Two Restorations

 

 “CONSERVATORS SHINE NEW LIGHT ON IRREPLACEABLE ART”
by Jared Bowen

[This segment was broadcast on PBS NewsHour [now PBS News Hour] on 26 December 2014.  A series of paintings created by Mark Rothko for Harvard University was thought irreparably damaged by years of sun exposure and removed from view.  Thirty-five years later, the paintings have returned, thanks to art historians and curators using digital projection, which offers viewers the appearance of restoration for works too fragile to touch. The segment was produced by Boston’s WGBH.] 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: an art restoration breakthrough.

An international team of art historians and curators have developed a new technique to restore works of art without ever touching them. It’s being used for the first time on a Mark Rothko mural.

Jared Bowen from WGBH in Boston has this report.

JARED BOWEN: Even in 1960, it was a coup, when Harvard University landed Mark Rothko [1903-70; born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire, now part of Latvia] to paint a series of murals for its new penthouse dining room. Rothko was already considered one of the country’s greatest artist[s], and this was to be among his biggest commissions.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR, Senior Conservation Scientist, Harvard Art Museums: He really wanted you to be up close and surrounded by his work so that you could feel the — feel the painting.

JARED BOWEN: Rothko paint[ed] panels to envelop the space. They and the studies and sketches he produced in planning them are now on view in the newly renovated Harvard Art Museum’s first special exhibition [16 November 2014-26 July 2015, Special Exhibitions Gallery].

They were robustly read [red?], says curator Mary Schneider Enriquez.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ, Associate Curator, Harvard Art Museum: He had been focusing on these kind[s] of purples and crimson, as we like to say, of course, at Harvard. [Harvard’s school color is crimson and it is also the university’s frequent nickname.]

The ground of crimson or purple is then set off with these extraordinary contrasts of this red that is just incredible. As you look at any of his paintings, the play of color and contrast blending and then working against and with each other has always been essential to his work.

JARED BOWEN: The panels were officially installed in 1964, but were in steep competition with the room’s Harvard Yard views. The penthouse shades were rarely drawn and the light-sensitive murals suffered substantial damage.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: As the sun would traverse the sky, the paintings became faded, and in an uneven way because of the geometry of the room, so some parts were shadowed. Some parts received more sunlight. The paintings changed. And so what started off as a unified whole slowly drifted apart.

JARED BOWEN: By 1979, Harvard realized the murals were irreparably damaged and removed them from their dining room perch. And the series, one of only three ever painted by Rothko, was placed into storage and, aside from a few exhibitions, had largely disappeared from public view and memory.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: It’s been an extremely sad thing that this extraordinary work of art has not been included in the art history of Rothko. So it’s been a real priority for all of us to bring these works back to our — back to a place in which we can study them and recognize the achievement in th[ese] extraordinary paintings.

JARED BOWEN: Thirty-five years after removal, Rothko’s murals are once again on view, hung in the same configuration in a room with the same dimensions and against walls painted the same olive mustard Rothko himself chose.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: This really brings them back and puts them in the middle of his entire history in a major way.

JARED BOWEN: But they had to be hung without touching the canvasses, says conservation scientist Narayan Khandekar. It turns out Rothko mixed his own paint, which inadvertently left the canvases overly susceptible to ruin and far too fragile for physical touch-ups. [See my post “Conserving Modern Art,” 11 December 2018, on Rick On Theater.]

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: Rothko used this binding medium, glue-size, which is — gives a very porous surface. And if you put any kind of isolating varnish over that, it would saturate the paint. It would change the color relationships. Everything that we do as a conservation approach also has to be reversible.

JARED BOWEN: How to restore the Rothkos to their original glory without ever touching them? To achieve that, Harvard collaborated with art historians and conservation teams from MIT and the University of Basel in Switzerland. They devised a software program that replicates Rothko’s original paintings pixel by pixel, color by color.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: We were able to have access to an alternate panel that had been shipped up to Cambridge, but not installed, and which had unfaded sections on it, and were able to use those to make the final adjustments on the digital image of what the paintings looked like.

JARED BOWEN: The digital recreation is projected with nonthreatening low light onto the canvas.

NARAYAN KHANDEKAR: It’s about 2.07 million pixels. So, we have to calculate the color and the intensity for each of these pixels and then shine it in exactly the right spot.

The color that’s on the painting, plus the compensation image, gives the viewer the impression of what the paintings looked like in 1964. We’re very, very confident that we’re as close as can be for this project.

JARED BOWEN: The technology is a game-changer, museum officials say, but it also raises questions about whether conservation in the digital age fundamentally changes the art. Rothko’s color is back, but no longer by his own hand.

MARY SCHNEIDER ENRIQUEZ: One of the key questions is, where is the line between what is the original work of art and the art that has the projection system on it? I mean, have we changed what he has done? No, we haven’t changed his canvases.

JARED BOWEN: But they have changed the possibility that damaged masterpieces the world over can once again see the light of day with the elaborately configured light of a projector.

I’m Jared Bowen for the “NewsHour” in Boston.

[Jared Bowen is the Host and Executive Arts Editor at public media company GBH.  (GBH is the trade name of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts, and some of its public media outlets)  

[He is host of the daily radio program/podcast The Culture Show, is a regular guest host on Boston Public Radio, and a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.  He’s also the moderator of the sold-out Boston Speakers Series at Symphony Hall.]

*  *  *  *
“HITCHCOCK’S FASCINATION WITH DANCE”
by Sarah Kaufman 

[Sarah Kaufman’s report on the restoration of Hitchcock’s first known directorial work on a feature film ran in the Washington Post on 4 August 2013 (sec. E [“Arts”]).]

Of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic obsessions, the moving body is one of the most remarkable. He lingered on bodies in motion with a choreographer’s eye to show us panic, passion and the fragile nature of sanity. Now, in a newly restored version of Hitchcock’s first film, a 1925 silent movie called “The Pleasure Garden,” we can see the roots of that fascination. It all started with dancers.

“The Pleasure Garden,” which will be screened Sunday [4 August 2013] at the National Gallery of Art, is a tale of greed, betrayal and murder centered on a pair of chorus girls. One remains a backup dancer but the other becomes a star, because she shows more leg. Their friendship frays as Jill [Carmelita Geraghty (1901-66)], the starlet, throws off her fiance to be a prince’s mistress, while hard-working, naive Patsy [Virginia Valli (1896-1968)] marries a schemer with loose morals and a looser grip on reality.

