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Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Time’s Echo

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon

Arts

4.71K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken, in someone’s hope, perhaps, that it’ll be forgotten? Where does history ...

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source. The question that resurfaces in a time of horror, one of them may be what remains when memory is

0:17.2

wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken.

0:21.9

In someone's hope, perhaps perhaps that it'll be forgotten. Where does

0:25.2

history live? Jeremy Eichler's answer is that music becomes the code of our

0:32.4

darkest secrets.

0:34.0

Baba Yar is the ravine in Kyiv,

0:40.0

where Nazi invaders killed and dumped the bodies of more than 33,000 Jews.

0:46.0

In the last couple of days of September 1941,

0:49.0

it became an officially unmentionable disgrace to the Germans who executed the

0:54.4

atrocity and to the Ukrainians and Russians who didn't stop it. Almost 20 years

0:59.7

later and ever since then Baba Yar got it standing as the biggest mass murder in the Nazi

1:06.5

war on the Soviet Union, but only because Yifgeny Yevtuchenko wrote a famous poem about it called Baba Yar and

1:15.3

Dmitri Shostakovich in turn defied the authorities to compose a Baba Yar

1:20.7

memorial at the head of his 13th Symphony.

1:25.0

There in one grim anecdote is how history lives inside music.

1:30.0

Music as a last refuge of history that we confront no other way.

1:36.0

Jeremy Eichler, you've written an irresistible new book

1:41.0

from the ruins of the 20th century called Times Echo, the Second World War, the Holocaust,

1:47.2

and the music of remembrance. And very particularly about four giants in 20th century music.

1:55.2

Rickard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dimitri Shostakovish, the Russian,

2:01.0

and Benjamin Britain, the Englishman.

2:05.0

Jeremy Eicler, what we want is for you to teach us how to listen to this music.

...

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