Mary Kouyoumdjian (born 1983)
Mary Kouyoumdjian was born in northern California where her Armenian parents relocated after escaping the Lebanese Civil War. She has an B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, an M.A. in Scoring for Film & Multimedia from New York University, and a D.M.A. and M.A. in composition from Columbia University.
Her website describes her like this:
MARY KOUYOUMDJIAN is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first generation Armenian-American and having come from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary, and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new. A strong believer in freedom of speech and the arts as an amplifier of expression, her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient individuals and field recordings of place to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.
Her 2014 composition Bombs of Beirut is characteristic of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s approach to music and testimony. This powerful and moving work is described on her website like this:
Lebanon, once the refuge where my grandparents and great-grandparents sought safety from the Armenian Genocide, became the dangerous home my parents and brother were forced to abandon during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). We often read stories and see images in the news about violent events in the Middle East, but we very rarely get to hear the perspective of an individual who lived through them. Inspired by loved ones who grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, it is my hope that Bombs of Beirut provides a sonic picture of what day-to-day life is like in a turbulent Middle East –– not filtered through the news and media, but through the real words of real people. The prerecorded backing track includes interviews with family and friends who shared their various experiences living in a time of war; it also presents sound documentation of bombings and attacks on civilians tape-recorded on an apartment balcony between 1976-1978.
Bombs of Beirut is performed by the Kronos Quartet, who commissioned the work. The three movements are titled “Before the War,” “The War,” and “After the War”: