The Syrian pianist Aeham Ahmad (b. 1988) opens his memoir with a reflection on the aesthetics of destruction:
A photo can never really tell you what happened before or what came after. Like that picture of me sitting at a piano, singing a song amid the rubble of my neighborhood. It was reprinted by newspapers all over the world, and some people said it's one of the photos that will help us remember the Syrian Civil War. An image larger than war. But when I think back to that moment, I think of another image, superimposed on all the rest, an image of three birds.Footnote 1
His words capture the double bind of ruin images: by aestheticizing debris, a photograph can mobilize a global audience, bringing awareness to a catastrophe that might otherwise be ignored. In 2015, Ahmad's performances in the streets of war-torn Yarmouk – his neighborhood in Damascus – went viral, earning him the moniker ‘The Pianist from Syria’. While Ahmad's global reputation is now inextricably linked to the Syrian Civil War, he wrote his memoir to tell a different story of his homeland, one in which music remains central to his personal and familial identity.
The photograph of Ahmad performing in the rubbled streets of Yarmouk fits within a larger visual trope of ruination. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, aestheticized scenes of destruction, or ruins, have become iconic.Footnote 2 Captured in these images is devastation that results from drastically different causes – from the 2010 ruins of post-earthquake Haiti, to the charred remains of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers after they collapsed in September 2001; from the smoking debris of Dresden's old city centre after it was firebombed in the final months of the Second World War, to the broken glass of store windows after peaceful protests in support of Black Lives Matter throughout the summer of 2020. And yet, each scene has visual parallels, which are often heightened in ruin photography. These parallels become a shared set of visual codes, which can be consciously evoked by those who lived (and live) through these crises. Using the framework of previous catastrophes is one means survivors have for processing the effects of urban destruction. Ahmad's own career is a case in point: in 2018, he performed for children in Hiroshima, as part of a documentary recorded by a Japanese television station about communities recovering from global disaster.Footnote 3
In the traumatic aftermath of destruction, music also becomes a framework – a set of tropes and practices that can transform a scene of chaos into a space of aesthetic contemplation. Ahmad described music as ‘[his] revolution’ after his performances in the rubble of Damascus catapulted him to global fame. Since immigrating to Germany in 2015, he has continued to juxtapose music with scenes from war-torn cityscapes to raise awareness and funds for fellow refugees. But for his international reputation, Ahmad's performances are a highly personal means of responding to catastrophe: a way to reconnect with his family and friends who remain in Damascus (sometimes by even setting their words to music), as he implores his audience to bear witness to a scene of destruction thousands of miles away.Footnote 4 Other artists have used a similar ruin code to respond to traumatic events as they unfold around them. In June 2020, for example, Sudanese-American hip hop artist Dua Saleh released ‘Body Cast’ to ‘lend my support to people mobilising in the city’ in the wake of George Floyd's murder.Footnote 5 The song's music video featured shots of boarded-up facades cross-cut with Saleh walking through a railway ruinscape. In both of these recent examples, creating music in ruins becomes a personal outlet for trauma and a mechanism for political advocacy.
Though this forum focuses on musical practices that have arisen in the aftermath of urban catastrophes since the twentieth century, one of the central reasons why Ahmad's and Saleh's musical responses resonate on personal and political levels is their evocation of historical ruin tropes, connecting them to musical performances that have taken place in ruined landscapes for centuries. From the city laments of the Ancient world to the contemporary repurposing of war-torn buildings for concerts and spontaneous music making in the Middle East, there are countless examples of musical life happening amid scenes of urban catastrophe. Rubblescapes have reshaped the sound of cities wrought by devastation, profoundly altering the ways in which music is transmitted, received, and composed. Moreover, musical practices have not only continued in spite of the destruction but have also been propelled by its aftermath.
