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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2022
The transformation of rubble into aestheticized ruins turns on the relation of aesthetics, politics, and power alongside questions of memory, imagination, and embodiment. Working outward from this suggestive confluence, I investigate contemporary practices of commemorative composition that resituate elements of the historical archive, and so turn sonic rubble into ruin. Using Mary Kouyoumdjian's 2014 composition Bombs of Beirut as an example, I consider how the composer uses witness testimony and archival recordings of wartime sounds from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) to first construct, and then destroy, a version of the city of Beirut. In so doing, she engages in what Marianne Hirsch would call a ‘postmemorial act’ that reconfigures the relationships between physical, mental, and social spaces. The resulting palimpsest of meanings not only offers an important contemplative space for approaching the past but also suggests intriguing futures for the musical art of the ruin.
1 Murrow's recordings can be heard on the BBC at www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/ww2/blitz; and on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za2Lus0CkRc (accessed 9 November 2021). See also Davis, Elmer, This is London (London: Cassell, 1941), 196–7Google Scholar.
2 Archibald MacLeish, speech given at the Waldorf-Astoria on 2 December 1941, quoted in John K. Hutchens, ‘Radio Notebook’, New York Times, 7 December 1941, 16.
3 The concept of the earwitness has been further developed by Carolyn Birdsall in ‘Earwitnessing: Sound Memories of the Nazi Period’, in Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dyck (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2009).
4 For more on secondary witnessing, see Langer, Lawrence, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)Google Scholar and LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For an exploration of the composer as potential secondary witness, see Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Mbembe, Achille, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, trans. Inggs, Judith, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Hamilton, Carolyn et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 20Google Scholar.
6 Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16Google Scholar. I have discussed the intersection of performance, archive, and repertoire at greater length elsewhere. See Phillips-Hutton, Ariana, ‘Performing the South African Archive in REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony’, Twentieth-Century Music 15/2 (2018)Google Scholar.
7 Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22Google Scholar.
8 Hirsch, Family Frames, 245.
9 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 128.
10 A live recording from 2014 is available on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/marykouyoumdjian/bombs-of-beirut-kronos-quartet-live-at-the-greene-space (accessed 9 November 2021).
11 Mary Kouyoumdjian, interview with Anthony Joseph Lanman, One Track Podcast #95, S8E7, http://1trackpodcast.com/1-track-contemporary-classical-podcast-s8e7-mary-kouyoumdjian/ (accessed 30 November 2021).
12 There is a resonance here with Svetlana Boym's theorization of nostalgia as a rejection of modernity's unidirectional conception of time in her The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
13 Music of Armenia, ‘Mary Kouyoumdjian: “Bombs of Beirut”’, Music of Armenia (blog), 24 January 2014, http://musicofarmenia.com/mary-kouyoumdjian-bombs-beirut.
14 George Hall, ‘Kronos Quartet Review: Sonic Slinkys and Exploding Bombs’, The Guardian, 10 May 2016, www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/10/kronos-quartet-review-barbican-london.
15 The programme for the Kronos Quartet's performance of Bombs of Beirut on 7 February 2015 is available at https://hancher.uiowa.edu/kronos (accessed 9 November 2021).
16 Kouyoumdjian, interview with Lanman, http://1trackpodcast.com/1-track-contemporary-classical-podcast-s8e7-mary-kouyoumdjian/ (accessed 30 November 2021).
17 Music of Armenia, ‘Mary Kouyoumdjian: “Bombs of Beirut”’.
18 Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, ‘The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 63/1 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Kouyoumdjian, interview with Lanman, http://1trackpodcast.com/1-track-contemporary-classical-podcast-s8e7-mary-kouyoumdjian/ (accessed November 30, 2021).
20 The layers here are manifold: as Kouyoumdjian notes in her discussion of the song cycle Ervoom Em (I am Burning), casualties of the August 2020 blast included members of her own family, www.marykouyoumdjian.com/projects.html (accessed 9 November 2021).
21 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2013), 18Google Scholar.
22 Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, Cultural Anthropology 23/2 (May 2008), 195CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Huyssen, Andreas, ‘Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity’, in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Hell, Julia and Schönle, Andreas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 18Google Scholar. See also Doss, Erika, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cizmic, Maria, ‘Music of Disruption: Collage and Fragmentation as an Expression of Trauma in Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Piano and Strings’, in Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.