The action sweeps from London to Lake Como and on to Dakar, where Patsy finds herself in a battle for her life that had me holding my breath. I think I was gasping. And I was just watching a press screener on my computer, with no music. (The National Gallery will have live accompaniment [a new score was commissioned for the restoration by British composer Daniel Patrick Cohen (b. 1988)].)

Hitchcock [1899-1980], master of suspense — even in the infancy of his career.

On top of that, he delivers the sisterly camaraderie, ephemeral glamour, drudgery and creepiness of London’s nightclub scene — and the strong backbone surviving in it demands, as seen in the film’s plucky heroine — with verve and a surprising depth of insight.

“What every chorus girl knows,” reads one of the inter-titles, and next we see a dancer elbow-deep in soapsuds, washing her tights.

Yet it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the British filmmaker had a soft spot for dancers. Think of his nonverbal finesse, his precise and fluid way of blocking scenes and isolating gestures, as in a work of dance-theater. He put his actors in motion with a kinetic charge that was simple, direct and emotionally powerful — Cary Grant running for his life in “North by Northwest” [1959], and earlier in the film, striding down a hall in a way that told us what kind of man he was. And recall the dizzying grace of Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s slow-dance kiss in “Notorious” [1946] as the camera swirls around them.

“The Pleasure Garden” was restored by the British Film Institute National Archive in a three-year project to refurbish the nine silent Hitchcock movies that still exist. Produced between 1925 and 1929, they suffered varying degrees of damage over the years. Now cleaned and pieced back to near-original form, the films have been on an international tour. “The Hitchcock 9” has been presented here by the AFI Silver Theatre [Silver Spring, Maryland] and the National Gallery. “The Pleasure Garden” is last in the series.

Of the nine, “The Pleasure Garden” has a double significance. It proves, astonishingly, that the seeds of many Hitchcockisms were planted at the start: his love of motion, but also his fondness for voyeurism, staircases, binoculars, ominous beverages and dirty jokes. Here, right off the bat, Hitchcock is Hitchcock, almost fully formed. At 26.

The very fact that we can marvel at the director’s early ease is a result of “The Pleasure Garden’s” second point of interest: This film was in the worst shape, and is now the crowning glory of the restoration project.

It is “the standout example of how restoration can affect the viewing of the film,” Kieron Webb, the BFI’s film conservation manager, said in a recent phone interview. The film had previously been known only in incomplete copies, with what appeared to be two different versions in circulation, Webb said, and both were missing footage. With the restoration, an extra 20 minutes was added. Missing bits of one section were found on a Dutch print; a lost scene was added from an original nitrate print preserved at Southern Methodist University [University Park, Texas]. The tints and tones were corrected to better match the setting and mood. Finally, the film was cleaned of dirt and mold, and scratches and tears were digitally repaired.

If you see “The Pleasure Garden,” though, you won’t be thinking about the hundreds of hours technicians spent sprucing it up. You’ll be making mental notes of the symbols and images that Hitchcock returned to later in his career. The film opens with a snaking line of dancers clattering down a spiral staircase (“Vertigo” [1958] alert!) into the bowels of the theater, taking us down to an underworld where it’s not artistry that counts, but how much skin you show.

Hitchcock may have been thinking of [Edgar] Degas [French Impressionist painter and sculptor; 1834-1917], whose top-hatted dandies peering at ballerinas didn’t have art on their minds either. The next scene is like something out of a Degas painting: A long tracking shot takes us across a row of finely dressed gentlemen in the audience leering at the dancers with predatory enthusiasm. One gent is peering through binoculars, and we see, “Rear Window”-style [1954], exactly the extent of the flesh he’s ogling.

At one point, Patsy is having tea, and the camera zooms in on her cup, where a couple of tea leaves are floating. It calls to mind that eerie glass of milk, glowing supernaturally in Cary Grant’s hand as he carried it up to Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” [1941], and the frame-filling shot of the coffee cup that is poisoning Bergman in “Notorious.”

But what’s so special about the tea? Webb explains it’s a Britishism that would have resonated with audiences at the time. The leaves represent “an omen about a stranger approaching,” he said, and at that moment Patsy meets the handsome villain who will talk her into marrying him.

Thanks to the BFI’s restoration, we’re treated to a sly little shot pertaining to that marriage that had been lost. It was discovered at SMU, and it offers a telling bit of Hitchcock’s humor. Remember, this is a man who liked to punctuate a love scene with a bawdy punch line — the train entering a tunnel after a kiss in “North by Northwest,” fireworks exploding after a cuddle in “To Catch a Thief” [1955]. So as the pretty young dancer wakes up from her wedding night, beaming, the director gives us a close-up of a bitten apple.

Not subtle, but then again, kid Hitchcock was scarcely out of his teens.

[Sarah Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist, and educator.  For more than 30 years, she has focused on the union of art and everyday living.  As the chief dance critic and senior arts writer of the Washington Post from 1996-2022, she wrote about the performing arts, pop culture, sports, science and personal expression.

[Kaufman’s work has been featured on national radio and television, including NBC News, CNBC, the PBS NewsHour, and On Point with Tom Ashbrook.  

[The screenplay for The Pleasure Garden was written by Eliot Stannard (1888-1944), based on the 1925 novel of the same name by Oliver Sandys (pseudonym of Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis; 1886-1964).  The movie was a British-German production, shot in Italy and Germany in 1925.  It was released briefly in the United Kingdom in 1926, but withdrawn and rereleased officially in 1927, becoming a huge hit.

[The restored Pleasure Garden, with the new score, has not been released on video due to a lack of funding to record it adequately.  Available DVD releases contain a poor quality and badly edited version of the film, and there are bootlegged copies on the market as well.  As of 2021, The Pleasure Garden has become the first Hitchcock film to enter the public domain.

[“The Hitchcock 9” restoration was started in 2012 and took three years to complete.  The other eight films were: Blackmail (1929), Champagne (1928), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmer’s Wife (1927), The Lodger (1927), The Manxman (1929), and The Ring (1927).]

"Austin theater company works to preserve Latin American culture"

by Journey Love Taylor, Marcos Sanchez, Natalie Erzal,                    Tara Bordeaux and Gil Garcia

[The following report on the Latino theater troupe Proyecto Teatro of Austin, Texas, was aired on PBS NewsHour on 5 March 2024.]

