From the Fragments, We Make “Something Anew”: Assyrian resurgence in collaborative piano and visual-arts performance

This article focuses on the interdisciplinary, collaborative performance of two solo piano compositions written about my community, the stateless and transnational Assyrian people.[1] It forms part of my larger research project, ‘Performing Assyrian-ness’, exploring the transnational tensions in performances of a representational classical music genre aimed at sustaining endangered Assyrian heritage. I explore these tensions through my position as an Australian-born Assyrian pianist trained in the Western art music tradition. This article examines one aspect of my artistic practice, which responds to one key complexity in Performing Assyrian-ness: the colonial legacy of Western art music’s nineteenth-century nationalistic inclinations, its influence on early Assyrian compositions and its lingering echoes in today’s discourses and attempts to perform the style.[2]

The act of performance has continuously served as a crucial platform for cultural continuity in my Assyrian community. One example is the mid-1970s performances led by descendants of 1915 Assyrian Genocide survivors, who transformed their grandparents’ eyewitness lamentations into powerful protest songs on stage in the diaspora.[3] Counter-memory strategies such as these develop what historian Alda Benjamin calls ‘songs of defiance’.[4] Such practices, in response to repeated silencing, persecution and the threat of erasure, constitute a significant, persistent feature of Assyrian performance practice. More than a survival strategy, they demonstrate an expressive commitment to voicing and continuing Assyrian identity and culture. Over the past 15 years, Assyrians in the diaspora have expressed growing interest in cultivating an art music tradition capable of sustaining Assyrian identity, culture and language. Significantly, increasing existential fears due to continued persecution and displacement from the Assyrian homeland raise the stakes in these musical goals. Yet, as an Assyrian pianist who is regularly encouraged by my community to ‘elevate’ and ‘revive’ Assyrian music through this medium, I have long questioned my instrument’s culturally expressive capacity to ‘Perform Assyrian-ness’. This project analyses two Assyrian-themed piano compositions that I restaged and performed with commissioned visual art by Assyrian artist Dicky Bahto (US), drawing on Dylan Robinson’s decolonial reparative model for artistic practice and performer-scholar Paolo de Assis’s critical performance mode. Through this transnational collaboration, I examine how we critically engaged with these piano compositions, recentring them in a broader practice of the Assyrian use of performance as a space for enacting resilience, which I conceptualize as an Assyrian Resiliency Practice. I argue that these performances demonstrate a culturally grounded approach to Assyrian art music through recentring the solo compositions in a continuing performance practice of Assyrian Resiliency.

After providing a brief background about my community, I will present a detailed exploration of acts of resilience in Assyrian and Indigenous music more broadly before returning to Assyrian music to conceptualize what I deem an ‘Assyrian Resiliency Practice’. I then turn to Assyrian demonstrations of resilience in art music genres and contextualize my practice as an application of the Assyrian Resiliency Practice concept to art music. The final section provides a close examination of the two collaborative restagings of solo piano compositions: ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’ (1925), by George Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, and ‘At the Palace of Ashurbanipal’, by Ilya Demutsky and commissioned by Assyrian pianist Elena Akopova. Each performance explores resiliency and empowerment in different ways; both approaches illuminate the potential for these solo piano performances to transcend the instrument’s expressive limitations and colonial legacy and, instead, resonate through the continuing Assyrian Resiliency Practice. This artistic research contributes to the use of practice-based decolonial approaches to piano performance and provides a novel performance-based approach to understanding diasporic music-making in minoritized communities.

Context

The Assyrians, a stateless transnational people Indigenous to northern Mesopotamia,[5] have faced significant challenges in maintaining their cultural traditions and language, due to centuries of displacement and persecution in their homelands. Various events across history, culminating in the 1915 Sayfo genocide[6], 1933 Simele massacre,[7] and the forced assimilation into Arab nations via twentieth-century Arabization policies, parallel Assyrians’ experiences today in relation to the 2014 emergence of ISIS and the ‘Kurdification’ policies of the Kurdistan Regional Government. These events, along with unsuccessful attempts to establish a nation-state, have led to mass Assyrian migration to Western countries, leaving a dwindling population of Assyrians in their Indigenous homelands who experience heightened marginalization along social, economic and political lines.[8] These existential threats have given rise to fears from Assyrian community members and scholars that Assyrian culture and language will wither in diaspora. Assyrian cultural historian Eden Naby warns of the ‘dangers of not surviving into the twenty-second century as a cultural community’.[9] However, despite little institutional support or opportunities to seek justice, music and performance have provided Assyrians an alternative space for recognition and empowerment.

Music as a platform for resilience and empowerment

The concept of resilience regularly appears across the works of Assyrian ethnomusicologists. Ethnomusicologist Nadia Younan shows how the Šíḥāne song-dance genre establishes a space for stateless transnational Assyrians to ‘(re)live and (re)claim one’s history’ in light of a traumatic past.[10] [11]Traumatic events survive in Assyrian collective memories and are drawn upon in Assyrian performance as ‘materials’ for transformation through ‘affective aestheticization’.[12] Empowering sentiments of survival are primarily expressed through lyrics and dance gestures that embody Assyrian warrior ancestors, which are transferred kinaesthetically during dance into Assyrian collective memory.[13] While Younan suggests that British colonial motives may have exploited the warrior ancestor trope often conjured in Šíḥāne, Assyrians view the warrior as embodying their ‘spirit’ of resilience amid displacement and persecution.[14] Younan argues that through Šíḥāne, the trope becomes a reclaimed ‘re-appropriation’ of a colonially imposed archetype.[15]

Ethnomusicologist Rashel Pakbaz finds similar forms of affective transformation in liturgical genres, namely the Assyrian Church of the East’s fourth century Martyr’s Hymns. In this genre, Assyrians simultaneously commemorate the persecution of early Assyrian converts to Christianity with their contemporary experiences as a minoritized community today.[16] A unique feature of the genre is its combination of thematically sombre texts with ‘modalities that sound joyful’, which Pakbaz argues reframes ongoing persecution as hopefulness and perseverance despite ongoing persecution.[17] A similar kind of affective shift is described in Naures Atto’s account of intergenerational transformations of 1915 Safyo Genocide memories.[18] Due to fears of repercussions from the Turkish state, Assyrians were discouraged from seeking justice publicly, leading to grief permeating into everyday life.[19] Children’s lullabies soon contained eyewitness accounts of the genocide but, significantly, were later restaged as protest songs by younger generations in the diaspora, who maintained the genocide accounts but shifted to a more assertive tone to express the determination to move beyond trauma.[20] By recontextualizing historical experiences through diverse affective states, Assyrians sound out a commitment to resiliency in contemporary performance.

