Forbidden Music Regained


Leo Smit Stichting
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Related Organizations

The main focus of the Leo Smit Foundation is on composers who lived and worked in the Netherlands. To put their music into a broader and international perspective, we work together with many partners. The organizations listed below offer a great wealth of information on suppressed composers from various countries.

The views and opinions expressed on these websites do not necessarily reflect the views of the Leo Smit Foundation.


  • Exil.Arte – Vienna

    exil.arte operates as a centre for the reception, preservation and research of Austrian composers, performers, musical academics and thinkers who, during the years of the 'Third Reich' were branded as 'degenerate'. Exil.arte's purpose is to restore these important missing links to the chain of Austrian music- history.

  • Musica Reanimata – Berlin

    The society was founded in 1990 with the purpose of integrating the works of composers persecuted by the Nazi regime into present-day musical culture. To this end, it organizes lecture recitals, in co-operation with the Konzerthaus Berlin and with the radio station Deutschlandfunk. It also organizes musicological conferences, and publishes current research in a journal and in a series of books.

  • Orel Foundation – Los Angeles

    The mission of The OREL Foundation is to encourage interest in and, especially, the performance of works by composers suppressed as a result of Nazi policies from 1933 to 1945 in order to allow the greater musical community of today and tomorrow the opportunity to determine the place of these composers and their works in the history and canon of twentieth-century music.

  • Zentrum für Verfemte Musik – Schwerin

    Jeunesses Musicales in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania organizes a biannual festival to promote music by composers who suffered under the Nazi regime, who were persecuted, forbidden or murdered. The festival includes an international competition for young musicians, concerts, masterclasses and symposiums.

  • Zentrum für Verfemte Musik an der HMT – Rostock

    In cooperation with existing initiatives, including international projects, the Centre's mission is to free ostracised music from the labels still attached to it from its suppression under the Nazi regime, and to re-establish it on an equal footing with other 20th century music – to give it the place in musical history which is its due. The Centre aims to focus the attention of artistic teaching on formerly forbidden music and to use of this unique opportunity to attract music students as ambassadors and increase their awareness.

  • Music of Remembrance – Seattle

    Music of Remembrance fills a unique spiritual and cultural role in Seattle and throughout the world by remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through musical performances, educational activities, musical recordings, and commissions of new works.

  • Forum Voix Étouffées – Strasbourg

    Founded in 2003 by conductor and composer Amaury du Closel, the goal of Forum Voix Étouffées is to rehabilitate the work of persecuted composers. The forum aims to give them their voice back with concerts, exhibitions, research and education.

  • LexM – Hamburg

    The "Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945" ("LexM") is a subject oriented, biographical music-dictionary. In this encyclopaedia, people are listed who were at the time professional musicians and affected by Nazi terror. Their lives spent in exile or subject to other forms of repression must be kept from oblivion and re-anchored in the consciousness of public musical life.

  • Orpheus News – Vienna

    We inform on projects, programs and new releases of people or organizations, who were or are connected with the ''historical' association Orpheus Trust or its successors' platform orpheus.news or who have called upon us for advice.

  • International Centre for Suppressed Music – London

    The International Centre for Suppressed Music (ICSM), a forum of JMI, is as a platform for bringing together those working in the field of suppressed music. The aim of the ICSM is to re-examine the work of composers whose careers were affected: to recover music suppressed by totalitarian regimes and later neglected and to restore, publish, perform and record the music. ICSM is also collecting an archive of interviews with surviving composers, musicians, their families and friends as well as manuscripts, scores and other documents showing how composers and musicians tackled both their musical and their political challenges.

  • Mes Musiques Régénerées

    A private database full of photos, biographical information, links and recordings on composers and musicians from France, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland and Italy.

  • Music and the Holocaust

    This website is focused on a particular aspect of that broad subject, namely the role of music in the Holocaust—the systematic mass murder by the Nazis of six million European Jews, as well as homosexuals, communists, Roma, and other victims during the Second World War.  It contains sound recordings, an interactive map and educational material.

  • Forbidden Music

    This is the official site for Forbidden Music, a book written by Michael Haas and published by Yale University Press in 2013. The site contains blogs by Michael Haas ranging from composer profiles, articles on concerts and exhibitions, to personal observations and reviews. All blogs are packed with photos and sound samples.

  • Musica Judaica

    A website on the Russian New Jewish School in music by Jascha Nemtsov. Contains an article on the history of the New Jewish School, composer biographies and sound samples.