Alexandra Birch is Mellon Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in History. She is a professional violinist and historian who works comparatively on the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet mass atrocity, including the Gulag through the lens of music and sound. Her first book is Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe (University of Toronto Press, 2025). At the Harriman Institute she is working on “Sonic Shatterzones, The Intertwined Spaces, Sound and Music of Nazi and Soviet Atrocity,” which is under contract with Indiana University Press.
Harriman: Can you briefly tell us about your background?
Alexandra Birch: I was raised in the U. S. but I have a very international family — a mix of Georgian and German and Jewish. I grew up speaking Russian, German, and a little bit of Yiddish. And my mom started me with violin lessons when I was two years old.
Harriman: How did you become interested in recovering music lost during periods of atrocity?
Birch: I was in the first year of my Master’s in violin performance at Arizona State when I participated in this fantastic program at the U. S. Holocaust Museum. It’s a research initiative on the Holocaust and the Soviet Union and they bring together an interdisciplinary group of mostly Master’s students and first year Ph.D.’s, to expand their interests. So, for instance, if you are interested in music and the Holocaust, like I was, they may bring you in and say, well, have you considered looking at the Holocaust in Soviet territories?
I’ve found a lot of complete pieces of music, which is great. You don’t have to do a lot of reconstruction.
While I was working in their archives, their staff musicologist Bret Werb pointed out a couple of fantastic scores written by professional musicians who survived the war. A lot of the lost music that’s been found is comprised of folk melodies, and they’re not complete scores. I’ve found a lot of complete pieces of music, which is great. You don’t have to do a lot of reconstruction.
Harriman: Wow. That’s amazing. And is that how you ended up pursuing a history degree?
Birch: I went straight from my Master’s into a violin doctorate, which is a performance degree. And then I applied to the postdoc program at the U. S. Holocaust Museum as a performer. And they’ve never had a performer, so I was very surprised to get it. I worked with a musicologist there and found a bunch of recovered music and ended up recording two albums for the U. S. Holocaust Museum. While there, I realized that I was missing the methodological rigor of having finished a doctorate in history or a Ph.D. in musicology. So, in 2020, I started a Ph.D. in musicology at University of California, Santa Barbara and realized that the methodology was too narrow, it was too cultural studies heavy without the grounding in modern European history, so I switched to a Ph.D. in modern Europe.
Harriman: And now you study sound as a tool for understanding sites of atrocity.
Birch: Yes, I work mostly with the music of Soviets who were already within the Soviet interior, including Central Asians, and also music from the Holocaust.
Harriman: How does sound bring your research to life?
Birch: In 2016, the summer before I finished my violin doctorate, I was an Auschwitz Jewish center fellow touring Poland and visiting all the concentration camps and immediately after that experience, I went and played at a music festival in Germany that had nothing to do with Holocaust studies or history. I was on my way to this Brahms rehearsal, and I was still trying to process all of these concentration camps I had gone to two weeks prior and also to switch gears and get back into musician mode. As I was walking to this rehearsal in the middle of nowhere in Germany, I came across one of those tripping stones, the little memorial plaques for the people murdered in the Holocaust that are in front of former homes and businesses. The tripping stone made me think about how we could reintegrate lost scores from the Holocaust into the classical canon, the way these tripping stones are integrated into the streets.
So, I started the project of incorporating these musical tripping stones into my program. I would give a normal classical concert — your Bach and your Beethoven or whatever — and then I would put in a piece by a Holocaust composer.
How do you understand visiting something like the Gulag in Kazakhstan, which covered millions of hectares?
And then, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I would give concerts that included Ukrainian national composers. So, there’s this great composer, [Vsevolod] Zaderatsky, who’s a Ukrainian, who was deported to the Gulag. I started playing his violin concerto alongside large-scale Russian works for the violin. And it became this interesting talking point because I’m not making any political statement inherently, I’m just saying here’s a Ukrainian composer who has equal validity to a Russian composer from the same period, but it becomes a talking point for people.
