Monday, March 23, 2015

New York symphony pulls composition with Nazi anthem

Rising composer Jonas Tarm’s ‘March to Oblivion,’ featuring quotation from ‘Horst Wessel,’ was to be performed in Carnegie Hall


By Lazar Berman, The Times of Israel

A composition from a budding young composer set to be performed Sunday at New York’s Carnegie Hall  was pulled because it contained a musical quotation from the Nazi anthem.

Estonian-born composer Jonas Tarm, 21, won a commission to write the piece from the prestigious New York Youth Symphony’s First Music composer’s contest. But Tarm’s nine-minute composition, entitled “Marsh u Nebuttya,” or “March to Oblivion” in Ukrainian, contained a 45-second musical quotation from “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi anthem still banned in Germany and Austria.

The composition also featured a 45-second quotation from the anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

NYYS Executive Director Shauna Quill told The New York Times that the move was “highly unusual,” but was undertaken “thoughtfully, but firmly, as soon as we learned the piece incorporated significant portions of music written by others that we determined were problematic for an orchestra such as ours to be asked to perform.”

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