Two solitary instruments – viola and cello – are heard on separate soundtracks by separate video screens showing footage from the former concentration camp Theresienstadt: peeling walls, cobwebs, a lifeless gym hall. The composition they play was created here; the Czech-Jewish composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944) wrote an orchestral piece that the Nazis used as the soundtrack to a propaganda film about Theresienstadt. We don't hear any orchestra. This is why the two instruments sound so abandoned. Although they also talk together; tones are repeated many times, as if they are trying to breathe life into the empty spaces. The melodic lines are detached from the context they should be in, but cannot be in, because the composer was taken to Auschwitz and murdered shortly after he performed the piece.
Like other Holocaust representations, Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Susan Philipsz lets us see that the visible traces of the atrocities have disappeared. The camera makes an effort. In that resounding emptiness, ghostly garlands of mismatched tones resound. They are full of holes – there should have been more musicians to make this piece of music sound right. In the speakers, the cello and viola sound almost electric, eerie, it's all so slow, the tones are stretched until they can't do it anymore. In his book Images in Spite of All the art theorist Georges Didi-Huberman defended using all images that exist from the atrocities. The same here: Haas' music calls to be heard, not forgotten. They are sounds, after all. Amputated, seeking for beauty, or remnants of something seeking for beauty. For no composer – even under the worst conceivable conditions – makes music that is deliberately evil.
