial, and lend no other weight to their adopted nationality. Often, where they landed -- 'permanently' was near 'accidental', and not a matter of loyalty or having been attracted to an ideology: their 'choices' were more of looking for any sovereign nation more or less not invaded or occupied by another, nor a nation where part of its populace were not being persecuted or systematically the objects of a genocide.


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