These linkages between history and affect, particularly as they are transformed through contemporary performance, appear frequently in the work of Indigenous artists around the globe. Aboriginal Australian researcher Clint Bracknell describes Indigenous-led archive repatriation in performance as an empowering act for reclaiming cultural heritage and challenging colonial attitudes towards Indigenous musics as ‘static’.[21] Wiradjuri musicologist Laura Case traces the use of the violin by Aboriginal people in the twentieth century, beginning as a ‘civilizing force’ by European colonists, but becoming ‘a means for powerful cultural continuation’ for Aboriginal people.[22] Wolastoq tenor Jeremy Dutcher transforms Western art music performance practices using Indigenous logics to reclaim colonial archival recordings in his own terms.[23] Treating canon with the logics that shape his community’s intergenerational teaching practices, Dutcher’s performance approach transforms Western art music to simultaneously speak to his ancestors who sound through the archival recordings whilst speaking back to salvage ethnographers as a testimony of continuing, living Indigenous culture.[24] Like Assyrians, these communities use contemporary performance as a space to articulate Indigenous identities against colonial institutions. Notions of the past, present and future echo across these expressions of resilience, often occurring after or in response to difficult periods of fragmentation. As Hilary N. Weaver writes about Indigenous Resilience, ‘the hard life experiences that we have can be transformed, just as composting food scraps results in the creation of nourishing soil’.[25]

These demonstrations of resilience in performance bring to light emergent forms of agency and positive transformation that Xwélmexw artist, curator and writer Dylan Robinson describes as a ‘resurgence’.[26] Similarly, historian Sargon Donabed coins the phrase ‘persistent perseverance’ to describe waves of Assyrian resurgence and demonstrations of agency despite discrimination, particularly in carving out new spaces for recognition and empowerment in the context of socio-political exclusion and prejudice in the Middle East.[27] Significantly, Donabed highlights artistic mediums as a vital space that Assyrians use to ‘learn the ways of the past, and reinvent them in the foreseeable future’.[28] Across the above demonstrations of agency, survival and perseverance, resurgences emerge through the use of performance by minoritized voices, who transform traumatic memories with an array of creative choices relating to affective states.

Defining an Assyrian Resiliency Practice

The examples of resurgence across Assyrian song-dance genres, hymns, lullabies, or protest songs constitute what I term an ‘Assyrian Resiliency Practice’. I define this as an Assyrian performance practice that employs artistic, culturally affirming actions in response to the threat of cultural erasure, whether institutionalized (e.g., genocide) or in the collateral effects of displacement (e.g., the loss of language and culture). A central, grounding tenet of this practice is the voice, which I define as encompassing vocalized sound (e.g. singing, Assyrian language lyrics, and idiomatic representations of the voice) and its broader figurative role in Assyrian music performance. The voice represents the agency of Assyrian performers, emerging through their creative choices to articulate an Indigenous identity against colonial structures, and transforming meaning through various affective states. It is both what leads to and emerges as a resurgence in performance. Here, I draw on Younan’s articulation of ‘affective aestheticization’ in the Assyrian Šíḥāne song-dance genre – ‘the materials for, and the (re)construction of, collective memories may result from traumatic experiences but through affective aestheticization have the potential to represent the resilience of a community, including the Assyrians, who choose to use their past for present purposes’.[29] Overall, this practice unfolds through performance, where various strategies are reassembled, and existing strategies are chosen and reworked in new ways.

Processes of reassembly within the Assyrian Resiliency Practice can be understood using the sociological concept of motility, which relates to an individual or group’s use of available tools in the context of mobility or, in the case of globally dispersed Assyrians, migration.[30] Its application in ethnomusicology has brought a new dimension to understanding the role of music in transnational movements of people, through illuminating the factors that shape music’s capacity for transformation in new contexts.[31] Its focus on the choices and agency of individuals and groups makes way for a more empowering perspective of the music of displaced people. Motility scholars outline three main components of this concept: access, skill, and appropriation.[32] Access can be defined as the possibilities offered within a particular context, while skill defines one’s ability to execute.[33] Both access and skill are transformed through the process of appropriation by people who ‘consider, deem appropriate and select specific options’ to achieve their goals through a grounding of their values.[34] To illuminate the concept of motility, I turn to a musical example of resurgence and perseverance amongst the Assyrian community.

Not long after the 1933 Simele massacre, Assyrian families were resettled to a new military base in Habbaniya, Iraq. It was here that, despite a severe period of trauma, loss, and betrayal by the Iraqi government, Assyrians developed a new genre of music that continues to be a popular style today. As a result of the RAF’s presence and their Iraqi Military force, known colloquially as the Assyrian Levies, Assyrians had increased access to and were trained in marching band instruments, alongside saxophone, violin and drum kit.[35] Assyrian levies then shared these new skills amongst their community, teaching Assyrians their instruments and forming new bands, transforming popular Western dance tunes through Assyrian language translation.[36] In these new bands, singers performed diverse setlists featuring song-dance genres like Šíḥāne alongside Assyrian language translations of popular foxtrot, waltz and samba songs. Although a new and influential style had just developed amongst Habbaniyan Assyrians, the Zúrnā and Dāḅúlā practice did not cease.[37] Instead, their creative appropriations of available tools in Habbaniya – colonial marching band instruments – produced new expressions of Assyrian-ness that provided joy and respite after a traumatic recent past.

I consider this to reflect the process and principles of the Assyrian Resiliency Practice. New materials, such as Western instruments, songs, and dances from Latin America, are accessed and adopted alongside existing practices, like zúrnā-dāḅúlā accompanied dance. These materials are reassembled and transformed in this process, birthing new, reimagined forms and genres while continuing previous traditions. Assyrian voices lead this resurgence, sounding the Assyrian language in all its recognized forms and new adaptations.

Art music discourse and resiliency lineages

Increasingly, transnational discourses across various parts of my community reveal a desire to cultivate a representational musical genre that maintains and communicates Assyrian heritage on an international stage, hoping to bring awareness to our plight and ongoing marginalization. Different perspectives exist regarding what Assyrian musical styles are, how they should be performed, and what version of Assyrian-ness they should relay. However, these perspectives also share some desired characteristics. These mainly include acoustic performance, a ‘concert atmosphere’, and an emphasis on music ‘for the ears’ rather than ‘for the feet’.[38] Transnational discourses also position both approaches in opposition to Assyrian dance bands, which perform regularly at Assyrian weddings and parties and resemble the bands that emerged in Habbaniya. But how do community and scholarly discourse intersect with diverse experiences in performance, mainly where training in Western artistic practices is concerned? As an Australian-born Assyrian pianist, this persistent tension has marked my journey from childhood to academic fieldwork. On the one hand, I share my interest with the community in ‘elevating’ Assyrian music to create new and exciting performances. On the other, I am critically aware of how this discourse around ‘elevation’ – often entwined with the colonial roots of Western art music – intersects with and challenges our conceptions of cultural continuity. The act of performance brings a unique insight into these tensions in ways that community discourses or academic research cannot fully capture.

