ARMENIAN EXPRESS

posted by James Reel

    I just got off the phone with Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian, about whom I’m writing a magazine article. I don’t like conducting phone interviews during my radio shift, but our options were limited because of the 12-hour difference between Tucson and Yerevan. (Note to University of Arizona budget guardians: I was using my cell phone, so it’s not going on the UA tab.) Anyway, midway through the interview I had to do a break, which coincidentally introduced probably the most famous Armenian classical music of all: selections from Khachaturian’s Gayane (spelling may vary in your locale). I was actually rather embarrassed about this, and tried to stash the cell phone in a spot where Mansurian and his translator couldn’t hear what I was up to on the air.
    It’s not that I agree with those who regard Gayane as trash; sure, it’s loud and garish, and the ballet is set on a Soviet collective farm with the “patriotic” characters prevailing in the end, which makes it even less attractive to fevent anti-communists. But the music is very well orchestrated, and makes excellent use of typical Armenian rhythms and melodic twists. Still, as I was talking to Mansurian, I was afraid he’d regard Khachaturian’s dances as Armenian music for tourists, bright little baubles that over-simplify and cheapen the culture for export.
    Mansurian’s music, too, is deeply Armenian, but its inspiration comes more from Armenian church music—his was the first entire country to establish Christianity as its national religion, back in 303 A.D.—and from folk song (rather than dance), especially as preserved by Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), the most revered figure in Armenian music. Mansurian’s works don’t sound folksy, as do many of Khachaturian’s; the Armenian element is more subtle than that. Indeed, if you’re not familiar with the patterns of the Armenian language, you might miss the connection; like the Czech-speaking Janá ek, Mansurian often employs native speech patterns to shape his melodies and rhythms.
    Some of Mansurian's music reminds me somewhat of Shostakovich’s last quartets and sonatas for violin and viola. This is most apparent in Mansurian’s first two string quartets, from 1983-84, which will soon be issued in performances by the Rosamunde Quartet on ECM. The Shostakovich connection is less obvious in the more recent Mansurian music ECM has already released; Mansurian’s music from the 1990s, while retaining its brooding, melancholy lyricism, can have a harsher effect, even without being strongly dissonant.
    I didn’t bother to ask Mansurian his opinion of Khachaturian, and I kept the music low in the background so he probably had no idea what I was playing. Maybe he actually likes Gayane; there’s no reason that a man who speaks of soul and landscape in music can’t also kick up his heels at the sound of the “Sabre Dance.”