Audible Loss

Andrea Zarafshon Moore is Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College.

Introduction: Music, Crisis, Memory 1 1. Absent Names, Present Lives: Art Song as Intimate Memory 25 2. Sounding Witness: Musical Testimony and Memorial Stakes 59 3. Loss Without Words: Musical Memory Beyond the Discourse 91 4. Envisioning the Present: Music as Speculative Imagination 122 Epilogue: All the Trembling Bells 153 Acknowledgments 171 Notes 173 Bibliography 193 Index 217

In Audible Loss, Andrea Zarafshon Moore makes a powerful and persuasive argument for understanding the role that music can play in public memorial culture. Through her breadth of repertoire, pertinent analytical frameworks, and thoughtful attention to contemporary public crises, Moore offers readers both new material and new methods for listening to the memorial arts. Audible Loss is sure to become a landmark contribution to contemporary dialogue about memory culture in the United States, in music studies and across the disciplines.---Martha Sprigge, Associate Professor of Musicology at University of California Santa Barbara and Author of Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic What is the sound of loss? Audible Loss is an innovative and timely intervention in memory studies, that engages with the question of how composers, activists, and artists have aimed to make loss audible - whether through the reading of names, through musical memorial compositions, through the marking of silence, or the orchestration of chimes and bells. Moore takes us on a compelling journey into how sound has been a primary medium through which American traumatic events such as AIDS, 9/11, Black Lives Matter, and COVID have been communicated.---Marita Sturken, author of Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era