A Kind of Haunting: for two narrators, baritone and string orchestra

Commissioned by Britten Sinfonia; premiered 25 March 2025, Milton Court/Barbican, London; second performance, 26 March 2025, Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham; third performance, 28 March 2025, Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden

300-word statement

A Kind of Haunting is a 50-minute ‘hybrid’ work – part ‘melodrama’, part cantata – involving spoken and sung texts. The way the diverse texts – ‘subjective’ memoir fragments (my own), ‘objective’ commentary (Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University) and poetry (Jacqueline Saphra) set to music – are interwoven, and how the multiple narrative is constructed, are a critical part of the work’s originality.

The subject of the piece is the workings and associated emotions of intergenerational memory in the context of the Holocaust. A Kind of Haunting is a culminative project, building on decades of creating work exploring memory as rendered through music.

A wide-ranging set of research questions and areas sit behind the piece:

1. How do ‘second-’ and ‘third-generation’ survivors encounter and process ‘inherited’ memory and traces of trauma? In its multi-layered musical and textual tissue, the piece responds as a kind of ‘working through’, psychologically speaking.
2. How can music depict the feelings that memory engenders? In particular, here I explore the qualities of the ‘half-remembered’ and the simultaneity of presence and absence.
3. Musical ‘melodrama’ is a neglected genre. I explore here how, in combination with song, it can be a 21st-century driver of artistic innovation, both in terms of form and expression.
4. What constitutes musical auto-ethnography? The piece posits music, combined with text, as a medium by which to illuminate a cultural topic, if, as here, researcher and research object are properly one and the same.

As markers of significance, the work was commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia and supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. It received considerable attention through interviews, articles and reviews from national and international media at the time of its world premiere tour: Deutsche Welle (German national television network), BBC Radio 3 (‘The New Music Show’) and 4 (‘PM’), The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Jewish Renaissance.