18 March 2025 | 2:00-4:00pm on Zoom &
in Lecture Room 1, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Melissa Bilal (Herb Alpert School of Music, UCLA)
Between Erasure and Sonic Recovery: Tracing Koharik Gazarossian’s Life and Music
This lecture traces the life and work of Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967), a Constantinople-born, Paris educated, internationally acclaimed pianist, composer, and music pedagogue. It contextualizes her biography within the history of continuities and ruptures in Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire to post-Ottoman Republic of Turkey. I will talk about Gazarossian’s personal and aesthetic ties with a circle of Armenian feminist activist and public intellectual women in mid-twentieth-century Istanbul and with other Armenian and non-Armenian musicians of her time. I will focus on her efforts of connecting her native community of Bolsahays with Armenians around the world, and her dream of starting an organization for Armenian musicians of the diaspora. I will turn critical attention to Turkey’s cultural and memory politics which resulted in erasing her from the country’s music history despite the fact that she was a leading figure in Istanbul’s western classical music scene and a mentor to many Armenian and non-Armenian musicians. I will also alk about recent projects of “recovering” her legacy.
Melissa Bilal is a sociocultural anthropologist and historian specialized in Music and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Memory Studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology and the Department of Music Performance, Education, and Composition at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music where she holds the Promise Chair in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture and serves as the director of the Armenian Music Program. Dr. Bilal’s ethnographic research explores the role of music in the transmission of Armenian memory in Turkey, while her archival research is focused on the musical and intellectual history of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Her most recent publications are the book chapter “Pavagan E (Enough!): Zabel Yesayan’s (1878–1943?) Political Thought on Peace, Justice, and People’s Right to Self-Defense” in Histories of Political Thought in the Ottoman World (Oxford University Press, 2024) and the co-authored book Feminism in Armenian: A History in Twelve Biographies and Primary Sources (Indiana University Press, Forthcoming 2026). She is currently working on a biography of pianist and composer Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967) and on her ethnography Injuries of Reconciliation: Music, Memory, and Everyday Survival of Armenians in Turkey.
Ottoman Auralities 