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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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In-depth documentaries which explore music, history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts and literature.

Sunday Feature: Music on the Brink of Destruction

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Factual: History

Music: Classical

22/01/2017

Music on the Brink of Destruction

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Music on the Brink of Destruction

Shirli Gilbert reveals the complex history of music composed in the Nazi camps and ghettos

Historian Shirli Gilbert reveals the complex history of music that was composed in the Nazi camps and ghettos, drawing on new research and digitised archives.

The Nazi camp system was a sprawling universe of brutality and murder that held millions of individuals from across Europe: Jews, Roma and Sinti, German communists, Poles, POWs, and countless others. The musical works these prisoners created are extraordinary documents from the time: fragments recovered from the rubble of war and genocide; monuments to the lives that were destroyed.

This forgotten musical legacy is beginning to be recovered by historians and musicologists, who have been drawing on newly-discovered scores, songs and oral histories to resurrect the diverse musics created during the Holocaust: from string quartets in Theresienstadt and tender ghetto lullabies to the fighting songs of the Jewish partisans, macabre camp ballads, and sardonic cabaret. Nazism's victims used music to document their lives, to mourn the loss of home and family, to show solidarity with the anti-fascist cause, to escape reality, to indulge in gallows humour. They also made music on the orders of their jailers, who used music both to celebrate and to oppress.

In the aftermath of war, a few dedicated individuals set about collecting voices and songs on the brink of destruction. Now, drawing on original research and newly-digitized archives, Southampton University's Shirli Gilbert, historian & author of Music in the Holocaust , analyses this rich musical history from the worst of times.

Producer Mark Burman.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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