Interview with Gascia Ouzounian, Associate Professor of Music
Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, Fellow in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project SONCITIES. She is the Academic Lead of the Performance Research Hub.
What are you working on at the moment?
Just today I'm finishing the first draft of a book which is called The Trembling City. It's about sound, urbanism, and mass violence. I look at the topic of the unsettled city, the city under pressure, and how we understand it through sound and listening. I'm looking at earwitness testimonies of war and genocide, at different kinds of historical and archival material, but also looking at what urbanists, architects, and urban planners are thinking about in relation to cities in states of ruin, and how planning itself is sometimes used as a harmful or violent mechanism to displace or harm urban communities. I'm looking at how cities are made and unmade in relation to violence, through the lens of sound and listening.
This sounds amazing. When you say ‘earwitness’, how does that survive in the archives?
In different ways. For example, one of the books that was very important for this project is called The Drone Eats With Me. It's a wartime diary of the 2014 war on Gaza by Israel. It's by Atef Abu Saif, an author who was an educator and journalist, writer and politician. It's a very sonic account: on almost every page of this diary of that 51-day war, there is a description of a sonic experience. It was also very much tied to space and architecture, which is important in relation to the city under attack. He's describing hearing the sounds of the warships, of bomb detonations, rockets, and exploding munitions—but also saying that he can't escape these sounds: he feels them transmitted through his building, through the architecture, through the furniture, through the walls, through the floors. He can also hear the drones which are constantly surveilling that territory. It's called 'The Drone Eats With Me' because he's never free of that drone sound. So, I try to think about what it means to inhabit the "dronesphere" (that’s Aroosa Kanwal’s term) as a listener and knowing that you are a target in that context, and what it means to inhabit a very severely degrading acoustic space.
I also look at what urban planners are saying about overbuilding and overcrowding in Gaza. Of course, that's before the current war, which has levelled much of that territory. I’m thinking about what it means when there's no more privacy of the home, when buildings are built so close that they're practically touching each other, and theorising how the city itself is weaponized through the transmission of loud, harmful sounds through the built environment, through the fabric of the city—how the city is weaponized through the transmission of sound. I'm also thinking about how militaries and nation-states use sound and vibration to enact a more subtle and elusive form of warfare, a type of violence that exceeds the definitions of how we understand violence in relation to international humanitarian law or noise pollution and things like that.
This is reminding me of a particular theatre piece – did you see A Knock on the Roof at the Royal Court?
I did not. Tell me about it?
I also did not get into London to see it! But I know it's a monologue about the ‘knock on the roof’, the dropping of smaller bombs on homes in Gaza as a warning that inhabitants have up to 15 minutes to get out before full-scale bombing occurs. The play is basically a woman rehearsing her process of fleeing her own home.
Thank you for letting me know about this. It sounds exactly like the kind of thing I'm thinking about, also in connection to the Holocaust. There are many survivors of the Holocaust who recount the horror of the doorbell or the knock at the door. I have a chapter on sound and spatial violence in the Warsaw Ghetto, a segregated, walled-in city-within-a-city where 400,000 European Jews were concentrated, and where many people went into hiding for months or even years. I ask what happens to listening itself when it becomes a way of continuously attuning to signals of immanent death—when listening is transformed into a site of violence and enduring trauma that, for many survivors, endures far beyond the violent events themselves have passed.
Perhaps relevant to this music studies-theatre studies connection, the next thing I wanted to ask about was where you see performance research or performance and research coming together across disciplines in Oxford?
I think the Performance Research Hub is a great forum to establish this over time. It's rooted in the work that you were all doing in the Performance Network (https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/reimagining-performance-network); we're building on that, and it will evolve in different ways as we move into the Schwarzman Centre. I see it evolving in a number of ways ways, particularly in the interdisciplinary context that is going to become much more prevalent once we're in the Schwarzman Centre, where many different faculties will be in the same space and interacting on a more everyday basis.
Performance research for me can encompass many different things. Already just within the Hub itself, in the Steering Committee, we've seen such a range of interests, from people doing community-oriented research which is performance based, or ethnographic research with performers, and research which speak to very difficult and challenging issues like human rights—as related to labour migration, for example, which is something Professor Samantha Sebastian is researching through the songs and voicing practices of Overseas Filipino Workers. It can also be very historical: animating classical texts through different kinds of performance-based research and through performance itself.