This forum presents both a theory of musical rubble and specific examples of rubble music making that differ by time period and geography as well as by the race, gender, and class of the actors involved. Several overarching questions animate our inquiry. First and foremost: why is music repeatedly performed in situations of precarity, when both performers and audiences are faced with concerns about their survival? Who is empowered to reclaim this debris; to make music in it; to aestheticize the jagged edges of trauma, injustice, and revolution? How do musical practices complement, augment, or perhaps contradict other artistic activities taking place within these desecrated spaces? How might we productively analyse this repertoire produced under trying circumstances in a way that is both intellectually rigorous yet ethically sound? By focusing on the effects of destruction as they manifest in urban musical practices, we examine the contradictory and sometimes morally questionable ways in which music functions in the aftermath of urban trauma.
Rubble, ruin, and ruination
In the past two decades, scholars and artists across the humanities and social sciences have made the study of ruined spaces central to their analyses of painting, film, photography, literature, and architecture.Footnote 6 One of the main approaches that has emerged in ruin studies is the distinction between rubble – the material destruction itself – and ruin – the aestheticization of debris.Footnote 7 The aesthetic transformation of the former into the latter is epitomized by the German Romantic tradition, where ruins became sites of distant contemplation. In Caspar David Friedrich's ruin paintings, for example, abandoned churches are cast against mysterious shadows, becoming sublime through their allusions and incompleteness.Footnote 8 We can see a direct line from this staging of aesthetic contemplation in the nineteenth century to the ruin concerts that took place across German cities in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In these settings the ruin aesthetic served as a mechanism of avoidance, as German audiences avoided their own culpability for the crimes of the Third Reich.Footnote 9
Does this aesthetic paradigm have anything left to offer our present? For anthropologist Ann Stoler, the answer is a resounding no. In her study of debris, she notes that romantic ruin gazing often ignores spaces of imperial destruction.Footnote 10 Her work explicitly cuts against the ‘wistful gaze of imperial nostalgia’ to draw attention to the violence that ruins inflict on those who live within these spaces of decay.Footnote 11 More significantly, she argues that ruins are mechanism of state power: ‘ruins are not just found, they are made. They become repositories of public knowledge and new concentrations of public declaration’. Many sites that have been destroyed by imperial forces are not labelled ruins or even rubble at all – they remain unmarked, unmentioned, and ignored in public discourse.Footnote 12 Gastón Gordillo similarly critiques the romantic rubble trope as a power mechanism that renders spaces touristic and uninhabitable. In his study of damaged spaces in northern Argentina, he argues that rubble is a creation of the Western heritage industry – a way to abstract the ruins of colonialism and freeze them in time to capitalize on the appeal of the ruin aesthetic. The heritage industry thus uses ruins to keep this region in the grip of colonial power, in a process that obscures the ways that local communities in Argentina continue to live in, and transform, damaged spaces.Footnote 13 These studies draw attention to the colonial legacies of ruin aesthetics by focusing on the visual debris of oppressive empires and their aftermaths. They redirect our attention towards the imperial power structures that directly cause or enhance the devastation of nuclear and natural disasters, war, and industrial decay.
And yet, the musical examples discussed in this forum demonstrate how the lure of romantic ruins remains a key mode for responding to disaster and raising political awareness in its aftermath.Footnote 14 Our forum thus combines awareness of the causes of ruination, which are central to post-colonial critiques of ruin gazing, while interrogating the continued appeal of the romantic ruin across a range of genres and geographic contexts. Thus, we might imagine Caspar David Friedrich's rubble flâneur in the twenty-first century, wandering through the industrial spaces of Dua Saleh's music video. The overlay of historical and contemporary ruins – reinforced by Saleh's music – is both arresting and a call to action. Indeed, Saleh repurposes the trope to transform and reclaim a space that might otherwise be dismissed or derided in the public eye. Rather than an act of nostalgic ruin gazing (à la Svetlana Boym),Footnote 15 contemporary examples of the rubble arts move their audience beyond aesthetics, prompting us to ask whether these ruins offer commentary on a destroyed tradition or community, and perhaps, with revised framing, if they can become a harbinger of hope for the future.
