Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe.

Cotter, Alice Miller

Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe. By Maria Cizmic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [xii, 233 p. ISBN 9780199734603. $65.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index, companion Web site.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the field of trauma studies has become vast. Primarily as a result of the feminist movement, the return of Vietnam War veterans, and the rise of Holocaust survivor testimonies, researchers began to show widespread interest in understanding the psychological effects of trauma. Although terms such as "shellshock," "wound to the mind," and "lasting effect" have been used since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ii was not until 1980 ihat the first formal category of trauma, specifically "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD), appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders I (DSM-I) and became recognized as an acute public health concern in the United States. By the 1990s, scholars had begun to find that trauma studies aligned well with the values of interdisciplinary slink% and now, with more than thirty years if research from neuroscience and clinical psychology as well as the humanities, this relatively new area of study has given rise to a substantial body of scholarship. Yet despite increased interest in trauma, musicologists have scarcely explored the topic--and likely with reason, since the articulation of connections between music and lived experience is no easy task.

Maria Cizmic's Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe is more than a pioneering study; it represents a real breakthrough. Stemming front her 2004 dissertation, it is the first book-length investigation to focus on music in relation to trauma. In a sweeping. discussion that weaves together issues surrounding memory, truth, ethics, and spirituality as they existed in Eastern Europe and Russia prior to and during glasnost. Cizmic examines how four musical compositions by Alfred Schnittke. Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Ftemyk Gorecki bear witness to trauma. She is not afraid to ask big questions of these works: how they metaphorically perform the psychological effects of trauma, how they participate in public conversations regarding suffering, how they shape the meaning of a testimonial act, and how listeners respond (p. 3). In return, her discussion (addressed to both non-specialists and scholars in a variety of disciplines) is as wide-ranging as it is ambitious and requires a reader willing to traverse complicated in terrain. The effort is well worthwhile.

To be sure, Cizmic's work is an important addition to a growing subfield in studies of twentieth-century composers who have used music to engage in a range of reflections in the midst of and aftermath of violence, censorship, and the terror of "not knowing the rules" in totalitarian Eastern European societies. Yet her chief contribution lies in the use of trauma theory as a conceptual tool for understanding how these composers found ways to respond to the brutality, instability, and psychological damage suffered by survivors of the gulag era. The author's methodological underpinning is fundamentally hermeneutic in scope and draws on a dichotomy in trauma theory, namely that "trauma forces representation to fall apart at the same time that representation offers an important path for recovery" (p. 169). This tension between unspeakability and the need for expression influences how individuaLs respond to traumatic events, and, as Cizmic shows, aesthetic corollaries often surface. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the Soviet government managed the meanings of historical traumas by "ignoring them, falsifying records, or transforming them into narratives of heroic triumph" (p. 4), yet people inevitably participated in creative acts to make sense of the realities of suffering and to reckon with what the State did not. Without using overly technical language, the author emphasizes the flexibility of musical expression for engaging the effects of trauma just as composers might use music to reflect on other aspects of human experience. Cizmic strikes a remarkable balance between relying on trauma theory to guide her discussion and stepping back to assess its explanatory work.

The most nuanced passages involve Cizmic's revision of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman's application of trauma theory to film and literary works. Rather than favoring representations of trauma that stress disruption, fragmentation, and the limits of language as locations for truth, a tendency for which Caruth and Felman have been criticized (see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 266-97), Cizmic reframes the works under consideration "in terms of art's ever-plastic ability to capture in content and form people's wide range of experiences" (p. 19). A piece of music might express some of the disruptive, fragmented aspects of trauma, but instead of characterizing a work of art as if the piece itself suffers from symptoms of PTSD, Cizmic emphasizes music's capacity to express and bear witness to many complex responses to trauma, including aspects of recovery. The openness and flexibility with which she interprets music through this conceptual frame is noteworthy.

