Music of Remembrance Turns 25

The organization focused on preserving the music of Holocaust victims looks back to look forward.

Music of Remembrance (MOR) may have been one of, if not the very first, community organization I reported on when I moved to Seattle and started working as a journalist. I’ve written about their commissions and performances many times and was amused to see my name as a source on their Wikipedia page! I’ve always been moved by the high level of their work and the artists and choreographers (interviewing Donald Byrd stands out in my memory) they’ve not just secured but held onto in longstanding artistic relationships. I also have always wondered if they’ve gotten the attention they deserve in Seattle. I’m happy to have had the chance to sit down with artistic director Mina Miller yet again to review a quarter century of honoring the voices of Holocaust victims, survivors, and witnesses—and to hear about how the organization is looking to the future.

—Emily

Making Voices Sing Again

In 1998, when Mina Miller had the idea to start a musical organization that would revive voices lost to the Holocaust, she knew only half a dozen people in Seattle and had few connections. A pianist and university professor new to the area, Miller just felt a calling. She figured she’d stage some musical numbers at the Jewish Community Center and see what happened.

“My parents’ entire families were annihilated in the Holocaust,” Miller says. “I just had a visceral awareness of the loss, of the need to tell stories, and to make voices sing again.”

The one person she did have a connection to was Gerard Schwarz, the former director of the Seattle Symphony. “He said to me, ‘Benaroya Hall is opening in the fall of 1998,’” she recounts. ‘“Put it in Benaroya Hall so that you are taken seriously as a music organization.’”

So, along with her husband, David Sabritt, Miller launched Music of Remembrance (MOR), turning her home office into a box office and printing off tickets at Kinko’s for their first performance. She had no idea who would show up. Would they get 500 audience members, or five?

Turns out, 500 people showed up, and Music of Remembrance was born. Miller, as artistic director, has been commissioning and staging classical musical performances since then, starting with bringing lost works to life and continuing on to completely new productions.

“In the first years, we were pioneers in introducing Holocaust music. Nobody else was doing it,” Miller says. “No one else was playing the music of Erwin Schulhoff, the Terezin composers—there was a book written about them, but they weren’t on the main concert stage. And so Music of Remembrance was one of the first groups to dedicate entire programming to this music.”

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It’s hard to imagine MOR, out here in the Northwest corner of the United States, being among the first to play the works of Jewish musicians who died in Nazi death camps. Not only that, but the quality of the performances is held to the highest classical standards. MOR’s regular musicians include Seattle Symphony clarinettist Laura Deluca, violinist Mikhail Shmidt, and principal viola Susan Gulkis Assadi. Shmidt, Miller notes, has only missed one concert in 25 years. The musicians take on MOR work on top of their full-time Symphony jobs. “They never say no to me,” Miller says with pride.

MOR went from rescuing nearly lost music to commissioning new works with the help of top musicians and composers. Miller asked composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Sheer to create a piece about the persecution of gay men in Nazi Germany; “For a Look or a Touch” is based on the relationship between Manfried Lewin, who was killed, and Gad Beck, who lived until 2012. Heggie and Sheer also collaborated on “Another Sunrise,” based on an Auschwitz survivor’s account of the unspeakable horrors of the death camp.

Heggie “wants someone listening to his music to go on a journey, for it to be a transformative journey, emotionally,” Miller says. “And I have to say, he is uniquely successful at that. You enter the world of his music and you experience these characters and their journey, and you are different when it ends, because it is so illuminating. His insights are so revelatory. Gene Shear is one of the most extraordinary librettists. You experience people on so many dimensions.”

MOR has brought to life many other rarely known Holocaust stories. “Vedem,” created by Lori Laitman and David Mason, illuminates the experience of young teenage boys imprisoned at Terezin, as recounted in a clandestine journal. “Kolo’t,” by Betty Olivero, captures the life and ultimate end of Sephardic Jewish life in Salonika (Thessaloniki). And Gerard Shwarz, the Symphony director who gave Miller the blessing to create MOR, wrote two pieces of his own—including the intentionally unsettling “Rudolph and Jeanette” in memory of his own grandparents, who were shot into an open grave in Latvia in 1942.

The composers, librettists, instrumentalists and singers feel an affinity to the mission of MOR, even the many who are not Jewish. “Heggie is writing operas for Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, the Met,” Miller says. “But he composes for Music of Remembrance because the mission means something to him, and he wants to share his voice to make a difference.”

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In recent years, MOR has embraced musical narratives around human tragedies outside of the Holocaust, invoking voices and stories from Japan, Iran, and the Armenian Genocide, ensuring cultural competency through close working relationships with each community.

“It’s not just a matter of our mission expanding or changing, it’s a matter of finding new ways of expressing our mission,” says Sabritt, who now in retirement functions as executive adviser to MOR. “There was a mission of rescuing the music and the composers from obscurity, and especially honoring those who spoke out through their music against what was happening in the world…. I can’t think of a more potent lesson than the dangers of remaining silent when we see evil around us.”

In 2022, MOR premiered a new commission, “Tres Minutos,” about a brother and sister separated at the US-Mexico border. San Francisco-based composer Nicolas Lell Benavides was working with Heggie and Sheer on another project when he got a call from Miller, asking him about a shelved idea about a border story.

“Truth be told, I initially had reservations,” Benavides says. “I’m not Jewish; I’m not sure I’m a good fit for Music of Remembrance.” Miller quickly convinced him to change his mind.

“Mina is such a visionary leader. She sold me immediately. She told me, ‘Remembering the Holocaust is no good if we don’t remember all the other struggles of people all around the world. Refugees, people who are fleeing violence, persecution—they share a similar story. It’s important for us to tell these stories and to remember that the Holocaust is not in the past, it’s a living memory. It’s something we need to know about it so we don’t repeat those mistakes.’”

Miller explained how MOR is evolving into a forward-looking organization. “It was such a beautiful thought, and immediately I went from ‘I’m not sure I’m the right person’ to ‘Oh, yeah, let’s do this.’” 

“Tres Minutos” will be performed in San Diego early next year, and MOR has received an invitation to bring it to Tijuana, too. The goal of MOR, Miller says, is not to moralize or to simplify humans into victims and martyrs. “You experience these people as real people, not headlines in a newspaper—people with real emotions that are living through this,” Miller says.

“I’m not advocating for anything in the opera,” Benavides says. “The opera is not about the border crisis. The opera is about understanding the bond that siblings have and basically the blood they share but the paperwork they don’t share. That’s it. These are real families, real people who miss each other. Ranging back to all persecutions, when we “otherise” people, when we think of them as less than human, we enable ourselves to do terrible things to them.”

“The message from Music Remembrance now is music that matters,” Miller says. “It mattered 25 years ago, and it matters even more now, because our world is changing, and we need to address these issues in a way that reaches people’s emotions.”

Music of Remembrance’s 25 year gala occurs on May 21 at 6 pm at Benaroya Hall, following a performance of “For a Look or a Touch” and “Another Sunrise,” starting at 4 pm. More information and tickets here.

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Shoutouts

The Washington State Jewish Historical Society celebrates Jewish American Heritage Month – thank you to everyone making Jewish history in this state. Please come to our showcase on June 15^th to show your support. Registration is at wsjhs.org/roots. We want to celebrate with you for the launch of the new Washington Jewish Memory Archive. —Lisa Kranseler