Music’s Enduring Power to Evoke Our Pasts

For Proust, it was famously the taste of a madeleine that brought back a flood of childhood memories. Music can do much the same for us. It often evokes a feeling, sometimes deep within us, of something buried but not forgotten, and not just for us as individuals, but sometimes even for groups and even entire nations.

That sense of music as cultural memory is a fundamental concept to Jeremy Eichler, the John McCann Assistant Professor of Music. Eichler has spent his career exploring the intersections of music, history, and memory, from his 18 years as the Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic to writing a book on music and the Holocaust to now teaching Tufts classes on music’s connections to war and nature. 

He’d grown up loving music and had played viola in a string quartet as an undergraduate at Brown. Out of college, he landed a gig as a freelance classical music critic for the New York Times, and around the same time began pursuing a doctorate in European history at Columbia. Days he went to seminars, nights he went to concerts and wrote them up quickly.

Eichler’s work for the Times eventually led to an offer to become the chief classical music critic for the Globe, which required deep immersion in the city’s cultural world. But the topic of his Ph.D. thesis, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, a memorial to Holocaust victims that premiered in 1948, kept coming back to him.

“I was fascinated by the question of how classical music carries forward meaning from the past,” he says. Historians had written about things like architecture and cinema and their links to memory, but Eichler felt there was more to say about how music as an art form “remembers us,” bearing witness to history and opening up a window onto earlier eras. 

Those themes lie at the heart of what became his 2023 book Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, which was named a best book of the year by the Times and NPR, and was lauded as book of the year by the National Jewish Book Awards.

In it, he examines Schoenberg’s memorial score along with war-related compositions by Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. “It is an invitation for readers to think more deeply, not just about individual works of music, but about how and why we listen in the first place,” he says. “I also wanted to ask what were, for me at least, important questions about how, in an era of digital distraction, the arts might help us live today with a sense of felt contact with history.”

The Sounds of War and Memory

At the time he began teaching at Tufts, the London Philharmonic Orchestra had named Eichler its first writer-in-residence and just started its 2024-25 season dedicated to “Moments Remembered,” revolving around the themes in Time’s Echo. The orchestra played three of the four pieces highlighted in the book, and Eichler wrote program notes and gave several talks to concert-goers. 

“The idea that a symphony orchestra could think of itself as a convener of conversations about how societies remember was really unusual and meaningful,” Eichler says.

Eichler’s work on the links between war, music, and memory has also brought him into conversations far beyond the orchestral world. Last May he was invited to speak in Bogotá, Colombia, at a gathering focused on diverse ways to approach the many forms of memories of conflict—in that case, the long civil war between the government and guerrillas that had killed over 200,000 people from 1958 to 2013. 

The talk was sponsored by a civil society organization that focuses on how art helps societies overcome legacies of political violence. As part of the program, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw was performed alongside a new memorial by Colombian composer Juan Pablo Carreño. 

“It was extremely powerful to explore these ideas in that setting—you could feel that every Colombian in the room had a relationship to the country’s violent historical past,” he says. “None of the questions posed by these works about memory and transitional justice were abstract for the people in that audience.”

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Eichler’s seminar at Tufts, Sounds of War and Memory, which he taught last spring,  was built out from the world of the book. It closely examined conflicts like the First World War and the music written in response to it, as well as 9/11 in sound and the role of memory in the war in Ukraine. 

“It’s precisely because culture remembers as deeply and profoundly as it does that Russia has targeted archives and centers of Ukrainian national heritage with their attacks. The destruction of art is a destruction of memory for a culture,” says Eichler. 

For the class’s final project, Eichler urged students to use their own pasts as a starting point. “I tried to give students a lens to train on whatever they’d like to focus on. We examined how war memory narratives have been expressed through the musical arts, whether it’s pop songs or other musical traditions.”

Whether or not his students have their sights set on future careers in the humanities, Eichler sees value in what this kind of humanistic exploration can bring to anyone’s life. “The hope is that my classroom might be a place—among others—where a seed is planted, a place where students begin to build and nurture deeper relationships to music, literature, and the arts in general. Over the long term, those relationships can of course be part of the sustaining food of life.”

The Nature of Music and the Music of Nature 

Last fall, Eichler created a new course, Music and Nature, part of a wider project to understand both the nature of music and the music of nature, as he puts it. In the class, he explore the inspiration composers have drawn from the natural world, augmented by listening assignments that range from Bach and Offenbach to whale songs and Bug Music by composer David Rothenberg, who wrote music inspired by insects such as katydids and cicadas. 

“I invite students to hear more nature in our music, and also take seriously the music that’s coming from the natural world—to hear more music in nature,” he says. 

For their final class assignment, he gave students the option of a research paper or a creative project. The majority chose the creative route. One made field recordings with underwater microphones of local rivers and played music over it to create soundscape compositions. 

Another created a video game based on her own recordings of natural sounds—“it’s a game about listening,” says Eichler. A third student shot a video at the New England Aquarium of fish swimming in a large tank, and then created a virtual piano keyboard overlaying the video, so different notes would play based on where on the vertical axis the fish swam. 

“All these wonderfully creative projects engaged in thoughtful ways with some of the big questions we asked about human music and its relationship to nature’s music—and about listening as a way of coming to know the natural world and our connection to it,” Eichler says.

Practicing what he teaches, last year he joined a group of musicians jamming, so to speak, with humpback whales off the coast of Maui. “It was pretty extraordinary,” he says. “They were using underwater microphones and speakers to bring this incredible symphony of whale song above the surface and playing their own music at the same time to engage with the whales.” 

In March, he’s heading to the Amazonian jungle in Colombia, participating in the Wild Symphony Project, a group of musicians and sound artists from around the world gathering to make music with the soundscapes of the rainforest.

Mahler’s Revolutionary Musical Language

Among all the composers who Eichler is drawn to, Gustav Mahler has long been a favorite. “He speaks about the purpose of a symphony as being the creation of a world unto itself. I always found the all-encompassing nature of his vision for what music could be both on stage and in our lives so compelling.”

Now Eichler has a new class to bring that appreciation to his students. This semester he’s teaching Mahler Then and Now, which he calls “a journey into Mahler’s art and life and the the windows it opens onto his time and place in history, but also, in a way, very profoundly into our own world, too.”

He hopes it will serve as a laboratory in which students learn not just about Mahler’s music but about the value of the humanities more broadly, and how they can help young people make sense of their own lives in a complex world. The only requirement for the class is the ability to read music—and since the course is well subscribed this spring, that’s apparently not an impediment. It will come in handy as the class examines Mahler’s musical scores to better grasp their “revolutionary musical language.”

But the scores of course don’t become music until someone performs them, and the class also explores that metamorphosis—with some help from visitors. Eichler has invited a group of highly accomplished conductors and performers to come to Tufts to talk about their relationships with Mahler’s music (see sidebar above).

 “They’re all people for whom Mahler has played a meaningful part in their own artistic journeys,” he says.

The series of talks this spring, called the Mahler Sessions, will be open to the public, but the focus is still on the students. They will be on stage with the guest speakers and Eichler at Distler Auditorium, discussing the art of interpretation. “Together we will explore how Mahler’s music moves from notes on a page to shared communal experiences in sound,” he says.

He hopes the class and the speaker series help to clarify “the relationship between interpreting a score and interpreting a life—whether we’re talking about Mahler’s or our own.”