Music and the Armenian Diaspora

Searching for Home in Exile

Sylvia Angelique Alajaji

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780253017611
• eBook ISBN: 9780253017765
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and their descendants have used music to adjust to a life in exile and counter fears of obscurity. In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Sylvia Angelique Alajaji shows how the boundaries of Armenian music and identity have been continually redrawn: from the identification of folk music with an emergent Armenian nationalism under Ottoman rule to the early postgenocide diaspora community of Armenian musicians in New York, a more self-consciously nationalist musical tradition that emerged in Armenian communities in Lebanon, and more recent clashes over music and politics in California. Alajaji offers a critical look at the complex and multilayered forces that shape identity within communities in exile, demonstrating that music is deeply enmeshed in these processes. Multimedia components available online include video and audio recordings to accompany each case study.

ONE

OTTOMAN EMPIRE
1890–1915

Komitas Vartabed and the Construction
of “Armenia”

On April 24, 1915, over two hundred leading Armenian figures living in the Ottoman Empire were arrested without warning on orders from the Interior Ministry. The empire was in crisis. In November 1914, the Ottomans had officially entered World War I as allies of the Central Powers, thus ending their pledge of neutrality. As tensions with England and France played out in Ottoman territories throughout the Middle East, escalating conflicts with Russia resulted in bitter and devastating setbacks for the already thinly spread Ottoman army. Meanwhile, within its own crumbling borders, the so-called Sick Man of Europe continued to contend with the revolts and uprisings being staged by ethnic minorities demanding independence. For the Young Turk triumvirate in power, these uprisings and outside threats provided added fuel to their pan-Turkic conception of the empire—a self-conception in which there was no room for an increasingly belligerent Christian minority with nationalist aspirations of its own. The arrests on April 24 served as an ominous prelude to the unprecedented massacres and deportations that were to follow in the coming months. All told, approximately one million Armenians would perish. With the trauma forever etched into their cultural memories, the survivors formed a widespread diaspora whose identities rested on the sense of Self initially forged in those chaotic years leading to 1915.

Among those arrested was Komitas Vartabed, the beloved musicologist who had gained the adoration of Armenians living throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire for recovering and promoting what he claimed was the true Armenian music. Although Komitas was among the fortunate few to survive—saved due to the intervention of Henry Morgenthau, then the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire—he suffered a debilitating mental breakdown that forced him to spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital in Paris. For many Armenians, Komitas’s relentless pursuit of a “pure” Armenian music made possible a site from which to imagine Armenia—a site to which Armenians could cling and lay claim when physical boundaries were unattainable. His pursuit, born during a time of burgeoning (and competing) nationalisms, helped establish a discourse that resoundingly altered the way Armenianness was to be defined.

In transforming the discourse of the Armenian musical narrative he simultaneously became implicated in the pantheon of Armenian heroes. Almost any conversation on Armenian music leads, in one way or another, to Komitas. These conversations are inseparable from the genocide, and embedded within them is the dialectic of death and rebirth—Komitas’s death, yes, but also the death of Ottoman Armenia and its attendant cultural markers and, in its place, the birth (or rebirth) of Home—an Armenia that, according to the nationalist ideology of the period (and the nationalist ideologies that would come after the genocide), had been lost, only to be rediscovered by Komitas.

KOMITAS: AN OVERVIEW

Hence, the secret of the structure of our melodies is clear, and it would be a vain task to seek scales corresponding to the European major or minor keys in our music. We would not find them because they do not exist. . . . May I be excused if I stress here again that our music in its national spirit and style is as Eastern as is the Persian-Arabic, but that the Persian-Arabic is not our music, nor is our music a branch of theirs. The situation is that ours has been subjected to their influence. This is analogous to the position of our language, which like Persian, Kurdish and German, etc., is a branch of the Indo-European family, yet is not German, nor Kurdish, nor even Persian. (Komitas 1898, 126)