Performing Assyrian-ness in art music is a complex process, largely due to the community’s transnational nature, diverse cultural expressions, and insufficient resources. Since community resources and funds raised in the diaspora usually support ongoing arrivals of refugees, cultural production is mainly individually funded.[39] Fundraising concerts across Australia, Europe, and the US, such as the Assyrian Aid Society US Chapter’s Mesopotamian Night, have been devised to address both activities. Staged performances largely adopt the European concert hall tradition, featuring Assyrian singers accompanied by orchestras including Middle Eastern and Western instruments. These concerts demonstrate a kind of motility, which Naby says has ‘revived’ and ‘promoted the expansion of Assyrian entertainment’, composition and performance.[40] However, tensions in the discourse around compositional and staging methods reveal competing sets of Assyrian cultural politics. In a 2010 review of the US Mesopotamian Night, the Assyrian music critic and archivist Abboud Zeitoune wished to hear more ‘Assyrian’ roots in the programme, suggesting that the concert’s music arranger should replace the programme’s European influences with ‘Assyrian-oriental elements’.[41] The programme featured Western orchestral arrangements of Assyrian hymns and works by twentieth-century Eastern Assyrian composers such as William Daniel and Paulus Khofri, who trained in European conservatories and produced works that combine nineteenth-century European nationalistic composition with Assyrian music and Middle Eastern compositional techniques. Though Zeitoune praised these compositions, he suggested programming works by Western Assyrian composers Nouri Iskandar and Gabriel Asa’ad instead, which he believed were more rooted in ancient Assyrian music. Zeitoune’s position is that since ‘oriental’ music more broadly has its ‘roots in ancient Mesopotamia’, it is more suitable for cultural continuity purposes.[42] A central difference between these works and those by Daniel and Khofri is the increased presence of modal writing (or microtonality) and a Middle Eastern approach to instrumentation and arrangement.[43] While it would be too simplistic to reduce the differences in this discourse to binary oppositions between Eastern and Western Assyrian perspectives, it is worth examining the distinct contexts of the leading composers across the style, each representing diverse lineages of resiliency practices.[44]

Assyrian ethnomusicologist Rashel Pakbaz describes William Daniel’s experiences as a 1915 Genocide survivor as the impetus for his compositions, written in a style she terms ‘Mesopotamian Art music’. She describes the aims of this style as the ‘cultural communication, promotion, and protection’ of Assyrian heritage.[45] Born in Iran but spending the second half of his life in the US, Daniel became an important nationalistic figure amongst Assyrians, establishing choirs across Chicago and California. After witnessing the Ottoman Empire’s disillusion and resulting formation of modern-nation states, it was no surprise that Daniel found inspiration in twentieth-century nationalistic composition, which promised a musical framework for defining an Assyrian national identity. He drew specifically from the music of Assyrian mountain villages in Hakkari (southeast Turkey), which he believed had resisted ‘mixed colouring’ due to their geographical isolation from neighbouring Arab, Kurdish and Turkish communities.[46] This music inspired Daniel’s melodies, which he arranged in piano-vocal compositions with functional harmonies and Western duet styles.[47] Considering Daniel’s identity as an Assyrian genocide survivor and his nationalistic career, his European-influenced compositional approach could be viewed as an artistic strategy for Assyrian recognition by adopting a high-brow musical form commonly associated with social elevation in Western contexts.

Like William Daniel, Syrian-born musicologist and composer Nouri Iskandar was driven by a desire to promote his community’s heritage amidst colonial practices of erasure in the Middle East. Widely known across the Middle East for his pioneering work in ‘serious’ Syrian music and Syriac chant, Iskandar spent his artistic career drawing linkages between contemporary Syrian music and the longstanding practice maintained by Syriac-language communities since ancient times.[48] Iskandar was born just six years after the seminal 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music, where an intersection of Arab nationalism and Western Orientalism resulted in key decision-makers sidelining the musical cultures of non-Arab Indigenous communities like the Assyrians.[49] This backdrop was formative for Iskandar’s compositional approach – a style shaped by his studies in music pedagogy and Arab and European classical music – which he strove to develop further by experimenting with modal polyphony. Iskandar honed these skills in his compositions to counter Arab hegemonic narratives – for example in his 1995 work, ‘Love Dialogue’, for large-scale choir and Middle Eastern orchestra, where he drew sonic parallels through his juxtaposition of Syriac hymn with Arabic Islamic chant to highlight the shared cultural histories between these groups.

Though differing in their philosophies, Daniel’s and Iskandar’s approaches to art music each aimed to articulate a distinct Indigenous identity against and through transformations of colonial framings. These works are performed on international stages to diverse audiences with the hopes of communicating, promoting and preserving Assyrian heritage. However, when performed transnationally, performers of this tradition face several challenges that intersect with diverse Assyrian and global audience expectations (or perceptions of authenticity) and the colonial residues of nationalism and orientalism within the concert hall tradition. This raises questions about the effectiveness of art music as a cultural resiliency tool or its capacity to engage in the Assyrian Resiliency Practice. The critiques of Mesopotamian Night by Zeitoune in 2010 echo the tensions I navigated in my fieldwork, where disagreements regarding differing choices in language dialect, arrangement, and a lack of cultural resources arose during performance. Through my conversations with Western classically trained musicians throughout the Assyrian diaspora, a common sentiment emerged – a sense of limitation in their performances resulting from their Western training or Western notions of cultural authenticity and difficulty accessing Assyrian musical resources which they sought to maintain sonic connections to their ancestral homeland.

I, too, grappled with the confinement of cultural expression in Assyrian art music, particularly when I began performing at Mesopotamian Night concerts in Australia. While piano-vocal arrangements like Daniel’s provided plenty of options for accompaniment, finding materials for AAS’ request that I perform a 15-minute programme of short, engaging Assyrian piano music with nostalgic melodies was far more complicated. First, there is little Assyrian music for solo acoustic piano due to its mechanical barriers that make it unpopular amongst Assyrian musicians.[50] Second, while I knew of Assyrian-themed orientalist compositions for the piano, I was reluctant to perform them. I was critical of and felt entrapped by the hierarchical separation of artistic roles between composers and performers common to Western art music. I disagreed with traditional views that limit performers’ creative agency and expect faithful performances of the composer’s work, especially if it dictated that I adhere to the composer’s Assyrian-themed orientalist narratives.

With very little solo repertoire to draw from and a lack of tools to break free, I began to question exactly what and how much my artistic voice could achieve in solo piano performance: Given the significance of the voice to the Assyrian Resiliency Practice, to what extent can I reconcile the expressive challenges posed by the acoustic piano within an Assyrian musical context? As an Assyrian pianist, how can I engage with these narratives in performance and recentre these solo compositions in a broader Assyrian Resiliency Practice? How can performers experience a resurgence in art music through Assyrian resilience practice?

First, it is worth exploring briefly the complexities presented by the acoustic piano in Assyrian performances and the contention surrounding its digital counterpart – the ‘org’ synthesizer, which features significantly in Assyrian pop music. The use of the acoustic piano in Assyrian music is confined mainly to its equally tempered keyboard and percussive mechanism, limiting the expressive capabilities and microtonality present in Assyrian vocal performance. In contrast, the ‘org’ synthesizer keyboard is favoured by Assyrian musicians who regularly perform at weddings due to its versatility, portability, microtonal abilities and Middle Eastern sounds. Interestingly, the desire for acoustic performance amongst Assyrians concerned with cultural production is often raised in opposition to synthesiser instruments like the org, which they believe has been detrimental to the ‘elevation’ of Assyrian music. Yet, without modifiers like pitch or modulation wheels, the acoustic piano is confined in its musical capability of representing the Assyrian voice alone.

