The project page for this work can be accessed here: Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears

“Witness” is the third part of the larger multi-movement composition “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” for string quartet. It can also be played very effectively as a stand-alone work. “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” and “Witness” are based on interviews with child survivors of the Holocaust/Shoah. For more information and an overview of the project, go to the “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” project page here.

“Witness” was created as a musical narrative of memory. It references the lifelong impact of being a firsthand witness to deeply disturbing historical events. It explores contradictory aspects of our humanity while honouring the spirit of survivors who, as witnesses to the Shoah, give their testimonies to scholars of history and to the citizens and public of today. In so doing, many survivors report both greater meaning and purpose in their lives, while also experiencing the risks of emotional vulnerability and the reliving of terrible traumas which this courageous public process can exact upon them. 

“Witness” opens with a fast viola arpeggios that accompanies a wide-ranging melody doubled in two octaves on the second violin and cello. This melodic line is one of a number of motifs that binds the composition together. The sense of space created by this melody provides some contrast between suggestions of a spiritual world up in the sky, and through the intermittent lines of the first violin, a falling to earth and the terrible reality that unfolds there. The second part of “Witness” contains violent dance rhythms that are suggestive of the impersonal, mechanical-technological, and modernist nature of the Nazi death camps as experienced firsthand by Holocaust survivors. The cello is the focus of this middle section with some of the most musically demanding writing of the whole composition. The third part of the work returns attention to the witness to an escape to a higher spiritual place that is suggestive of what is called the overlook effect; a place of greater detachment or reflection that allows the audience to potentially perceive our humanity and our world as a whole.