Musical rubble and ruins
Scholars of rubble and ruination have focused largely on ruin as a visual medium. Our forum's authors approach these topics through hearing and listening, which yields new insights into ruin aesthetics. Musical ruin practices – which can include performances at sites of destruction, works that evoke a rubbled space within a composition, or a combination of these elements – distort the temporality of destruction. The transformation from rubble into ruins takes place in real time through the act of musical creation or performance and can be undone when this process ends. Musical responses to destruction can similarly play with a musician's (and an audience's) sense of proximity and distance to the site of destruction – distance being a central theme for romantic ruin artists. When living in Yarmouk, for example, Ahmad created a metaphorical space between the rubble around him through his performances. He made proximate ruins distant through aestheticization. Conversely, when he performed in Germany after his immigration, his concerts brought his audiences closer to the distant rubblescapes of Syria, thousands of miles away. Musicians also have their own ruin tropes – whether textual, harmonic, recorded palimpsests, genres, or quotations – that can layer scenes and memories of urban destruction. This layering can extend across generations, as several of the articles in this forum will demonstrate.
Musical practices expose the ethical complexities inherent in artistic responses to ruins – an exposure that happens because musical performances are affectively charged yet semantically malleable. Composers, performers, and audiences can often romanticize destruction by channelling the listener's attention towards the effects rather than the causes of catastrophe. Our contributors present different ways of understanding and analysing the enduring appeal of this transformation, examining how music mediates questions of privilege and community across a range of geographical and political contexts. In doing so, each author draws attention to key features of the rubble arts that often go overlooked when the focus is on the purely visual dimension of ruins – particularly concerning temporality and cultural trauma. Both Ahmad and Saleh, for example, use music to transform rubble into ruins in real time. It is this temporal transformation that is essential for understanding how music lends a unique perspective to the study of ruins.
When we hone in on individual artists and communities, a focus on rubble and ruin can contribute to the burgeoning field of music and trauma.Footnote 16 But for these works’ therapeutic values, there are also examples of how ruin codes – musical and visual – have been abused for political and nefarious ends. Aestheticizing debris, for example, can be used to turn an audience's attention away from the complex causes of catastrophe towards its effects, to elicit feigned sympathy for what Susan Sontag has famously called ‘the pain of others’, or worse, to prioritize material damage over human suffering.Footnote 17 To analyse these juxtapositions, we need to recognize the desire to make sense of catastrophe through this artistic transformation, while accounting for the political potential for both advocacy and abuse. The articles that follow interrogate this double bind in catastrophes dating from second-century Jerusalem to contemporary Port-au-Prince. We take the juxtaposition of romantic ruins and imperial ruination, discussed previously, as a framework for analysing musical responses to these urban catastrophes.
We have divided the forum into two distinct strands of ruin music making: living in ruins and living with ruins. These categories foreground the temporal manipulations that are central to musical ruin practices, allowing us to analyse both the immediate and the lingering effects of urban catastrophes on sonic experience. Though these strands are not mutually exclusive, they help to illuminate some of the social and economic factors that complicate, enhance, and shape the music produced in and about these rubbled soundscapes.
Living in ruins
We use the rubric ‘living in ruins’ to analyse the ways in which individuals and communities experience everyday life amid the physical scars of urban catastrophe. Under such conditions, musical life is reshaped by rubble in ways both embodied and material, becoming a response to the damaged environment. In writing about the aftermath of the Algerian War, Frantz Fanon noted the intractable presence of ‘seeds of decay’ sown by the French colonizers – from the rubble of the war-torn landscape to the limited opportunities available to the Algerian community.Footnote 18 In these environments, music is one mode through which suppressed peoples can speak truth to power.
