A Kind of Haunting is a 45-minute work for two narrators, baritone and string orchestra, composed by Michael Zev Gordon and premiered at Milton Court Concert Hall, London in March 2025 by the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Jonathan Berman. James Newby was the baritone soloist, Louisa Clein and Allan Corduner the narrators. The work is a hybrid, between musical melodrama and cantata, and follows a recitative-aria structure in which the baritone sings settings of poetry by the London-based poet Jacqueline Saphra, whilst the two narrators have their own discrete material: Narrator 1 speaks original material written specifically for A Kind of Haunting by the US comparative literature professor and scholar of Holocaust memory, Marianne Hirsch, in which she explores her concept of postmemory, ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before–to events that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images and behaviors among which they grew up’Footnote 1 ; Narrator 2 voices the composer himself, recounting his story.
In A Kind of Haunting Gordon composes through the lenses of memory, representation and intergenerational trauma, weaving together fragments of text and music that overlap, interrupt and overwhelm each other to create a musical haunting. The work explores the absence in his life – until recently – of the story of his grandfather Zalman’s murder by the Nazis during the Holocaust, collapsing musical time and space, and deploying quotation as a representative tool.
‘As full and as empty as memory itself’,Footnote 2 postmemory is, according to Hirsch, a structure of transmission:
Descendants of individuals and communities that have survived powerful collective experiences –catastrophes such as war, genocide and extreme violence, but also transformative political movements such as coups, revolutions and uprisings – often feel as though they were shaped by events that preceded their birth. They experience these events not as memories, but as postmemories; they are belated, temporally and qualitatively removed.
[…]
To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present.Footnote 3
In this article I will demonstrate the extent to which A Kind of Haunting is a postmemorial work, as defined and refined by Hirsch, and how these structures of inheritance determine every parameter of the piece. I will also complicate some of the claims around the efficacy of music as a site of postmemorial aesthetics by considering the limits of musical representation.
The Limits of Representation
The very opening of the piece is a quotation that will become A Kind of Haunting’s idée fixe: a tiny fragment of the lullaby ‘Yankele’, composed by Mordechai Gebirtig, a Polish Jewish composer who was murdered by the Nazis in Krakow in 1942 (see Example 1). The ‘Yankele’ fragment decays almost immediately and is one of the central pieces of material in the work to fall away, or to be pushed away, only to return over and over, sometimes explicitly, sometimes camouflaged, occasionally with only the rhythm pushing its way through.
Example 1: Michael Zev Gordon, A Kind of Haunting, bars 2–4; used with kind permission.
This brief, nostalgic sonic artefact is imbued with a variety of semiotic functions in the work. It is a memory, emanating from another time and place, but it is also, more explicitly, a signifier of the composer’s memory in toto. Like Robert Schumann – an important influence on Gordon’s work in generalFootnote 4 – in the song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, Gordon uses the absence of a previous context in which the listener has heard material as a prosodic device. Schumann does this by silencing the singer and relying on the listener’s memory of the words sung earlier in the cycle, Gordon uses the ‘Yankele’ fragment throughout A Kind of Haunting, obsessively transforming it with all manner of conceptual silences. The silences affect the ‘Yankele’ fragment temporally and qualitatively, just as postmemories are ‘temporally and qualitatively removed’.Footnote 5
Few listeners are likely to recognise, let alone know the provenance of, Gebirtig’s ‘Yankele’. I would argue, however, that it functions as a signifier of Gordon’s memory and as a representation of ‘Jewishness’. In the framing of the piece, it means more than just Jewishness; it is an inescapable sonic representation of the history of the persecution of European Jews, not only by the Nazis but during all the pogroms of the centuries preceding the Second World War.Footnote 6 This is the first conceptual silence which emanates from the fragment’s simple outlining of a D-minor arpeggio – dominant, tonic, mediant and then a short glissando down from the dominant to the subdominant – that of the forced removal and attempted extermination of the people and culture that produced these sounds.
But how am I able to ascribe a Jewish identity to the ‘Yankele’ fragment? It was composed by a Jewish composer, but upon first hearing within the context of A Kind of Haunting this is not immediately apparent, nor does Gebirtig’s identity make all of his music essentially Jewish (by this logic it could instead be socialist music, since he was a member of the Jewish Labour Bund, a socialist political party).