Themes of confinement in Western classical music performance regularly appear across post- and decolonial commentary about the concert hall tradition and critique its rootedness in Western individualism, modernity and settler-colonial listening practices.[51] I suggest that contemporary Assyrian performances today intersect with Western audiences’ expectations of authenticity stemming from a legacy of reductive musical tropes and sonic markers of ‘otherness’ produced in nineteenth-century orientalist compositions depicting Assyrian themes.[52] Since most Assyrian-themed solo piano compositions are dominated by non-Assyrian composers, I argue that this gives way to appropriative compositions that transmit orientalist narratives and contribute to the misrepresentation of Assyrian people and culture. Consequently, this hinders community desires for cultural resilience within the genre. Nina Sun-Eidsheim’s conceptualization of ‘Phantom Genealogies’ provides a relevant perspective on this phenomenon.[53] She uses actor–network theory to trace the invisible forces ranging from listeners to scores that form a restrictive, racialized ‘timbral bracketing’ of African American vocalists and transmit these views back into public discourse. Like a phantom limb, these genealogies of timbre are invisible yet still cause pain and difficulty for their bearer. Similarly, appropriative compositions embed orientalist narratives about Assyrians and circulate them through performance, gradually shaping public understandings of Assyrian identity and culture over time.

While Daniel and Iskandar could experience a resurgence through their compositional practices, I suggest that the same case for performers, particularly in concert hall contexts, has been partially limited because Western-trained classical performers are not afforded the same creative agency that composers are. In addition, transnational Assyrians’ diverse cultural expressions complicate the nationalistic tendencies that assert a homogenous national identity in sonic form. Compounded by anxieties of cultural erasure and barriers to accessing Assyrian materials in performance, these tensions highlight the need for performance strategies that critically engage with Western art music whilst embracing its potential for creative use in the Assyrian Resiliency Practice. These alternatives could offer more resurgent approaches for performers that centre their creative voices in Assyrian art music. By exploring my artistic practice below, I offer my alternative for repositioning the acoustic modern piano within the Assyrian Resiliency Practice.

Contextualizing my practice through Assyrian Resiliency

My artistic practice seeks to confront challenges raised in the theoretical and contextual sections above by exploring modes of expressive storytelling outside conventional acoustic piano performance, bringing Assyrian voices to the forefront in re/telling cultural narratives. To do this, I combined ethnographic fieldwork virtually and in transnational locations with experimental performance, drawing on critical Indigenous and experimental performance methodologies and engaging in a transnational interdisciplinary collaboration with Assyrian artist, Dicky Bahto. The ethnographic fieldwork occurred across ‘Virtual Assyria’, Australia and the US to both plan and discuss collaborative work with Dicky, and to examine discourses amongst diverse Assyrian audiences about the genre, as well as audience responses to our restaged performances.

Critical studies of performance across diverse cultures have explored various ways that performers can transcend limitations in Western art music. In Dylan Robinson’s critique of what he coins ‘inclusionary performance’ (the exploitative use of Indigenous artists and musics in Western art music performance frameworks in the name of representational politics), he proposes a subversion of this dynamic by encouraging Indigenous researchers and artists alike to ‘draw on, strategically use, and reframe all the tools available to us’.[54] Much like the process involved in the Assyrian Resiliency Practice, Robinson’s proposal involves collecting, reassembling and subsequently reframing tools for a culturally affirming and resurgent experience in performance. Reassembly leading to resurgence is also understood by artistic researcher and pianist Paulo de Assis in his ‘emancipated performer’ concept.[55] He coins the ‘musical-work-as-assemblage’ as a new way to interrogate the ‘musical work’ concept, which he believes is central to any critique of Western art music performance practice. De Assis applies Nietzsche’s three modes of historical thinking to music performance, arguing that experimental performance specifically engages in a Nietzschean critical relationality to history, as opposed to mainstream performance approaches that ‘obey’ an authoritative text or the historically informed performance practice explorations of musical works through various historical sources and instruments.[56] In this critical performance mode, de Assis stresses the importance of reassembly through consistent research-based materials that critique and reconsider the ‘role of interpretation’. De Assis maintains that the impact of this critical mode ‘operates with and within the performance itself’ – like the affective transformations of traumatic histories and colonially imposed tropes in Younan’s analysis of Šíḥāne song-dance performance. My practice weaves this practice of affective transformation in Assyrian performances with Robinson’s and de Assis’s processes to explore how I can transcend my instrument’s limitations in art music performance.

I draw on Robinson’s reassembled use of event scores, typically associated with contemporary experimental performance groups like the Fluxus Quartet. Robinson uses event scores as a reparative model for restaging appropriative Western art music compositions that sever ties between Indigenous music and their ancestral lineages. One example involves commissioning an Inuit filmmaker to produce a work that ‘addresses contemporary Inuit realities and histories while providing a space for Inuit youth to advance resurgence’.[57] Performed with a composition appropriating Inuit dog-sledding practices, Robinson explains that film and its strategy avoid adherence to the themes presented in the original composition and instead prioritize its own internal logic and focus.

Reassembly and Resurgence: Multimedia performance collaboration with Dicky Bahto (US)

Inspired by Robinson’s use of film in his reparative model, my collaboration with Dicky explored how modes of expressive storytelling outside conventional art music performance could be engaged through affective aestheticization to recentre the Assyrian voice. Dicky is a US-based visual artist with Assyrian heritage who regularly works with photography, moving images and performance. Over the course of our collaboration, our exchange of creative perspectives and encounters with differences led to a period of growth for me in my musical practice. Dicky tells me his artistic influences lie in avant-garde filmmaking and experimental music practices.[58] Two key themes emerged from our discussions that resonate with the Assyrian Resiliency Practice I outlined earlier. First, Dicky told me about his extensive experience in lecturing about Soviet montage theory, which in his description, “can be understood in simple terms as the juxtaposition of two different images that have a new meaning arising from the conflict between them”.[59] For Dicky, the significance of the meaning isn’t found in the separate images themselves but rather in the new meaning that is created after putting one image next to another. This process charts out an assembly or reassembly of images that come together to form something new, like the reassembled instruments and sounds that emerged in Habbaniyah, or de Assis’s critical performance mode.

Secondly, Dicky treats his work as flexible forms rather than fixed outputs, which he takes apart and reassembles or reinterprets as material for different projects. He describes this as ‘taking apart and coming back together’, which recalls similar themes of fragmentation and resurgence described in Donabed’s conceptualization of Assyrian perseverance.[60] Many of the materials used in Dicky’s films for this project are derived from existing bodies of work that he has taken apart and reassembled differently through our various explorations of resilience. Specifically, he drew on materials from previous works that he created after witnessing the destruction by ISIS of cultural sites and artefacts in the Mosul Museum. Anthropological archaeologist Helen Malko described these attacks as a deliberate act of cultural genocide, occurring alongside the killing and torture of local Assyrian and Yezidi communities and aimed at erasing their cultural memory and identity from the region.[61] Similar erasures occurred across mainstream media reports about these events, which preferred ‘less political’ terms associated with national identity like ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Syrian Christians’ over Assyrian self-identification practices. Historian Sargon Donabed argues that this reinforces what he calls ‘academically accepted truisms’ that reduce Assyrians to their religious identity and distance them further from their historically rooted presence in these lands.[62]

Dicky also discussed feeling disconnected from his Assyrian heritage due to his family’s displacement from Turkey during the 1915 genocide but sought connection as a child through regular visits to the ancient Assyrian statues held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Witnessing ISIS’s destruction of Assyrian artefacts in Mosul was emotionally painful for Dicky, as they represented his only tangible connection to his heritage. However, the events also prompted Dicky to turn to his art, creating artworks that incorporated ancient imagery with self-portraits to reconnect and reclaim cultural memory. I argue that Dicky’s artistic practice embraces the processes of the Assyrian Resiliency practice – he reassembles fragmented pieces of Assyrian-ness in the context of displacement, genocide and erasure – by layering Assyrian faces over ancient Assyrian symbols, statues and artefacts. These reassemblies of materials and artistic tools like Soviet montage creatively transform traumatic memories into new meanings that make way for resurgences of Assyrian voices in stateless diaspora.

