Music, Memory, and Healing in War and Other Conflicts

Ukrainian Canadian communities offer a profound example of how musical memory preserves cultural identity across generations. Ukrainian emigrants from Galicia and Bukovyna brought folk songs with them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maintained and adapted these traditions to their new contexts in Canada during the time of Soviet censorship in Ukraine. In the diaspora, these songs became cultural anchors—carriers of memory, heritage, and national consciousness but also new reality.¹ Ethnomusicologists such as Tetiana Koshytz, Robert Klymasz, and Brian Cherwick have documented how these repertoires persisted through community choirs, festivals, and church gatherings. The community’s musical continuity effectively kept an independent Ukrainian identity alive, long before it was politically possible within Ukraine itself. During the current war, these songs have been reactivated as part of a cultural response to Russian aggression. Performed at community gatherings, concerts, and protests, they now function both as historical reminders of recurring oppression and as affirmations of resilience and sovereignty. They illustrate how musical continuity across time and geography plays a pivotal role in identity reconstruction and communal healing after displacement and war.

Here I find myself thinking of the power that a song like “Strange Fruit” has as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory)—Pierre Nora’s term for a place (e.g., a battlefield) or cultural product (e.g., a monument) that concentrates and preserves a complex of memories for a community or broader public.⁵ Composed in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, a Ukrainian-Jewish-American high school teacher in the Bronx, “Strange Fruit” became an indelible part of American culture after Billie Holiday recorded it in 1939. I imagine you all know that the metaphorical “fruit” in the title is the lynched and burned body of a Black person, hanging by a rope from a tree in the American South. It was an astonishing act of bravery for Billie Holiday to record this scathing condemnation of extrajudicial killing in an era when lynchings were still taking place, segregation was the law of the land, and the Civil Rights movement was still well over a decade off in the future. And it is a testament to the power of the recording and her repeated performances of “Strange Fruit”—she ritualistically closed her concerts with the song—that it continues to occupy a central position in histories of jazz, of American music, and of American political life more broadly. Some of its lines are shockingly vivid: “the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth . . . the sudden smell of burning flesh . . .” But there is also something understated and matter-of-factly about the song’s concluding line: “Here is a strange and bitter crop.” In listening to Holiday sing this song, I (we) cannot avoid confronting the incontrovertible, utterly damning fact of lynching in America. The song refuses to allow me (us) to forget this fact. Eighty-six years after it was first recorded, “Strange Fruit” remains a potent “site of memory” in a way that few other American songs are.

From my perspective, the activities of Ukrainian art music professionals and their audiences during the full-scale Russian invasion can be understood through the lens of “everyday resistance,” as defined by James C. Scott. Despite constant blackouts, daily air raid sirens, and the sound of explosions becoming part of ordinary life, musicians continue to perform, and audiences continue to attend concerts and cultural events. These performances often take place by the light of mobile phones or in bomb shelters—turning each cultural gathering into an act of defiance. In this context, every public musical event becomes more than entertainment; it becomes a gesture of resilience and solidarity. Ukraine is currently experiencing a cultural boom, and a key element of it is the growing interest in Ukrainian heritage. Sold-out festivals of Ukrainian art music in Kharkiv, Lviv, and Kyiv—along with a recent new production of Borys Liatoshynsky’s opera The Golden Hoop by the Lviv Opera House—highlight not only the continued importance of the arts during wartime but also their unique ability to bring people together and help them process collective trauma.

Public musical performances have played a notable role in maintaining community cohesion and supporting the emotional well-being of displaced populations during times of war. Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, a number of Ukrainian artists have toured across diasporic communities, responding to the social and cultural needs of these audiences. While many of these performances are linked to fundraising efforts for Ukraine, they also function as sites of collective memory and identity negotiation, where diasporic audiences engage with familiar cultural references and recent national events.

Artists and groups such as Okean Elzy, Kalush Orchestra, DakhaBrakha, Hardkiss, and Jamala have appeared in concerts across various countries, reaching both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian audiences. Through their programming and public engagement, these performers contribute to maintaining transnational cultural ties and drawing attention to the war. Songs associated with post-Maidan mobilizations—such as those by Okean Elzy—are often included in concert programs, establishing links between previous political movements and the current conflict, and framing recent history through a musical lens.

I would like to introduce Ghassan Sawalhi, a Palestinian musician currently living in Boston. Ghassan was born in Jerusalem and raised in Ramallah, where he lived for twenty-one years before coming to the US to take up a scholarship at the Berklee College of Music. His parents and brother are in the West Bank, and he has friends and family in Gaza. As we discussed the current state of music in war-torn Gaza, Ghassan told me that, unsurprisingly, there are very few public music performances in the territory at the moment. Over the course of the Israeli invasion, regular bombing campaigns and armed attacks have made it dangerous for Gazans to congregate in large numbers. Compounding this immediate danger is the existential triage people in Gaza are forced to make; as Ghassan put it, a common attitude is “we don’t need music right now–we need food, we need water, we need shelter, we need safety.” In this situation, many people simply don’t have the time, the space, or the energy to devote to collective musical experiences. Moreover, in Gaza and throughout the region, music’s strong association with festivity and celebration makes public performances feel inappropriate for some. Add to this the fact that in occupied lands, it is always dangerous to make music that the occupation might deem inappropriate or seditious. In Gaza and the West Bank, this danger creates a culture of self-censorship for many musicians. Of course, people have been known to make music in the most abject surroundings imaginable. For example, Ghassan told me stories of people playing oud and singing while living in overpopulated refugee camps that the Israeli military periodically attacks. While some of these small performances circulate beyond the region via social media, their primary value appears to have more to do with the ephemeral solace they provide to musicians and their intimate audiences than with the creation of lasting solidarity or collective relief from trauma on a grand scale.

Ghassan recently released an album of original music titled Boosaleh (The compass). He began working on the album in an attempt to deal with his own private grief and other emotions. The album’s songs—which draw upon traditional Arabic music, Arabic hip hop, and tropes from classical Arabic poetry—occasionally reference the war’s violence, but more often they operate impressionistically, evoking an atmosphere of deep sorrow, loss, and love that circulates through specific cities and their denizens. The Palestinian people who are referenced in Boosaleh are not reduced to their victimhood, pain, or anger. Rather, they display what Avery Gordon has called “complex personhood,” the kind of irreducibly plural, ambivalent, dynamic characteristics that all people—whether in wartime or peacetime—possess. Music like this portrays Palestinians as sorrowful and angry and exhausted and resilient in the face of extreme violence, but more than anything, it portrays them as people, deserving of dignity and respect. I don’t know how many people in Gaza are able to listen to Boosaleh, but I imagine that those who hear it may find it therapeutic in the same way that composing it was for Ghassan.