In this first episode of our second season of Thoughtlines we talk about how culture fights back with historian Professor Kenneth Marcus (he was Fulbright/IFK_Senior Fellow in fall 2021).

As a visiting fellow at CRASSH he’s been exploring what happens when music ‘goes there’ and tackles the horror and heartbreak of war. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its musical resistance, rapidly going viral on social media, is effectively his project in real time. But his focus on the epic pacifist works of Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, and Benjamin Britten reminds us that music was shaping the global human rights imagination well before now.