All India Radio has started its broadcast day with the same music every morning since 1936. The tune is distinctly Indian, with its droning strings and melancholy violin. But it was written by Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish emigrant from Czechoslovakia.
That was the first of numerous shocks unveiled at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music’s “From India to Indiana: Melding Music,” a lecture and concert held at Schoenberg Hall on Feb. 27. The ARC Ensemble, a Canadian organization that specializes in bringing attention to musical works prohibited or ignored by repressive regimes in the twentieth century, presented six of Kaufmann’s compositions while he was residing in India from 1934 to 1946 in front of an audience of roughly 300 people. The Indian influences in the other compositions, on the other hand, were easy to miss — a quiet droning cello line or a fluttering violin melody would only emerge from being hidden inside the music on rare occasions.
Source: https://www.jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/294835/jewish-composers-works-get-new-life/
