Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe by Maria Cizmic (review)

Maria Cizmic’s new volume is the latest addition to the growing field of study of Eastern European music during Communist rule. Cizmic is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of South Florida, and an alumna of UCLA. The book had its first incarnation as her doctoral dissertation ‘Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in 1970s and 80s Eastern Europe’; eight years later, it has evolved into this book, published by Oxford University Press and helpfully accompanied by a password-protected website that contains aural excerpts of the music discussed in the text (<www.oup.com/us/performingpain,acc.3Feb.2013>). While the present title is not misleading, that of the original dissertation is more precise. The 1970s and 1980s were the years of ‘stagnation’ and ‘glasnost’ in the Soviet Union, during the course of which it gradually became possible for writers, scholars, and artists to address issues of pain, remembrance, and truth. Cizmic has selected four case studies for the numerous ways in which music written in this period interacted with those topics. The book unfolds as a series of hermeneutic essays, and Cizmic readily acknowledges her reliance upon the analytical methods promoted by Lawrence Kramer (p. 23); she has also been inspired by writers such as Susan McClary, Katerina Clark, Margherita Mazo, and Boris Groys.

The works by three Soviets and one Pole—Alfred Schnittke (Concerto for Piano and Strings, 1979), Galina Ustvolskaya (Piano Sonata No. 6, 1988), Arvo Pärt (Tabula Rasa, 1977), and Henryk Górecki (Symphony No. 3—The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, 1976)— serve as a stimulus for Cizmic to explore ‘how music participates in discourse regarding the meaning of trauma and loss’ (p. 167). She aims to show how music acquires meaning, how it engages with the context it originated from, how knowledge of the context enhances our experience of listening, and, in turn, how music may enhance our understanding of the world. The choice of works to be discussed is interesting, because in fact these pieces (with the exception of Górecki’s symphony) have not been ‘intentionally composed as responses to trauma’ (p. 10), and it would be challenging to argue that they aim ‘to address and memorialize the suffering and . . . war’ (p. 9). Hence, Cizmic’s assertion that ‘all four pieces engage in the social debates about memory and trauma contemporary to them’ (p. 24) is far from precise. This is a rare slip, however, as she is otherwise careful with her wording.

There is a lot to admire about Cizmic’s book. She fuses the most recent theories on trauma, pain, and loss with musicology and performance theory, and attempts to explore how music can and does help people deal with traumatic events, making it possible for them to make sense of their memories and to share their experiences with fellow sufferers and sympathetic listeners. Cizmic makes the reader keenly aware of the fact that music cannot exist outside of its cultural, social, and political fields, without losing sight of the highly idiomatic and idiosyncratic ways in which it can create something akin to meaning. Cizmic not only engages with the issues of composition, but broadens her approach to incorporate performance and reception.

There are two main problems, however. The first is that, while she aims to address the entire Eastern European field, the focus is clearly on the Soviet context. Poland is represented by just one of the four case studies, while the remaining countries constituting the former Eastern Bloc are hardly mentioned. Of course, the political and cultural events in the Soviet Union inevitably impacted upon the rest of the bloc; still, it is impossible to get a realistic picture of the diverse Eastern European cultures just by focusing on these examples. The book is structured in such a way that Cizmic introduces trauma theory and its applicability in the realm of music at the beginning, then proceeds directly to...