Time Echoes in a Warehouse

A present-day reflection on music, memory, and presence in a world on fire

Passing Shoreline Amphitheatre, driving home from San Francisco after a Swedish House Mafia concert, I played A Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg: seven minutes of dissonant strings and a narrator half-speaking, half-singing in English about the Warsaw Ghetto, German commands cutting through, building toward a chorus of men’s voices singing the Shema Y…