Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa’s oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima (1989, 2001) memorializes the traumatic destruction of Hiroshima, Hosokawa’s birthplace, by a nuclear bomb in 1945. In this lecture, musicologist Anna Gatdula examines Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima as a sonic archive that opens inquiry into the contradictory nature of historical matter: the subjects and objects of history, the perpetrators and victims of trauma. Examining the notion of “voicelessness” in relation to hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), Gatdula considers tensions between silence and testimony, individual and collective memory, and the politics of victimhood and reparation to ask: Whose voice is voiceless? The victims, the perpetrators, the traumatized? In this talk, Gatdula theorizes historical redress outside paradigms of sovereignty altogether, contributing to ongoing discourse about the role of art in mediating historical memory and the politics of representation.

Anna Beatrice Gatdula

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Oct 29, 2024

Anna Gatdula Discusses Toshio Hosokawa’s “Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima” · UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

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