J. Mackenzie Pierce has written a meticulously researched overview of musical developments in Poland from the interwar period through the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. For offering this comprehensive and integrated look into the middle decades of the past century—often treated separately in studies as the interwar period, the war, or the postwar—Pierce is to be applauded. And he is to be particularly commended for his central focus on the scant acknowledgment of Jewish suffering in the musical culture of the period.
Pierce argues that a group of musical professionals he calls the musical intelligentsia—both non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews—saw themselves as bearers of a Polish national tradition. Considering themselves an elite linked back to a nineteenth-century tradition of organic work, they aimed to help shape the broader society into a modern nation through musical culture. A key value for the musical intelligentsia, Pierce convincingly demonstrates, was that of continuity, which contained ideas around progress towards the development of a modern Polish polity. Beginning already in the interwar period, with its rising ethnonationalism and drift towards fascism, Polish Jews were increasingly marginalized in the music world. The war years of course segregated Polish Jews even further, and most died in the Holocaust. Beginning already during the war and then more so in its aftermath, the musical intelligentsia’s focus on continuity and a narrow ethnonational vision of national culture left little room for acknowledging Jewish suffering and loss.
The book is clearly organized into three sections and seven chapters, which deal with the interwar years, the war and Holocaust, and then its aftermath. Chapter 5 on wartime Lviv is an especially welcome exploration for an English-language readership. Throughout, Pierce demonstrates an astonishing command of individual and institutional histories at a time of massive upheaval. He mobilizes an impressive array of primary sources to underpin his analysis, including the expected Polish archives, but also collections in Ukraine and across Europe and the United States. He also consulted dozens of periodicals, multiple memoirs, and countless letters. The book reads as a cultural and political history, but as a musicologist, Pierce also usefully includes around ten examples of relevant musical analysis.
Given this exhaustive dive into the Polish musical world across the mid-century decades, it might seem churlish to ask for more. Warsaw is the focus of this study for understandable reasons, but Krakow might have been fruitfully examined in greater detail for a more comprehensive view of developments. Throughout the study, Pierce highlights numerous key figures, both more and less known, to great effect. But the two arguably most famous and influential coming out of the war were Andrzej Panufnik and Witold Lutosławski, and they receive surprisingly light attention here. And more generally, this reader was left wondering about the particularities of this Polish musical world. How did the musical intelligentsia differ from the intelligentsia in Poland more broadly? Pierce evokes Marci Shore’s landmark 2006 Caviar and Ashes on the Warsaw literary milieu, but does not offer much in the way of comparative insights. And was there something particularly Polish about all this? There is a vibrant scholarly literature on the musical worlds of many countries in central and eastern Europe, and situating this study in the broader historiography more fully would have been useful. Nonetheless, Sounds of Survival is an invaluable addition to our understanding of the political and cultural history of Poland in the short twentieth century.