The Austin, Texas theater company, Proyecto Teatro, aims to promote and preserve Latin American culture. Its latest project is helping redefine Latin American history. Journey Love Taylor of our Student Reporting Labs Academy shares the story as part of our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Geoff Bennett, “PBS NewsHour” Co-Anchor: The Austin, Texas, theater company Proyecto Teatro aims to promote and preserve Latin American culture. And its latest project is helping redefine Latin American history.

Journey Love Taylor of our Student Reporting Labs Academy shares this story as part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Journey Love Taylor: At The VORTEX Theater in Austin, Texas, Proyecto Teatro is in the middle of rehearsal “Cabarex 2,” the second installment of a trilogy of stage plays that explore Latin American history, from the times before the arrival of Columbus all the way through to an imagined future.

Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez is the longtime artistic director for the company.

Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez, Artistic Director, Proyecto Teatro: We’re wanting to use this show to raise awareness of what we can do as a local community to take back our culture, to take back our art form and our identity.

Journey Love Taylor: But this isn’t just a play. It’s a cabaret, and it’s performed completely in Spanish.

Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez: This type of work, you don’t really see it so much in Spanish, and you don’t see this type of work in the Latino community, because cabaret is derived from European art forms, and so it’s a little odd and a little different and new to see it in the context of our culture.

And so when people saw it, they were just so happy to be able to see their stories, their people, their characters in the lens of cabaret with, like, the musical numbers and the dance sequences and the jazzy music.

Valeria Smeke, Dancer and Performer: My favorite part about being involved in this production specifically, I think, would be the dances.

There’s one with, like, chairs. You have your little, like, chair dance routine. I love that one.

Rachel Rivera, Choreographer, Makeup, Costume, and Hair Artist: Being a part of something so impactful in my community feels like a great responsibility, especially since I feel that I am a leader and someone who creates something for other people to see and other people that are not part of my culture to see, to make sure that what I’m doing always carries that intention that I want it to carry and the intention of respecting and honoring my culture.

Valeria Smeke: I really don’t get a chance to, like, connect with my roots, so being here and, like, Rachel teaching us these indigenous dances, just learning about the history, it’s a really beautiful thing.

Journey Love Taylor: For the “PBS NewsHour” Student Reporting Labs, I’m Journey Love Taylor.

[Proyecto Teatro was founded in 2007 and is located at 5700 Avenue G, Austin, Texas 78752-4510.  The Principal, or Artistic Director, is Luis Ordaz.  The company can be contacted at (512) 524-8555 or info@proyectoteatro.com; the website is www.proyectoteatro.com.] 

*  *  *  *

[Because the NewsHour report was so brief, I went looking for some other coverage of Proyecto Teatro.  The two pieces below are both a little older (pre-pandemic) than the one above, but I found them informative and interesting.]

“TEATRO CON TENACIDAD
THE SHAPE OF LATINA/O THEATRE IN AUSTIN”
by Emi Aguilar and Roxanne Schroeder-Arce 

[This article was posted in the website HowlRound on 19 June 2015.]

This is the second of seven posts in a series about the state of Latina/o theatre in Texas.  In this series, each of the contributing writers presents insight into the happenings, developments, and future of Latina/o theatre and performance in their respective regions.

Austin, Texas hosts several Latina/o theatre companies, and each year more historically white institutions are producing plays with Latina/o themes and characters. In past the few seasons, Austin Latina/o theatre companies like Teatro Vivo, ALTA Teatro (Austin Latina/o Theatre Alliance), and Proyecto Teatro have produced and showcased plays from the Latina/o experience, while other mainstream companies like ZACH Theatre, Austin Community College, and the University of Texas at Austin have produced plays with Latina/o themes, characters, and bodies. Additionally, presenting houses like the Paramount Theatre presented productions from Latin America and US Latina/o theatres. Overall, the number of Latina/o productions being offered in Austin is growing, and represent a diversity of perspectives and aesthetics from Austin Latina/o communities. However, there is still relatively little Latina/o theatre in comparison to the number of Latina/o-identified people living in Austin. What exists is sporadic, hard to find, and in some cases reeks of appropriation and tokenism. In an attempt to paint a picture of the current Austin Latina/o theatre scene, we will highlight some of the challenges Latina/o theatre in Austin faces and articulate how the Austin Latina/o theatre community is responding to such challenges.

One issue faced by Latina/o theatre artists in Austin over the past several decades is the need for a consistent venue for Latina/o arts. The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center currently hosts four performance groups, including ALTA, Teatro Vivo, Proyecto Teatro, and Aztlan Dance Company. Each company has its own artistic and social objectives. This center, often referred to as “the MACC,” has helped with the need for a consistent space where the Latina/o community and those interested in Latina/o arts can find theatre told from the uniquely Latina/o perspective. This magnificent new facility also provides free parking for sanctioned events, though it is taking some time for the Austin community at large to become accustomed to attending events at the MACC.

One resident company of the MACC, ALTA, has been in existence for over fifteen years. The company’s mission has recently changed, and it now works as a community of artists and volunteers to foster new Latina/o theatre talent in Austin. ALTA promotes collaborative productions among local and international artists. ALTA’s productions are typically written by Latin American playwrights, and produced in Spanish with English subtitles. One exception is their annual Pastorela. Conceived and directed by Patricio Villareal, La Pastorela 2013 engaged the Austin community in a way that is rarely experienced elsewhere in the City. At the end of the play, the young and young at heart pummeled a Satan piñata in a joyful community ritual. 

[La Pastorela dates back many centuries, performed during the Christmas season by amateur and professional artists, in theaters and churches, in Mexico and in Mexican communities since the middle part of the last millennium. La Pastorela changes from year to year and from production to production, but at its core its always the same story. It’s the story, usually told with humor and song, of the shepherds who are visited by angels and told to go to Bethlehem and see the newborn Jesus. In the course of the trip to Bethlehem, the devils come and try to trick the shepherds. The details of the story are often changed to reflect the current state of the world.] 

Proyecto Teatro also typically produces work in Spanish. The company’s mission is “to preserve and promote the Latin-American culture through theatre, providing a source of transformative arts education and quality cultural entertainment.” Proyecto Teatro strives to offer theatre artists and audience members a space conducive to human development through the arts. Recently, Proyecto Teatro produced an original piece called Por Los Mojados, which was devised and performed by young people ages seven to seventeen, under the direction of the company’s executive and artistic director, Luis Armando Ordaz Gutiérrez. Combining visceral dialogue, contemporary dance, and comedic elements, Por Los Mojados showed the realities of border crossings from the youth perspective. Working as an ensemble, the young artists courageously implicated the US and Mexican governments in these violent experiences to put truthful narratives on stage. The production is set to tour to Los Angeles this fall.

