Behind the Scenes

On September 28, 2010, Mythic Imagination inaugurated a year-long program, Creativity in Captivity. The opening evening of September 28th was a concert at the Schwartz Center at Emory University in Atlanta.

The concert was produced in partnership with the Emory University Center for Ethics, and was free and open to the public.

All of the music in the concert was written by people inside the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Dr. Francesco Lotoro, a concert pianist, composer and professor of musicology in Italy, has spent the last 22 years racing against the dissolving history of the Holocaust to find, document, copy and record thousands of pieces of music that were written in the Nazi camps, as well as music written by prisoners of war during World War II. Mythic Imagination partnered with Dr. Lotoro, a concert pianist and professor of music in Italy, to insure the permanence of the archive and help to continue his research and recording, as well as bringing the work to America and creating performances.

By giving the concert, we are trying to raise money to fund Professor Lotoro’s continued work.

Dr. Lotoro explained: “If we think of it, no one can control the creative energy of mankind. In fact, the creativity of mankind multiplies the more difficult, the more restrictive, the more limited the situation. It was generally a sentiment of many of those who knew they would not survive to leave a testament, they had nothing. They couldn’t leave their house, their belongings. They had nothing… So people who were maybe even resigned to an atrocious death, had all the more reason to create artistically… The process of creating music was something close to the heart, a testament of the heart.”