Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic & Trembling-Scores for Improvisation

This critical and poetical writing explores improvisation in music as a carrier of oral memory. Inspired by Didi-Huberman's metaphor of ‘fireflies’ representing oral cultures in danger, this research explores non-Western improvisational practices, in particular those of Armenian troubadours (Ashugh/Gusan), to revitalise musical cultures threatened and impacted by genocides. Using the ‘counter-listening’ method theorised by Gascia Ouzounian, I explore and develop alternative modes of poetic and political listening. I've invented the concept of the ‘trembling-score’, to propose a different way of transmitting music, one that embraces the variations of music between temporalities, thanks to a practice of cross-generational and cross-cultural improvisation.

Around twenty interviews with artists, researchers, philosophers and musicologists, three of which are included in the book. Graphic scores by contemporary artists (Caroline Partaminan, Andrius Arutiunian, Fluxusgroup, Scratch Orchestra...) and ancient scores (Armenian Khaz, a notation that gives free rein to improvisation and interpretation).

Description of the writing by the author Patricia Reed:
"Marie’s project put forward the idea of the ‘trembling score’ as a means to address the politics of memory through an examination of the mediums of memory. Drawing from her Armenian heritage,
and her proclivity towards music Marie created a vast research ecosystem throughout her process, actively joining and forming communities, reaching out to scholars, learning instruments, as well as feeding back some of her personal family memorabilia into official archives. In this way, her research process truly became a process of incorporating and sharing outward. In her implicit critique of the use of musical scores as a way to preserve and conserve fidelity to the original intentions of a musical author, Marie turned toward the tradition of the troubadour in Armenian music, wherein memory and musical play takes place performatively and improvisationally - implicitly asking the question, of how other cultures of memory may have to contort themselves to be legible to the conventions of Western museological practices of memory freezing."