New York Times, United States

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Music

Songs Lifted in Praise of an Armenian Hero

By MELINE TOUMANI

Published: October 17, 2008

THE state conservatory of music in Yerevan, Armenia, is named for
Gomidas, a late-19th-century composer probably unfamiliar to anyone
who is not Armenian. An avenue and a grassy park in Yerevan also bear
his name, and a monument in the center of the city depicts his long,
narrow physique, his melancholy face and the robes he wore as an
ordained priest.

Gomidas, considered the father of Armenian music, in 1899. Photo

The soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, who with her husband is giving new
life to Gomidas’s collected work. Photo

Gomidas (or Komitas), born in 1869, is considered the father of
Armenian music. In the decade before World War I he traveled
throughout Anatolia and the Caucasus gathering songs from Armenian
villages, transcribing them in European notation, studying and
categorizing them. His manuscripts and analytical essays constitute
the Armenian folk and classical music canon almost on their own. So it
is no surprise that his name and likeness are familiar and influential
throughout the Armenian republic.

But it is less obvious why a statue of Gomidas even taller than the
one in Yerevan stands along the banks of the Seine in Paris. Yet
another monument to him is in Detroit, and in July a bronze bust of
Gomidas went up near the Parliament Building in Quebec City. In the
Paris suburb of Alfortville a street was named for him; in London, a
research institute.

One might argue, optimistically, that these memorials speak to the
imprint Gomidas left on Europe and the Western world. From 1899 to
1914 he gave concerts of Armenian music and lectures about it in
cities like Berlin, Geneva, Paris and Venice; in 1906 the French music
journal Mercure called his work `a revelation.’ Debussy said that even
if Gomidas had composed nothing beyond his song `Andouni,’ he could be
regarded as a great composer.

But Gomidas never wrote a symphony or an opera, and much of the music
he gathered and composed was lost or destroyed. He had lost his mind
by the age of 46, a misfortune thought to have been triggered by the
1915 massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. (Gomidas, then living
in Constantinople, was deported to Anatolia with about 200 others and
later released by special intervention.) He passed the last two
decades of his life incapacitated in a French psychiatric ward. So the
more likely reason for any acknowledgment of Gomidas nearly 75 years
after his death is that Armenians everywhere have been engaged in a
desperate quest to win recognition for their national hero and their
national tragedy.

Now comes what may be the best shot Gomidas has had to shine for the
Western classical music world since those lectures and concerts in
Europe a century ago. The internationally acclaimed soprano Isabel
Bayrakdarian, a Canadian citizen of Armenian descent, and her
Armenian-Canadian husband, the pianist and composer Serouj Kradjian,
may finally give patriots of Armenian music what they have been
waiting for. They are performing music of Gomidas and others on a
concert tour called `Remembrance,’ with Anne Manson and the Manitoba
Chamber Orchestra, which arrives at Jordan Hall in Boston on Sunday
and concludes at Zankel Hall on Monday. In addition they will perform
recitals in other North American cities and have just released an
album of Gomidas’s songs on the Nonesuch label.

Mr. Kradjian said he was inspired to orchestrate Gomidas’s songs when
he heard a set of 1912 wax-cylinder recordings of Gomidas
singing. Through the spare, distant-sounding performance Mr. Kradjian
noticed barely audible hints of a violin, a cello and a clarinet in
the background. His research suggested that Gomidas, before his 1915
deportation, had intended to orchestrate these compositions.

`When I realized this, my interest became a passion,’ Mr. Kradjian
said recently.

To refer to Gomidas’s compositions is a slight misnomer. Many of the
works attributed to him are folk songs that he notated or arranged; he
himself was quick to say that the people were the composers.

In his years of field work Gomidas observed the spontaneous process of
song creation in Armenian villages; his meticulous documentation
anticipated the work of Bela Bartok and later ethnomusicologists. He
analyzed the use of particular song forms for celebrations, religious
events, chores, laments and other activities. He devotes several pages
of his treatise on the plowmen’s songs of the Lori region to an
obsessively detailed typology of syllables of exclamation: ho! hey!
ay! and the like.

In 1910 Gomidas moved to Constantinople and organized a 300-member
choir that was a jewel of the city’s Armenian cultural milieu, then
thriving, and composed a polyphonic setting of the Armenian liturgy.

Skip to next paragraph Multimedia When Mr. Kradjian set out to
orchestrate a set of Gomidas songs, he turned to the choral works to
imagine how Gomidas might have harmonized traditionally monophonic
folk songs.

`Gomidas wasn’t the first person who tried to harmonize Armenian
music,’ Mr. Kradjian said. `There were people before him, such as his
teacher Makar Yekmalian, but they had an inferiority complex. When
they looked at composers of their time like Tchaikovsky, they felt
that Armenians didn’t have a music of their own because it was only
coming from clergy or villagers. But what Gomidas realized was that
even Beethoven and Mozart were influenced by German folk
music. Italian composers heard Neapolitan folk songs.’

Robert Atayan, a scholar of Gomidas’s life and work, has argued that
the composer’s three years spent studying music theory in Berlin led
him not to make Armenian music sound European but to try to produce a
comparable body of work on behalf of his own people.

Still, it is not easy to place Gomidas’s music on some kind of
East-West spectrum. In Ms. Bayrakdarian’s interpretations many pieces
have the light, energetic color of European art song; others, like
those in which a single syllable might float through an entire phrase,
reflect distinct Armenian styles of worship and lament.

Ms. Bayrakdarian ‘ whose last name, suitably, means standard bearer ‘
said of the tour with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra that rehearsals
might have been simpler with the chamber players of the Armenian
Philharmonic Orchestra, who appear on the Nonesuch album. But
performing with a non-Armenian group is also part of her vision.

`There comes a point in a musician’s life when you must assess the
musical value of something that’s very dear to you,’ she said. `A song
that your mother sang you will always have a place in your heart, but
does it have the merit to be in a program with Ravel and Bartok? So
you can’t imagine how happy I feel when somebody who is not Armenian
appreciates this music. A project aimed at introducing Gomidas to the
world has turned into an international effort.’

The dream of bringing Gomidas’s work to an international audience was
not just the catalyst for a recording and concerts (and a 2005
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary filmed in Armenian
churches and villages). It was the pretext for
courtship. Mr. Kradjian, 35, had known Ms. Bayrakdarian, 34, since
their teenage years, when both moved from Lebanon to Toronto with
their families. Mr. Kradjian played the organ at the same Armenian
church where Ms. Bayrakdarian sang in the choir.

By 2001 both were busy pursuing successful careers, and they had not
crossed paths in 10 years. Then Mr. Kradjian decided to approach
Ms. Bayrakdarian about a project that could bring Gomidas’s music to a
wider audience. `It turned out she had the same dream,’ Mr. Kradjian
said.

He added simply that getting married, having a child and building a
life together turned out to be a quicker and easier undertaking than
their work on Gomidas.