I want to counteract the conflicts of our era with collective experiences of listening, imagining, and inner reflection. I believe work with music and sound can empower displaced individuals whose voices often go unheard – and regenerate our relationship with the other-than-human world. I want my work to inspire collective imaginings of what could be.
My compositions and installations recalibrate what seems possible using sound, image and word. Central to my mission is work with women, displaced communities, and other-than-human species. By tuning in to what our everyday existence conceals, I facilitate experiences that inspire us to envision a better world, and that reinvigorate our potential for transforming ourselves.
I use multiple instruments and pre-recorded sound and image. I build new creative tools to engage with my audiences and to newly connect us to our shared environment. I make the quotidian fantastic to expand our sense of reality. Whether we meet in a club, a museum, a concert hall or an open space, I invite audiences to join me on a creative journey. At the heart of my work is a search for emotional experience that generates new narratives.
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Composing and (collaborative) making
As a composer I work with both acoustic and electroacoustic media, and I have engaged deeply with modal traditions associated with the oud.
In recent projects, I have worked with museum collections such as at the Manchester Museum, where I composed a sound work with an interactive planet, and designed an app for interspecies sound composition.
In my recent project DisOrient I composed for oud and live electronics, extending the instrument with unusual additions (chopsticks, linguine, thimbles) and applying electronic processing. I play with perceptions about where and to which tradition this instrument belongs. Some of this work is released on my album A Thousand and One Hopes.
One of my lockdown collaborative projects was connective tissue, a mixed-media exploration in partnership with artist Lin Li. Our completed works include Teatime!, Be water, be light and Unwept Tears. They have been screened at numerous independent film festivals around the world.
Two of my earlier collaborative projects are Today is Good!, a song-writing project with asylum-seekers, and Beyond Mode, a quartet developing modal music of the Mediterranean. I am Founder and Director of the online platform for world music and sound art, Music Boat. For several years I collaborated with luthier and musician Karim Othman-Hassan on an internet resource about the oud Oudmigrations.
Research and writing
As a scholar, I have published numerous articles and books, including Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West (2013), and Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War (2007). In 2021 I won the American Musical Instrument Society’s Frances Densmore Prize for my article “Orientation through Instruments: The ʿūd, the Palestinian Home, and Kamīlyā Jubrān” in the world of music (new series), vol. 8, no. 1, 2019.
My most recent book is The Oud: An Illustrated History, and I am currently working on Performance, Language and Memory: perspectives on the music of György Kurtág, co-edited with Gergely Fazekas (in progress, to be published in the musicological series ‘Contemporary Composers’ published by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini).
My early career was as a concert pianist, following studies at the Royal Academy of Music, London and the Liszt Academy, Budapest, where I was a student of Ferenc Rados and Gyorgy Kurtág. I also studied composition and saxophone, and performed widely in Europe as soloist and in ensembles, broadcasting regularly for Hungarian radio. My specialism was new music – repertoire written after 1945, and I had the privilege to work with several major figures including Messiaen, Berio and Kurtág. In 2003 I co-directed a major London Kurtág festival which won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award.
While Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, my research was generously supported by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Humboldt Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. My teaching covered areas from Intercultural Performance to Music and Orientalism and Music during the Cold War, and I supervised doctoral research on topics from the Hungarian folk revival to Kuwaiti song. After 20 years in academia I worked freelance for some time, while Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London.
Since December 2022 I have been Research Professor at Codarts, Rotterdam, and the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts at Leiden University.
