Music is a powerful form of expression, and is a core component of a cultures identity.

All musicians ourselves, we had a large interest in integrating our fascination and passion for music
with our project, and sought to do so through broad, overarching searches through humanitys history with music. One especially noticeable aspect caught our attention in the unnatural, unsettlingly artificial state of the music of Germany, homeland of innumerable legendary composers, during the Third Reich, and the more we investigated, the more fascinated we became and the more we realized that we wanted to cover this topic, not only because it was immensely absorbing and of interest, but because we legitimately felt a responsibility to raise awareness of the social and human issues of this musical time period. Once we had determined our topic for the project at hand, we set to undergoing a full scouring of all relevant databases available to us through SHS librarys resources, as well as a thorough online search of the most prominent names in the Nazi-era degenerate music scene, both in present times and during the actual Third Reich. Through this manner, appointments for important interviews were set, relevant biographies and historical texts were reserved and checked out from local libraries, and core subjects and topics were condensed into a list of roughly 50 online sources that were evenly divided among us three to process, filter, and condense into website material. Our original plan was actually to create a video documentary, but it eventually had to be reconsidered due to various time and technical conflicts; namely, massive schedule issues our frantic junior semesters had with being able to meet with notable contributors to the modern degenerate music scene deprived us of the substantial amount of interviews we wouldve needed to create such a video-centric project a documentary would have demanded. By switching our format to that of a website, we were given a medium which allowed us to access, edit, and simultaneously work on our project online any time we had. Portions that definitively required physical communication were completed during our weekend meetings at the local Saratoga Library.

Freedom of expression is a powerful human right that holds itself as one of the core tenets of the US Constitution; it is logical to state that music, one of the purest forms of expression, is founded upon this right. During the reign of the Third Reich, two entire generations of composers, music, and expression were shut out and wiped from existence; To let these entire generations of expression and suppressed basic human rights remain forever silenced would be to essentially allow the Nazis to have succeeded in their conquest over the idea of freedom and equality of the moral human condition. Our responsibility, as modern human beings bestowed with all the rights we are justifiably endowed at birth, is to grant our previous generations freedom from oppression of humanity, and to ensure that this lamentable chapter of human history can attain its long awaited closure.