Posts Tagged Music

Amnon Weinstein prepares a violin from the Holocaust for exhibit. He began restoring the violins in 1996 and now has 30 of them to display in an exhibit called "Violins of Hope."

Amnon Weinstein first encountered a violin from the Holocaust 50 years ago. He was a young violin maker in Israel, and a customer brought him an old instrument in terrible condition and wanted it restored.

The customer had played on the violin on the way to the gas chamber, but he survived because the Germans needed him for their death camp orchestra. He hadn’t played on it since.

“So I opened the violin, and there inside there [were] ashes,” Weinstein says.

Weinstein was horrified; were these incinerated remnants of concentration camp victims? The Nazis plucked Jewish musicians from arriving cattle cars and forced them to play as other prisoners went to their death. Hundreds of Weinstein’s relatives — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — died in the Holocaust. To handle one of those instruments was too much.

“I could not. I could not,” he says.

It was many decades later in 1996, when Weinstein was ready. He put out a call for violins from the Holocaust. One came from a survivor who played in the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra.

UNC Charlotte music professor David Russell plays a violin that belonged to a member of the Auschwitz Men's Orchestra.

On a recent day, the violin was being played by David Russell, a music professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Russell and Weinstein are old friends, which is how Charlotte came to host the North American debut of Violins of Hope. Eighteen instruments are here; Russell says each carries the touch and playing style of its previous owner.

“When I play one of these instruments, I go through that same process of discovering what makes this instrument sound the best,” Russell says. “That means that I’m walking in their footsteps and their voice is actually heard by my playing of this violin.”

The violin was perhaps the most important instrument for the Jewish people, Weinstein says. He has restored more than 30 Holocaust violins, and many are inlaid with an intricate Star of David in mother-of-pearl. Orthodox Judaism forbade displaying portraits or sculpture, so Weinstein says violins often hung as art on the walls.

“Never [would you] see a Jewish house without an instrument on the wall. It was a kind of tradition,” he says.

Weinstein began collecting these violins to honor that tradition, but also to break the silence: His family never spoke of the Holocaust. Once, he asked about his grandfather and says his mother silently opened a book about the war and pointed to a pile of bodies.

The Auschwitz Men's Orchestra is seen here in an undated photo. Jewish musicians were forced to perform in Nazi concentration camps.

Weinstein then married Assi Bielski, whose father was a famous Jewish resistance fighter portrayed in the film Defiance. Weinstein was amazed how happily the Bielski family talked about the war.

“We are completely different in this way,” he says. “Her family killed Germans, by quantities, not by one. My family was all killed by the Germans.”

Bielski says her family was always very happy, and they were not humiliated.

“It’s the number tattooed on your arm that is a constant reminder of the humiliation,” Bielski says. “For us there was none of it.”

Weinstein says that perhaps what he’s doing with the violins is to make his life a little bit easier from “all [of] this heritage, which is unbelievable.”

The Violins of Hope are Weinstein’s resistance. They’re like tombstones, he says, for the thousands of Jewish instruments and musicians destroyed in the war.

You can listen to a documentary about Violins of Hope from member station WDAV here

NPR – “Violins of Hope”: Instruments from the Holocaust (found via the-seed-of-europe)

Definition: Not everything that looks expensive or precious actually is.

Origins: If you, like me, were raised on 90’s one hit wonders and the first thing that this phrase brings to mind is the refrain from Smash Mouth’s 1999 song, “All Star,” than I applaud your memory. However, I hate to be the one to tell you that the actual song words mean the opposite of this idiom. The refrain actually goes like this: “Hey now you’re an All Star get your game on, go play/ Hey now you’re a Rock Star get the show on get paid/ And all that glitters is gold/ Only shooting stars break the mold.” The song leaves out “not,” which changes the entire meaning and implies that all shiny precious things are just that. The origins for the saying “all that glitters is not gold” can be traced as far back as the 12^th century where French theologian Alain de Lille wrote a variant of the saying: “Do not hold everything gold that shines like gold.” After de Lille, other authors, poets and playwrights such as Chaucer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare have taken on the saying in various forms. The present form of the phrase originated in 1687 when English author John Dryden stated, “All, as they say, that glitters is not gold,” in The Hind and the Panther.

Hendrickson, Robert. Words and Phrase Origins. 3rd ed. New York: Facts On File, 2004, 18.
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Daniel Butterfield

Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, a Union Army general in the Civil War, is credited with composing the iconic “Taps.” In 1862, Butterfield was camped at Harrison’s Landing in Virginia and it was here where he first played the tune. It has been argued that ‘Taps” was not an original idea but was instead a revision of several bugle calls. Butterfield’s version became popular during the war and the U.S. Army officially adopted ”Taps” in 1874.

It received its name because the music could be done with taps of a drum if there was no bugler available.

Due to his actions during the Civil War, Butterfield received the Medal of Honor for his service.

YouTube link: “Taps”

Villanueva, Jari. “24 Notes That Tap Deep Emotions,” found online here.
Daniel Butterfield’s photo.

The Mills Brothers at a London Palladium Appearance in 1934

With 2,250 recorded songs, the Mills Brothers have recorded more than any other artist.

They also achieved another unprecedented accomplishment by recording and broadcasting in every decade from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Throughout their career, the Mills Brothers circled the globe more than 17 times.

In 1998, the Mills Brothers were honored with a Grammy for Life-Time Achievement, but by this time, only one of the original four brothers was still living. He, along with his son, accepted the award.

They were also inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1998. The Vocal Group Hall of Fame states the Mills Brother’s wide influence in the following way:

The Mills Brothers were not only the first black vocal group to have wide appeal among whites, they were the most successful American group of all time, with 71 chart singles spanning four decades. . . . The Mills Brothers’ influence was pervasive: they made black music acceptable to a wide audience and encouraged other black vocalists to carry on what they had started.  And lest we forget, they did it with dignity and grace in difficult racial times, carried forward by their warmth of character and mellow sound.

Vocal Group Hall of Fame website.
Photo and information found on Mills Brothers website.