You are dead. Will you be remembered with music? Commemorating a
single life is usually straightforward; everyone has at least a
favorite song or two. I smiled at my friend Fred’s funeral when
REO Speedwagon’s “Live Every Moment” began dribbling through the
speakers. The music, though treacly, was a brave choice for a macho guy
of my generation: In 1984, I muttered something nice about REO
Speedwagon to my fellow burger-flippers only to be menaced with a
raised fist and a battle cry, “You mean REO FAGwagon!”
Tending the collective dead with music is more complicated. As
the bodies pile up, the cumulative anonymity of every lost soul
blurs grief into an amorphous sense of loss. Despite its grim
mission—to promulgate the music of those who perished in the
Holocaust—Seattle’s Music of Remembrance (MOR) resists the
temptation to make one piece or one song stand for many by serving as
an ongoing, perpetually renewing memorial. Endowed with a rotating
collective of excellent chamber musicians, MOR not only revives
forgotten composers such as Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein,
and Hans Krasa, but asks living composers to respond to the
Holocaust.
MOR begins its 12th season (Sat Oct 10, Plestcheeff Auditorium at
SAM, 2 pm, free) with Klein’s Duo for violin and cello, “Prayer”
for double bass by Ernest Bloch, and Paul Schoenfield‘s
Camp Songs, based on dramatic texts by Aleksander
Kulisiewicz, a Polish dissident imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp. Composed in 2002, the Songs typify the
strengths and weaknesses of MOR’s new and new-ish music that leans
too heavily on song cycles—some of which are good, like Jake
Heggie’s For a Look or a Touch—with too infrequent forays
into radical pieces, like Steve Reich’s Different Trains. MOR is
overdue to present Luigi Nono’s caustic 1965 masterpiece Remember
what they did to you at Auschwitz, or at least commission work that
connects the Holocaust to other 20th-century genocides (e.g.,
Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur).
Later that day, guitarist and installation artist Dave Knott plays music from his self-released disc Sweet Little Guitar
Ditties (Sat Oct 10, Wall of Sound, 315 E Pine St, 6:30 pm, free).
If you haven’t encountered Knott with Sun City Girls, Animist
Orchestra, or Matt Shoemaker, you have probably strummed or
twanged one his stringboard installations at Wall of Sound, Cornish
College, Jack Straw, Gallery 1412, or by the Aurora Bridge. Here he
debuts short guitar pieces that, according to guitarist Sir Richard
Bishop, “bring me back to those fleeting moments where thought
stands still and all that is left is ethereal melody. Yes, short
and sweet, but in no way simple.” 