Teatro Vivo produces and promotes bilingual theatre, and strives to “nurture a window into the community to make theatre accessible to all audiences, especially those underserved in the arts.” Founded by Rupert Reyes and JoAnn Carreon Reyes, Teatro Vivo’s mission is to produce culturally relevant Latina/o theatre that addresses critical social issues such as colorism, citizenship, and cultural fluidity. Teatro Vivo serves the community by telling stories that positively reflect the Latina/o community and uniquely celebrates the vibrancy of the Latina/o culture. A highlight of Teatro Vivo’s season each year is the Austin Latina/o New Play Festival, produced by Teatro Vivo in collaboration with Scriptworks. Now in its fifth year, the 2015 festival featured three Texas playwrights, Andrew Valdez from Austin, Jelisa Jay Robinson from Houston, and Adriana Garcia from San Antonio. Each playwright was selected through a blind panel and then given over a month to work with a dramaturg and develop their play. The process included auditions, a week of rehearsal, and a staged reading at the MACC followed by a post-show discussion. Teatro Vivo always offers these discussions as a mode of community engagement through which audiences affect the shape that each new play takes. Based on what they have discovered throughout the festival, each of the playwrights has expressed their desire to continue their own play development process.

ZACH Theatre, a historically white institution, recently began consistently staging plays with Latina/o themes, bodies, and characters. In collaboration with Teatro Vivo, ZACH is producing Latina/o works *through their Theatre for Families program. Cenicienta, a bilingual production for young audiences based on Cinderella, features a strong-minded Latina more concerned with becoming a writer than marrying a prince. Written and devised by two artists from Austin, Rupert Reyes (Teatro Vivo) and Caroline Reck (Glass Half Full Theatre), Cenicienta uses object puppetry to tell a new Cinderella story. Cenicienta marks the second collaboration between Teatro Vivo and ZACH Theatre.

Educational institutions in Austin have also begun to produce more Latina/o theatre. The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre & Dance produced Esperanza Rising in 2015, though their 2014 production of In The Heights faced challenges of representation in casting which led to student protests. Austin Community College also recently produced GUAPA by Caridad Svich. The value of representation of Latina/o stories on the stage is trickling down to the high schools throughout the state. Edinburg High School’s production of Zoot Suit from the Rio Grande Valley landed at the UIL state meet at UT Austin a few years ago, a grand and influential state theatre festival competition. Donna High School brought their production of blu by Tejana playwright Virgina Grise to the state meet this year.

As Austin continues to produce a diverse range of Latina/o stories in a variety of venues, we are hopeful that each company and artist gains more support and continues collaborations that engage deeply with the community. In addition to the theatre companies and educational institutions producing Latina/o theatre, several independent artists known on the national Latina/o theatre scene call Austin home, like Amparo Garcia-Crow, Adrian Villegas, and Raul Garza. New work is consistently generated in Austin and spread throughout the nation.

Through a newly founded theatre collective in Austin, TIA: Teatro In Austin, we hope to continue the dialogue about how each of these works is in conversation with one another and with the current national Latina/o theatre community’s momentum. Austin Latina/o theatre companies and artists are tenacious and eager to share their stories with diverse audiences far and wide.

*  *  *  *
“AUSTIN THEATER TROUPE RECOGNIZED
FOR PLAY ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION”
by Marlon Sorto 

[Marlon Sorto’s article about Proyecto Teatro’s winning a local theater award was posted on the website of the Austin American-Statesman on 4 September 2016; it was updated on 25 September 2018.]

When the Latino kids in the theatre company Proyecto Teatro debuted their first play “Por los Mojados” in March, they aimed to expose Austin audiences to some of the not-so-well-known history of illegal immigration from Latin America to the United States.

They did not expect that many months and performances later they’d be nominated for five B. Iden Payne Awards, which recognize exceptional theatrical performance, production, and design in Austin.

Proyecto Teatro, a local organization which promotes Latino culture through theatre in Spanish, also plans to start a tour to perform this show across the country. The youth company is mostly made up of Latino kids 9 to 17 years old.

The Payne Awards nominations committee includes local theater performers, producers and advocates and nominated the play in the youth category for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Direction in Theatre. The production also was nominated for Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Choreography and Outstanding Cast.

The awards ceremony will be held Oct. 26 [2016] at the Rollins Studio Theatre in the Long Center. The troupe will tour with the play across the country, beginning in Nov. 19 in Austin and before visiting cities such as San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami.

“We are very happy to help change the perception about the Hispanic community here in Austin and in the United States,” said Luis Ordaz, executive and artistic director of Proyecto Teatro. Ordaz also wants to submit the play to the Festival Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2016, he said.

“Por los Mojados,” which combines theater performance in Spanish with English surtitles, dance and video, was inspired by the border crisis in 2014. More than 60,000 unaccompanied minors entered illegally into the United States, escaping violence and gang threats in their home countries in Central America, said Ordaz.

The actors spent several months researching and writing the script, a process guided by Ordaz, he said.

The title of the production, “Por Los Mojados” — which translates to “For the Wetbacks” — aims to reclaim a derogatory term by reflecting the tough experiences and raw stories of Latino undocumented immigrants, Ordaz said. With this production, the ensemble has the opportunity to “highlight the work of Latinos and show that we are not (all) ‘criminals and rapists’ as a politician said recently, but a community which has a rich culture and the same artistic potential as Anglos.”

Ordaz referred to comments made by presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The show also challenges audiences, explained Ordaz, especially when it describes some darker passages of history, such as the Inquisition in Colonial Latin America and United States intervention through policies like the Truman Doctrine, which critics say was the beginning of a long process by which the U.S. increasingly played the role of world police force.

[With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972; 33rd President of the United States: 1945-53) established that the United States would provide political, military, and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.]

“Although we are very young, we are professional actors and we have worked a lot under our director to create a great script about this very sensitive and controversial issue,” actress Briana Campos said.

The Arts & Health

 

[Here are two reports from PBS NewsHour on the confluence of the performing arts and matters of health.  The first report concerns the beneficial effect of music on the health, particularly mental health, of people who aren’t musicians.  It’s proof that, indeed, “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” (William Congreve [1670-1729], The Mourning Bride [1697]). 

