Music, Crisis, Memory: New Music and the New Ends of History (Andrea Zarafshon Moore)

Since 1945, global memory culture has often been driven by the convictions behind Holocaust remembrance: that remembrance prevents recurrence, and that to "never forget" is to embrace specific moral lessons. These lessons and their imperatives have aligned easily with democratic principles of tolerance, equal protection for all citizens, and freedoms of speech, religion, and press. In the post-Cold War era, the convergence of memory's lessons with state democracy seemed complete, as the fall of the Soviet Union and its allies was grandly declared the "end of history" by political scientist Francis Fukuyama as early as 1989, seen as the culmination and termination of a long dialectical process.

The result of these memory imperatives has been a surfeit of commemorative projects--the so-called "memory boom" of the last forty years--which in the U.S. has been further inflated by the memorial culture of 9/11, including its vast musical repertoire. In the face of memorial excess, it is forgetting, rather than remembering, that might seem aspirational, suggesting a utopian future in which the historical lessons now so anxiously guarded no longer require the same vigilance. Yet in 2025, history itself is being rapidly repurposed: unwritten and rewritten, stripped from public sites, and suppressed when it runs afoul of the current regime's ahistorical revisionism. With these "new ends of history"-where history is both terminated and repurposed toward authoritarian aims-the assumption that memorials can offer a perpetual account and site of solace for future audiences can no longer be taken for granted.

In this talk, I suggest it is here that musical memorials can make a distinctive intervention. Their liveness and ephemerality-which may otherwise render them less legible as memory- become strengths in a moment when other forms of memory can find the very histories they address into question. Taking Joel Thompson's Seven Last Words of the Unarmed and Gloria Coates's String Quartet No. 8 as examples, I suggest that these pieces operate not just as musical works but as flexible and repeated memory acts that, with new urgency, eschew monumental permanence.

Andrea Moore is Associate Professor of Music at Smith College. Her research interests are centered on new music and musical institutions, and include questions of musical value and prestige, contemporary Bach culture and other post-canonic traces, and cultural memory.