Music Salon – Haunted Voices: Music and Imagination in Remembering the Holocaust

On February 1st at 8:00-9:15pm, you are invited to the Music Salon – Haunted Voices: Music and Imagination in Remembering the Holocaust.

To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), we explore the rich legacy of music by Jewish composers like Mahler and Greenberg, as well as folk traditions and liturgies. Our guests are musicologist and educator Eleanor Johnston, and mezzo soprano Ramona Carmelly. With a mix of live performance and oral testimony they consider the long history of antisemitism in Europe and North America, and create in the audience a haunted imagination through an understanding of how our world has been impoverished by suppressing, erasing and misappropriating so many voices.

This event will be live in the Music Room (Colin Friesen Room).

Presenter/musician bios:

RAMONA CARMELLY has captivated audiences in opera, music theatre, jazz, cabaret, and concerts, including Wagner’s Wesendonck lieder, Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No.5, Ravel’s Scheherazade, Mompou’s Cançons Becquerianas, Mahler's Symphony No. 3, and roles from the sublime to the ridiculous, among them Fricka (Die Walküre), Waltraute (Götterdämmerung), Venus (Tannhäuser), Amneris (Aïda), Quickly (Falstaff), MèreMarie de l’incarnation (Dialogues des Carmélites), Mrs. McLean (Susannah), Mrs. Grose (Turn of the Screw), Dido/Sorceress (Dido and Aeneas), Gertrude/Witch (Hänsel und Gretel), Mercedes (Carmen), Maddalena (Rigoletto), Ottavia (L'incoronazione di Poppea), Marcellina (Le Nozze di Figaro), Mme de la Haltière (Cendrillon), Katisha (The Mikado), Golde (Fiddler on the Roof), and Miss Hannigan (Annie).

Ramona was honoured to sing The Angel and Narrator in the 2015 premiere of David Warrack's multi-faith oratorio, Abraham. She looks forward to creating the title role in Don't Call Me Mama, a biographical portrait of “Mama” Cass Elliot, and reprising her role as iconic Canadian artist, Emily Carr, in Jana Skarecky and Di Brandt’s upcoming opera, We Will Walk in the Forest. She is occasionally found in reruns of the Lifetime-Global TV series Zoe Busiek: Wildcard, as the oblivious diva onstage amid murder and mayhem.


ELEANOR JOHNSTON earned her PhD and teaches at York University. She holds a master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the ways in which presented objects foster/prevent feelings of belonging and the tensions and ethical questions embedded therein. This work is in part motivated by her own experiences growing up Jewish with an Anglo last name. The tension between the ability to “pass” and the desire to represent family lost to the Shoah has informed much of her scholarly work.

Eleanor particularly enjoys collaborating with performers in lecture-concerts exploring social and artistic themes, such as Canadian musical responses to the Holocaust, and Jewish diasporic works in America. She has presented at national and international conferences on ethical presentation of Holocaust material in both music and picture books. In addition to her scholarly work, she has worked in the public-school board as an elementary and music teacher and as the education coordinator for the Buffalo Philharmonic.


SUSAN GREENWAY is a freelance pianist, accompanist, chamber musician and teacher based in Toronto. She holds a Master's Degree in piano performance, with a specialization in collaborative piano, from the University of Toronto. Recently, she accompanied flautist Ron Korb on his Grammy-nominated CD "Asia Beauty".

Susan has participated in many masterclasses at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta. She has worked with Anton Kuerti, Andre Laplante and other master teachers. Her main teachers at University of Toronto were Boris Lysenko and Marietta Orlov. As a young pianist she won awards for her playing in the Canadian Music Competitions and the finals of the Kiwanis Music Competitions, both as a soloist and in chamber music. As a teacher, she has a flourishing studio of approximately 50 students.



The Music Salons are open to the public. We invite everyone to join and take part in what will be a very unique event and discussion. Participants are invited to submit questions to the speakers in real-time via the Chat function to the right of the screen.

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