Throughout the project, I understood that my artistic practice also engaged in a similar kind of reassembly and resurgence. Various materials were gathered to inform my restagings, including my historical research, my study of scores and their performance histories, practice reflections, archival images, audio-visual recordings of my performances and Dicky’s existing artwork. These individual sources take on a transformed meaning when I juxtapose and reassemble them in performance, which, for me, sparked a resurgence in the form of expanded creative artistry and a recentring of Assyrian voices in performance. What follows is a close examination of the performances that engage with these methodologies, illustrating how they address the previously discussed challenges and contribute to a dynamic recentring of solo piano art music works through the continuing Assyrian Resiliency Practice.

Case Study Introduction: Performing Assyrian-ness Lecture Recital Film

This section examines two case studies that I call ‘performance responses’, based on two of three performances I presented in a 50-minute lecture-recital film produced in 2021–2022.[63] The project received funding from the NSW Government through CreateNSW and premiered online in November 2022.

The “Performing Assyrian-ness” lecture-recital wove together Assyrian stories of resilience drawn from my historical research with recontextualised performances of solo piano compositions featuring commissioned visual art and narrative framing that explored themes of resiliency. The film’s objectives were twofold. First, to reimagine ‘Assyrian-themed’ Western art music compositions for solo piano in order to transcend the piano’s expressive challenges and second, to connect with diverse audiences through engaging storytelling methods. I approached the performances as experiments in the Assyrian Resiliency Practice that offered an alternative approach to nationalistic understandings of sonic identity in this genre. Second, it aimed to spark conversations about the genre’s future among globally diverse but primarily transnational Assyrian audiences, whose view of the development of this genre I sought to understand. I treat the project as a reconsidered, accessible lecture-recital aired on YouTube, akin to a documentary. In turn, the online lecture-recital became a virtual site for ethnographic fieldwork, where audiences shared their responses in the YouTube video’s comment section.

The case studies below will begin with a brief overview of the original composition and its performance history to identify how they shaped the rationale for our collaborative restaging response. I will then describe the restaging process and its theoretical and practical implications.

Performance Response 1: (Ir)reconciling Assyrian Women Mourners

The link to the performance recording can be accessed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mCf2DoBEuw0TCY2iuSrzUWCq2NJyP6-E/view?usp=sharing. ©Lolita Emmanuel.

In 1925, Greek-Armenian spiritual leader and mystic George Gurdjieff composed ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’ with Ukrainian pianist Thomas de Hartmann. Originally a standalone work, it was later used to accompany Gurdjieff’s spiritual dance practice, which he named ‘Movements’. While Gurdjieff claims to have esoterically accessed and memorized the music for ‘Movements’ during his early-twentieth-century travels across Asia, Johanna Petsche suggests these claims are unlikely, given his lack of musical transcriptions.[64] Instead, she finds that Gurdjieff’s teachings and piano music hinged on Western orientalist interests and romanticized notions of the Middle East. His collaborator, de Hartmann, aimed to capture the ‘essence’ of these melodies through harmonizations reminiscent of nineteenth-century orientalist and Bartokian treatments of ‘folk’ musics.[65] Still, ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’ and its choreographed dance have become quite popular worldwide, particularly amongst followers of Western new-age spirituality. These ideas are embedded and circulated among the public in performances, recordings, online forums, and exchanges among contemporary followers of Gurdjieff’s practice, who continue to seek materials like his writings as authentic sources for guiding their practice. Some of these writings are full of sweeping generalizations about Assyrians, depicting Assyrians as cunning rogues and hot-tempered grudge-bearers.[66]

Considering this, I began the restaging process by examining the performance history of ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’ to understand how past performances and related discussions – through institutions or audiences – weave orientalist depictions into majoritarian narratives that shape global understandings of Assyrian-ness. Like Sun-Eidsheim’s ‘Phantom Genealogies’, these performances compound on the already conflated and misrepresented narratives of Assyrian-ness. Across various circulations of ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’, I discovered repeated orientalist symbols and narratives woven into claims and implications of authenticity, relying on Gurdjieff’s teachings and writings about Assyrians.

Some musical initiatives like The Gurdjieff Folk Instruments Ensemble, guided by Gurdjieff’s written sources, have sought to deliver what they describe as ‘ethnographically authentic’ performances of the Gurdjieff–Hartmann compositions.[67] The ensemble employs various instruments heard across southwest Asia, but their ethnographic methods remain unclear. Interestingly, Pestche suggests that Gurdjieff’s music for ‘Movements’ was likely more influenced by Armenian music than the diverse cultures he claims to represent.[68] Whether or not this is an orientalist conflation of musical expression, the ensemble’s use of ‘authentic traditional’ instruments as markers of authenticity would likely lead listeners to believe in its representation.[69]

This performance recording featured in an ABC Radio National podcast episode titled ‘Trapped: Yezidis and Christians in Iraq’, published as part of the series The Spirit of Things.[70] Airing in September 2014, just months after ISIS’ capture of Mosul, the podcast aimed to provide insight into particularly targeted Yezidi and Christian communities in Iraq. Between discussions about Christian and Yezidi religious practices, Australian podcast host Rachael Kohn introduces The Gurdjieff Folk Instruments Ensemble’s performance of ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’. First a frame drum taps an ostinato rhythm, then the duduk melody opens with a melody shaped by descending augmented seconds – what Davidjants calls the ‘oriental gap’.[71] This is followed by Kohn’s introduction: ‘this is music from the northern Iraq region, based on an ancient Assyrian Christian mourning ritual’. Kohn’s affect sounds, to me, reverential, but she speaks with conviction about the geographical origins of supposedly ancient Assyrian melodies accessed through Gurdjieff’s esoteric knowledge.

I argue that this podcast uncritically circulates Gurdjieff’s Orientalist depictions of Assyrian music whilst perpetuating its own Orientalist romanticisations of Assyrian spiritual mourning practices.[72] Moreover, the podcast avoids emic names such as Assyrian or Chaldean and instead emphasises ‘accepted truisms’ by discussing Iraq’s ‘Christian’ communities. Yet, framing Assyrian Women Mourners within academic discussions about ISIS’ attacks on Iraqi communities conveniently positions Gurdjieff’s Folk Instruments Ensemble performance as an authentic Assyrian expression from the northern Iraq region. It appears that this podcast, despite striving towards authenticity, still perpetuates orientalist misconceptions.