It is the accumulation of cultural tropes that transforms ‘Yankele’ into something semiotically Jewish, not some essential sonic truth about being Jewish. Guy Debord described modern industrial society as one of spectacle in which ‘everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation’, and if we expand his concept of the ‘image’ to include sonic artefacts, then ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images’. It then follows that his description of a ‘degradation of being into having’ ought also to encompass that of sonic appearance:
The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having – human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing – all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.Footnote 7
This analysis is rendered all the more powerful when The Society of the Spectacle is read contrapuntallyFootnote 8 with the work of another great scholar of representation, Edward W. Said, who, in his book Orientalism, problematises the nature of representation:
the real issue is whether indeed there can be true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth’, which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representations (or misrepresentations – the distinction is at best a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse.Footnote 9
I do not deny that a rigorous analysis could reveal how ‘Yankele’ is inspired by, and is a product of Polish Jewish culture, but I would argue that this is not its function in this context. It acts instead as a sonic artefact within Said’s universe of discourse, not only representing Jewish music because of the last few centuries of world history, culminating in the Holocaust, but also because of the last few centuries of ‘Western’ music and its mobilisation of orientalist tropes. ‘Jewish’ is but one of these tropes but, in A Kind of Haunting, it is indelibly linked to the Holocaust. Musical history has trained listeners to identify it as such and to define their own relationship to it according to parameters of belonging and exclusion, power and disenfranchisement.
Perhaps it is worth noting that I am writing this in Berlin, where I live and work as a non-Jewish, non-German resident. I mention this to describe my position in the field, to contextualise my listening and to suggest that whilst representations may be ‘embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer’, they are, at a close second, embedded in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the represented-to. I am listening to and studying the score of A Kind of Haunting in a city where time and space are collapsed in the same tense and ambiguous ways as in Gordon’s music, where Stolpersteine are underfoot every day, where there are commemorative signs outside neighbourhood factories in which enslaved labourers were exploited but no such signs outside the nearby Bayer company compound, where the skeleton of the Wall is a tourist attraction whilst its shadow still snakes through the city, bisecting buildings, parks and the economy.
In her consideration of the sonic possibilities of postmemory, Leslie Morris writes about klezmer in Germany:
In the case of the sound of klezmer in Germany, the sounds listened to are not simply Jewish sounds remembered in the present, but rather ‘un-remembered’ sound that is produced and fabricated as a simulacrum of remembered, elegiac sound. Thus the simulacrum of sound in German culture today is marked, perhaps, by a nostalgic desire for Jewish sound. Or, to pose the question in a somewhat different way: are Germans melancholic because of the absence of Jews, or does the fabrication of Jewish sound fill the spaces of this melancholia? If certain sounds evoke for Germans what they think of as Jewish spaces, do these sounds – evoking a fabricated presence – then automatically carry with them the very absence of Jewishness?Footnote 10
Morris’ use of ‘absence’ here is one of comparison to the past rather than an actuality of the present.
In A Kind of Haunting, ‘Yankele’ is mobilised (as in Said’s mobilisation of latent orientalism)Footnote 11 in myriad ways, recontextualised, interrupted and reconfigured; it is simultaneously a signifier of identity and memory. It is slippery, eluding static identification, and for this reason I don’t hear any re-orientalisingFootnote 12 taking place. ‘Yankele’ is the tension that propels the movement in Gordon’s work; prior to any consideration of the texts that he sets, it is the fundamentally musical means by which he composes postmemorial music.
Whilst Gordon’s ‘Yankele’-as-representation is effective in composing postmemorial music, its reduction to musical representation means that the work reproduces spectacular social relations à la Debord. My relationship to A Kind of Haunting is mediated by representation, leaving me alienated from it. I may be moved by the work, I may feel empathy, but I am still kept at arm’s length by a universe of discourse in which representative identities confront one another and are reinforced, each – to quote Said again – ‘implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth”, which is itself a representation’.
