“I Never Saw Another Butterfly”: The Holocaust Through Music

Joanne McDade, soprano, and Dr. Thomas Snydacker, saxophonist and faculty member at Northern Illinois University, will present a program of vocal and instrumental music resulting in part from poems and musical works written by children and adults during the Holocaust. The concert will feature the song cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly, written for voice and saxophone by the contemporary composer Lori Laitman. The work is a musical setting of six astonishing poems written by Jewish children who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp and eventually transported to Auschwitz where they perished.

Saxophonist Tom Snydacker will also perform Abyss of the Birds, by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written in 1941 during his captivity as a prisoner of war in a German prison camp. This solo piece is the third movement of a more lengthy work titled Quartet for the End of Time, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. This movement was originally scored for solo clarinet, but can also be performed on saxophone, as it is on this concert. The Abyss of the title portrays the sadness and weariness of time, while the Birds seem to cry out desperately for light, stars, and jubilant songs.

Additional repertoire includes “Three Yiddish Songs” by Viktor Ullmann and works by Ravel.