[The second report examines the relationship between the Houston healthcare community and that city’s performing artists and performing arts institutions.  Performers, including actors and musicians but especially singers and dancers, are susceptible to many career-endangering health issues that “civilians” (as one of my teachers called artistic muggles) don’t face.  Houston’s hospitals and health-care facilities have developed a community of care for Houston’s performing artists that the professionals of both societal groups claim is unique.] 

“OPERA LEGEND RENÉE FLEMING TEAMS UP WITH
DR. FRANCIS COLLINS TO STUDY HOW MUSIC CAN IMPROVE HEALTH”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[The following story, about opera singer Renée Fleming and former NIH head Francis Collins working in tandem on the application of music therapy to a range of mental and emotional stresses, was reported on PBS NewsHour on 22 February 2024.  The transcript and video of the segment is at Opera legend Renee Fleming teams up with Dr. Francis Collins to study how music can improve health | PBS NewsHour.

[Note: The NewsHour transcript of its segments is annotated with the warning, “Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.”  In light of that statement, I have edited or corrected mistranscrIptions directly from the video, sometimes without marking them below.  I’ve also added annotations in brackets to clarify some remarks.]

Giants in their fields of music and science are merging their knowledge to propel advancements in body and mind. A recent international gathering of researchers, therapists and artists took stock of what is known and what is yet to be discovered. Jeffrey Brown reports for our ongoing arts and health coverage on CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz, “NewsHour” Co-Anchor: Two giants of music and science are merging their knowledge to propel advancements in body and mind.

Researchers, therapists, and artists from around the world gathered to explore what is known and what is yet to be discovered.

Jeffrey Brown takes a look and a listen for our ongoing arts and health coverage on Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: [Renée Fleming singing in concert.] She is a singer, one of the world’s most beloved sopranos. But at times in her remarkable career, Renée Fleming has experienced terrible bouts of somatic pain [relating to or characteristic of the body as opposed to the mind or spirit], the body’s way of distracting her from the mental anxiety brought from performance.

Renée Fleming, Singer: I was never a natural performer. And so I just kept reading and reading about the mind-body connection, trying to understand more about what was causing this, et cetera. And I discovered that the medical profession and neuroscientists were studying music. And I asked him [indicating Dr. Francis Collins, sitting next to her] why one day.

Jeffrey Brown: He is the renowned physician-geneticist best known for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and leadership of the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Francis Collins, Former Director, National Institutes of Health: [26 June 2000, in the East Room of the White House, at the presidential conference, Decoding the Book of Life: A Milestone for Humanity] Today, we celebrate the revelation of the first draft of the human book of life.

Jeffrey Brown: Francis Collins headed the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research, for 12 years until 2021.

Dr. Francis Collins: I’m a doctor. I want to find every possible way to help people who are suffering from illnesses or other kinds of life experiences that are limiting their ability to flourish. I want to make everybody flourish, and music is such a powerful source of that kind of influence.

Jeffrey Brown: Together, they are leading proponents of a marriage of arts and health, advocates for research, understanding, and practice in the nexus of music and the brain.

We talked recently on the NIH campus [Bethesda, Md.] about their music and health initiative, now in its seventh year.

Renée Fleming: I believe the arts should be embedded in health care across the boards.

Jeffrey Brown: Embedded meaning?

Renée Fleming: Meaning, we already have it in many, many places. Many hospitals have discovered just how beneficial it is to have creative arts therapists on staff. Children’s hospitals should have a creative arts studio, I think, available to parents and their children and families. So, I just think it should be everywhere in health care.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a growing movement, one we have been reporting on around the country, including neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins studying music’s impact on dementia patients, a hospital at the University of Florida incorporating arts into its care, individuals who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries, like former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, playing the French horn to help rewire her brain and rebuild her ability to speak.

[Gabrielle Giffords (b. 1970) is a retired member of the United States House of Representatives from Maricopa County, Arizona, from January 2007 until January 2012. She suffered severe brain injury during an assassination attempt on 8 January 2011, when she was shot in the head.  Giffords resigned from Congress on 25 January 2012 to focus on her recovery and, as of 2016, has recovered much of her ability to walk, speak, read, and write, though she continues to struggle with language and had lost fifty percent of her vision in both eyes.]

Our understanding of the brain’s connections and responses is still in early stages, Francis Collins says, with projects like the NIH-funded BRAIN Initiative [Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies] helping show how individual circuits connect and respond. We do know some basics, however.

Dr. Francis Collins: I think you can say the acoustic cortex, which is where your brain processes incoming sound, and particularly musical sound, does have some pretty interesting circuits. It’s also plastic [easily shaped or molded]. It responds to training.

If you look at the brain of somebody who had intense musical training before age 7, you can actually see that part of the cortex is a little larger than in somebody who did not have that. So, our brains are responding to the environment very clearly in that way.

And then you can say, OK, if you have a musical experience that affects you, you can see how that signal that starts out in the acoustic cortex spreads to many other parts of the brain.

Jeffrey Brown: Maybe you have had an MRI? Renée Fleming got in and sang for two hours.

(Singing [in the MRI machine])

Renée Fleming: When I show this video to people, I always say, well, no Grammys for this performance.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: One interesting finding [was], that for an experienced singer like Fleming, her brain circuits were more active while she thought about or imagined singing than when she actually sang.

Did that surprise you?

Renée Fleming: It surprised me a great deal. It’s also — I think what’s even more surprising to me is that music actually is in every known mapped part of the brain. So it’s extraordinarily diverse and throughout the entire brain, as we know, as we currently understand it.

Jeffrey Brown: The research so far has a wide range of implications for child development, Alzheimer’s, and other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s, and other conditions and interventions.

Some research goes on in labs, some in the world, as in a study in which individuals were offered singing lessons. One group was given individual training, the other as part of a chorus.

Dr. Francis Collins: For 12 weeks, and to just see what happens as far as their health, the people that had individual singing, they did OK. The people in the choir, by all kinds of measures, were actually affected in a very positive way.

Many of them had chronic pain. Their chronic pain was noticeably reduced. They had various measures of personal attitudes. Their attitude toward generosity went straight up, and their oxytocin levels went up too, as another sort of hormonal measure of good will, good sense of health.

[Oxytocin is a hormone released by the pituitary gland. It plays roles in behavior that include social bonding, sexual activity, reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth.]

Renée Fleming: My favorite is, postpartum depression is tremendously benefited by singing in a choir. I would never have — I wouldn’t have guessed that.

Narrator: Having even one risk factor . . . .

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, you know those advertisements for drugs we’re all bombarded with?

Narrator: [Clip from a television commercial] Ask your doctor or pharmacist if Paxlovid is right for you.