In her study of the archive of Holocaust photography and the repetition in various media of just a few iconic images from the more than 2 million that exist, Marianne Hirsch writes:
Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation –often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible […] [P]ostmemory need not be strictly an identity position. Instead, I prefer to see it as an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma. It is defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by the unbridgeable distance that separates the participant from the one born after.Footnote 13
Hirsch seems to suggest that representation is an inevitable aspect of postmemory aesthetics since it is intrinsic to postmemory itself. As we will hear later, however, ‘creation’ – as in memory, as in music – will prove far more productive.
The resonances between the work of Hirsch and Said go far deeper than their shared academic disciplines, institutional positions (Said was Hirsch’s predecessor as Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia) and activism for peace and equity in Palestine and Israel. Fundamentally, both investigate the nexus of representation, history and the arts, elucidating the material and political realities composed of essentially textual practices. Said’s theory of orientalism – that of a textual practice of interpretation, representation and translation of an ‘other’ predicated upon geopolitical power imbalances – is an invaluable prism through which, in the light of Hirsch’s writing, to listen to A Kind of Haunting.
Echoes within Echoes
Some of the very first words spoken by Narrator 2, the voice of Gordon, are ‘Far far away, long ago, and right now’, collapsing the time and space between the moment of performance and the subjectivities of all the protagonists in the work. The fairytale-like language reflects the structure of the work and recalls Gordon’s childhood memory of his father telling him a story, a story that he has gone on to tell his own children. The presence of this storytelling demonstrates the absence of a much larger story, that only as an adult did Gordon learn of his grandfather Zalman’s murder, having been shielded from it as a child. But the music and narration tell us that Zalman did have a presence in the composer’s childhood: a haunting by a quasi-imaginary figure, in equal parts present and absent.
Hirsch describes the common tropes and artistic strategies of what she defines as the ‘aesthetic of postmemory’:
Their [postmemory artists’] memorial sites are dominated by idioms of trauma, loss and mourning, invoking tropes of absence and silence, unknowability and emptiness. They tend to rely on archival images and documents, highlighting ghosts and shadows, gaps in knowledge and transmission. They use projection, reframings, recontextualization. They juxtapose or superimpose past and present, without allowing them to merge.Footnote 14
The extent to which A Kind of Haunting adheres to Hirsch’s description of the postmemorial artistic genre becomes more and more apparent as we listen through its absences.
Early in the piece, Gordon composes absence through the relationship between the two narrators. Already at bar 46 (see Example 2), the interplay between the narrators, Hirsch’s analysis of inherited memory and Gordon’s personal memory of absence, creates a sort of silence. Not a musical silence but an absence, a palpable haunting by omission: not the omission of fact, sound or language, but the omission of signified meaning. Gordon says, through his narrator, that his parents spoke in Polish so that their children would not understand what they were saying, whilst Narrator 1 recites Hirsch’s text:
Some of them spoke, others said nothing
But did they not communicate in other ways?
Did they not transmit their fear and guilt
Anxiety and need
Courage and resilience?
Example 2: Michael Zev Gordon, A Kind of Haunting, bars 46–55; used with kind permission.
At the same time a fragment from ‘Yankele’ continues in the strings, mostly quietly, transposed from the pitch at which we first heard it. Not only is it a fragment of the tune, but the fragment is itself fragmented and scattered across the instruments. Sigh-like descending major and minor 2nds, as well as major 3rds, in the first violins, contrast with ascending major 3rds in the second violins. The second violins’ strident movement is always counterbalanced by descending major 2nds and glissandi major 3rds. The violas repeat a tonic pedal point that is undermined by a cello line which hovers around the same pitch but seems not to have the strength to hold it for long, slipping down a tone before resolving back to the tonic in irregular cycles.