Another thing I do, is to capture the sounds of atrocity sites with a 360-degree, surround-sound microphone. How do you understand visiting something like the Gulag in Kazakhstan, which covered millions of hectares?
Or Auschwitz, which stretches for 10 to 15 miles. Capturing the sounds brings in this immersive, virtual reality experience, and can help gain an understanding of sites that I don’t think many people are going to get out to visit.
Harriman: And how do you incorporate that into your work?
Birch: I’m doing it in combination with things like mapping projects. At Nazarbayev University right now they have a Gulag mapping project, and I contributed some of my photos of sites, and then also these 360 recordings, so people will be able to go into the map eventually, and hear how the insides of the bunkers sound, for instance. They’ll be able to link to that map.
Harriman: And you have a book you’re working on while at the Institute called “Sonic Shatterzones, The Intertwined Spaces, Sound and Music of Nazi and Soviet Atrocity.” Can you tell us about that project and how you’re using sound alongside the chapters of each book?
Birch: It’s eight case studies and it covers everything from Solovki and a study of the Indigenous communities in the White Sea region and how the Gulag impacted them, to the Holocaust on Soviet territories, the evacuation experience to Central Asia, the Gulag in Kazakhstan. It closes with composers from the post-Soviet period and their responses to unresolved questions of atrocity from the 20th century — how they are incorporating Gulag themes or music themes or themes of the Holocaust into their music today. How they’re addressing those themes in response to contemporary political violence. And every chapter has an associated either full length album or one of these VR mapping projects where you’re able to interact with something else.
Harriman: And you performed at concert hosted by the Harriman Institute and Barnard at the end of January. Can you tell us about it?
Birch: Yes, it was for International Holocaust Remembrance Day and I think with rising anti-Semitism globally, and in response to contemporary Israeli politics, it’s important to recenter these days of commemoration both to discuss anti-Semitism, but also as a reminder that the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish catastrophe. There were crimes against Sinti and Roma, and against the Soviet population as civilians, and Soviet POWs, and so on. Because my scholarship is heavily Soviet, I presented a basically Soviet program of important themes of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.
I played a fantastic piece that has this very arresting musical representation of gunfire, where it interrupts this very Jewish sounding melody. It’s composed by Emil Levvand, a Ukrainian survivor. A professional violinist who served in the Red Army and then returned to Moscow and found out that his entire family had been killed. It’s like, it’s an experience of survivorship where I don’t even know that he would call himself a survivor because he didn’t flee from the German advance, he joined the Red Army and he just happened to not be in his town when his family was killed.
I also played the recovered violin sonata of Mieczysław Weinberg, who was a Soviet evacuee, but also experienced sizable Soviet anti-Semitism through the 50s, 60s, 70s. He was on Stalin’s execution list and was pardoned only because Stalin died. The man to whom the sonata is dedicated was his father-in-law Solomon Mikhoels who was executed in 1948.
Music and culture and poetry, this is something that’s understandable within the aesthetics of horror and it’s much better than trying to look at grim statistics
Harriman: And you’re teaching a course this semester, A Cultural History of the Soviet Century. Can you tell us about it?
Birch: It’s almost impossible to emotionally or even intellectually understand the scale of catastrophe in the 20th century. We don’t process images well, and when you’re looking at an image of, I don’t know, mass graves it becomes this monolithic thing — dead people. And what we’re not seeing in this case are the individuals.
And, so what I like to do is give students access to the historical context through things like mapping and survivor testimonies, even perpetrator testimonies, and then give them the cultural products of individuals to hang on to. Music and culture and poetry, this is something that’s understandable within the aesthetics of horror and it’s much better than trying to look at grim statistics. I also think it’s helpful to look at cultural products when you’re either a generation removed, or a culture removed, from mass atrocity. Because there’s something that is universalizing about art.