“Music as Witness: a Composer Commemorates the Holocaust”

This month, I will visit the Washington and Lee University campus to discuss three of my compositions related to the Holocaust. The event, slated to begin at 4 p.m. in Hillel Room 101, is free and open to the public.

Featured compositions:

• they burn, the fires of the night: lamentations from the ashes, a song cycle inspired by Menachem Z. Rosensaft’s “Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen,” a series of poems that powerfully impart the intense emotions that result from the sharing of personal stories and the larger terror associated with the Holocaust.
• Playing our lives, a string quartet in tribute to the music and musicians who were interned in the Nazi concentration camp Terezín. Terezín was considered a transit camp where Jews and other prisoners were kept until transport to death camps such as Auschwitz.
• Steal a Pencil for Me, an opera set in two acts that conveys a love story and drama about overcoming great adversity in the Westerbork transit camp and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

And, at 7 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 12 at Grace Episcopal Church, the Chamber Music Society of Lexington will present “Beloved of my Being: The Music of Composer Gerald Cohen,” an instrumental and choral program consisting of my compositions.

Learn more here.