Musically, we are stuck in a ‘Yankele’ loop. Whilst the Gordon narrator recalls a memory of silence, ‘Yankele’ begins to break free from circularity. As Narrator 1 asks ‘Did they not transmit their fear and guilt?’ the violas finally ascend from their repeated tonic, leaping a major 3rd, only to be met each time by the other instruments descending in steps and leaps. Not until Narrator 1 says ‘courage and resilience’ are the violas’ ascending major 3rds echoed by other instruments: the first violin first desk ascends a semitone, the double basses a minor 3rd. This only lasts one bar. The sighing cycle continues for two bars, ending with a D♯-minor chord (although it is not spelled like that) in the double basses, cellos and violas, with the violins playing a G♯/G major seventh plus an A♯. The D♯-minor chord stops abruptly, leaving the violins hanging on their ambiguous upward-yearning triad, as the Gordon narrator tells us ‘Polish was the language from another place.’ This text is a punctuation. As though the heaviness of this other place is too great, the strings return to ‘Yankele’, in the key in which we first heard it: a different, rocking fragment accompanied by twinkling artificial harmonics; then it, too, fades away.
Lullabies and fairytales are sonic mediations between parents and children, musical and literary forms composed of repetition and transmitted repetitiously, the fabric of the relationship between child and caregiver, performed at every bedtime as structure to the day, structuring their bond. In A Kind of Haunting Gordon presents a triple echo of this mediation: it was in his childhood that his postmemories were first created; his narrator tells us that he will tell the fairytales told to him as a child to his own children, the presence of these stories signifying the absence of others; through this childhood tool of mediation A Kind of Haunting is composed.
Five bars foreshadow the next aria (see Example 3) but are interrupted by the Gordon narrator saying ‘He never spoke about leaving Poland in 39’ … my father’. The absence in the text, the absence in Gordon’s life – his inability to access his father’s memory – interrupts our first brief glimpse of this other place: ‘There’s a little wooden house’, a simple descending diatonic melody sung by the baritone accompanied by two fragile solo lines, first and second violins, also descending, tracing new harmonic relationships.
Example 3: Michael Zev Gordon, A Kind of Haunting, bars 83–87; used with kind permission.
Before we arrive at the aria proper, we hear for the first time the violence suffered by Gordon’s grandfather during the Holocaust. But we hear it through a prism: Gordon imagining now, in the present tense of the performance, what his father thought and felt when Gordon was a child; echoes within echoes. The music reaches its densest and loudest point thus far, f fragments of ‘Yankele’ in the violins against tremolos, leaps and glissandi in the violas and cellos, snap pizzicato punctuation in the double basses. Narrator 1 returns, interrupting, against music that is quiet again, rocking like a lullaby, but with more forward momentum: ‘But I’m not sure if we tried, we’d be able to tell their story. All we hold are “flashes of imagery”, “emanations”, “broken refrains”, “A wonderful gift – and a relentless curse”’ (see Example 4).
Example 4: Michael Zev Gordon, A Kind of Haunting, bars 110–117; used with kind permission.
These ‘flashes of imagery, emanations, broken refrains’ are what Gordon composes next, contracting the time between himself, his father and grandfather in the text, contracting the spaces that they occupy through sudden changes in musical texture and duration: a different, brief sonic world for Gordon’s suburban childhood, his father’s former home of Janów and the emotional and physical space of guilt that his father feels for not having been with Zalman when and where he died. The final sonic world to accompany the image of Gordon’s relationship with his grandfather, one of absence and silence, has no corresponding unique identity. Instead it is a collage of the music of suburban childhood, his father remembering Janów and his father’s guilt. This inheritance is fragmentary, like a memory but not his own memory: postmemory. The narrator says, ‘But I’m also the grandson of grandfather Zalman, shot dead in an impossibly distant forest. An impossibly distant grandfather … in black and white […] I had to go and find it myself. In colour, yet still in black and white.’
‘In colour, yet still in black and white’: yet another device for superimposing geographies and temporalities. For Gordon to go to Poland is to create a version – in the present tense, yet geographically distant – of the old photographic version of his grandfather in black and white, occupying the domestic space of his family home. No surprise, then, that this is followed by glissandi, extrapolated from and echoing the ‘Yankele’ fragment, mobilising again that tripartite representative tool.
On Relationships and Gates
And so Aria 1 begins, again with ‘There’s a little wooden house’, and continuing:
Where no one lives anymore
Where the shadows of the lost are climbing the walls
Where old sorrows never stop weeping
And yesterday’s tears must wet your cheeks.
There’s a little wooden house
Where you are not a shadow
Yet you are bound to shadows
Bound to shadows
Where time stands still but time moves on
And the clock chimes then
And the clock chimes now[.]
