Peabody Preparatory student violinist Micah Seliger turned to the Arthur Friedheim Library in 2024 when he wanted to find scores for solo and orchestral performance. Seliger, 11 at the time, had first heard about composers silenced during World War II at a 2022 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert that included the Prelude to Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized) by Franz Schreker, an Austrian composer whose works were banned by the Nazi Party in the 1930s. When Seliger met a Juilliard graduate student writing a doctoral thesis on suppressed Jewish artists and composers such as Schreker, it further sparked the young violinist’s curiosity.
Seliger is a descendant of a Holocaust survivor: his grandfather, Gustav Seliger, was born in Poland in 1937, escaped with his family from the Warsaw Ghetto, and lived in hiding during World War II. Hearing works by Schreker and other suppressed composers made Seliger think about how that persecution impacted the music he appreciates. “I was very interested in 20th- and 21st-century music, and the era already fit my interests,” Seliger says during an interview at the Peabody campus on a December Saturday before a lesson. “I thought playing music by a suppressed composer would be fitting for my bar mitzvah project.”
For his bar mitzvah service project, Seliger wanted to find suppressed works that could be performed by the two orchestras he plays in, the Preparatory’s Young Artists Orchestra and his Howard County public school’s orchestra, as well as a solo piece for himself. Unfortunately, Seliger’s search in the Friedheim’s collection only surfaced four works that could be a possibility for the Young Artists Orchestra. Seliger and his mother reached out to Friedheim Library staff to see if there was something they could do to increase the library’s access to and/or collection of works by suppressed composers.
Seliger is a descendant of a Holocaust survivor: his grandfather, Gustav Seliger, was born in Poland in 1937, escaped with his family from the Warsaw Ghetto, and lived in hiding during World War II. Hearing works by Schreker and other suppressed composers made Seliger think about how that persecution impacted the music he appreciates. “I was very interested in 20th- and 21st-century music, and the era already fit my interests,” Seliger says during an interview at the Peabody campus on a December Saturday before a lesson. “I thought playing music by a suppressed composer would be fitting for my bar mitzvah project.”
For his bar mitzvah service project, Seliger wanted to find suppressed works that could be performed by the two orchestras he plays in, the Preparatory’s Young Artists Orchestra and his Howard County public school’s orchestra, as well as a solo piece for himself. Unfortunately, Seliger’s search in the Friedheim’s collection only surfaced four works that could be a possibility for the Young Artists Orchestra. Seliger and his mother reached out to Friedheim Library staff to see if there was something they could do to increase the library’s access to and/or collection of works by suppressed composers.
Seliger’s efforts led to a collaboration to add 150 musical works by composers persecuted during World War II to the library’s collection. Forbidden Music Regained is an ongoing collection of music by Jewish composers or other Dutch composers who refused to collaborate with the occupying Nazi regime. It was published by Donemus Publishing in collaboration with the Leo Smit Foundation and the Netherlands Music Institute. Each score includes front matter, such as a composer biography, that provides context about the composer and the work itself. Seliger raised money to acquire the six volumes of Forbidden Music Regained currently available via crowdfunding as part of his bar mitzvah service project.
Seliger’s project also opened the door to a new collaboration by connecting Friedheim Library director Kathleen DeLaurenti with Aleksandra Marković at Donemus. DeLaurenti shared the library’s work building digital collections, and Marković was eager to partner on a digital collecting pilot.
“We don’t usually offer digital content to libraries, although this is an avenue that we are very willing to explore,” Marković writes via email. “In this case, a few factors contributed to our decision to offer this music as a digital catalog: firstly, Micah came to us with a special project that we wanted to support, and furthermore, we wanted to do what we could to bring this ‘regained’ music to the attention of musicians worldwide.”
This digital collection demonstrates the work the library is doing to modernize collecting approaches to meet student and scholar performing needs. “It can be difficult to acquire [scores] digitally, because many publishers are reluctant to work with us on that format,” DeLaurenti says. “Because Micah was interested in elevating as many voices as he could, it created an exciting opportunity where we were able to come to an agreement on a license that makes these works available in the same way that print is available in our collections, and in a format that 21st-century musicians are interested in accessing.”
Seliger’s journey highlights the role that research plays in performance, issues of access to material, and the ways in which artists can be intentionally silenced and forgotten. “I’m not a musician at all,” says Andrea LeWinter, Seliger’s mother, while noting that she and her husband, through Micah, were also learning about these persecuted Jewish composers. “We knew there were efforts to uncover what was lost, and Micah wanted to shine a light on it. He thought he could play some of the music or ask one of his orchestras to play some of the music. And then when we went to find this music? That was this huge rabbit hole.”
