Music/Folklore paper by Vasvári, Louise O.
Concert Pianist Ági Jámbor's War Memoir Considered in Its Broader Historical Context (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
In 1949 Ági Jámbor wrote a memoir of survival in wartime Budapest, but it was only in 2020 that it was published as Escaping Extermination. Hungarian Prodigy to American Musician, Feminist, and Activist, Jámbor studied in Hungary with Zoltán Kodály and later in Berlin with Edwin Fischer, with whom she performed in Europe, but in her postwar refugee life in the U.S. she was able to reestablished only a limited musical career. As in her memoir there is little of substance about her musical life, I have tried to reconstruct fragments of her personal and professional life. It is elucidating to move beyond the author's personal limitations of memory, as well as her silences and gaps, juxtaposing later documentation related to her life. I will discuss her performance work, such as her recitals of all of Bach's keyboard music, her performances with fellow Hungarian refugees Eugene Ormandi and Nicholas Harsányi, her compositions of children's music, and her collaboration with Albert Szent Györgyi in the Psalmus Humanus, for which Jámbor composed the music and Szent-Györgyi wrote and spoke the lyrics, as well as her interest in the then still fledgling discipline of ethnomusicology and Hungarian gypsy music, which was then little known in the West. Jámbor's prewar cosmopolitan European life, as well as her long and difficult postwar émigré life, can take on additional interest as exemplary of refugee artists in the tumultuous intellectual history of Central Europe in the twentieth century.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Louise O. Vasvári (Ph.D., UC, Berkeley) is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. Currently she teaches in the Linguistics Department at NYU and is also Affiliated Professor at the University of Szeged. She works in Medieval Studies, diachronic and sociolinguistics, Holocaust Studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of Comparative Cultural Studies. In relation to Hungarian Cultural Studies she has published numerous articles, as well as, with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011). Since 2011 Vasvári is also Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Cultural Studies. louise.vasvari@stonybrook.edu