Time's Echo Quotes

“Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—“I am lost to the world”—a beautiful song that forms its own shelter from the flow of linear time, closing with words that bespeak the radical loneliness of attachment to a celestial ideal: “I live alone, in my heaven of love, devotion, and song.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“For Schoenberg, equally discordant were the social expectations of his adoptive home, with all its backslapping optimism and compulsory cheerfulness. “It is difficult for us to smile incessantly,” he explained to one old friend, “when we would like to spit, to spit fire….[O]n no account may one speak the truth here—even when one knows it; even when the other does not know it; even when the other wants to know it: for that is the game.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Surely at the very least, the group would have walked past the stump of an old tree near the camp laundry. Today it still sits on the very same spot, ash grey and deeply furrowed. On a recent, visit I found its heartwood almost entirely obscured by stones placed in accordance with the Jewish tradition of symbolically marking the graves of the dead to signal that they had not been forgotten. This stump is what remains of Goethe’s oak. In the end, Metamorphosen’s upwellings of grief, its spiralling of sorrows, its network of links to Beethoven’s sublime music of mourning are all gestures akin to the placing of such stones; for this too is music of farewell, a pebble on the grave of German culture’s utopian dream, adapting the language of the Goethe poem that still beats somewhere far below the rippling surface of this music. What it is, what it was, what it could have been. In memoriam.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“deeply shaken composer himself. “Songs connect, collect and bring together,” the critic John Berger has written, providing “a shelter from the flow of linear time: a shelter in which future, present and past can console, provoke, ironize and inspire one another.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“There is a way of pleasing most people and still not hurting one’s aesthetic standards,” he wrote, “and that, I feel, should be the aim of a composer.” Britten’s way of having his cake and eating it too often involved a kind of radical thinning out of textures, the use of imaginative instrumentations, and employing common tonal chords that have been defamiliarized or spiked with a “wrong” note, such that the harmonies often feel at once modern and antique. But paired with this commitment to public legibility was also an integrated social vision for music, a keen desire to bring his art form down from the mountaintops.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“silence. — “It does not seem to me,” says Sebald’s Austerlitz, “that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“the insufficiency of the Enlightenment, its darkening of that which is full of light enough.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Walter Benjamin’s phrase, time itself has been “filled with the presence of the now.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“the composer Murray Schafer reminds us, “The eye points outward; the ear draws inward.” Sound not only surrounds us but enters our bodies, vibrates within us. When music floods a room, there is nowhere to hide.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Art remembers what society would like to forget.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Indeed, experiencing Survivor or any other kindred musical memorial—in the fullness of what they have to offer—requires a different modality of listening. We are there not to be entertained but to bear witness to the music’s own testimony,”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Adorno has here articulated the central contradiction—he calls it an “aporia”—inherent in all Holocaust memorials: legitimate art after Auschwitz must represent, translate, or in some way evoke the violence done to victims in a form that is legible to posterity. But to instrumentalize or aestheticize the victims’ memory is necessarily to violate it. In these terms a “true” memorial must accomplish the impossible: communicate the event while preserving its utter inscrutability, honor the victims while rejecting any and all ascriptions of meaning.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“one century before Schoenberg’s birth when Moses Mendelssohn first entered the gates of Berlin—from the emancipation of the Jews, to the emancipation of dissonance, to the emancipation of memory.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“unleash the pent-up dissonance latent beneath the surfaces of two hundred years of European art?”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“truths about corruption, domination, repression, and moral rot. In this telling, then, Schoenberg’s own atonal revolution, as well as music’s turn toward harsh modern dissonance, was a kind of course correction, from an art that manufactured deceptive beauty to an art that conveyed existential truths—about life, about the suffering of humanity, about history, and about the possibility of a still-darker future. “Dissonance,” Adorno wrote, “is the truth about harmony.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Under the nose of enlightened humanism, Napoleon had declared himself emperor. Slavery had persisted in America. Belgian colonial rule had ravaged the Congo. Germany had committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia. Beautiful art, in such a world, was like its own kind of opium for the masses, its charms serving to mask uglier”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Beethoven could imagine the interests of the individual (freedom) as potentially reconcilable with those of society (form). This moment of promise, however, would be short-lived.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Adorno was approaching music “not merely as an organization of sounds but as an embodiment of the truths perceived by human consciousness;”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“works of art are, in Adorno’s words, “the hidden essence of society, summoned into appearance.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Speech itself has been superseded by song just as memory “dilates” itself, as if leaping from the domain of history (a narrated sequence of events) to the transcendent register of faith.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“fire….[O]n no account may one speak the truth here—even when one knows it; even when the other does not know it; even when the other wants to know it: for that is the game.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Even now,” says the title character in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, “when I try to remember…the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“the sense of a past that had not passed.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“The room in fact quickly began to feel less like a museum than a refuge from time’s passage altogether, a place where the past is still present and can be safely protected.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Modernity had no one prescribed sound for Strauss; it was about living with multiplicity and contradiction. He”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind him all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“The poet Friedrich Schlegel once famously noted that “the historian is a prophet facing backwards.” In”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Benjamin’s vision of the true purpose of history: to sort through the rubble of earlier eras in order to recover these buried shards of unrealized hope, to reclaim them, to redeem them.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Time measures Nothing but itself —W. G. Sebald”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance