Destroying the Imagined City

Abstract 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.