This performance history informed my initial desire to restage ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’, and I began with the following question: what meaning could be produced if an Assyrian woman like me engaged with this work in performance? During our collaboration, I shared prompts with Dicky relating to engaging with the mourning theme in hopes to subvert Gurdjieff’s depiction of Assyrian mourning. However, by trying to subvert this depiction, I realized I was confining myself to Gurdjieff’s interpretation, prompting me to interrogate my learned attachment to the mainstream view of the ‘musical work’ and its sacred score. This extended into my solo practice sessions, where I felt confined within the affective expression of mourning set out in ‘Assyrian Women Mourners’. Though an ethnomusicological analysis of these expressions is out of the scope of this paper, I noticed that the composition’s soft dynamic range, minimal texture and Orientalist melodies – performed ‘Andante funebre’ – defined an affective expression of mourning on the piano that conflicted with the one that I was familiar within my community’s mourning practices. I began asking myself, ‘Should I deliver an interpretation of this work based on my experience of Assyrian mourning practices instead? Is this self-orientalizing? Do I make interpretive choices based on ethnomusicological findings in Assyrian affect? Would that mean I am performing the representational politics of ‘inclusionary performance’?’ These questions were irreconcilable and, instead, I decided against attempts to merge the composition with any interpretive additions that claim to represent ‘authentic’ expressions of Assyrian mourning. My reasoning is similar to critical Indigenous studies commentary on refusal that prioritizes the context of Indigenous practices over Western normative views regarding knowledge consumption and accessibility. Indeed, Assyrian mourning rituals are performed contextually by select people whose skills I do not possess; nor did I feel comfortable experimenting with them in artistic pursuits. I also embrace Robinson’s ‘structural refusal’, a strategy to ‘impede Indigenous knowledge extraction and instrumentalisation’.[73] Instead, the broader performance outcome is akin to what he calls ‘Indigenous+art music’ – in this case, the sometimes-irreconcilable musical encounters between the musical work, Indigenous expressions and the listening dynamics that shape perceptions or claims to authentic expressions of Assyrian mourning.[74]

Our restaging as Assyrian performers does not imply a more ‘authentic’ expression of Assyrian heritage. Instead, we use the work to centre diverse Assyrian voices in performance for the first time, and as Dicky says – ‘trust that viewers can create meaning out of it’.[75]

Performance Response 2: Making something anew, only because you see the destruction

The link to the performance video can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lQG8SvmhupcdTuXeEScJ1qDntrruQBhE/view?usp=sharing © Lolita Emmanuel.

The second performance response restaged Ilya Demutsky’s ‘At the Palace of Ashurbanipal’. Assyrian pianist Elena Akopova commissioned the work in 2016 for a UC Berkeley event titled ‘Pop up Palmyra: Art in response to the destruction of the past’, planned in response to ISIS’s destruction of artefacts in Iraq and Syria. Its performance history can be described as a series of reassemblies occurring through waves of resurgence between 2014 and now, beginning with a fracture in the transnational Assyrian community after ISIS’s 2014 attacks, continuing through Akopova’s commissioning and performance of the work, followed by my subsequent performances between 2020 and 2022. After seeing her live performance recording featuring a projected image of an Ashurbanipal relief behind her, I contacted Akopova to congratulate her and learn more about the piece.[76] Akopova kindly agreed to put me in touch with Demutsky who would share the score with me, understanding my difficulties with finding piano repertoire and explained that she commissioned the work for similar reasons.[77]

I first performed the work at Mesopotamian Night 2020 with no projections and received polite applause. In contrast, my following set featuring piano-vocal compositions was enthusiastically received, as evidenced by audience interaction and post-concert feedback.[78] Though both sets occurred in concert hall settings with audiences submerged in darkness, I experienced more face-to-face encounters with affect amongst performers and audiences during the piano-vocal performances – direct eye contact and emotional exchanges were more possible between me, singers, and audiences than during my solo performance. As a soloist, I experienced a visual and figurative separation from audiences, which can be explained by the dynamics established through what Marc Couroux defines as the ‘proscenium–audience dialectic’ of nineteenth-century concert hall practice.[79] Robinson combines Couroux’s concept with Levinasian theories of alterity to explain how concert-hall settings erase these face-to-face encounters in performance that, in Levinasian terms, define our ‘ethical responsibility’ to each other.[80] Though the composition employs highly expressive pianistic techniques and dissonances for expressionistic storytelling, I suggest that without face-to-face encounters, its solo performance is confined by the proscenium–audience dialectic, which restricts affective exchanges and connection between those in the performance space.

My affective experience of the composition is through a series of resurgent episodes that I wanted to share with audiences (as described in my practice reflections in Figure 7), which I sought to convey in performance by experimenting with affect through expressive storytelling tools outside traditional concert-hall practice. This restaging aims to challenge the isolating experience of solo piano performance on the proscenium-stage and explore ways to enhance and be in dialogue with the various artistic voices (including Akopova’s) and Ancient Assyrian symbols connected through this work.

For restaging, Dicky’s visual art reassembled materials including ISIS propaganda footage and fragmented faces in the form of torn portraits, layered over ancient Assyrian symbols and artefacts. The images are jarring – cutting abruptly to ISIS fighters drilling and tearing down statues. These images are reassembled again through re-layered juxtaposition with my performance recording footage, creating new meaning beyond the original ‘work’ through montaging techniques. Cutaways between my performance and Dicky’s film were made by Assyrian cinematographer and director Carlos Hydo, whose edits link me, Dicky and the various reassembled materials together, also shaping the affective meaning produced through this montage.[81] In an interview with Dicky about his work, he suggests the following meaning:

[In the film, you see] ISIS footage of them destroying things, and then there’s me putting things together and so … why it means something is because [of] the way that those things are placed against one another. Yeah. Like it becomes about, you know, making something anew, only because you see the destruction.[82]

This restaging produced multiple face-to-face encounters between me, ISIS fighters, and the ancient and modern Assyrians seen in Dicky’s work. It generated a sonic, visual and affective response to ISIS’s destruction of Assyrian cultural memory and the various connected erasures of Assyrian’s historical connections to Iraq. These encounters and combined expressions offer new meanings and opportunities to engage with the work beyond its solo piano performance on the proscenium stage.

Restaging the work with the film sparked interest amongst audiences,[83] as evidenced in more comments from online audiences that echo similar responses relating to affect (Figure 10).

Our reimagined performance allowed for an expanded experience of resilience through reassemblies of fragmented materials that a) recentre Assyrian voices in performance and b) facilitate a reconnection to cultural memory and connection between Assyrians dispersed across transnational diaspora. The former achieved this by recentring Assyrian voices by layering my performance with Dicky’s art, which included footage of ISIS destroying artefacts that he recontextualized by inserting himself and other Assyrians into the ancient sculptures. The latter embraces Assyrian Resiliency Practices by using performance as an alternative space to revisit ancient symbols and reconnect with cultural memory, whilst offering connection amongst those who engage with the work via a range of affective aestheticizations that transform traumatic memories into various sentiments of resilience. Significantly, these outcomes have made way for a resurgence in my expanded artistic voice and creative agency, which now sits alongside the previous resurgences woven into the performance history of this composition.

Conclusion: Assyrian art music resurgences

The Assyrian use of performance amid the threat of cultural erasure is not only an act of resilience, but one of resurgence. Through what I term the Assyrian Resiliency Practice, performers reassemble fragmented materials in stateless diaspora to reassemble cultural memory, articulate Indigenous identity against colonial structures and reclaim Assyrian heritage. Through affective transformation, these gestures both affirm a continuing Assyrian identity and generate new meaning, bringing forth an expanded sense of empowerment.

