Spatial Memory

Spatial Memory, Music, and the Sound of War

Music facilitates the convergence of space, place, and memory in composition and performance. As a cultural artefact, music preserves, and so performing music is an act of conservation. Music belongs to a larger soundscape, which encompasses the nuances of sound in space. Yet, music and soundscapes are often ignored in the criticism of wartime literature. Carolyn Birdsal maintains that an inquiry into the soundscape “can be studied to gain insights into social organisation, power relations and interactions with urban space” (12). The role of sound and sound’s relation to spatial memory is essential in Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, and The Cellist of Sarajevo by Stephen Galloway. In both texts,

The band finds shelter and camaraderie in The Hound Club, which provides Hieronymus Falk in particular with a sense of racial and geographical belonging. His own identity is questioned because he is a Rhineland bastard; he identifies as German, and yet Germany denounces him as a cultural stain. Andy Bennett posits that music can facilitate a “collective sense of identity and feeling of community” in giving displaced peoples a spiritual homeland (4). Hiero is “lost as a cat” (Edugyan 271) when he isn’t playing music, but the Hot-Time Swingers and the Jazz community give him a space to exist. The other characters of Half-Blood Blues are also similarly displaced. Sid and Chip are American expatriates who came to Germany’s Jazz scene to evade the Jim Crow laws. Paul is a Jewish man in the Third Reich, while Ernst and Fritz identify with Jazz as a counter-culture movement to oppose German authoritarianism. As Moly McKibbin states, Jazz becomes the way these characters engage in discourses with each other and with politics, despite the language barriers between them. Jazz facilitates the band’s authorship of space, leading to their definition of Germany’s

Music is not only assailed upon by acoustic conflicts, but by censorship. In Berlin, the Hot-Time Swingers can no longer perform live due to the new laws (Edugyan 93). Even in Paris, Sid knows that “the music’s just dying” (Edugyan 260) as a result of Nazism’s spread through Europe. Rather than participating in everyday life, Parisian citizens were “hunched up on over some radio somewhere” (Edugyan 244), waiting for the war to begin. Hiero has to stop speaking so he can ‘pass’ as Senegalese, hiding his German heritage. Without the universal discourse of Jazz, Sid finds that language proves to be “a constant door in [his] face” (Edugyan 274). When the French accidentally shell a borough of Paris, Sid doesn’t hear the cacophony of war that exists in The Cellist of Sarajevo. Instead, it’s the absolute silence of death which frightens him. In trying to escape the violence in Berlin, the Hot-Time Swingers encounter resounding muteness in