Lauren Eldridge Stewart's article examines the complicated legacies of classical music camps in Haiti. The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake continue to reverberate throughout the country's cultural landscape, especially within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. Performers and auditors of classical music in Haiti have witnessed major political upheavals in the past that have impacted the practice of this genre – notably the effects of dictatorships and occupations – but the physical shifting of tectonic plates have necessitated a critical renegotiation of the staging of summer music camps. Despite the ever-increasing competition for resources, camp directors, staff, and students have persisted in gathering annually to practise and perform, thus refusing to acquiesce to the narrative of failure most commonly ascribed to the state. Instead, they repurpose the tropes of the rubble-to-ruin transformation in the service of representing and redefining Haiti for themselves – as a ruined, yet resilient monument to liberty.
Jessica A. Schwartz's contribution focuses on the relationship between the United States and Marshall Islands, where the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958. She examines the politics of gendered vocal decay through the ruined singing voices of the female Marshallese population. By hearing how musicians live in post-catastrophic landscapes, with the scars that impact their bodies and voices, Schwartz explores the sonic and material seeds of decay lingering in these former imperial soundscapes.
The actors at the heart of Eldridge Stewart's and Schwartz's examples also transform destroyed landscapes into stages for political battles surrounding reconstruction and rebuilding. Communities must not only work through the psychological aftermath of the traumatic event but also decide what is to be done with the rubble. This is a challenge that can be observed across global rubblescapes, especially those that are consciously ignored by political elites. In writing about Japan's 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, Noriko Manabe notes that even naming the catastrophe was considered a political act. The word ‘Fukushima’ was avoided in Japan's public discourse in favour of ‘3.11’ so as not to stigmatize the Fukushima region or prioritize the nuclear disaster over the natural ones.Footnote 19 Manabe's work examines how Japanese musicians used protest songs to critique the state's support of nuclear power, sometimes by performing near the very nuclear facilities they are challenging.
In such fraught environments, musicians can turn to ruins and ruined objects to critique governmental policies and arts institutions, reusing destroyed spaces and items that make explicit their political agenda. Objects and physical spaces often elide in ruin music making, as the former becomes a synecdoche for the latter. Guillermo Galindo, for example, creates instruments from discarded objects found at the US-Mexico border, while Pedro Reyes's installation Disarm (2013) consists exclusively of musical instruments made from confiscated and repurposed firearms.Footnote 20 David Lang's Symphony for a Broken Orchestra (2017) is a commentary on the woeful state of arts funding in the Philadelphia public school system, composed for the district's dilapidated instruments in desperate need of repair.Footnote 21
Emily Richmond Pollock's contribution to this forum turns to a political environment where music is evoked as both a physical space and a metaphor for tradition. Her article considers the Stuttgart Opera House in the wake of National Socialism. As she examines the contested nature of post-war German rebuilding efforts, Richmond Pollock draws attention to the reconstructive politics around West German opera houses – a process that pitted tradition and renewal against one another. Across Germany, city officials made diverging decisions about the look and sound of opera: some houses were painstakingly rebuilt overtop the rubble of buildings destroyed in the air war, while others broke new ground musically and architecturally. Richmond Pollock's microhistory of partial reconstruction in Stuttgart examines the political efficacy of the ruin trope in post-1945 Germany, while drawing attention to the ethical slippages inherent in focusing on the effects, rather than the causes, of urban destruction. In different ways, then, these three articles demonstrate how music can be a type of sense making for those who live surrounded by material reminders of catastrophe. This sonic sense making can serve therapeutic and political ends simultaneously.
Living with ruins
While ruin studies often focus on the immediate aftermath of a destructive event, Eldridge Stewart, Schwartz, and Richmond Pollock each draw attention to the extended period of recovery from urban catastrophe – if recovery is even possible at all. The places they discuss are what historian Maria Tumarkin has called a ‘traumascape’ – a space irreparably marked by violence and its contested place in cultural memory. Tumarkin's term reminds us to assess the irrevocable transformations of spaces shaped by global catastrophes.Footnote 22 Our second rubric, ‘living with ruins’, considers the multi-generational impacts of rubble, focusing on ruined spaces that linger in the memories of individuals and communities, as they use music to renegotiate their relationship to traumatic spaces long after the physical debris has been cleared. These essays examine the sonic traumascapes of war-torn Europe and the Middle East, concluding with a final travelogue that links these spaces from 1945 to the present.
