"Terezin is full of beauty”. So says one of the extroardinary poems in Drawing Life: Remembering Terezin Jocelyn Pook’s song cycle  which pays tribute to the victims of the concentration camp that the Nazis dressed up as propaganda to deceive the Red Cross. Inspired by the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of poetry and drawings by children in Terezin, the work has just been released on an album for Pook’s own label, Humming Records, so her music can now rip out your heart at home as well as in the concert hall.
This has been an ongoing project, originally commissioned by the Jewish Music Institute in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of Terezin’s disintegration. Live performances, starring the singers Melanie Pappenheim and Lorin Sklamberg, have presented clips of film footage together with the music (you can see some in a filmed interview with Pook by Suzy Klein on the JMI website). This year, though, marks another anniversary: the 80th of the concentration camp’s first establishment within the former 18th-century garrison town, in what is now the Czech Republic, making the CD release more than timely.
Pook, 61, is particularly celebrated for her film and TV music, including the scores for King Charles III, Brick Lane and The Wife. Born in Solihull, she started out as a viola player before moving into composition and her musical activities have been eclectic, extending to work with pop legends like Peter Gabriel, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave via her Electrica Strings project. 

“Often I’m just brought in as a composer and have very specific things to do,” she says. “But for this piece, I was driving and shaping the project. It always feels like jumping off a cliff and just hoping, not being sure which direction you’re going to go. It can be quite uncomfortable, but it’s also good to keep an open mind.”
Drawing Life’s narrative travels through the initial persecution of the Jewish population under Nazi control; the deception that led many to pay a hefty sum for the supposed privilege of moving to Terezin; decisions about what to take with them (each had an allowance of 50kg of luggage — nobody could possibly lift that much); and the bitterness and horror that awaited them. 
A commission about such a painful subject is one of the biggest challenges a composer can face. “If I’d been approached for a project about one of death camps, I don’t think I would have agreed,”says Pook. “It would have been too hard. At least Terezin had some light and shade, since there was so much artistic activity there. But sometimes you can feel quite overwhelmed by the stark reality of what people had to endure.”
Despite everything, Terezin became legendary for its population of artists and intellectuals, often from distinguished circles in Prague and Berlin, who managed to find hope and human dignity through culture and learning. The musicians included such figures as the composers Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása and Pavel Haas, the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer and the harpsichordist Zuzana Ružiková, to name but a few.

Many of the inmates nevertheless were deported to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where they were murdered. “What was really hard,” says Pook, “was going through the poems and drawings, realising how few people survived, how few children.” Of some 15,000 children in Terezin, only 100 were left alive. “What made it easier was working with the testimonies of survivors — the people whose story did have a happy ending.” Her score incorporates clips of interviews from sound archives such as the Imperial War Museum’s, in which survivors recount their experiences; she also interviewed Zdenka Fantlova, author of the memoir The Tin Ring. 
The voices are woven into the recorded canvas of music and Pook has translated the rhythm and pitch of their speech into musical phrases or motifs.  “As I listened to the interviews, I started to be inspired by little phrases, by ideas from these testimonies. I hadn’t set out with that intention at all — but this can happen.”
Steve Reich used a similar technique in works such as his Different Trains, which he has described as ‘bringing Janácek up to date’, since the great Czech composer had developed a sophisticated means of using speech patterns to build his distinctive style. Janácek’s home town, Brno, was less than 300km from Terezin. Pook acknowledges Reich as a major influence on her early compositions, but adds that any such influences in Drawing Life have been completely unconscious. Yet they couldn’t be more appropriate. 
Her style is concentrated, atmospheric and listenably ‘minimalist’ — shadows of Philip Glass as well as Reich — and it easily opens itself to the impact of Jewish melodies or motifs. She was startled, though, to be on the receiving end of some agitated correspondence concerning a passing hint of Klezmer in her score: “I was told that they would never have had Klezmer in Terezin because it was all very highbrow!”
Pook is not Jewish herself. “I don’t have any Jewish heritage,” she says, “and yet I’m obsessed with Jewish culture and was all the way through my twenties and thirties.” Several of her previous works had tackled Jewish subjects — one is named Hallelujah, another incorporates Yemenite Jewish singing — and she thinks it was her ability to meld different ethnicities in her music that won her the commission. At its darkest, Drawing Life offers deeply unsettling moments: recordings of barking guard dogs are incorporated in one number, another lists the items that a couple about to be deported are trying to remember to pack. 
But the most heart-rending sections emerge as a young poet describes the beauty of nature in woodland and birdsong. How wonderful it is, the poem suggests, to be alive. In the end, says Pook, Drawing Life is about “the human ability to find ways to nourish and strengthen the spirit even in the harshest conditions, against all the odds”.

Jocelyn Pook’s  Drawing Life: Remembering Terezin is out now on Humming Records.