4 Songs

Akh Maral jan

Dzirani Dzar

Oror

Tsayn dor ov dzova

There is no one more important in the history of Armenian music than Soghomon Soghomonian – or Komitas as he has been known since 1894 when he was ordained a priest in the Armenian Apostolic Church and adopted the name of a 7th-century Armenian poet and musician. Had he not been so diligent in researching Armenian folk song, thousands of examples of which he collected in the twenty years round the turn of the 20th century, the musical culture of his country might have died with so many of its people in the massacre of 1915 – an event which he survived but at the expense of his mental health and his creativity for the last 20 years of his life.

Komitas was not only the Bartók of Armenia. As one of the first Armenian musicians to have a Western musical education, he was also, it is said, its Bach and its Schubert by virtue of establishing new traditions in, respectively, church music and song. By Bartók’s standards, the arpeggiando piano part in Akh Maral jan is a somewhat incongruously diatonic accompaniment to the exotically inflected vocal line which, however, is no less expressive for that. Except in a few lines in the middle, to which a similar arpeggiando treatment is applied, the passionate lament of Dzirani Dzar demands its own colouring. Even Batrók would have been impressed by the minimal accompaniment of Oror which has a melodic line of such beauty as to need little or no harmonic support. The highly emotive patriotism of Tsayn dor ov dzovag, though expressed in largely Western musical terms, is poignantly prophetic in the way it dies out at the end.