It lies above the previous material of fragile solo lines, this time played tutti, and grows gradually from two to five lines of transparent descending scalic figures, each repeating their own contrasting rhythmic cycles. They create a tonality hovering between D major and B minor, and rendered more ambiguous by the assignment to each part of different subsidiary modes, beginning on different root notes and emphasising minor 3rds. The baritone line is less ambiguous in its tonality but floats, untethered from the harmonic space by its contrasting rhythmic cycles and occasional falls of a semitone from D to C♯ at phrase endings. A flattened-6th B♭ (descending a minor 3rd from C♯ each time) creates a prosodic connection between the words ‘cheek’, ‘then’, and ‘now’, mirrored by the double basses on ‘then’ and ‘now’ (see Example 5). Now the listener can make sense of the earlier foreshadowing. The intervening interruptions and overlapping mean that this new musical place can be conjured postmemorially, through a network of relationships between various past, present and future tenses.
Example 5: Michael Zev Gordon, A Kind of Haunting, bars 217–224; used with kind permission.
Aria 2, beginning some three minutes after the end of Aria 1, reverses the descending lines of the first aria. The strings ascend incessantly, striving upwards in the mode in which the original ‘Yankele’ fragment is heard, D E F G A B C smeared across the cellos and violas. Note the simultaneously close and distant harmonic relationship from the D major of Aria 1. The apex of the ascent, middle C, is then met by a second violin glissando from C to E♭, a flattening of the second degree. The ascending smear repeats in the cellos and violas, this time transposed, with B♭ as the root note – producing a major-3rd relationship to the D – and the fourth degree sharpened, to create a tritone that clashes with another violin glissando from C to E♭. It repeats, again beginning on B♭ but with the tritone resolved down to E♭. Again it repeats: Bb C D E♭ F G A♭. The apex of the ascent, A♭, is then met by an upward second violin glissando to C♭, yet another flattening of the second degree, and it continues. The baritone also ascends stepwise but leaps upwards and glissandos down again, straining under the weight of his higher register. The violins glissando up and down in artificial harmonics, an unstable, ghostly presence. Gordon has created a descending motif within an ascending one, an intimate connection to Aria 1, although their characters appear divergent.
The baritone and strings strive upwards until they meet in static tremolo chords, aligning with Polish words, the first to be uttered in the piece but foreshadowed at the beginning of Aria 2: ‘Summoned by silence, not your silence.’
Summoned by silence, not your silence,
Called to travel the vast white distance,
Stooped beneath weight you can never touch you must meet Loss at last,
Keening Loss who trails her veil to the gate,
Spreads wide her arms:
Wszystko w poządku.
Gordon is compelled to travel to Poland to confront the ghost of his grandfather: ‘You must meet Loss at last.’ Is this Loss also the loss of language and meaning? Unless the listener speaks Polish, the phrase ‘Wszystko w poządku’ is rendered noise, a signifier without signified. The text of Aria 2 ends with, ‘Old words spill from her mouth like salt, and you taste salt. Wszystko w poządku.’
In the recitative that precedes this aria, Narrator 2 says,
When I first go to Poland my father says, why would you want to go there? But when I call home, he says, ‘Wystko w porzandko?’, “Is everything okay?” Never before had he spoken a word of Polish to me.
These Polish words sound a lot like the Polish in Aria 2, ‘Wszystko w poządku’, but now the listener has a translation. Gordon sends us back to what we’ve heard before, superimposing our own geographies and temporalities, collapsing aesthetic and clock time to discern a meaning for that place’s ‘taste of salt’, now that Gordon’s father has provided a key to possible understanding. And then we’re thrown back yet again, all the way to the recitative of bar 82 – to the time of Aria 1’s foreshadowing – where the Gordon narrator recalls his childhood and his father’s ‘Borscht and salt cucumbers on the table’, speaking to his wife in Polish so that the children couldn’t understand: ‘Polish was the language from another place. Mysterious, dark, impossibly distant.’
