At a glance, it may seem like the gravity of the Holocaust has been diluted by the ubiquity of a handful of works in the mainstream media. Curricula everywhere now include Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as required reading; box-office smash “Schindler’s List” won seven Oscars in 1993, and “Valkyrie,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” and “Defiance” were all recently released; and the band Neutral Milk Hotel even fixated on the story of Anne Frank for its album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. All the attention given to these few accounts of the atrocity can soften its impact.

Caroline Helton, clinical assistant professor of music in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, wants to look past the mainstream explorations and explore the more personal, intimate music that came out of the Holocaust era. Her program, “Voices of the Holocaust,” will take place this Saturday, free of charge, in the Apse Room at the University of Michigan Museum of Art at 8 p.m. She will be accompanied on the piano by Kathryn Goodson, a collaborative pianist and teacher.

All of the music on Helton's program was composed by Jews whose lives were affected by the Holocaust. None of the music has been digitally recorded before and scores were difficult to find, Helton said in an interview with The Michigan Daily.

Helton said that when the Nazis came to power in Germany, “there was an active effort to destroy books and music and art that were created by Jews.”

“So that’s where so many of the pieces (by Jewish composers) got lost — they were simply destroyed. And the archives are still in a mess in Germany,” she added. "We don’t know what was created there oftentimes.”

After sifting through historical and musical records, Helton has crafted a program that features the rare works of three European Jewish composers: Robert Kahn, Erich Korngold and Darius Milhaud.

Born in Mannheim, Germany, Kahn was a famous and prolific composer, conductor and pianist before the rise of Adolf Hitler. His lyrical, conservative style was heavily influenced by the Romantic great Johannes Brahms, a friend of Kahn's.

But in 1933, his reputation was compromised when laws were enacted prohibiting Jews from performing in public or publishing their works. Kahn escaped Germany in the late ’30s and fled to England, where he “lived in obscurity (and) relative poverty,” according to Helton.

Korngold is “the pioneer of what we think of as movie music,” Helton continued. A musical prodigy whose first opera was published when he was 11, Korngold left his native country of Austria to compose the score for the Warner Bros. movie “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”

That was in 1938, six weeks before the Anschluss — the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. The rest of his family left on the last train to Switzerland. The Korngold works that Helton will be performing premiered at the last public concert he held in Austria.

Ending the first half of “Voices” is a song cycle focused on Jewish identity. Called “Poèmes Juifs,” the music was written by celebrated avant-garde French composer Milhaud. The lyrics, however, can be traced back to a set of anonymous Hebrew texts describing the Jewish experience in Europe.

The poems present “a story of how to deal with life as a Jew in persecuted times,” Helton said.

The poems express yearning for a world where Jews would “be able to work the land and breathe fresh air and live where (they) want to live … so those themes pervade the ‘Poèmes Juifs,’ the five songs by Milhaud,” she added.

Milhaud’s song cycle was written in the early 1900s, documenting a pre-Holocaust era of Jewish persecution.

In the first half of the concert, only the Milhaud songs deal directly with Jewish identity.