Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe by Maria Cizmic (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe by Maria Cizmic Alice Miller Cotter 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, it was not until 1980 that 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 study, and now, with more than thirty years of 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 from 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 Pärt, and Henryk Górecki 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 interdisciplinary 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 [End Page 527] 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...