Through this simple deployment of the word ‘salt’ and the translated and untranslated Polish, Gordon and the poet Jacqueline Saphra conjure for the listener an embodied experience of the composer’s haunting, of the echoes within echoes in his life. We experience these musical and textual events not as memories, but as postmemories: they are belated, temporally and qualitatively removed, but we, like the composer in his story, can now fill in the initial absence. Paradoxically, with these first inklings of meaning, the true shape and scale of the absence becomes clearer and more palpable, for Gordon as for the listener. In composing relationships of absence, and by collapsing time and space, Gordon creates an intimate musical connection suffused with postmemory. In contrast to the representative use of the ‘Yankele’ fragment, which, in activating identity, produces alienation, these relationships are both more effective in communicating a postmemory aesthetic and more musically affective.
I want to touch briefly, now, on the text of Arias 4 and 5 and to return to Hirsch’s writing on the tropes of postmemorial aesthetics and the structures of Holocaust memory. In Aria 4, Saphra’s text transports us back to the ‘little wooden house’, and locates it to, ‘inside my head where I strain to hear the voices of the dead’:
Though the little wooden house is surely gone
I can hear the children wailing through this song.
Who can I save? Who knows my name?
Am I too late to find the little wooden house beyond the gate?
[…]
I was not here, yet here I am beside the door
And the silence isn’t silence anymore.
The baritone sings a melody very similar to that of Aria 1, accompanied by unadorned block chords in the strings.
‘In the cultural remembrance of the Holocaust, the gate is both memory and a defense against memory’, writes Hirsch,
Those who read and study about the Holocaust, encounter this image [the “Gate of Death” to Birkenau] obsessively, in every book, on every poster. Like the gate of Auschwitz I, it is the threshold of remembrance, an invitation to enter and, at the same time, a foreclosure. The electric fences, towers and lights, the forbidding warning signs, repeat cultural defenses against recollection, and, especially, against looking beyond the fence, inside the gate of death, at death itself. The postmemorial generation, largely limited to these images, replays, obsessively, this oscillation between opening and closing the door to the memory and the experiences of the victims and survivors.Footnote 15
References to ‘gates’ and ‘doors’ pepper the language of A Kind of Haunting. ‘But only Babcia, my grandmother – her memoir in Yiddish – only she held the gate wide open for me’, is the first instance, spoken by the Gordon narrator. The gate-as-memory-and-defence-against-memory metaphor culminates in Aria 5, after which Gordon composes outside the constricting structures of postmemory as described by Hirsch.
Saphra’s Aria 5 poetry begins:
Still the shadows, still the shadows
Overgrown and grave the garden
The waiting gate, the blight of time
What lies beyond?
Who holds the light?
Gordon sets this text to a music of brand-new timbre and texture, with shuddering pianissimo jetés in the cellos, violas and second violins, to which violin 1 responds in very short ascending gestural leaps.
Aria 5 ends:
The years are changing shape
They slip your grasp
They hold the distance
They turn to glass
Now, right now, can your shadows come to rest
Now, right now, can you hold the light
Step through the gate.
The handle is turned, we walk through the gate with narrators and baritone, only to find that what lies beyond this aria is the same as what came before.
The same, but also a little different. Blocks of ascending minor 3rds, sometimes glissando, sometimes legato, are contrasted with the descending glissando from the ‘Yankele’ fragment. These blocks are repeated many times at very different dynamics, from pp to ff. Eventually we arrive at the entire ‘Yankele’ fragment with which A Kind of Haunting began, transposed up a semitone (see Example 6). The fragment gathers into a chord that diminuendos to pp. And again. Then we have just the dominant to subdominant glissando, in the original key of the fragment, before returning to Yankele in B♭ minor. This oscillation continues until we hear the ‘Yankele’ fragment in its original D minor, but instead of a glissando from dominant to subdominant, there is a much longer upward glissando from the mediant to the subdominant. The chord fades away to ppp as Narrator 1 says, ‘We were not there.’
Example 6: Michael Zev Gordon, A Kind of Haunting, bars 1032–1036; used with kind permission.
In this melancholic repetition of different ‘Yankele’ forms, the work arrives at something other than catharsis. Finally, the representative idée fixe doesn’t fall away, isn’t pushed away. It becomes explicit and obvious and the music steps outside its constant circling, its echoes within echoes. The ghosts are not banished, instead they are confronted on Gordon’s own terms and made more corporeal: A Kind of Haunting becomes his attempt to reach beyond postmemorial aesthetics, circumventing the screen of postmemory through the creation of his own memories, linked directly, intimately and durably to history.