Music scholars have examined trauma's complex relationship to sound in a variety of ruined landscapes, including (but not limited to) Martin Daughtry's work on belliphonic experiences in the Iraq War; Maria Cizmic's writing about musical expressions of Eastern-European pain; Alexander Cannon's exploration of ‘the musical ruin’ of traditional forms in contemporary Vietnamese music; Tala Jarjour's documentation of the rapidly disappearing Suryani community in Aleppo; and Rachel Beckles Willson's observations about the divergent European and Middle Eastern reception histories of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.Footnote 23 Our contributors draw attention to the personal effects of traumascapes, demonstrating how music becomes an inter-generational response to working through the lingering aftermath of catastrophe.
Amy Lynn Wlodarski approaches this topic from the perspective of an individual composer, focusing on the compositional sketches George Rochberg made as a young American soldier wandering through the decimated French countryside in the final months of the Second World War – sketches he did not return to until shortly before his death. Using Rochberg's war-inspired late works as an example, Wlodarski explores how reconstructive compositional processes became entangled with concepts of post-war humanism and trauma. In Wlodarski's reading, Rochberg creates musical analogues of rubble and ruin – associating the former (i.e., debris) with modernism and the latter (i.e., art) with his own aesthetic predilections, presented as a form of salvation. She analyses the anti-humanist proclivities of this narrative, even as it helped Rochberg process his long-suppressed experiences as a US infantryman in Saint-Lô, France.
Ariana Phillips-Hutton explores how traumatic events are commemorated across archival and performative boundaries, demonstrating how music serves as a particularly apt medium for bridging the gap between these two formats. In her analysis of Mary Kouyoumdjian's Bombs of Beirut (2014), a work the composer created from family sound recordings and interviews, Phillips-Hutton demonstrates how cityscapes evoke familial connections to become part of a process of secondary witnessing. In this context, transforming rubble into ruin becomes a commemorative act that marks both family history and global conflict.
Generational trauma also shapes the concluding article, Ruth HaCohen's ruins travelogue. She examines a series of musical recollections from war-torn cityscapes, connecting post-war geographies from Europe to the Middle East. Her familial narrative offers a musical counterpart to examples of ruin travel writing that flourish in post-war contexts,Footnote 24 often as a means for survivors to make sense of the debris. Through her article, HaCohen offers further insights into the imaginative transformations that music in rubble can induce for audiences, who were often witnesses of the wartime catastrophes memorialized in these musical works.
Music, rubble, and ruins: hearing the resonances of catastrophe
In his counter-theses on visual culture, W.J.T. Mitchell notes that ‘all media are mixed media’.Footnote 25 The articles that follow cut across lines of disciplinary inquiry, positioning music alongside the study of other artistic media. In doing so, they also connect areas of musicology that have previously been considered distinct, whether geographically, temporally, or conceptually. Just as the visual invites an exploration of the unseen, the auditory compels us to seek out the unheard. Our authors offer comparative examples of rubble music making that prompt readers to sit within the uneasy ethics that arise from performing and analysing artistic responses to catastrophe. Each example calls on us to listen differently to the sounds of decay, and in so doing, become entangled in the ethical conundrums that arise from listening to the aftermath of catastrophe. By exploring the unseen and unheard remnants of these ruinscapes – engaging with memory, gender, race, disability, and post-colonial theories as they relate to traumatic soundscapes – each author reminds us of the power and the limits of aestheticizing debris.
This forum thus offers readers diverse analyses of how people use music to engage with manmade and natural catastrophes. The examples that follow expose a common thread of transformation that takes place through musical practices. Yet while music can consistently turn rubble into ruin, there are always political constraints around who gets to make this transformation. By tracing the sound of music in and about ruins, our forum offers a timely reflection on the nature of post-catastrophic music making, proposing new directions for analysing the relationships between music, traumatic memory, and spaces of performance.Footnote 26
