This year priorities for JMI International Centre for Suppressed Music are a Conference in April 2008 in conjunction with the Institute of Music Research and the Royal Conservatoire of Canada called Music, Oppression and Exile: The Impact of Nazism on Musical Development in the 20th Centuryand a recording of the most popular opera arias of Franz Schreker – arguably the most popular pre-war composer in Central Europe – hardly heard of today. This will be undertaken by the young German Soprano Anne Schwanewilms and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Conference and Concerts: London, 9–13 April 2008 Music, Oppression and Exile: The Impact of Nazism on Musical Development in the 20th Century International Conference presented by JMI SOAS International Centre for Suppressed Music and the Institute of Musical Research, University of London Wednesday 9–Friday 11 April 2008 Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU Scope of the conference: Musical Life before Hitler, the first theme, includes Jewish composers who were both traditionalists and modernists. At the time of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, it could be argued, Jewish musicians were perhaps Germany’s and Austria’s most important living, cultural assets. Furthermore, there was hardly a note of popular music that did not rely on Jewish artists for either the melodies or the words, and usually both. In the area of serious music, Jewish composers were equally active, enjoying considerable prestige at home and abroad. The Mechanics of the Third Reich’s Music Policies poses some interesting and potentially conflicting agendas: for example, how does one ban Jewish composers without giving off the subliminal message that the traditional music with which most of them aligned themselves was somehow un-German? How does one ban atonal music and other avant-garde idioms by Jewish or non-Jewish composers, without presenting the message that National Socialism was a conservative, rather than a progressive, form of government? Here more than elsewhere is where one can look at and examine the idea of ‘inner exile’, whom it affected and its wider impact. The third area is the most varied: the effects of transplantation were as distinct and individual as the people involved. A composer who landed in Rio had a different experience and affected his new homeland differently from a composer who landed in Adelaide or Singapore. The catalysts of musical life in every country were often (post 1933) musical refugees. This could encompass a whole variety of musical activities, including publishing or management in London and New York, early music scholarship at Oxford, music education in Tokyo or the Bossa Nova in Brazil. Musical Life after Hitler inevitably had to grow out of the ruins of Hitler’s Europe. The effects are still felt today but there were also more tangible events that still have to be examined: the de-Nazification processes; the re-introduction of banned music to the arenas of Germany’s Europe, and the philosophical, aesthetic and cultural reaction to the years of suppression.