Therapy
It’s easy to fall into the trap of psychoanalysing the composer and his librettists. A listener not directly affected by the postmemory that haunts the work’s creators can assume the therapist’s chair and dissect every word, note, timbre and dynamic, making pronouncements accordingly. The literary scholar Ananya Jahanara Kabir, writing about Partition postmemory in the Punjabi diaspora and inspired by the ‘cultural recall’ of Holocaust memorialising, defines ‘musical recall’ and suggests that ‘music offers certain therapeutic possibilities for traumatised subjects that go beyond those offered by narrative, or the telling and reading of stories’.Footnote 16
The transformation of traumatic memory into musical post-memory [sic] suggests that memory can become ‘a repository of the sublime’,
she writes, quoting another literary scholar, Ernst Van Alphen,
‘only when that which is remembered is not embedded within an overt narrative’.Footnote 17
Whether or not Gordon’s trip to Poland and the excavation of Zalman’s story were therapeutic for him should not, however, be confused with the musical work that reflects that journey and its embedding in postmemory. We are not listening to Gordon self-therapising through music; such a suggestion is a simplistic reduction of the composer’s art and craft, corralling A Kind of Haunting within a singular function. The therapeutic possibilities of Kabir’s ‘musical recall’ lie in the music ‘belonging’ to the culture that recalls it, rather than postmemorial music in general being therapeutic for any audience. However, as I have demonstrated earlier, the ‘musical recall’ involved in Gordon’s mobilising of the ‘Yankele’ fragment creates alienation through systems of identity and representation that reinforce spectacular social relations. Only by being embedded within an overt narrative are the alienating effects of Gordon’s ‘musical recall’ mitigated by his collapsing of musical time and space. His temporal and geographic superimposition is only made possible by the work’s linear narrative, however much that is obscured by circularity.
Much of the brutality and horror of the Holocaust, and the specific circumstances of Zalman’s murder, are elided in the piece. It bears reiterating, however, that A Kind of Haunting is a work not of the Holocaust, but of the inheritance of silence caused by the Holocaust. The impossibility of fully comprehending the Holocaust is the most profound silence, haunting both the work and its listeners. Throughout the piece, the music repeatedly heaves and drags itself towards uttering the ‘unspeakable’, but collapses under its own weight, pausing to rest in fermatas, tremolo chords or chords that simply fade away before picking themselves up again. Giorgio AgambenFootnote 18 has done much to counter the trope of the supposed ‘unspeakability’ of the Holocaust but, nevertheless, I hear it explicitly in Gordon’s work.
Hirsch echoes Agamben’s sentiments in her 2024 article ‘Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7’:
Staying with the enormity and unspeakability of these histories risks obscuring the voices of those witnesses who, committed to passing it on for the future, do tell their story as best they can. It risks privileging utter victimization, thus obscuring moments of resilience, courage, and ingenuity that enabled survival.
She continues:
Memorial artists, writers, and museologists have developed a compelling postmemorial aesthetic, which reflects the complex, contradictory, and multiply mediated elements of this structure of transmission. They evoke the haunting that ensues in the aftermath of trauma and the pull to relive it. Yet, the gaps in knowledge and understanding, the silences and fractures that characterize this aesthetic, acknowledge the unbridgeable distance of such extreme experiences, even as they provoke an urge to learn more and to understand. Postmemorial works engage readers and viewers in acts of mourning for a lost world, in impulses to repair the loss and heal those who have suffered it, while at the same time recognizing the unbridgeable disconnection of the aftermath.Footnote 19
In reframing the tropes of postmemorial aesthetics, I believe Hirsch explains how A Kind of Haunting escapes some of the constraints of the genre. In its many silences and absences the piece rehabilitates the limits of representation, of which it is also composed, and becomes a multifaceted work that deserves to be performed in ‘cultures, institutions, and political ambiences’Footnote 20 beyond its initial run of concerts in London, Birmingham and Essex.
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