Large Ensemble Opera/Oratorio Choral Chamber/Solo Vocal Chamber/Songs

Dear Mountains

co-composed with Karen Ouzounian

duration: 42 Minutes

 

Collaboratively researching and writing Dear Mountains has been a profoundly wonderful, intense and moving experience for us. In combining stories from Karen’s family with a broader evocation of the cultural and emotional life of the Armenian diaspora over the last 100 years, the piece draws inspiration from three very different types of sources: 1) Scenes of music-making as captured through various archives: an essay depicting Armenian exiles in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx as they listen to Kemany Minas’s haunting 1917 recording of Eghin Havasi; a field recording made in 1939 by Sidney Roberston Cowell in Fresno; a 1927 Columbia Records recording of a father and son duo from Worcester, MA playing their own violin and piano versions of Anatolian dances; and the recorded voice of the composer, musicologist, and priest Komitas singing Hov Arek Sarer Jan in the Ottoman Empire before the Genocide. 2) It draws on personal archives through interviews with Karen’s maternal grandmother, Sirvart Margarossian Hamboyan, and father, Zarah Ouzounian, as they describe life and choral singing in Beirut, Lebanon. In movement eight, an additional story is revealed: a 100-year old family story about Sirvart’s grandfather, Mihran Margarossian, that she keeps returning to, especially in her later years. 3) And finally, Dear Mountains includes imagined versions of Anatolian Armenian dances, which take traditional rhythmic and melodic modes as a starting point for contemporary inventions. These dances draw inspiration in particular from the Kef music tradition that flowered in the Armenian-American community, who played music of merriment and joy as a response to overwhelming sorrow and trauma.

As we thought about the contemporary world of the Armenian diaspora and the fractured ways in which Armenians today understand their stories and histories, we kept returning to a question: how can we approach the emotional world of the past, not dates and figures, but the way things felt? In searching for answers, the music of Dear Mountains sits in a fuzzy, multi-layered space between memory, archive, and imagination. Each movement negotiates this relationship in its own way. For example, the third movement centers around our exacting transcription for cello of a 1917 recording of Eghin Havasi, made in New York City by Kemany Minas (singing in Turkish except for one Armenian word, “mayrig,” meaning mother) along with violinist Harry Hasekian. In the 1920’s, Armenian Genocide survivors would gather every Sunday in Van Cortlandt Park and listen to this recording and these gatherings were remembered in beautifully poetic detail in an essay by Hagop Asadourian in the Spring 1993 issue of Ararat Magazine. In our evocation of this scene, the choir becomes the emotional and physical landscape of Van Cortlandt Park while the cello brings into the present moment Hasekian’s violin and Minas’s voice.

Similarly, in movement five the cello plays a transcription of a violin solo from a recording the musicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell made of Armenian musicians in Fresno in 1939. The oud solo in the middle of the movement takes inspiration from this same recording, but gives the space for the performer to elaborate freely in the style and spirit of the original solo, improvising on and recreating the musical form in the way that Armenian musicians have for a thousand years. Interspersed between these solos, the chorus sings text taken from Sidney Robertson Cowell’s sympathetic yet matter-of-fact aural commentary for these Library of Congress recordings. In movement seven, on the other hand, our starting point was contemporary interviews with Karen’s father and grandmother about their lives in Beirut and the importance of the Armenian choral tradition they grew up with. Here our goal was to channel this remembered world of warmth and joy, and through the texture of our music we threaded short quotes and allusions to Komitas’s setting of the Holy Liturgy, the Badarak. This liturgy was central to the Lebanese-Armenian community’s sense of identity and was music that Karen grew up with as well during her childhood in Toronto.

Dear Mountains is not intended to be a comprehensive portrait of the Armenian diaspora or its music; but rather, the flow of the piece mimics the experience of growing up in a diaspora: a fragmented world full of incomplete personal stories, deeply layered cultural references, and larger currents of historical narratives. Some historical context might be helpful. Karen’s grandparents and great-grandparents were born in the Anatolian cities of Gesaria, Akshehir (Konya), Marash, and Sepastia, in what is now Turkey, and were among those Armenians who survived the 1.5 million killed during the Armenian Genocide, which reached its apex from 1915-1917. Karen’s family fled to Lebanon where they formed a new life and community until immigrating to Canada during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s. 

Orphanhood and exile are present throughout Dear Mountains. Like the clouds being sung to in Komitas’s Hov Arek Sarer Jan (“Make a Breeze, Dear Mountains”), Armenian communities have dispersed and reformed elsewhere, but remain forever tied to a homeland and the mountains they may never return to. Dear Mountains is a piece of memory and archive but also represents an act of present-day imagination, defiance, and survival, channeling an Anatolian Armenian culture that was systematically erased and no longer exists in its indigenous land, yet continues to live and evolve around the world.

– Karen Ouzounian and Lembit Beecher