Joy H. Calico

Burkhardt Fellow
Musicology
Vanderbilt University

Musical Remigration: Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Joy H. Calico is an associate professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. Her work focuses on opera and on German music and cultural politics in the mid twentieth century. She is the author of Brecht at the Opera (University of California Press, 2008) and of numerous articles published in journals and books.

At Radcliffe, Calico will work on her second book, titled “Musical Remigration: Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe.” In it, she examines the performance and reception of a highly controversial piece of music in seven European countries in the 1950s: three in the West (France, Norway, West Germany); three in the Soviet bloc (Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland); and one neutral (Austria). She chose “Survivor” for this transnational study because it is a major modernist piece, written after the Holocaust and commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising, by a prominent Jewish composer who had emigrated and become an American citizen—a combination that irritated virtually every exposed nerve of postwar Europe. Calico hopes to illuminate individual contexts and discover common ground across the Cold War divide.

Calico earned her PhD from Duke University. Her year at Radcliffe is made possible by a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Newly Tenured Scholars. She has also received fellowships and grants from the Howard Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and the German Academic Exchange Service.