This article has explored how performers of Assyrian art music can engage in the Assyrian Resiliency Practice through creative reassembly that transcends the colonially imposed parameters that confine Assyrian voices in art music performance. While community and academic discourse reveal diverse and sometimes conflicting views on how this tradition should develop, the performance experience offers a more nuanced potential: one that emphasises affect, presence and creative agency.

In the case studies above, performance served as a site of critical and creative reassembly – one that allowed me, an Assyrian pianist trained in Western art music, to expand my artistic practice addressing the culturally expressive challenges of solo acoustic piano performance. My own reassembly of Assyrian-themed piano music, Robinson’s decolonial performance methodology and de Assis’s critical performance mode, merged with my collaborator Dicky Bahto’s reassembly of his artistic materials to recenter Assyrian voices in two ways. The first performance response critiques Orientalist composition and its perpetuation of Assyrian erasure in public spheres, while illuminating the sometimes-irreconcilable encounters between Indigenous expression and art music. Though irreconcilable at first, the restaging led to an expanded sense of artistic agency through my interrogation and rejection of the musical-work concept, which enforces expectations upon performers to ‘faithfully’ reproduce a composer’s work. The second performance response, ‘At the Palace of Ashurbanipal’, embraces Dicky’s own practice of ‘making something anew, only because you see the destruction’. This idea resonates deeply with the Assyrian Resiliency Practice, which is grounded in reassembly and resurgence. The restaging also continues a pattern of resurgence demonstrated by the composition’s commissioner, Elena Akopova, and composer Ilya Demutsky. It also critiques the Western performance practices that obscure the capacity for Assyrian performers and audiences to share the affectively aestheticized experience of resilience. Of course, these are not the only colonial structures – rather, it is equally significant for us to examine how Arab and Ottoman performance practices might confine Assyrian expression or shape its engagement with the Assyrian Resiliency Practice.

In transnational performances of Assyrian art music, performers encounter a diverse range of Assyrian cultural expression, resiliency lineages and tastes. Rather than pursuing a single, sonic representation of Assyrian-ness, the case studies offer performers a reconsidered approach to resilience in Assyrian art music that strives to engage with a broader practice of creative reassembly to bring Assyrian voices to the forefront of cultural storytelling. By untangling misrepresentation and erasure through and due to art music’s colonial structures, this approach gives rise to a resurgence of diverse Assyrian voices and resiliency lineages. Narrative storytelling through multimedia performance is just one alternative, however. As community members continue pursuing Assyrian art music, it is still worth exploring how sonic experimentation in the tradition might meaningfully engage with the Assyrian Resilience Practice and reflect the heterogeneous cultural expressions within the transnational Assyrian community.[84]

Endnotes

[1] In my research, Assyrian refers to anybody who identifies with the name. Assyrians identify as belonging to the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Syriac Catholic Church predominantly. Transliterations of Assyrian terms are based on the Library of Congress’ Syriac Romanisation Table, accessed here: https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/syriac.pdf.

[2] Thank you to my wonderful friends and colleagues, Dr. Paul Kelaita, Dr. Laura Case, and Dr. Alexis Weaver, for your comments on an earlier version of this text.

[3] Naures Atto, ‘What Could Not Be Written: A Study of the Oral Transmission of Sayfo Genocide Memory among Assyrians’, Genocide Studies International, 10 (2016), 183–209, here 183.

[4] Alda Benjamen, Assyrians in Modern Iraq: Negotiating Political and Cultural Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 152–54.

[5] These lands span the present-day borders of northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, southwestern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Repeated waves of migration have formed a multi-layered transnational diaspora, with more Assyrians living across the globe than in their ancestral homelands. Large community concentrations are primarily in Australia, North America and various European countries. Though dispersed globally, Assyrians have established transnational networks via the Internet, shared cultural practices, and various community activities and events such as weddings and parties.

[6] Sayfo (literally ‘the sword’ in the western dialect of Assyrian) is the term used by Assyrians to refer to the 1915 genocide, known commonly as the Armenian genocide, orchestrated by the Young Turk party, which resulted in the killing of millions of Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Yezidi people in the region.

[7] The 1933 Simele massacre saw the mass killing of thousands of Assyrians in northern Iraq by the newly formed Iraqi military. See Benjamen, Assyrians in Modern Iraq, 18.

[8] Daniel J. Tower, ‘The Long Road Home: Indigenous Assyrian Christians of Iraq and the Politicisation of the Diaspora, in Religious Categories and the Construction of the Indigenous, ed. Christopher Hartney and Daniel Tower (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 178–202, here 178.

[9] Eden Naby, ‘The Assyrian Diaspora: Cultural Survival in the Absence of State Structure: Cultural Survival in the Absence’, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, ed. Tūraǧ Atābakī (London: Routledge, 2005), 215.

[10] Nadia Younan, ‘Stateless Rhythms, Transnational Steps: Embodying the Assyrian Nation through Sheikhani Song and Dance’, Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 3 (2019), 41–62, here 49.

[11] Šíḥāne (often spelled ‘sheikhani’ in most English-language Assyrian contexts) is a popular song-dance genre danced by Assyrians worldwide.

[12] Nadia Younan, ‘Shaking the Ground: Intersections of Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory, and Resilience in Assyrian Popular Music and Dance’, (Phd diss., University of Toronto, 2023), 37.

[13] Younan, ‘Stateless Rhythms’, 137.

[14] Younan, ‘Stateless Rhythms’, 137.

[15] Younan, ‘Stateless Rhythms’, 137.

[16] Rashel Pakbaz, ‘Modes of Resistance: Memory, Language and Identity in the Performance of Assyrian Liturgy in Iraq and Beyond’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2022), 125, www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/337424.

[17] Pakbaz, ‘Modes of Resistance’, 125.

[18] Naures Atto, ‘What Could Not Be Written’, 62.

[19] Naures Atto, ‘What Could Not Be Written’, 62.

[20] Naures Atto, ‘What Could Not Be Written’, 62.

[21] Clint Bracknell, ‘Connecting Indigenous Song Archives to Kin, Country and Language’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 20 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2019.0016.

[22] Laura Case, ‘The Adaptation of Violin Playing by Indigenous People in Early Twentieth-Century Western Australia and New South Wales’, Musicology Australia, 44 (2022), 107–26, here 109.

[23] Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 141.

[24] Dylan Robinson, ‘Hungry Listening’, 141.

[25] Hilary N. Weaver, ed., The Routledge International Handbook of Indigenous Resilience (London: Routledge, 2022), 13.

[26] Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening, 21.

[27] Sargon George Donabed, ‘Persistent Perseverance: A Trajectory of Assyrian History in the Modern Age 1’, in Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East, ed. Paul S. Rowe (London: Routledge, 2018), 115–31, here 115.

[28] Donabed, ‘Persistent Perseverance’, 143.

[29] Younan, ‘Shaking the Ground’, 37.

[30] Michael Flamm and Vincent Kaufmann, ‘Operationalising the Concept of Motility: A Qualitative Study’, Mobilities, 1 (2006), 167–89, here 167.

[31] Martin Stokes, ‘Migration and Music’, Music Research Annual, 1 (2020), 1–24, here 11.

[32] Flamm and Kaufmann, ‘Operationalising the Concept of Motility’, 169.