Born Soghoman Soghomanian in Kütahya, (present-day) Turkey, in 1869, Komitas literally and figuratively personifies the Armenian diasporic experience and, save for his catastrophic ending, the diasporic ideal. The legendary proportions of his biography parallel the essentialized Armenian narrative and its tropes of hardship and survival, and the complexities and nuances behind his “search and rescue” of Armenian music pale in comparison to the ultimate price Komitas paid in pursuit of his goal. The biography thus provides an ideal place to begin, for within it lie the keys to the fundamental bedrock of the Armenian narrative. As Rita Kuyumjian states in her psychobiographical study of Komitas, “survivors of the Armenian Genocide have recognized Komitas’s prolonged suffering as a symbol of their own personal and collective anguish, and ranked him among Armenia martyrs. Indeed, members of the Armenian Apostolic Church have recently proposed his canonization” (2001, 2–3).

As the story normally goes, an Armenian priest discovered the orphan Komitas while visiting Kütahya, and upon witnessing his impoverished condition and hearing his singing abilities, whisked him off to study at a seminary in the Holy See of Echmiadzin, in Russian Armenia. There he quickly grabbed the attention of the reigning catholicos (the head of the distinctive Armenian Orthodox Church), learned Armenian (he spoke only Turkish until then), and gained prominence as one of the school’s brightest students. Hints of his future work appeared in these early years at the seminary, as he began to collect and notate the folk songs of pilgrims who were making their way to this religious center of the country (26). In 1894, he was ordained a celibate priest and took the name of Komitas after a much-beloved seventh-century poet and composer.

Komitas spent the next three years studying musicology in Berlin, during which time he became one of the founding members of the International Musikgesellschaft (International Music Society) and published an article in the first issue of the society’s journal (At’ayan, Grigorian, and Kerovpyan). Upon his return to Russian Armenia, he continued to collect folk songs throughout remote mountain and countryside villages, amassing several thousand. Most sources maintain that he transcribed more than four thousand songs, of which only approximately twelve hundred survive. Many of Komitas’s belongings were sold or disposed of after he was hospitalized, which accounts for most of the lost transcriptions. In 1910, he moved to Constantinople, where he organized and led the highly celebrated three-hundred-member Koussan choir, which toured the Ottoman Empire and Russian Armenia (as well as countries as varied as France, Switzerland, Georgia, Greece, and Egypt) and sang choral arrangements of the folk songs he had collected. Komitas would remain in Constantinople until his arrest in 1915.

In many ways, Komitas’s work (and the subsequent veneration of him by Armenians throughout the world) is entirely consistent with nationalist projects throughout Europe and parts of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which folklore was used and appropriated towards nationalist ends. His collection of folk songs and his stylization of them in his own compositions allowed for the development of a musical narrative that imagined into being an autonomous, singular collective Self. Moreover, Komitas’s work sonically constructed a unified Armenia that had been divided for approximately three centuries. In the mid-sixteenth century, the western portion of Armenia had been subsumed into the Ottoman Empire (what would today be considered the Anatolian region of Turkey), while the eastern portion eventually became part of the Russian Empire and, subsequently, a republic of the Soviet Union. As Marc Nichanian writes:

[T]he separate development and cultural differences between Western and Eastern Armenians were so pronounced by the twentieth century that these two segments of the same people had very little in common. Separated for centuries, confined within different empires with sealed borders, Russian on one side, Ottoman-Turkish on the other, they developed their traditions without much contact with one another. . . . All of Armenian intellectual life and literature are in fact inscribed in such a framework of double dichotomy: first between language and cultural traditions, then between historical circumstances. (2002b, 2–3)

Komitas’s work and life straddled both portions and sought to overcome the dichotomy that separated the two. The folk songs he collected came from villages in the border regions of both, while the tours his choir embarked upon ensured that the music would be heard by both. The provinces and villages from which he collected folk songs include, among many others, Arshaluys and Lori in present-day Armenia and Van, Eğin (now Kemaliye), and Erzurum in present-day Turkey (PURL 1.1). The cities in which his choir performed include Geneva, Paris, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Cairo, and Constantinople. He also lectured widely on his findings in Berlin, Bern, Lausanne, Paris, and Venice. His prestige, reputation, and veneration are not limited to one side or the other. He has become that rare Armenian figure that unifies diasporic Armenia and the country of Armenia despite a cultural and linguistic divide that continues to mark Armenians to this day.

