Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler By Michael Haas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 400. Hardcover 35. 9780300266504.

The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler sets out to capture the diverse experiences of composers exiled from Europe in the 1930s.Following the author's debut monograph, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (2013), which primarily detailed the bodily and sonic treatment of composers in the lead up to and under the Nazi regime, this new book focuses on how "a representative rather than comprehensive" group of composers personally and professionally negotiated the process of exile through their music during the wartime and the postwar eras (xiv).As Haas argues, "the music of exile was the means by which composers could return to a sense of inner stability" through "a state of physical and mental transplantation."It was "a unique synthesis written by a composer in a place to which they did not fully belong" (9).Haas' findings speak to a plethora of highly individualized experiences of exile as expressed through music, but he also identifies certain patterns in compositional approaches that reflect a shared longing for "return" or "inner restitution" (9).As Haas explains, these composers yearned for return not only "to a country, a homeland, a language, but also to a particular way of life, a loss of privilege and position within an educated and cultivated society" (20).Both the composers who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe and those who left composed music that employed the same compositional tools, structural forms, or poetry as revered composers of their former homelands, while many of the Jewish exiles drew on quintessentially Jewish, Yiddish, or Zionist texts, titles, or musical language.One of this book's many interventions is its deliberate reconceptualization of the meaning and long-lasting impacts of exile.Haas understands exile to include both those Jewish and non-Jewish composers who were physically displaced, as well as non-Jewish composers who experienced what he calls "inner emigration" or "internal exile" by bodily remaining under Nazi authority but composing as if they were abroad (1-2).Music of Exile endeavors to resolve a discrepancy between the music that composers crafted in their former homelands, and the aesthetic and stylistic changes they later made either in internal exile or in the countries where they found refuge.Rather than foregrounding the triumphalist view of migr musicians' contributions to their new homelands, as many contemporary scholars have done, Haas instead asks what the "cost" of these aesthetic and stylistic changes were, and whether they were "organic, or made out of existential necessity" (4).Composers who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe, he explains, navigated the local regime by withholding