Remembrance of Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Foundation and the Voix Étouffées Forum organised an international conference ‘1918-1938: The politicisation of music in Europe’, on 9 and 10 November 2019 at CEGESOMA in Brussels.

This conference examined the instrumentalisation of music by the political world in the inter-war period.
There are numerous cases that shed light on the way political propaganda has spread through European musical culture.

With the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Europe for Citizens Programme of the European Union

Programme (PDF in French)

9 November 2019:

• Sylvain Schirmann, L’entre-deux-guerres : une impossible pacification ? [The inter-war period: an impossible pacification?]
• Amaury du Closel, Le bolchevisme musical [Musical Bolshevism]
• Werner Grünzweig, Artur Schnabel and Hanns Eisler: How They intended to change the World - but went in very different Artistic Directions
• Michael Haas, The Salzburg Festival’s Vision of an Austrian Identity and its Unintended Consequences
• Didier Francfort, Musique et austrofascisme dans les années 1920 et 1930 [Music and Austrofascism in the 1920s and 1930s]
• David Catchpole, Society (Re)forming Opera: Conservative Politics and the Collaborations of Egon Wellesz and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• Cécile Quesney, Les compositeurs français présents au mois Mozart à Vienne en 1941 [French composers during Mozart month in Vienna in 1941]
• Philippe Olivier, Otto Klemperer face aux événements politiques survenus en Europe entre 1918 et 1938 [Otto Klemperer on the political events in Europe between 1918 and 1938]

10 November 2019:

• Nicolas Dufetel, Comment Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) fit entrer la musique classique européenne dans son pays entre 1923 et 1928 [How Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) brought European classical music to his country between 1923 and 1928]
• Francisco Parralejo-Masa, Antisemitism and Sephardic Heritage in Spanish Music historiography (1918-1936)
• Yolanda Acker, The Politicisation of Music in Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War
• Maria Belen Perez Castillo, Music, Politics and Propaganda in Franco’s Jails (1937-1939)
• Elsa Calero-Carramolino, « Devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d’étoiles » [‘Before this night full of signs and stars’]: the last song-books from the Spanish Civil War. From the Battle Front to the Marx and Memorial Library and Worker’s School of London

• Next