As much as Armenians throughout the world have venerated Komitas and his work, the discourse surrounding both must be understood for the possibilities and impossibilities inherent within it. For within Komitas’s sonic construction of Armenia—as it has been understood and constructed in the Armenian diasporic imaginary—musical expressions evocative of the Ottoman past and present, a musical identity in which Armenians played formative and important roles, could not exist. One Armenian music scholar writes, for example, of a nineteenth-century Constantinople where Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and western European musics existed comfortably side by side—until Komitas (and others) “[awakened] fellow Armenians to their collective cultural identity” (Hubbard 2010, 302). Sentiments similar to this one abound in the literature and speak to the extent to which the music “discovered” by Komitas allowed for a shift in the definition of Armenianness towards one that most constructively legitimized the Armenians’ claims as a nation and a people.

Although Armenians had been active participants in the urban and court musics of the Ottoman Empire (see chapter 2), Komitas largely stayed away from collecting folk and popular songs found in urban areas, choosing to focus almost wholly on rural peasant populations, where he believed the only traces of authenticity remained.¹ As most descriptions of his work suggest, Komitas “discovered” Armenian music via the Armenian peasant. Though he expounded at length—through writings, lectures, and so on—on his work, some recurring themes include discussions of songs linked to certain activities in daily life (typically classified as work, or hoovelner [plowing], songs), methods of improvisation, the creative process, links between physical geography and song (that is, the qualities of songs found in mountainous regions as opposed to the qualities of songs found in flatter ones), and general conclusions on form and structure. For example, one of his most widely cited and celebrated articles, “The Plough Song of Lōri” (1914), explores in great detail the performance and structure of a song sung in the village of Lōri during a communal plowing session (PURL 1.2). Komitas discusses the role of each villager in the performance of the song and how it corresponds to his or her role with the plow. He meticulously examines every utterance and analyzes each in terms of the physical activities taking place. He divided folk songs first geographically, then regionally, and finally by type (including work, ritual, lyrical, dance, and instrumental).

It is important to remember that Komitas’s work did not only encompass Armenian music. Among the thousands of melodies and folk songs he collected, transcribed, and/or published were a number of Turkish and Kurdish melodies (including the adhān, or call to prayer). Certainly, the collection of these songs allowed for Komitas’s cross-cultural comparative analysis of Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish melodies, clearly delineating and differentiating one from the other.² However, despite how Komitas’s work is primarily remembered and conceived of today, the context in which many of these melodies were recorded speaks to a critical part of the Armenian musical past that would become a point of contention after the genocide, as political and cultural figures in the diaspora attempted to move Armenian identity away from the cultural markers of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the Turkish melodies he notated and transcribed were those sung by members of his own family, while the Kurdish melodies were sung by Armenians as well (see At’ayan 2006; Bilal and Yıldız 2014). As the following chapters will demonstrate, the multilingual, aesthetic fluidity of identification in the Ottoman Empire that these transcriptions represent became a point of musical departure in the coming years, an aspect of Armenian cultural identity to work against.

