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On the evening of March 29, the Slosberg Recital Hall at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. was filled with reflection, resonance and remembrance. The occasion was “Time’s Echo Live,” a live multimedia performance led by cultural historian and music critic Jeremy Eichler and based on his acclaimed book “Time’s Echo,” followed by a live Q&A session. On Nov. 28, 2023, Eichler’s two-day festival of the same name, featuring the Borromeo String Quartet and different programming, took place at the Goethe-Institut in Boston.

This year’s event offered a uniquely immersive experience, blending historical narrative, archival visuals, and live performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “String Quartet No.3 in F Major, Op. 73,” interpreted by the renowned Lydian String Quartet. Eichler, an award-winning historian, former Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow, and former chief classical music critic for the Boston Globe, guided the audience through a powerful interplay between music and memory.

Eichler corresponded his narrative with the five movements of Shostakovich’s quartet, giving them evocative subtitles: “Blithe ignorance of future cataclysm,” “Rumbling of unrest and anticipation,” “Forces of war unleashed,” “In memory of the dead,” and lastly, “The eternal question: Why? And for what?”

Accompanied by archival images and personal stories — particularly of Alma and Arnold Rosé, a father-daughter pair of Jewish-Austrian violinists — Eichler’s storytelling contextualized the music with the traumas and ruptures of WWII. The synthesis of media, memory, and melody created a deeply reflective space that many audience members found profoundly moving.

Professor Aida Y. Wong, Head of the Division of the Creative Arts at Brandeis University, found the experience deeply impactful.

Speaking from her point of view as an art historian, Wong believed that the night of performance engaged with different senses of the audience.

“We think of the sensory experience as something that is fully embodied in the moment,” Wong said. “But I think that after something is said and done that there’s a certain resonance in that experience that artists and musicians try to recapture, and that a good piece of music will be allowed once we did not witness that event to have that bodily reaction to it.”

Wong praised Eichler’s integration of narrative and performance for its ability to foster what Jeremy called an active way of “deep listening” to have music “not only listened to, but heard.”

“That segment is really an uplifting moment, pointing to maybe something more positive, but at the same time, it comes back to remind us we are really dealing with some fairly heavy memories,” Wong recalled.

Jessica B. Smith, a cellist in the audience, echoed this sentiment. She noted that the subtitles of the movements that Eichler coined conveyed a sense of impending darkness and complexity, connecting to the state of today’s world in a poignant way.

“What the composer was feeling [was] so raw, and so right then in 1946 communicated directly into the music when he wrote it and then communicated right back to us,” Smith said. “I think it wasn’t so much the words, the explanation was more just a pause to reflect on the meaning and a sense of really trying to access the moment when the music was written.”

For violinist Clara Lyon of the Lydian Quartet, the performance’s structure — with the inclusion of Eichler’s narrative between movements — shaped both the musicians’ interpretation and the audience’s perception.

“By inserting the words interstitially between each movement, it does change the flow of the piece,” Lyon said. “Shostakovich writes in the music that he intends the fourth movement to go directly into the last movement without a break. And that's not how we presented it last night, because we did break it up between every single movement and I think each movement certainly can stand very well on its own in that context. But that’s one big difference in terms of the flow, and I think it does change the feeling a little bit.”

Mark J. Berger, a violist in the Lydian Quartet, noted that Eichler’s contextualization enriched the performance without being didactic.

“There were a lot of peripheral stories that relate thematically to the music of the Quartet, but he wasn’t trying to explain how to hear or how to feel the music; these were just factual events that happened in proximity to when this quartet was written,” Berger said.

Berger also praised the narrative’s alignment with the quartet’s dramatic arc.

“The subject matter and the content of the stories that he was telling very much did map on to the dramatic arc of the quartet, building up towards this really ferocious middle little part, and then the extreme sorrow and sadness of the fourth movement, the kind of ambiguous meaning of the last movement,” Berger said.

Lyon added that the performance’s emotional range reflected Shostakovich’s own struggle under authoritarianism, emphasizing the role of music in processing human emotions and addressing timely issues.

“Being a musician and spending time with different kinds of music allows you the opportunity to think deeply about and process all of the different kinds of human emotion,” said Lyon. “That’s one thing I value a lot about music as a profession, I think that Shostakovich wrote so much of his music under intense duress and in spite of and often in resistance to the state of fascism.”

This poignant evening also served as a bittersweet milestone for the Lydian String Quartet. Founded in 1980, the quartet has been a fixture of Brandeis artistic life for 45 years. Yet the university has announced it will not renew the Quartet’s contract next season, placing the ensemble’s future at Brandeis in jeopardy.

The current lineup includes Lyon and Julia Glenn on the violin, Berger on viola, and Joshua Gordon on cello. For this performance, Sophia Szokolay joined as a guest violinist. Many audience members attended to show their support, knowing it might be one of the Quartet’s final performances on campus.

Wong, in a letter printed in the program, announced a donation initiative to preserve the Quartet’s presence. “Our larger goal is to raise $7 million to ensure that the Lydians, which have been a cornerstone of our cultural identity for 45 years, continue to make music on our campus, with our students, and for our community,” she wrote.

For Eichler, “Time’s Echo” is not only a book and music performance — it’s an invitation to listen. When writing the chapter on the Soviet experience of war and Holocaust memory, he noted the ironic coincidence of Putin’s war against Ukraine, which he called “a haunting epilogue of the story.”

“There must be someone waiting on the other hand of the musical performance to receive the signal of the past. There must be someone ready to listen,” Eichler said.

Through that act of remembrance, music bridges the generation gap between the past and present — between silence and understanding.

By interweaving narrative, history, and music, Eichler and the Lydian Quartet invited the audience into a space where memory was not only preserved, but actively reawakened. It was an evening that honored the power of music to bear witness and to resist, echoing the urgencies of the present. This performance also stood as a poignant reminder of the irreplaceable role that the arts — and those who bring them to life — play in cultivating empathy, understanding, and historical consciousness.

—Staff writer Dailan Xu can be reached at dailan.xu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @Dailansusie.