Jeffrey Brown: Renée Fleming has one she’d like to see.

Renée Fleming: Ask your doctor if music therapy is right for you.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: As a kind of prescription.

Renée Fleming: Exactly. Exactly.

(Crosstalk)

Dr. Francis Collins: The prescription. Why not?

Jeffrey Brown: Yes, but you have to — you’re saying it still has to be shown exactly in a scientific method . . .

Dr. Francis Collins: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . for a doctor to be willing to prescribe it.

Dr. Francis Collins: Sure. That’s our system, and I’m totally behind it. You need evidence that this actually isn’t just a nice thing; it actually improves outcomes.

I’m pretty convinced from the data we have that’s the case for various places, but let’s tighten that up. Let’s make it absolutely incontrovertible. And then you will have a better chance with the insurance companies saying OK, because that may save them money in the long run.

Man: [Instructor of a music therapy demonstration in a conference] Let’s listen to this melody line as it floats all the way up.

Jeffrey Brown: At this recent gathering and others, Fleming and Collins are advancing new findings through a variety of collaborations, including NIH Music and Health with 20 NIH institutes, the Kennedy Center’s Sound Health partnership, and the Renée Fleming Foundation.

Everything you’re talking about requires a kind of buy-in from your communities, the arts world and the science world. But is there still pushback?

Dr. Francis Collins: There’s a bit, but I think were getting some real momentum going. It doesn’t hurt that scientists are also musicians. At least, many of them are.

This workshop, we invited multiple leadership at NIH to come and take part, and they all said pretty much yes, and they went away saying, that was even more interesting than I thought.

Jeffrey Brown: A young person now goes to the music conservatory, you want them to study therapy, science, health?

Renée Fleming: Well, these would be divisions within a conservatory or university.

But there’s definite buy-in now. But when I started, people were saying exactly what you’re saying, is, well, we have too much to do already with what we’re doing, in terms of presenting, and we’re strapped, and the funding is difficult, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think pretty much everyone is on board now, because we’re community service providers. So, I think people who run performing arts organizations and conservatories are starting to see the benefit of it.

Jeffrey Brown: And these two don’t just talk about bringing their disciplines together. They have been known to give it literal form, as amateur musician Francis Collins accompanies science-fascinated Renée Fleming.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

(Music [Fleming on stage singing with Collins accompanying on guitar and signing])

(Applause)

Amna Nawaz: And Fleming has edited a collection of essays from scientists, artists, and therapists called “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” [Penguin Publishing Group; publication date: 9 April 2024]. That’s due out this spring.

[I want to connect this NewsHour report on the benefits of music to anguished souls to some past posts on Rick On Theater that touch on the same or similar topics.  The first is “Theater: A Healing Art,” published on 3 September 2023, in which I examine the function of theater as a healing event for those who witness it and those who perform it.

[One example I gave of this phenomenon was a play, The Last Cyclist, written by a concentration camp inmate for his fellow prisoners.  In my report, posted on 2 and 5 September 2022, on the play which was reconstructed and staged and then filmed, I observed that it was, first, a healing force for the incarcerated Jews 80 years ago by reducing their dire circumstances to their farcical foundations.  Then it was a healing phenomenon for both the modern actors, mostly non-Jews, who performed the reconstruction and the modern audiences who saw it in the present day.

[A more contemporary play that was conceived as a healing event for the participants and the spectators was Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, a play about combat service in Afghanistan and its effects on the GI’s and their families on which I reported on 10 July 2023.

[On 28 August 2020, I ran “Yo-Yo Ma on the Artist’s Role in the Time of Covid-19,” a collection of articles on the famous cellist’s call for musicians and other artists “to take up a role in the struggle against the pandemic and its consequences.  He especially focused on the issues of raising the spirits of Americans who were struggling under the health threat and the psychological burdens of being confined to their homes.”  This lines up precisely with the work of Dr. Francis Collins with Renée Fleming, reported above.

[In his moe than 30-year career with PBS NewsHour, Brown’s served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent, he’s profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[As Senior Coordinating Producer of “Canvas,” Anne Davenport is the primary field producer of arts and culture pieces and oversees all coverage. She’s been leading “Canvas” since its beginning, collaborating with Chief Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown for most of her 21 years at PBS NewsHour as well as with others.] 

*  *  *  *
“HOW A HOUSTON MEDICAL CENTER IS
HARMONIZING HEALTH AND PERFORMING ARTS”
by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet 

[Before the report on the use of music to reduce stress and distress, correspondent Jeffrey Brown covered the Houston collaboration between the health-care facilities and the performing arts institutions of the city.  The segment aired on PBS NewsHour on 2 October 2023 and is online at How a Houston medical center is harmonizing health and performing arts | PBS NewsHour.]

The Center For Performing Arts Medicine is an unusual partnership of a world-class hospital and world-class performing arts organizations. It was founded in 1992 with a focus on singers, but then something unexpected happened. Jeffrey Brown reports from Houston for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz, “NewsHour” Co-Anchor: It’s an unusual partnership, a world-class hospital and world-class performing arts organizations, a model in the growing field that brings together health and the arts.

Jeffrey Brown reports from Houston for our ongoing series, Canvas.

Woman [Dr. Yin Yiu]: We’re just going to get a look at your throat and your vocal cords. Breathe in.

Jeffrey Brown: We’re up close and personal with 25-year-old opera singer Emily Treigle and her vocal cords. This is her instrument, requiring constant care and attention.

Emily Treigle, Houston Grand Opera: It’s not like I’m playing the Trumpet or piano, like, if something goes wrong, you can see it. You know, it’s all in here. So, you need the professional to be able to go in and make sure that everything is going well.

Jeffrey Brown: In July, after multiple tonsil infections, Treigle, a mezzo-soprano, had a tonsillectomy. All went well, and, this day, she was getting a checkup ahead of the Houston Grand Opera’s new season.

For someone in your position, what’s the problem? I mean, what’s the thing you have to deal with or worry about most with your voice?

Emily Treigle: The short answer is everything. The long answer is, it’s incredibly challenging to be in a career that there are so many variables attached to it.

And so our task as singers is to have such a good, solid technical foundation that we can defy whatever odds are thrown at us and just continue to be able to produce a really beautiful sound. And when it’s something that’s outside of our control, our technical realm, that’s when we end up back here and say, something is not working. Can we do a checkup and make sure that everything is where it’s supposed to be?

Dr. Yin Yiu, Houston Methodist Hospital: We really encourage our singers as vocal athletes.

