Blog – Delilah Sykes
Conrad Leser’s (Lay-ser) melodeon, or button accordion, is one of the first objects you see as you come into the Holocaust Centre North’s permanent exhibition. The melodeon was one of the few objects Conrad chose to bring with him when he fled from Nazi oppression, from where he was studying in Zürich to the UK, to become an economics student, then an enemy alien, then in time the first Professor of Econometrics at the University of Leeds.
When I start to touch Conrad’s melodeon I am struck by the strangeness of this interaction – the negotiation of movement, sound, and care. I have it resting on an archive pillow that will support it and minimize the pressure of playing. Handling Conrad’s melodeon is hard. The leather straps are fragile and deteriorating. At first, it didn’t seem like we were going to be able to perform the push and pull motions that are essential for making sound. But the Collections team inspected the folds of the billows, the paper concertinaed within – and have given the all-clear. Though I can only make small, slow movements with it, rocking it back and forth, it’s louder than I expected. Some notes come easier than others, needing a bit more breath in the lungs to be heard. At first the incidental archive sounds annoy me, distracting from my main object of listening. The sound of the tiny balls inside the archive pillow shifting as we move, the creaking of the table and wooden panels and straps, the sound of the room (we test it – not the AC or the lights but some other elusive hum that we can’t locate). My back hurts from the odd and unnatural movements I’m having to perform to keep the melodeon safe, like some strange contemporary dance. When I sit down to rest and listen back to the recordings, I begin to appreciate the incidental composition of the melodeon, the room, its conditions of life now, and all the sounds which evidence our care.
Though I count myself as a multidisciplinary artist, I can’t help but gravitate to sound. Its here-but-not-here-ness. The ephemeral and the corporeal, inseparable. My practice often attempts the intangible, through performance, film, text and installation – and in recent projects, I have worked with sound as a way of holding presence and absence simultaneously: with voice, field recordings, and layered composition to explore what it means to listen to something that is only partially accessible. This is really what drew me to the Memorial Gestures residency. The act of engaging with the archive is not only interpretive but also requires a sensitivity to what cannot, and should not, be fully known or translated.
I first saw the melodeon as a lung, and I still see it as one. A lung must breathe; an instrument must be played. When I first contacted the Collections team at Holocaust Centre North, I wasn’t hopeful that I would be allowed to touch, let alone make sound with the melodeon. It is a Hohner Club Model I, which was produced commonly in the 1930s but is rare to find in good condition. When I received the reply that the team had inspected and tested the instrument, and that it could be very gently handled – not played in full how it would’ve been – but that I could make some sounds that preservation would allow, this seemed even more interesting. If the melodeon is a lung, then it is also a voice, and has a testimony to tell. During our research stage of the Memorial Gestures residency, we discussed living memory and objects as witnesses.
What is an archive? What is its purpose? What and why are we choosing to preserve (and why is sound so rarely included in that)? I can’t help but reflect that as time progresses, we are not interacting with the artefacts we choose to preserve in the way that is intended – the way that offers us an idea of their whole. As a result, we risk losing the memory – or the full understanding of human experience/history – that an object can give us. Our learning of the past stays at arm’s length. In preservation, or traditional approaches to archive work, we prioritise the visual and the object. But really it’s a multisensory and experiential approach to the past that has the ability to greaten our understanding of atrocity. Or else might it fade to the recesses of time, only understood by facts, figures, diagrams and dates copied into a schoolbook? Sectioned off as ‘back then’ and ‘over there’.
Rather than eliciting:
This sound gave me joy
I remember that tune
It’s stuck in my head
Is that the sound that reminded him of home
Or his mother?
Conrad Leser’s melodeon has not been played since the 1990s. What might we learn from its sound? How might it, within the archive, breathe again?
In my first full day in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, I felt I got to know Conrad. He was a man who campaigned for human rights causes throughout his life, loved logic and probability, but was also involved in the theatre and music, and would play the melodeon for his friends at social gatherings. I was particularly on the lookout for letters with return addresses on them, that would give me a clue as to exactly where he and the melodeon travelled and lived in Germany, Switzerland and the UK. It was while looking for this that I found his address in Cambridge, which was where he studied Economics and from which he was taken to the Isle of Wight then Canada and imprisoned as an enemy alien. When he was released and returned to Cambridge, on the same day (24th January 1941) he wrote two letters. One to his tutor at university and one to his cousin Margarete, with whom he was very close. To his tutor, he apologised for the gap in his studies and said he looked forward to telling him about his “adventures”. But to Margarete he described the ordeal in these words “I really feel as if I had been buried alive for 8 months and (am) now beginning to live again”. I wonder how well he played the melodeon – how his tunes changed?
In August I was at home recounting these details to my partner. Conrad, his life, his instrument. My housemate Carol, half listening, cooking dinner, coming in and out of the room, suddenly turned to me and said ‘Conrad? I think I know him! Long hair, plays in that band – I didn’t know he was a mutual friend.’ I was confused at first and then realised what had happened. It’s lovely to think that, for a second, Conrad and my excitement about his melodeon helped him become alive again. But perhaps what happened was less dramatic than that. Conrad was never really absent: his handwriting, letters, photographs and melodeon have all carried him forward. And so, I think Conrad’s melodeon is alive too. Not because it can return us to his life, what he heard, felt or remembered, but because it can still enter into relation with us. Even in the small rocking movements that make a sound – in the creaks, breaths and limitations of the encounter – it seems to resist being entirely still, and we can listen to what remains.
