This is the title of the exhibition that accompanies the official opening of the exil.arte centre at Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts on May 22nd. It is also the reason that… Continue reading →

Historically, there are cultural precedents that are worth considering. Nobody disputes this and though it’s perhaps too easy to carry on raising the spectre of Hitler, what I find interesting at this Trump/Brexit… Continue reading →

As I move my office from my home in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire to the belle-etage of the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, I find myself bereft of files, books… Continue reading →

A blog such as “Forbidden Music”, dealing with history, music and freedom of expression cannot allow the election of Donald Trump in the wake of Brexit to pass without reflection. There are already… Continue reading →

Since posting this article on Heinsheimer, Univeral Edition has now published his history of their publishing house since its founding in 1901 to the death of Emil Hertzka and Austria’s annexation in 1938.… Continue reading →

This week saw the opening of an exhibition on women composers in Vienna. It follows a run of performances Of Baruchs Schweigen – or Baruch’s Silence, by the composer Ella Milch-Scheriff with a… Continue reading →

  I wrote a catalogue chapter on the persecution of popular music during the Nazi years for the exhibition Stars of David, which ran at Vienna’s Jewish Museum in 2015. Obviously, in a… Continue reading →

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme” – a quote apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain. So what does this historic meter reflecting events start to show us? It’s thrown up many… Continue reading →

On April 22nd, I gave a lecture at Royal Holloway London University, on Karol Rathaus’s opera Fremde Erde – Alien Soil. I’ve now adapted it for inclusion on this blog. Much of the… Continue reading →

Born in Ternopol in 1895 as an Austrian who spoke Polish at home, educated in German, he spoke and wrote the language better than native speakers, as did his fellow Ukrainian/Austrian Poles and… Continue reading →