Overall, Komitas’s work resonates strongly with Ernest Gellner’s description of the role of the Volk in nationalist projects:

Nationalism usually conquers in the name of a putative folk culture. Its symbolism is drawn from the healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the Volk, the narod. There is a certain element of truth in the nationalist self-presentation when the narod or Volk is ruled by officials of another, an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted first by a cultural revival and reaffirmation, and eventually by a war of national liberation. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high culture, but it does not then replace it by the old local low culture; it revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted) culture of its own, though admittedly one which will have some links with the earlier local folk styles and dialects. . . . Society no longer worships itself through religious symbols; a modern, streamlined, on-wheels high culture celebrates itself in song and dance, which it borrows (stylizing it in the process) from a folk culture which it fondly believes itself to be perpetuating, defending and reaffirming. (1983, 56–57)

However, for the Armenians, the “alien high culture” to a certain extent had become internalized, and thus attempts to get rid of it were met with considerable controversy. One of the less discussed aspects of Komitas’s life is his rather contentious relationship with the Armenian Orthodox Church. Musically speaking, a significant portion of his work revolved around the church, whether through deciphering the system of notation (known as khaz) in which the liturgy and hymns of the church had been transcribed in the Middle Ages or arranging his own version of the mass (badarak). He outlined his reasoning for pursuing the latter in an article he published in 1896, “The Singing of the Holy Liturgy”:

I would propose the need for a Mass composed on the following lines: a) to avoid foreign and unnecessary embellishments; b) to select the most suitable arrangement of those songs which exist in several variations; c) to make the versification and the harmonization of the melodies, as far as possible, correspond with the meaning of the words, whilst maintaining the style and spirit of the church music of the Armenians—and to display a necessary and proper reverence and faithfulness to such an holy tradition; d) in arranging the melody and versification, the manuscript liturgies written in the ancient khazes should serve as the guide. (Komitas 1898, 140–141)

His first point resounds with his scholarly mission. This goal often led him to publicly denounce Armenian priests who introduced “Turkish” melodies and vocalization into the hymns and liturgy of the church.³ In “The Church Melodies of the Armenians,” Komitas discusses how the Turkish variants found their way into the performances of the liturgy in churches in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Constantinople. He clearly lays the blame on tirats’ous (cantors) who competed for the affections of wealthy amiras (the Armenian upper class) by attempting to “surpass one another with arbitrary gurgles and vibrations” (106). In yet another article he refers to the tirats’ous who continue this practice as representatives of a “wretched circle” (169). In her biography, Kuyumjian discusses at great length Komitas’s troubled relationship with the church, which ranged from the church’s criticism of his concert programs that featured secular music to accusations that he broke his vow of celibacy.⁴ These accusations and criticisms took their toll on Komitas, as evidenced in letters written to friends and colleagues, in his request to be released from his duties in Echmiadzin, and in his subsequent move to Constantinople in 1910. Some biographers, including those who were his contemporaries, believe that his opponents in the clergy contacted the Ottoman secret police, accusing him of including politically subversive songs in his concert programs (Kuyumjian 2001, 74).⁵ It seems, according to biographers, that this issue occurred in relation to a concert that was to take place in a theater in Constantinople on December 5, 1910. The deputy patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox Church issued a decree forbidding Komitas to perform sacred songs at this concert, and as the story goes, the Turkish secret police were contacted in order to ensure that the concert would not go on as planned. The concert did go on and Komitas ignored the issued decree, thus inciting further anger from within the church leadership.

This contentious relationship foreshadows one of the most enduring aspects of the way in which Komitas’s work (or, at least, the way it has been primarily conceived and remembered today) profoundly altered the Armenian musical discourse. His accusations that the clergy were singing in a “Turkish” style were consistent with accusations directed towards Armenian musicians in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s who continued to perform music evocative of the Armenians’ Ottoman past—music that exhibits more overtly shared characteristics, linguistic and musical, with Turkish music. Interestingly, these questions of purity first arise with the hymns and liturgy of the Armenian church, an integral cultural marker of the Armenian diaspora, and later extend to the performance and harmonization of peasant folk ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Guide to Online Media Examples
• Introduction
• 1 Ottoman Empire, 1890–1915
• 2 New York, 1932–1958
• 3 Beirut, 1932–1958
• 4 Beirut, 1958–1980
• 5 California
• Notes
• References
• Index