Oboe concerto to call up echoes from history
Dan Schwartz probably isn’t the only professional musician or college professor who spent two weeks in Amsterdam last summer.
But he’s most likely the only one who spent two weeks field recording ambient sounds at the docks, in a park and at the train station.
It’s in these everyday noises that he hopes to call up echoes from the past in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Amsterdam is the only city that had a direct actual strike of any of the places Germany was invading, so they shut down the docks and they shut down factories and things like that,” said Schwartz, assistant professor of oboe at the University of Oklahoma School of Music.
“It’s a really important event that you don’t hear a whole lot about. I went to Amsterdam and I recorded sound at places where these strikes actually took place … and I’m turning all those sounds into an electronic soundscape.”
That electronic soundscape will accompany Schwartz as he gives the world premiere performance of his new oboe concerto, “February Strike,” Thursday evening at OU’s Pitman Recital Hall.
“While the noises are recorded in 2017, I am hoping to draw a more meaningful connection for the audience to the composition, an aural link to the past, echoes of the locations that still exist today,” said Schwartz, who is the second oboe and English horn player for the Oklahoma City Philharmonic.
“The thread running through the entire work is that these sounds could have been exactly what the Jews in Amsterdam heard at the time: birds chirping in the trees of the courtyard of the Jewish theater which served as a temporary prison before Jews were sent away to concentration camps, muffled singing and echoed voices in the Portuguese Synagogue, footsteps in the park across from the train station where Jews were held immediately before being sent away.”
Historic protest
On Feb. 25-26, 1941, hundreds of thousands of workers in and around Amsterdam went on strike to protest the Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews. The strike came after months of tension after Germany’s 1940 invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, as the Nazis quickly moved from discriminating against Jews,
to establishing Amsterdam’s first Jewish ghetto, to rounding up Jews and shipping them off to concentration camps.
The strike shut down the capital and largest city of the Netherlands. Although the Germans swiftly and brutally put down the strike, it is still celebrated in the Netherlands as one of the first and biggest mass public protests against the Nazis during World War II.
“Carried out by thousands of Dutch, non-Jews (it’s) really the onlystrike of its kind in World War II, a unique and politically fascinating event,” Schwartz said in a follow-up email.
To honor the 10-year anniversary of the event, the city commissioned Dutch artist Mari Andriessen to sculpt a statue called“De Dokwerker(The Dockworker)” to commemorate the event.
Schwartz's newest oboe concerto is divided into three continuous sections based on locations that were pivotal to the February Strike and Jewish life in Amsterdam, including the dock worker monument. The “Portuguese Synagogue” section is set in a symbol for the city’s Jewish communal life dating back to the 17th century, when Jews first settled in Amsterdam, while the “Old Jewish Theater” section
centers on the place that became the site for the concentration and deportation of the Dutch Jews.
“It’s an odd project for sure, and very few applied music professors— applied meaning you teach the music side of things rather than the academic side, which would be music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology and things like that— compose. And I’m kind of proud that that’s one of my niche interests that I get to do,” Schwartz said.
Historic talk
Associate professor Carsten Schapkow, who teaches modern Jewish history in the Department of History and the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at OU, will deliver a talk about the February Strike before Schwartz’s performance and provide context for the composition.
The event also will include an audience discussion, question-andanswer session and dessert after Schwartz’s performance. Admission is free.
“The concert is personal to me in the sense that being a German myself, I feel connected to the subject matter because of the role Germany and the Germans played in the Holocaust, namely (they) enabled the Holocaust to happen,” Schapkow said in an email.
“I believe, however, anyone should learn from the lessons of the Holocaust regardless of her or his religious or cultural identity. Today, this is easy to say or maybe not any longer so easy to say because all sentiment of nationalism and racism are back again. Therefore, I believe remembering the February Strike of 1941 can be a way for us to understand what it means to resist, when and why.”
For Schwartz, who is Jewish, the concerto is a deeply personal project.
“In a world where the news cycle is only minutes long— blink and the next scandal, massacre, or drastic policy change has taken place— I wanted to write a piece to share with an audience that explored more meaningful, and effective ‘remembrance.’ This is why the piece is composed of actual sound from Amsterdam,” Schwartz said in an email.
“I am hoping to explore the notion of deeper connection, using the February Strike as context for a larger theme—standing up and doing what’s right in the face of total injustice. This is incredibly apropos to what is happening in the world today with the Oklahoma teacher strike, the Me Too movement, the amazing students of Parkland (Florida) taking on gun reform, and beyond.
"As a musician, I think I have an interesting medium in which to explore social justice issues, a universal medium, music, that can include all types in genuine discussion without discrimination.”