But of course, performance-based research can take so many forms. I'll give one example from a recent event we had with Elinor Frey, something that the Performance Research Hub, TORCH, and the Faculty of Music supported. She’s a cellist who specialises in music of the Baroque period for solo cello, and she was working with a musicologist, Nicholas Baragwanath (University of Nottingham), who decoded a system of spoken oral musical language, a solfeggio system from the eighteenth century, which we didn't have access to before he did this work. I saw them use this solfeggio system to bring to life eighteenth-century music in a new way; they were inventing variations for cello and an ensemble of musicians that didn't exist before they were doing it, by applying that particular solfeggio method. It was extremely complex music, very beautiful, but also remarkable that they could apply a musical code to create on the spot.
We now understand that music in a different way, and the performers are performing it in a different way through that interaction between history, theory, and performance. We will also analyse that music differently, since it emerges that we've been looking at that music in the wrong way: there have been centuries of thinking about it as a harmonic, vertical system of chordal progressions, whereas it's much more horizontal and melody-based. That upends how we think about music of that period. This is just one example of how an interaction between a performer and, in this case, a musicologist and theorist—through rigorous collaborative research—can be transformative to a field. That's what I hope we can nurture in terms of disciplinary crossings in performance research.
You've anticipated my next question! What's your dream for the future of performance research in Oxford?
My dream for performance research is that any kind of interdisciplinary work which involves some element of performance—whether that’s through studying performance, through enacting it, through critiquing it, through analysing it, through doing performance in new ways—can be supported, and putting people in touch with each other so that those networks are growing. I think that's really important; academic disciplines still tend to be quite siloed. So, putting performers and historians, classicists, musicologists, architects, literary theorists, technologists, people coming from X number of fields together so that they have a better understanding of what's happening in each other's fields. I think the best interdisciplinary research usually develops over a very long period of time, so I hope we can spark new and lasting connections. I hope we can fund and support research in that vein, by giving grants and supporting the actual performances or intellectual gatherings around performance-based research. And I hope that we'll be able to support a new academic programme in an interdisciplinary sphere, which might become a performance research MA, an interdisciplinary study and research programme.
Those are some of the immediate and long-term goals of the Hub. When I think about the kinds of spaces that we're going to have access to in the Schwarzman Centre—in particular the Black Box space and the auditorium, as well as the teaching spaces—you can already see there's going to be so much opportunity for interdisciplinary work at this juncture of performance research that will bring people into the work that academics and researchers are doing in a new way. We will also have opportunities for engaging with audiences, but also community engagement in a different way when we're in a space that we can really share and evolve and grow together.
Would you tell us about a performance that's special to you?
So many come to mind… One of them I saw years ago, about 10-12 years ago in Belfast, and I'll never forget it. I lived in Belfast for about 8 years. I was always very moved by the Irish traditional music that we would see and hear in the public sphere, especially the impromptu performances in pubs. Sometimes someone stands up and starts to sing and it's breathtaking and captivating. And it's a such a carrier of history and identity and, quite importantly, it’s a music that had been suppressed in Northern Ireland for so long, especially in the public domain. One day I heard a performance by three uilleann pipes players who were all members of the same family, a father and two sons, and they played for about 45 minutes with their eyes closed, in perfect rhythmic unison, some of the most beautiful and complex, ornate music I've ever heard. It was also through an instrument that you don't usually hear in a concert hall.
For me that was a really moving experience, just to see how connected they were to that music. You can't do that by only studying it. It has to be part of your everyday life. It has to be something you're doing in the home. It has to be something you heard when you were a child and that was sung to you as a baby. There's something just so beautiful about that: music as a carrier of history, of tradition. That might sound surprising coming from me, because I'm very interested in experimental music, new music, sound art, contemporary music—things that are more outside that sphere of traditional music—in terms of what I study and research. But I think there's something that's just undeniable about the connections that music can foster.
When we were hosting the Performance Research Hub's first networking event that Alex Coke beautifully organised and the Hub hosted, I think I said that, for me, music is so important because it's a humanising force. We understand our own humanity and each other's differently through it. And especially today, when we see so much pressure on both the humanities and humanistic ways of understanding the world—and also being together, togetherness, under pressure—I think music can be very a powerful tool of resistance.
