Editorial: Musicians at the Borders

We've been here before. Musicians and musicologists, immigrants and refugees, waiting at the border, struggling to cross. Some will succeed, most will not. How, anyway, does one measure successful passage?

Looking back at the century of immigration and exile—when we were here before—there are reasons enough to claim modest success. The International Congress of Musicology, organized by the American Musicological Society on 11–18 September 1939 in New York City, provided the opportunity for scores of European musicologists, many of them German and Jewish, to flee fascism and build new lives and careers in the United States. The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, organized by amateur musicians and music scholars in Jerusalem, lay the foundations for an international Jewish music culture in 1936, but failed to sustain it past 1940, not in small part because of the inability to secure entry visas.

The pressure on the borders made the acquisition of visas particularly difficult, but again there were some notable successes. The schools and departments of music at American universities invented positions called artists-in-residence in the late 1930s, which were then filled by exiled musicians, especially those from well-known European chamber ensembles, Rudolf Kolisch, for example, in the pioneering Pro Arte Quartet at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A few musicologists and music scholars, too, received visas to support research and teaching in exile, for example, at the New School for Social Research in New York or at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Estimates of the number of musicians escaping fascism and Nazism from the early 1930s until 1945 are cautiously placed at 1,500; similar estimates for music scholars reach approximately 150.

The estimates for the musicians and musicologists unable to cross the borders are much higher and much more difficult to verify. The voices of some who tried survive. Albert Schweitzer, for example, wrote to Gustave Reese on 25 July 1939 about the problems preventing many scholars from attending the 1939 International Congress of Musicology in New York City: "Mais, avec la situation en Europe il est difficile de faire des plans d'avance." Most of those unable to pass across the borders suffered tragedy, all too often the path to death. A very few musicologists, among them the Czech H. G. Adler, who survived the concentration camps at Terezín, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald, managed to chronicle the years waiting at the borders.

We've been here before. And we're here again. Staggering numbers of refugees and immigrants are waiting at borders worldwide. As their numbers grow, the attempts to deny passage multiply. Deprivation of the worst kind accompanies those who wait; death greets too many, too often. As we write in Spring 2016, borders are increasingly and almost daily tightened, with the prospect that many borders in Europe will soon be closed.

As we write about musicians at the borders in the past and present, we embrace quite deliberately the subject position signified by our use of "we." By taking this subject position as twenty-first-century music scholars, we wish to recognize that the field we have inherited is only possible because of our musical and musicological ancestors who struggled to cross borders at a critical, foundational moment in the formation of our discipline. We study and perform the music representing the passage across those borders. Many of our teachers survived that passage. We are convinced that our musicology—the musicology that fills the pages of Acta Musicologica—must bear witness to the longue durée of borders that critically define an intellectual history we share with those who went before.

There is a subtle dialectic between border and crossing, which the advocates of closed borders as well as the apostles of a globalized, borderless world overlook. A border that cannot be crossed would not be a border. And without borders there wouldn't be any crossing. As Michel Foucault observed, borders and trespassing are not opposites like black and white or inside and outside. One is a condition of the other.

The myth of the foundation of Rome relates that the...