[33] Flamm and Kaufmann, ‘Operationalising the Concept of Motility’, 169.

[34] Flamm and Kaufmann, ‘Operationalising the Concept of Motility’, 169.

[35] Michael K. Pius, ‘Habbaniyans Danced to Zor’na W’da’wou’la and Western Dance Music’, Nineveh Magazine, 20/4 (1997),13–18, here 14.

[36] Pius, ‘Habbaniyans Danced to Zor’na W’da’wou’la’, 33.

[37] The zúrnā, a double-reed wind instrument, and dāḅúlā, a double-headed bass drum, are frequently paired in Assyrian dance genres (like Šíḥāne) and performed during ritualistic events or celebrations. Many Assyrians view the zúrnā and dāḅúlā as ‘traditional’ instruments due to their strong associations with folklore, village life and ‘martial narratives’, like those described by Nadia Younan. Younan, ‘Stateless Rhythms’ and ‘Shaking the Ground’.

[38] William Daniel, William Daniel’s Creations (Chicago: Alpha Graphic Printing and Lithograph, 1978).

[39] Eden Naby, ‘Modern Aramaic Makes a Comeback as Language of Entertainment’, OGMIOS Newsletter 57 (2015), 18–20, here 18).

[40] Naby, ‘Modern Aramaic Makes a Comeback’, 57.

[41] Abboud Zeitoune, ‘Abboud Zeitoune Commentary on Mesopotamian Night’, Mesopotamian Night, 20 May 2010, https://mesonight.org/abboud-zeitoune-commentary-on-mesopotamian-night/, accessed 10 April 2024.

[42] Zeitoune, ‘Abboud Zeitoune Commentary’

[43] While some scholars debate whether microtonality is an original or adapted characteristic of Assyrian music as a result of musical borrowing from neighbouring Middle Eastern communities, its presence in Assyrian music is viewed by many Assyrians as an ‘authentic’ sonic expression. See Pakbaz, ‘Modes of Resistance’ for her further discussion on this topic in her PhD thesis.

[44] The inspiring phrase ‘lineages of resiliency practices’ emerged out of conversation with my Assyrian colleague and wonderful friend, Dr. Paul Keleita. I thank you for your wonderful insight.

[45] Rashel Pakbaz, ‘Reviving Mesopotamia: Genocide and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in the Nationalist Music of William Daniel (1903–1988)’ (MA thesis, San José State University, 2015), 1.

[46] Daniel, William Daniel’s Creations.

[47] Pakbaz, ‘Reviving Mesopotamia’.

[48] Tala Jarjour, Sense and Sadness: Syriac Chant in Aleppo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 75.

[49] Kristy K. Riggs, ‘Bartók in the Desert: Challenges to a European Conducting Research in North Africa in the Early Twentieth Century’, The Musical Quarterly, 90/1 (2007), 72–89, here 73.

[50] I explain these mechanical barriers in more detail below.

[51] See Robinson, Hungry Listening; Samuel A. Floyd Jr, The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the united States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Richard Taruskin, ‘Entoiling the Falconet: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4.3 (1992), 253–80, here 257.

[52] Taruskin, ‘Entoiling the Falconet’, 257.

[53] Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 63.

[54] Robinson, Hungry Listening, 23.

[55] Paolo de Assis, ‘Experimental Performance Practices: Navigating Beethoven through Artistic Research’, Music & Practice, 8 (2020), https://www.musicandpractice.org/volume-8/experimental-performance-practices-navigating-beethoven-through-artistic-research/.

[56] de Assis, ‘Experimental Performance Practices’.

[57] Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening, 189.

[58] Dicky Bahto, interview with the artist, 2022.

[59] Dicky Bahto, email from the artist, 15 May 2024.

[60] Donabed, ‘Persistent Perseverance’, 115–31.

[61] Helen Malko, ‘A Cultural Genocide in Iraq’ in Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations, ed. by Jeffrey Bachman (London: Routledge, 2019), 207–26, here 209.

[62] Sargon Donabed, ‘The Existential Threat of Academic Bias: The Institutionalization of Anti-Assyrian Rhetoric’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 54 (2022), 547–53, here 550.

[63] Performing Assyrian-ness can be watched online for free, here: https://youtu.be/LwnwUBs_VVg?si=IXMLeIo9p3RO1Mmk.

[64] Johanna Petsche, Gurdjieff and Music (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 121.

[65] Petsche, Gurdjieff and Music, 116. Petsche discovered in Hartmann’s autobiographical writings that the collaborative composition process involved Gurdjieff standing next to Hartmann, who was seated at the piano, whilst he hummed melodies that Hartmann would then harmonize, based on Gurdjieff’s dictation.

[66] Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) 115.

[67] Gurdjieff Ensemble, ‘Home Page’, 2020, https://gurdjieffensemble.com/, accessed 10 June 2024.

[68] Petsche, ‘Gurdjieff and Music, 121.

[69] Gurdjieff Ensemble, ‘Press Kit’, 2020, https://gurdjieffensemble.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Press-Kit.pdf, accessed 10 June 2024.

[70] Rachael Kohn, ‘Trapped: Yezidis and Christians in Iraq’, in The Spirit of Things (ABC, 2014). ABC Radio National is a nationwide radio network broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Through the lens of spirituality, The Spirit of Things claims to garner broader learnings for its listeners through the exploration of spiritual practices around the world – this episode focused on the spiritual practices of Yezidis and Assyrians, particularly at a time when their lives were at threat.

[71] Brigitta Davidjants, ‘Identity Construction in Armenian Music on the Example of Early Folklore Movement’, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 62 (2015), 175–200, here 189.

[72] In addition, the voices of the communities presented in the podcast discussion have little presence, featuring only a 15-minute interview with Professor Nasir Boutros and no Yezidi guests out of the 53-minute episode, devoted primarily to an intellectual exploration of spirituality in Iraq with Garry Trompf.

[73] Robinson, Hungry Listening, 23.

[74] Robinson, Hungry Listening, 23.

[75] Dicky Bahto, interview with artist, 14 November 2022. The original materials for this work were produced in an earlier work by Dicky, who invited his Assyrian friends to choose from a selection of photographs depicting Ancient Assyrian figures and symbols based on whichever portrait they felt connected to. Dicky’s friend Enanna, featured in the film, chose her namesake, Ishtar, the goddess of love, sex and fertility. Her portrait is shown in Figure 3.

[76] Akopova’s performance can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/VqWKvpBMKwM?si=Kv-gF2iMSSXZYsMN.

[77] Elena Akopova, email to the artist, 9 February 2020.

[78] Available here https://youtu.be/5h__19I9gfc.

[79] Robinson, Hungry Listening, 141.

[80] Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening, 179.

[81] My performance was filmed in a Sydney Conservatorium of Music recital hall with an end-on stage, which, much like the proscenium-stage format, focuses audience’s attention solely on the performer.

[82] Dicky Bahto, interview with artist, 9 October 2022.

[83] This work has now become an important and regularly requested piece in my repertoire.

[84] I invite readers of this article to watch my film, Performing Assyrian-ness, and share with me their views on performance, cultural resilience, and art music via YouTube comment or email: lolita.emmanuel@sydney.edu.au. The film can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/LwnwUBs_VVg?si=BtLrM3OGsTq_aZs9.