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  • The Touch of the Violin, the Coldness of the BellSynaesthesia, Mimesis, and the Unlocking of Traumatic Memory in Bunita Marcus’s “The Rugmaker” and Andra McCartney’s “Learning to Walk”
  • Jenny Olivia Johnson (bio)

When I started this piece, I didn’t remember. I had post-traumatic stress disorder. I thought I was writing a piece about making rugs.1


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Example 1.

Excerpt from Bunita Marcus’s The Rugmaker, mm. 1–10. (Copyright Four Lakes Music, Brooklyn, NY. Reproduced by permission of Four Lakes Music.)

I always had a fascination with bell sounds, and it was only after I had amassed quite a large collection that I began to think about why.2


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Example 2.

Excerpt from Andra McCartney’s Learning to Walk, timecode 0:00–0:12. (Score transcribed by Jenny Olivia Johnson with permission of the composer.)

I was thinking about rugs, something me and Morty [Feldman] always shared. But when I started composing, I started thinking about my father, who loved the violin, and was always singing. And how the sound of the viola is like my father’s voice. [End Page 18]


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Example 3.

Excerpt from Bunita Marcus’s The Rugmaker, mm. 81–84. (Copyright Four Lakes Music, Brooklyn, NY. Reproduced by permission of Four Lakes Music.)

There’s a feeliness to these sounds, like touch. A loving quality. A little girl singing a love song to her daddy. And I started to have memories.3

I realized that I never had curtains or drapes in my house. That sound of curtains being scraped on a metal rod has always bothered me.


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Example 4.

Excerpt from Andra McCartney’s Learning to Walk, timecode 5:12–5:44.

When I began writing my piece and listening to bell sounds, I found myself remembering being in hospital as a child and hearing the sound of hospital curtains.4

Five years after I wrote the piece, I started to have memories of my father coming into my bedroom at night and having sex with me as a child.5


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Example 5.

Excerpt from Bunita Marcus’s The Rugmaker, mm. 316–21. (Copyright Four Lakes Music, Brooklyn, NY. Reproduced by permission of Four Lakes Music.)

Suddenly I’m back there in that bed.


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Example 6.

Excerpt from Andra McCartney’s Learning to Walk, timecode 4:58–5:05.


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Example 7.

Excerpt from Andra McCartney’s Learning to Walk, timecode 5:06–5:09.

I also have a suspicion that I was sexually abused in hospital and that this is bound up with the sound of those hospital curtains closing. To me, that’s the creepiest sound in the piece.6 [End Page 19]


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Example 8.

Excerpt from Andra McCartney’s Learning to Walk, timecode 5:14–5:21.

This essay begins with the fragmentary voices and evocative sounds of two contemporary composers who were both sexually abused as children. As we can easily observe, their traumatic childhood memories—so distant and elusive and yet so sensationally raw—emerge primarily through the languages of sounds: sinuous, shimmering string sonorities; rich, echoic timbres of bells and distant voices; and thick, reverberant juxtapositions of acousmatic noise. If we listen carefully, we will also realize that it was the sounds themselves—these strings and bells and metallic scrapes—that triggered these survivors’ memories in the first place, that resurrected from the depths of their psyches shocking, devastating sense-memories of violation that seem to have otherwise been cognitively inaccessible, locked away, repressed, dissociated, or forgotten.

We can also observe that these composers’ sound-triggered recollections present as primarily somatic: their descriptions of the sounds as “cold,” “feely, like touch,” “white,” and “full of pain” suggest that their long-buried memories of trauma are somehow more embodied than cognitively remembered, stored more in the blood and tissue of torso and limb or the deep, elderly smell-regions...

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