Music

Roland Binet’s Musical and Video Creations: A Journey of Truth and Education on the Holocaust in Latvia



MUSIC | ARTS | ROLAND BINET | BELGIUM | LATVIA  |  COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED

Editor’s note: At our request, Defending History’s longstanding correspondent Roland Binet compiled this provisional list of his musical and video creations over the years relevant to issues covered by DH. Although Roland Binet has contributed to DH since 2010 there is an aspect of his work perhaps unknown to our readers. He has been a creative musician for more than fifty years playing mostly the flute and  has composed more than a hundred  pieces of original music. His music is based on modal, pentatonic, Chinese or Japanese scales as well as aleatory contemporary improvisations with periodic jazz influences. He has made his jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s quote on his last album “When you hear music and it is over, you can never capture it again”. But, of course, thanks to the numerous recordings he made, these aleatory instants can be heard on purely musical sites such as Reverbnation or Bandcamp. After his initial visit to Riga in 2009 and the shock he felt when he looked for the first time at pictures of the Liepaja massacre at the Riga Jewish Museum he took to studying the history of the Holocaust in the Baltic States. From there  it was only a small step to play and compose music in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had paid with their lives and belongings  for the crime of being Jewish  in countries that chose to collaborate enthusiastically with the Nazi killers.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Belgium, Latvia, Music, News & Views | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Roland Binet’s Musical and Video Creations: A Journey of Truth and Education on the Holocaust in Latvia

Film, Video, Radio, Music


[LATEST UPDATE. PAGE PUBLISHED 18 DEC. 2013]

ADVERTISEMENT

FREE ONLINE

Rewriting History logo

DIRECTED BY MARC RADOMSKY. PRODUCED BY DANNY BEN-MOSHE

See also DH sections on: ARTS, BOOKSFILM, MUSIC

Films and Videos on Defending History topics:

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Film, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, Michael Kretzmer's Documentary Film "J'Accuse!" on the Lithuanian Holocaust, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Film, Video, Radio, Music

Belgian Composer Releases New Video on Eve of March 16th



ROLAND BINET  |  ARTS  |  MUSIC  |  LATVIA  |  RIGA’s WAFFEN SS  MARCHES  | REGIONAL FAR-RIGHT MARCHES  | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED

Roland Binet, a Belgian composer working out of  De Panne, has just released on Youtube a new video comprising his musical composition to a series of photographs by his wife Francine Binet taken during their joint visit to Riga in 2012, the Latvian capital, to monitor that year’s far-right March 16th parade. The annual marches  glorify the Waffen SS, which fought for the Nazis and whose members all swore the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Mr. Binet is a veteran contributor to Defending History. His most recent and for many, quite startling piece, divulges the hard-to-believe erection of a monument to the Latvian Waffen SS in a town in Belgium.

 

Posted in Arts, Collaborators Glorified, Latvia, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Riga's Waffen SS Marches, Roland Binet | Comments Off on Belgian Composer Releases New Video on Eve of March 16th

In Defense of Transparency at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra



O P I N I O N   /    M U S I C

by Ronald C. Kent

In January 2012 I became aware of a then-upcoming performance of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Since I knew that Carl Orff was a Nazi-approved composer, who created this work in 1936, I wrote a letter to Maestro Andreas Delfs and Music Director Edo de Waart, requesting that they place the biography of Orff during the Nazi period in the program, in the interest of enlightenment, transparency, and full disclosure, thereby situating “Carmina Burana” in its historical context for listeners.

Continue reading

Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Germany, Media Watch, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In Defense of Transparency at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

The Holocaust: A Photographic and Musical Tribute



O P I N I O N   /   M U S I C

by Roland Binet  (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

 

MUSICAL AND PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPOSITION HERE

 

I know persons within my circle of acquaintances who refuse to look at the terrible pictures that this video exhibits. Photographs of Jewish victims of beatings, slayings.  Pictures of dead Jewish victims.  Pictures of local collaborators in the process of helping the Nazis in killing Jews.

These persons find those historical pictures too offensive, too terrible, too awful, for their taste.  They are not able too look at them, they are far too sensitive to put up with such awful scenes.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Latvia, Lithuania, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Roland Binet | Comments Off on The Holocaust: A Photographic and Musical Tribute

Massacres of the Jews in Liepāja (Šķēde) in Fall 1941



M U S I C

by Roland Binet  (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

The Nazis tried to hide their crimes against humankind during World War II. They had tried to hide the fact that in the former territories of the USSR they were killing Jews on a colossal scale starting in July 1941. And not only Jews, also anyone suspected of being a communist.

Although many soldiers in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen SS took pictures of Aktionen against the Jews, even kept pictures of massacres or dead Jewish bodies in their wallets, most of these photographic proofs of the Nazi crimes against humanity were destroyed, stolen from their corpses after their deaths, kept at home in Germany by descendants of these heinous and barbarous extermination soldiers, or, sometimes, recuperated by allied nations which kept them and not solely kept them, but displayed them as a testimony to these barbaric events.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Latvia, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Roland Binet | Comments Off on Massacres of the Jews in Liepāja (Šķēde) in Fall 1941

Rumbula and Ponár



M U S I C

by Roland Binet  (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

This composition, Rumbula and Ponár, memorializes the victims of the two most infamous mass murder sites of Latvia and Lithuania, Rumbula outside Riga, and Ponár (Polish Ponary, Lithuanian Paneriai) outside Vilnius. More than 130,000 people were killed in total at these two sites. The majority were Jews but there were many others of diverse ethnic and social background at Ponár.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), Riga's Waffen SS Marches, Roland Binet | Comments Off on Rumbula and Ponár

A Jewish Tragedy (Flute and Composition)


 


M U S I C

by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

 

Starting in 2009, after my first visit in Riga, I became interested in the fate of the Jews in the Baltic States during the war. I returned several times to Latvia and also visited Estonia and Lithuania. In 2013 while in Riga, I went to see the Rumbula Memorial to see for myself what that well-known and fateful place looked like. That year in Vilnius, I visited the Ponár (Paneriai) memorial site, another of those well-known fateful places.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Roland Binet | Comments Off on A Jewish Tragedy (Flute and Composition)

The Jewish Tragedy in the Baltic States



M U S I C

by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

 

THE AUTHOR’S MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS:

I   War

II   Ghetto

III   The Killing Pits

IV   Liberation

V   Remembrance

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Roland Binet | Comments Off on The Jewish Tragedy in the Baltic States

A Musical Tribute to the Rumbula Victims



M U S I C   /   O P I N I O N

by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

 

SOUND TRACKS OF THE AUTHOR’S COMPOSITIONS:

Rumbula

Threnody

 

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Latvia, Litvak Affairs, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Roland Binet | Comments Off on A Musical Tribute to the Rumbula Victims