LOCAL MUSICIAN CELEBRATES ARMENIANS’ RESILIENCE
Worcester Telegram
April 10 2015
By Richard Duckett TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
When the Ed Melikian Ensemble performs during dinner Friday evening
at the Third International Graduate Students’ Conference for Holocaust
and Genocide Studies taking place at Clark University in Worcester, it
will be more than just a prestigious engagement at an important event.
The music could speak from the heart about much that the conference,
running April 9-12, is pondering.
The ensemble will play Armenian music, Melikian said. “Some of it is
rather sorrowful. Some of it is brighter and happier.” The sadness is
for the 1.5 million people who died during the Armenian Genocide of
1915-23 at the hands of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. But the music also
gives note “to the fact we’re still here,” Melikian said. “We still
carry on with our traditions and music and life.”
The first genocide of the 20th century started nearly 100 years ago
the night of April 24, 1915, when more than 600 leading Armenians in
Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey’s capital, were arrested, taken
out of the city and executed. A paranoid government had chosen the
wrong side to back in World War I and was seeing enemies everywhere,
especially in its Armenian minority population.
The Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark
University is hosting the conference for which scholars from around
the world have convened for lectures and workshops on the theme of
“Emerging Scholarship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 100 Years
After the Armenian Genocide.”
The Ed Melikian Ensemble will follow the private engagement at the
conference Friday with its regular second-Saturday-of-the-month
performance at Sahara Restaurant, 143 Highland St., Worcester,
starting at 9:30 p.m. April 11.
Melikian plays the oud, a short-necked, half-pear-shaped string
instrument that dates back to ancient Persia and is featured in
Armenian and Turkish music, Jewish music, and much of the music of
the Middle East. “It’s the forerunner to the lute. It’s the forerunner
to the guitar. It’s a very unique sound,” Melikian said.
Melikian’s father loved Armenian and Turkish music and would play
recordings by groups.
“I would listen to them. I was just mesmerized by the music,”
Melikian said.
One year his sister gave him a ukulele as a birthday present. Then
“I graduated to mandolin.” He got his first oud when he was around 16.
One of his first public performances was at a party celebrating an
Armenian couple’s 50th wedding anniversary in Worcester.
Meanwhile, Melikian remembers that as a child he would often be awoken
by the sound of his father having nightmares and his mother trying
to comfort him.
“I couldn’t figure out why until I got much older,” he said.
Both his father and mother were survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
They were from the Turkish city of Sivas (Sepastia from historical
Armenia) although they did not know each other there. Melikian’s father
lived just outside the city and tended sheep for a Turkish family. “The
family actually protected him, so in good conscience I can’t blame all
Turks for what happened. It was the Ottoman government,” Melikian said.
His mother’s father was a barber in Sivas, and his customers included
Turkish officials who evidently liked him enough to warn him to
take his family and flee. One day he was told, “You won’t be harmed,
but you have to leave,” Melikian said.
It has been documented that thousands of Armenians were force-marched
into the desert where they perished.
Melikian isn’t sure what his parents saw. “Neither one of them talked
very much about what happened or how they got out,” he said.
His father settled in Worcester, his mother in Springfield. “They
got fixed up by relatives.”
Melikian was born in Worcester, and the family lived first on Chandler
Street (“there were many Armenian families in the Chandler Street
area,” Melikian said) and then the Greendale section of Worcester.
Melikian now lives in North Grafton.
Worcester and Fresno, California, were the two major places Armenian
immigrants gravitated to from the late 19th century on. In Worcester,
the new immigrants worked in the mills. The Armenian Church of the
Martyrs in Worcester was the first Protestant Armenian Church in the
Western Hemisphere. Worcester was also the first parish of the Armenian
Apostolic Church in America — the Armenian Church of Our Saviour.
Times change, but the Turkish government has never recognized that
there was an Armenian Genocide.
Adolf Hitler, however, knew about it. A week before invading Poland
in 1939 and precipitating World War II, Hitler said to his generals:
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
The world believes in success only.”
“We won’t let anyone forget what happened,” Melikian said. “There
are lots of events around April 24.”
The music also plays on. Melikian has played with groups at many area
clubs, and had performed as far away as Honduras.
“I’ve done the gamut for Middle Eastern music, including belly dance
music,” Melikian said. He is also a member of the group Jubilee
Gardens, and is one of the alternating hosts of the radio station
WCUW 91.3 FM program “Music of the Whole Earth,” which airs every
Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.
The Ed Melikian Ensemble is led by Melikian, oud; Leon Janikian,
clarinet; Ken Kalajian, guitar; and David Gevorkian, duduk (an Armenian
wind instrument). Other musicians also join. The group will play a
good deal of Armenian music at the Sahara Restaurant on Saturday. Its
repertoire is world music from Anatolia, Asia Minor and the Middle
East, and there is usually a lot of dancing, including belly dancing.
The ensemble has been a popular attraction there for a while.
“The audience is a real mix,” Melikian said.
Upcoming events to mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide
include a march from Lincoln Street tunnel to Worcester City Hall
starting at noon April 18. The march will be followed by remarks
from civic leaders, the planting of a Genocide Memorial Tree, and an
ecumenical service at 2:15 p.m. in St. Paul’s Cathedral, 38 High St.
At 6 p.m. April 24 there will be a service in Armenian Church of Our
Saviour, 87 Salisbury St., Worcester.