Music as a Representational Medium: Representation in Arnold Schoenberg's "A Survivor from Warsaw"

In 1976, Roger Scruton, and English conservative philosopher and writer, dubbed music a non-representation medium. This assertion has resulted in debate among many prominent scholars, and, despite numerous dissenting opinions, Scruton’s premise has persisted as an accepted premise for some scholars in Western music study. In this paper, I survey and analyze prominent writings debating the topic of music as a representational medium, compiling arguments for and against his five criteria for representational art. I then discuss Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in its context as a piece of representational music. In Schoenberg’s work, I use twelve-tone theory, contour theory, and a syllabic analysis of Schoenberg’s version of the Shema Yisrael to show that Schoenberg uses mimesis, performance directions, and combinatoriality to represent the titular subject: the experience of a survivor from Warsaw.