On January 29, Sebastian Ruth, Visiting Lecturer in Community Engagement and Founder and Artistic Director of Community MusicWorks (Providence, RI), joined music scholar and critic Jeremy Eichler for a January 29 event about Eichler’s critically acclaimed book Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Penguin Random House, 2023). Around the halfway point of Eichler’s talk, which laid out the book’s approach to post-World War II music as a witness to history that carried forward the memory of the wartime past, Ruth performed Benjamin Britten’s Elegy for solo viola as a meditation on these themes.
As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Time’s Echo proposes new ways of listening to history, and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the memory of culture, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today. We were grateful to host Ruth and Eichler for this event co-sponsored with Yale’s Program for the Study of Antisemitism.