Jeffrey Brown: Working with Treigle, Dr. Yin Yiu, a laryngologist at the Texas Voice Center at the Houston Methodist Hospital. As she puts it, she’s the T in the ENT [ear, nose, and throat].

She doesn’t sing herself, though some of her colleagues do, but she loves the challenge of caring for singers.

Dr. Yin Yiu: We think about athletes, right, and they have like this whole team of people that take care of them. And we don’t really think about performers.

So, singers, actors, people who do, like, use their voice in that capacity, we don’t think about them in that same way. But they can also have injuries, right? So, they can be performing and have different things happening. The vocal cords can get swollen. They can have vocal cord hemorrhage or bleed whenever. They’re singing. These are all things that can happen. And we get to be that team for them.

[The “swollen” vocal cords Dr. Yiu mentions may refer to laryngeal polyps or nodules, which can appear as swelling and can cause symptoms including hoarseness or breathiness, “rough” or “scratchy” voice, decreased pitch range, and vocal and bodily fatigue.  It was the condition with which singer-actress Julie Andrews was diagnosed in 1997—although she disputes the diagnosis—and as a result of the surgical treatment for which, she lost her magnificent singing voice.  

[Dr. Yiu has omitted from her list of vulnerable performers arguably the most susceptible to physical injury—though not usually to the throat: dancers.  These artists are brought up later in the report.]

Jeffrey Brown: The Texas Voice Center is part of the hospital’s highly unusual program, the Center for Performing Arts Medicine. Founded by Dr. Richard Stasney in 1992, it all began with a focus on singers, but then something unexpected happened.

Todd Frazier has led the center since 2012.

Todd Frazier, System Director, Center for Performing Arts Medicine: We started to get preachers, newscasters, classroom teachers, anyone that would associate their voice to what they do professionally.

[I would add to the list of potential professional subjects, lawyers, specifically litigators.  When I was an acting student and then a teacher of acting, along with the occasional priest or teacher, I saw a number of lawyers taking acting classes.]

And that’s when the hospital realized that, yes, there really is something special and unique here, and that’s unique to Houston as well.

Jeffrey Brown: The center then grew to support performing artists of all kinds from Houston’s thriving arts community, as well as from all over the country. Crucially, it also developed official relationships with several of Houston’s leading performance art groups.

Todd Frazier: There are a lot of unique health issues that show up in the arts community that deserve a home and deserve a place to be cared for.

Jeffrey Brown: Are you surprised that this is a thing now between the hospital and arts organizations?

Todd Frazier: I’m not surprised that its successful, because I am from the arts community [he’s a composer, trained at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and the Juilliard School in New York City], and I really knew that the artists were yearning for a home and a sympathetic place that they would be understood.

But I am — have to be surprised that a major hospital would sort of take this on in a way that’s sort of unprecedented. They felt it fit with their values to be supporting the arts and culture within the community of Houston, which all the hospitals are in Houston. And the physicians really enjoyed being able to help these talented people making their lives and homes here in Houston.

Jeffrey Brown: One major partner, the Houston Ballet, which now has an on-site clinic, giving dancers like Kellen Hornbuckle daily access to athletic trainers and physical therapists.

[Readers may remember some years ago, professional and college athletes, football players in particular, were discovered taking dance classes to help them tone and coordinate their bodies.  I wonder if it’s still common.]

Dr. Kevin Varner, Houston Methodist Hospital: The types of injuries that ballet dancers get are very unique. It’s a very unique population. And while they are performing artists, they are incredible athletes.

Jeffrey Brown: Kevin Varner is the chairman of orthopedic surgery at Houston Methodist Orthopedic Sports Medicine.

Dr. Kevin Varner: It’s interesting to look at how things evolved over the last 15 or 20 years in terms of dancer health. And, remember, it’s a big team approach, right? So, you really need a hospital that wants to be a partner, because you need not just orthopedic surgery.

You need nutrition. You need cardiology. You need primary care sports medicine, so people that take care of the dancer as a whole [and] when you do that, it really does improve dancer health.

Jeffrey Brown: In this session, Hornbuckle received dry needling, cupping, massaging, and other treatments to alleviate pain in her legs and prevent serious injury.

[Dry needling is a treatment for pain and movement issues in which thin needles are inserted into or near trigger points to stimulate the muscles, causing them to contract or twitch. This helps relieve pain and improve the range of motion. Cupping is a traditional therapeutic treatment in which heated cupping glasses are applied to the skin, supposedly to draw blood towards the surface for relieving internal congestion or loosening and stimulating the muscles.]

The big idea, according to Houston Ballet executive director James Nelson, change from reactive to proactive care.

James Nelson, Executive Director, Houston Ballet: So, when I was dancing, we never had any on-site care. It was always, wait until you’re broken, then go to the doctor, then get it fixed.

At the end of the day, it’s a very short career. And so to be able to give an artist a year, two years, five years more of this precious time is such a gift. And I attribute a lot of that to this partnership with Methodist. You won’t find this kind of relationship in most ballet companies.

Jeffrey Brown: Back at the hospital, Frazier sees this kind of focus on the performing arts only growing in the future.

Todd Frazier: Many universities are starting arts and health certificates, music therapy degrees.

And even medical schools are looking at internships in artists health or how artists might be cared for to develop those skills. And it is growing.

Jeffrey Brown: Meanwhile, singer Emily Treigle is ready to go.

Your throat looks great. I mean, I saw it.

(Laughter)

Emily Treigle: Thank you. Who knew my tonsils were so big? I had no idea. But now that I don’t have them, I certainly notice their absence.

I’m very excited about this coming season and seeing how things change now that I don’t have this obstacle.

Jeffrey Brown: Treigle performs [as Meg Page] with the Houston Grand Opera later this month in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Falstaff” [27 October-10 November 2023].

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Houston, Texas.

[Jeffrey Brown’s bio and credits are reported above. Alison Thoet is a writer and a “Canvas” associate producer and national affairs associate producer at PBS NewsHour.]

"Minneapolis chamber group performs music written by Polish prisoners at Auschwitz"

by Fred de Sam Lazaro and Simeon Lancaster 

[On Sunday, 15 October 2023 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, The Isles Ensemble, a chamber music ensemble who present a series of Sunday evening concerts at the church, presented a concert of music composed and arranged by Jewish musicians interned at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

[Fred de Sam Lazaro and Simeon Lancaster’s report on the unique performance was aired on the PBS NewsHour on 29 January 2024.

