Music, Migration and Mobility: The Legacy of Migrant Musicians from Nazi-Europe in Britain

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Music has always been highly mobile and musicians have been crossing cultural and physical borders for centuries, both voluntarily and as a result of inhospitable ideological, economic and environmental forces in their homelands. This project investigates the relationships that develop between migrants and their adopted host society, and how they manifest in their own creativity, each crucial to evaluating the cultural impact of migration. However, our understanding of the role of mobility and migration in shaping musical culture as a whole is as yet limited. This project brings fresh methodological approaches to the study of the experiences, musical lives and subsequent impact on British musical culture of musicians who came from Nazi-ruled Europe in the 1930s and '40s. Many of them went on to make major contributions to the successful reinvigoration of art music in the ensuing decades. The project will investigate and map the journeys and careers of approximately 30 musicians as they negotiated and helped to form aspects of British musical life in the post-war period as influential teachers, composers and performers, and in major institutions such as opera houses, the BBC, and higher education. It will explore how musical skills, traditions and values were transported and exchanged, and how these interactions affected the migrants themselves, local musicians, and public musical life at large. The project also probes the practical challenges of performing and mediating their compositions-which are defined by multiple trans-national cultural influences and traditions-through a programme of experimental open rehearsal workshops. Selected works by migrant musicians that for various reasons have remained hidden will be explored by professional and student musicians, and contemporarily relevant approaches to their presentation in performance will be tested in public. Through practice-based research, we aim to bring a fresh dimension to conventional musical analysis, highlighting the cultural value of this music for contemporary audiences interested in its broader historical context. The project includes a structured programme of research in a dozen major archives in the UK, Germany and Austria pertaining to this history, and in particular two key institutions, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Anglo-Austrian Music Society in London, both critical in different ways to the impact of this group of migrants on the shaping of post-war British music. Archival and historical research combined with images, oral history interviews and recorded performances will form the basis for the creation of a series of on-line 'story maps' that use geo-visualisation software to present multi-perspective narratives combining text, images, video and audio, and dynamic links to a host of relevant additional resources. From the start of the project we aim to facilitate dialogues between scholars and artists working within the context of mobility and migration today. The project team will develop a theoretical understanding of the relationship between musical cultures, mobility and migration that can benefit future research. A symposium co-hosted by the Austrian Cultural Forum will set out the scope and direction of a cross-disciplinary debate; a series of scholarly journal articles by the PI, Co-Is and RAs will develop specific themes; and an international conference co-hosted by the German Historical Institute will extend debate to other examples of music, migration and mobility. Public exhibitions at three partner institutions will complement the project's website, which will integrate the c.30 story maps, institutional case-studies, videos of workshops, performances and oral history interviews, textual commentary, and free-to-download music editions into a rich resource for the benefit of school students, musicians, educators and scholars who wish to find new approaches to our culture, characterised as it is by migration and mobility.