Seliger first approached the music directors of both his Bonnie Branch Middle School Chamber Orchestra in Columbia, Md., led by Tobias Morris (BM ’12, MM ’14, Violoncello), and the Young Artists Orchestra, led by Daniel Levitov, about performing a suppressed work at a concert. “I immediately thought this was such a great idea,” Levitov says. “Micah was so well-prepared, he came to me more than a year before his bar mitzvah date, and that gave me time not just to find pieces that would be appropriate, but also to think about how to craft an entire concert program built around those.”
When looking for possible orchestra scores to perform, Seliger first sought the assistance of his Preparatory composition instructor, Michael Rickelton (MM ’10, DMA ’17, Composition), who helped him scour the Friedheim offerings. When so little turned up, Micah considered expanding his bar mitzvah service project to include donating suppressed music to Peabody, and Rickelton suggested Seliger speak to DeLaurenti about such a process. She connected Seliger with Conservatory Musicology faculty member Matthew Vest, the music inquiry and research librarian at the UCLA Walter H. Rubsamen Music Library, who has expertise in the subject area.
While attending a scholarly conference, Vest heard about and was able to peruse some early versions of the Forbidden Music Regained scores. “I think what this publisher is doing is quite groundbreaking in terms of the scale and scope of works,” Vest says. “They’re not all for a full orchestra or just amateur performers. And in the process of talking [to Seliger] I brought up some of the quite well-known [suppressed] composers, and he was aware of those. But then I also brought up that this new publishing initiative was happening that might fit his interest.”
Dutch flautist Eleonore Pameijer founded the Leo Smit Foundation, where she is director, in 1996, and has worked tirelessly to promote this forgotten Dutch music over the past 30 years. Seliger worked with Pameijer and his Preparatory instructor, Grace Kim (BM ’19, Violin), to find an appropriate violin sonata at his skill level among the Forbidden Music Regained scores. He chose Violin Sonata 1 by Bob Hanf, a piece of music that appealed to Seliger’s modern tastes. Hanf was a Jewish Dutch violinist and composer murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. (Read more about Hanf and other composers in the series at the Smit Foundation’s own Forbidden Music Regained website.)
Levitov points out that programming for young artists can be challenging from a skill and subject matter perspective. “We’re talking about dealing with very mature subject matter and music that’s very profound,” Levitov says. “But I have to say, this Young Artists Orchestra, they are a great bunch of students. And they’re very committed to not just playing music but really making art, really making a statement. And they just had an incredible level of buy-in and were able to sit with a difficult subject, and I think they were moved to work hard and give a compelling performance.”
Seliger agrees. “Usually, we’ll prepare music and then we’re playing just to play,” he says of the YAO’s May 4, 2025, concert, which included “Wiegala” by Ilse Weber and “Praeludium” by Viktor Kohn, both of whom were suppressed composers killed in concentration camps. Seliger wrote the program notes for the concert’s program. “But I felt we were playing for a purpose.”
LeWinter points out that the bar mitzvah rite of passage into adulthood involves a fair amount of traditional learning and rituals—Seliger engaged in Torah and prayer tutoring for more than a year—but does not always include a service project, although many b’nai mitzvahs do. “The [scores] project, I feel, was the more meaningful and biggest transition into Jewish adulthood,” Seliger says, “more than the actual traditional parts of it.”
His mom asks him to explain a bit more. “When you go into adulthood, yes, you get a job and you have to do more work but also you’re faced with more responsibilities,” he continues. “I feel like the responsibilities are the important part. I’ve felt like the project represented kind of gaining more responsibilities.”
Seliger’s crowdfunding campaign enabled the Friedheim Library to acquire the full series of Forbidden Music Regained, an effort that aligns with Peabody’s goal to expand the repertoire that 21st-century citizen artists are studying, performing, and creating. “Usually, we work with individual composers to acquire digital scores,” DeLaurenti says. “We want these collaborations to help educate composers and empower them to think about what role libraries play in their business model, and in helping to disseminate their work—that’s a critical piece for Peabody. So to have publishers willing to also understand the value of libraries’ role and work with us is a real added bonus.”
That effort to expand the repertoire makes perfect sense to Seliger, who started this project to restore public knowledge of music suppressed by the Nazi regime in the 1930s through World War II. “My favorite part of this project was definitely the playing,” he says.
“It was powerful just to have a firsthand experience of music in that way,” he continues, bringing up that at first he considered this process of rediscovering suppressed composers to be sad, but over time he realized that the performance is a celebration of the beauty that was created. “You could be sad that this music is not really well known anymore or you can do something about it. And now the library will be able to make it accessible to other people. There’s just a whole bunch of music that nobody really performs as much anymore. And I feel like they should.”