‘Waters of Babylon’
Clarion Quartet keeps Holocaust-era music alive
Tatjana Chamis had never considered just how much music vanished during the Holocaust before she was approached by a Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra donor to form a quartet specializing in Entartete Musik —music the Nazis tried to erase from history along with the cultures that produced them.
“I hadn’t thought closely about the fact that many musicians and artists were lost and what was lost in our world,” said Chamis, the PSO’s acting principal viola player who has been with the symphony since 1993. “Quite a bit, it ends up. ... When those works are silenced for so long, they disappear.”
In 2015, Chamis and three other PSO members — violinists Marta Krechkovsky and Jennifer Orchard and cellist Bronwyn Banerdt — united to form the Clarion Quartet, which strives to introduce music written by suppressed composers to modern audiences. A year later, the group was at a concentration camp in Terezin, Czech Republic, performing a piece composed by former prisoners there.
Word of the Clarion Quartet’s mission and travels eventually reached Andrew Halasz, a professor and chair of Point Park University’s department of cinema arts. He and his creative partner, Kristen Shaeffer, an associate professor of media arts at Chatham University, began visualizing how to use the quartet’s experiences as a jumping-off point for a virtual-reality documentary.
After a five-year journey, Halasz and Shaeffer are finally ready to start screening “By the Waters of Babylon.” Their 20minute VR documentary about the Clarion Quartet’s work also features their June 2018 performance of “String Quarter No. 3” by Viktor Ullmann — who was imprisoned at Terezin before being sent to Auschwitz to die in its gas chamber — at the Rivers of Steel Pump House in the Waterfront.
Pittsburghers will be able to see all 360 degrees of “By the Waters of Babylon” starting this week at the Carnegie Science Center’s Buhl Planetarium. It will be screened there four times: twice on Wednesday along with a VIP reception, and two more times on May 31. Tickets are $36 ( Wednesday) and $ 15 ( May 31) at eventbrite.com.
Halasz and Shaeffer met in 2006 while attending Chatham’s film and digital technology graduate program. Their biggest project before “By the Waters of Babylon” was “Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives,” in which they enlisted filmmakers from around the city to make short films about their neighborhoods.
When a Point Park colleague told Halasz about the Clarion Quartet, the filmmaker in him was intrigued by the idea of putting a camera in the middle as
they played to capture the full breadth of the performance. As he learned more about Entartete Musik, he became more invested in the emotional aspect of how the Clarion Quartet is trying to keep this music alive.
“These are composers who were suppressed,” he said. “They tried to silence them. [The Clarion Quartet’s] mission is to get their music out there. This gave them a broader place to do that.”
Neither Halasz nor Shaeffer is Jewish, but the fact this was at its core “a story about artists” resonated with them, Halasz said. They partnered with the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and also went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of their research.
“Just to think about where we are in this moment and how these scenarios continue to happen where people are oppressed and their work is suppressed and destroyed, it’s just as relevant right now,” Shaeffer said.
“By the Waters of Babylon” features the Clarion Quartet performing
Ullmann’s piece, interviews with them, photos of a 21stcentury Terezin and drawings of what the concentration camp might have looked like in the 1940s courtesy of former Chatham student Abby Teibel. Halasz and Shaeffer thought really carefully about VR “being the right fit for this particular story,” Shaeffer said, but ultimately decided it was the best format for their vision.
They began working on the film in late 2017 and were getting ready to screen it publicly in late 2019 when the COVID-19 pandemic put those plans on hold. While that was disappointing, Shaeffer is excited to finally be “putting this music out there that was meant to be hidden and/or destroyed.”
“This project is about the defiance of these musicians to create music and hope through their art,” Halasz said. “This is a story that we want to tell because we want to honor and celebrate these artists who were silenced and didn’t have the opportunity to speak for themselves.”
Banerdt, a PSO member since 2014, said that Halasz and Shaeffer “are so sensitive and caring” and that their “passion was so evident” as they directed the Clarion Quartet at The Pump House. While performing in Terezin was emotionally overwhelming for Banerdt and Chamis, they somehow felt less pressure while filming even knowing they essentially had to get everything right in one take.
“They somehow made the camera disappear,” Chamis said. “None of us are used to working knowing a camera is watching us. I’ve never been so comfortable. They really set it up in a way that didn’t feel unnatural in the end.”
Both Chamis and Banerdt have seen “By the Waters of Babylon” in VR, though neither of them have watched it in a setting like the Buhl Planetarium. Chamis thinks that viewers can learn a lot about how musicians operate by watching it.
She would like to believe the film and the Clarion Quartet so deliberately preserving these artists’ works and memories “undoes some of the injustice done to them.”
“It’s going to be very touching,” Banerdt said. “And you hear the music, which is the most important thing. It’s really a 360-degree experience in every way.”