[For coverage of other examples of performances in Nazi concentration camps, see "‘Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it’s being discovered and performed’" by Jon Wertheim (2 March 2022), "‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin’" by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022), “The Last Cyclist” (2 and 5 September 2022).]

Geoff Bennett, NewsHour Co-Anchor: Observances were held across the world over the weekend for the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day [27 January 2023].

Fred De Sam Lazaro has the story of one effort to preserve and honor the music performed by prisoners in orchestras that were a fixture in the concentration camps.

His report is part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Kenneth Freed, The Isles Ensemble: This is a concert about music and Jewish identity, in particular, my own.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: An unlikely theme perhaps in a Minneapolis Lutheran church, but coming just days after October 7, as violence erupted in the Middle East, violist Kenneth Freed said a timely one.

Kenneth Freed: This is a particularly painful and perilous time for all of us.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: The works performed by the Minnesota-based Isles Ensemble ranged widely, a viola and piano duet of the prayerful Kol Nidre and various works highlighting Jewish experience and musical influence, this string quartet by Felix Mendelssohn for instance, with a classic Jewish folk song embedded.

Then there was one medley that didn’t quite fit in, or did it? Here’s how it was introduced.

Kenneth Freed: This music you’re going to hear is utterly shocking in its banality. Heads-up, it’s charming cafe music.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Banal, he added, until you realize that it was arranged by members of the orchestra at Auschwitz, performed by prisoners for the entertainment of Nazi S.S. guards at the camp, guards apparently briefly setting aside their loathing of the prisoner musicians.

Kenneth Freed: I can’t even imagine. Let’s put it aside for a Sunday afternoon and we will pretend that we have this relationship that isn’t based on ethnic cleansing.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Equally jarring, the cheerful, upbeat tempo and titles of these pieces. This tango was called “A Dream of Haiti” (phonetic).

To provide more context or perspective during their performance, it was punctuated by testimonies from the diaries of the prisoners. This entry was read by cellist Laura Sewell.

Laura Sewell, Musician: “The smoke from the crematorium really annoyed my colleagues. It was polluting the air, and it was hard to see the notes.”

Kenneth Freed: It’s unimaginable, some of those quotes. I can’t see the notes, but at least I get to play. I mean, I get to live another day, right?

Fred de Sam Lazaro: And the reason I can’t see those notes.

Kenneth Freed: And the reason I can’t see them, because the crematorium is bellowing smoke from dead Jews.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: The original manuscripts, the musical arrangements used by the Minnesota ensemble, reside permanently in the museum at Auschwitz today.

But they were first brought out into the world a few years ago here at the University of Michigan School of Music.

Patricia Hall, University of Michigan School of Music: I mean, I personally could not write a manuscript that is as neat as these are.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Patricia Hall is a professor of music theory. In 2018, she discovered hundreds of manuscripts at the Auschwitz Museum, popular German songs of the ’30s and ’40s arranged and adapted by prisoners for the camp orchestras.

Patricia Hall: This prisoner took the time to create this symbol of a bird out of musical symbols.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: In Nazi death camps, being selected to play music was a much preferred assignment, an alternative to backbreaking labor. Still, it was a precarious existence.

Patricia Hall: There was a particularly sadistic guard at the camp who would take prisoners out of the orchestra and take them to Block 11 and shoot them. So there’s one anecdote of one of the musicians estimating that up to 50 musicians were executed in this way.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Just on a whim of the guard watching them?

Patricia Hall: Yes, just a whim. You see this number, 5665. And through that number, we have this photograph. This is Antony Gargul (phonetic).

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Hall selected a representative sample of 10, foxtrots, tangos, and waltzes, some with vocals, to reproduce from modern-day performance, trying to stay faithful to how they would have sounded in the camp.

With the university ensemble under conductor Oriol Sans, the music was performed and recorded here in Ann Arbor.

Patricia Hall: I was extremely careful about retaining exactly the instrumentation. I thought these pieces were going to sound really quirky.

I couldn’t believe how beautiful they sounded. I was completely surprised.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Another surprise, audience reaction. She’d originally planned to simply archive these recordings in the university’s music library, figuring they’d be too painful to hear. But Hall says there was strong interest at subsequent concerts, including one at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage [Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan].

And it piqued the interest of musicians like Ken Freed and The Isles Ensemble.

A lot of people, I think, were almost reluctant to applaud, in a sense.

Kenneth Freed: I felt that too until we stood up. And it was like, I guess we should. But what are we clapping for here?

Fred de Sam Lazaro: In the church basement post-concert, Freed saw how the music had taken the audience, as he put it, to a new dimension.

1st Woman (in the basement): I don’t cry. And that stuff in the camps had me in tears.

2nd Woman (in the basement): I just have chills. Playing the music would have been one thing, but really putting those quotes in it, so you really did imagine yourself as in the camp.

Kenneth Freed: That’s kind of the reason I did today’s concert. It was to provide context to — because you feel music before you start to think about it.

Fred de Sam Lazaro: Music drawn for this concert from the historical breadth of Jewish tradition, he said, offered as medicine in a world wracked by conflict.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Fred de Sam Lazaro in Minneapolis.

Geoff Bennett: And Fred’s reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

[The Isles musicians are Stephanie Arado, violin; Natsuki Kumagai, violin; Kenneth Freed, viola; Tom Rosenberg, cello; Laura Sewell, cello.  Guest musicians at the performance were Miryana Moteva, piano; Gabriel Campos Zamora, clarinet.

[The 15 October concert comprised Kol Nidrei by Max Bruch (German; 1838-1920), Baal Shem Suite (Nigun, Improvisation) by Ernest Bloch (Swiss-born American; 1880-1959), String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13 – I. Adagio-Allegro Vivace by Felix Mendelssohn (German; 1809-47), Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner (German; 1813-83), unearthed music arranged by Nazi prisoners and Music of Auschwitz (German Waltzes interspersed with narrated letters home from the arrangers) recovered by Patricia Hall (b. ca. 1955), Kaddish by Maurice Ravel (French; 1875-1937), and The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind by Osvaldo Golijov (Argentinian; b. 1960).

[Fred de Sam Lazaro is director of the Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, a program that combines international journalism and teaching.  He’s served with the PBS NewsHour since 1985 and is a regular contributor and substitute anchor for PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

[Simeon Lancaster is a journalist and videographer.  A 2017 graduate of the University of St. Thomas, he’s a producer at the Under-Told Stories Project on PBS NewsHour.]