After an introductory chapter in which she makes provocative connections between theories of trauma and postmodernism, Cizmic divides the remainder of the book into separate case studies. She devotes the first chapter, "Music of Disruption," to Schnittke's Concerto for Piano and Strings (1979), viewing the work's disjointed musical textures and temporal treatment as a musical analogy to the ways that memory becomes fragmented in reaction to trauma. Because the rhetoric of disruption and fragmentation weighs so heavily in her analysis, it is unclear at moments whether she fully escapes the conceptual roadblocks encountered by Caruth and Felman. For example, it is disconcerting to Rnd her adopting language such as "non-teleological" and "breakdown of linear time" wholesale, not only because these are terms that can be applied to Schnittke's entire output, but also because scholars have called into question the tendency to take the fragmented nature of traumatic memory as a given (see, for example, Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], 30-31). Although Cizmic is aware of some of these pitfalls, many of them remain unresolved and linger throughout the course of the book. These challenges, more than anything, raise important questions for future scholars interested in music and trauma.

Chapter 2, "Hammering Hands," examines Ustvolskaya's Piano Sonata no. 6 (1988) from another perspective: the physical pain one experiences while performing the piece. Rather than focusing on how aspects of trauma are represented in the score, Cizmic's analysis foregrounds bodily pain as a mode of bearing witness to the physical suffering inflicted under Stalinism. The author situates the work within the composer's spiritual background, as well as within a historical crisis resulting from Soviet discourse that interpreted physical pain as a sign of triumphal patriotism. This is one of the book's more compelling case studies, in that Cizmic expands areas of musical representation to include embodied performance as an effective aesthetic means for responding to the physiological aspects of trauma.

In chapter 3, "Witnessing History during Glasnost," Cizmic addresses Part's Tabula Rasa (1977) as it is used in Tengiz Abuladze's critique of Stalinism in his film Repentance (1984). She examines how the music influences the meanings of suffering shown on screen and how this in turn elicits an emotional response from the audience. The author focuses on Part's "non-teleological, meditative universes that seem to reflect upon the nature of history, temporality, and spirituality" (p. 99). For Cizmic, Part's music serves "as a musical form of testimony ... that participates in this process by further enabling an empathic response to the interpretation of historical truth" (p. 132). Although a more rigorous musical analysis would have been welcome, the author highlights music's ability to relate to diverse contexts, particularly as it is recontextualized in film to bring awareness of human suffering to a widespread audience.

The final chapter, "Music, Mourning, and War," is a meditation on Gorecki's Symphony no. 3 (1976). Here, Cizmic confronts issues regarding the ethics of representation, and contemplates why the piece became known as a universal symbol of grief and became adopted as a musical memorial for the Holocaust in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. She walks the reader through Gorecki's integration of Polish folk music and religious references set to unhurried rhythms and hushed, stagnant harmonies and focuses on how the music's "predictable repetition ... creates a safe space within which to grieve" (p. 25). The chapter displays some of Cizmic's most poignant writing as she illustrates how the music encapsulates the ambivalent state of trauma, its contradictory tendency to forget and to remember: "it musically performs this silent-sounding tension, placing a listener in a space akin to grief, experiencing silence and also searching for sound" (p. 141). Here, the author engages in precisely the kind of memory work she seeks to define, asking the reader to contemplate how these narratives of suffering in all their gravity and emotional power are situated.

Although each case study presents its own specific set of concerns, what they hold in common becomes unmistakable by the end of the book: these works are not merely reminders of violence, pain, and death: they also function as vehicles for contemplating the realities of suffering in a way that reminds us of the miracle of human resilience and survival, an awareness that can play an important role in individual and collective processes of healing. Cizmic has opened important pathways in musicology for thinking about the broader uses of music to explore tragedy. Her explorations themselves serve as a testament to music's expressive potential and the creativity of a group of composers whose works reflect some of the most complex aspects of human experience. This endeavor alone is a formidable achievement.

ALICE MILLER COTTER

Princeton University