Longing and Belonging: Music for Piano by Armenian Composers

Global Musical Modernities and Local Agency presents

Longing and Belonging: Music for Piano by Armenian Composers

Eve Egoyan, piano

PROGRAM

Lullaby for the Knight (2010)

Tigran Mansurian

Aghavni (Doves) (2009)

Mary Kouyoumdjian

Tre Cicli (1969)

Boghos Gelalian

1. Allegro con spirito;

2. Adagio malinconico;

3. Allegro con furia

Goat-Rite (2014) [excerpts] 

Vache Sharafyan

Intermission

Seven Dances for Piano (1906) 

Komitas Vardapet

1. Manushaki (of Vagharshapat); 

2. Yerangi (of Yerevan); 

3. Unabi (of Shushi); 

4. Marali (of Shushi); 

5. Shushiki (of Vagharshapat); 

6. Het u araj (of Karin); 

7. Shoror (of Karin)

4 Monodien für Klavier (2011) 

Narine Khachatryan

Ghosts beneath my Fingertips (for Viva) (2020) 

Eve Egoyan

Post-concert presentation by Araxie Altounian, musicologist

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WALTER HALL

Peter Olsen, sound technologist

CONCERT OFFICE

Eric Chow, supervisor

Cory Bertrand, front of house coordinator

JACKMAN HUMANITIES INSTITUTE

Alison Keith, director

Sonja Johnston, communications officer

PROGRAM NOTES

The diverse and deeply expressive music on this program represents part of a very personal journey. I am Armenian-Canadian, born in Canada to Armenian parents. My father’s parents were both orphans of the Armenian genocide. In the spring of 2022, I travelled to Armenia for the first time. There I connected to music by living Armenian composers and charted new emotional territory for myself. Through this program, I am seeking a point of intersection between my Armenian heritage and my musical practice. The unique music on this program explores the piano through an Armenian folkloric lens, grounding itself in a work by Komitas Vardapet (the godfather of Armenian music), and including works by living composers from Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. Armenian history is a complicated one. Through the genocide and subsequent diaspora, we have lost ties to our historic past. I hope to find a musical place for myself between remnants of the past and the energy of the present to create a musical place of my own. Though I will never be able to return to my ancestral home without being fully aware of its violently destructive past and uncertain future, I hope to find something safe for me nestled within its extraordinarily rich and ancient culture. 

Eve Egoyan

In addition to being a personal musical journey that connects the Armenian-Canadian pianist-composer Eve Egoyan to her roots, the program of Longing and Belonging is a quest for Armenian post-genocide cultural identity. Its genesis is traced back to an idea that germinated years ago, triggered by a quotation from the composer-musicologist Father Komitas (1869–1935), founder of the Armenian school of classical music, claiming that Armenians must first establish a national idiom and only then move forward. However, in the post-genocide reality, with survivors scattered around the world, generations of Armenian musicians emerged in various countries who, while inspired by their traditional culture, were also strongly influenced by the ones they grew up in. Now, 120 years later, the question arises: what happened to the Armenian national idiom? As tonight’s program samples the diversity of styles and expressions of contemporary Armenian composers from around the globe, it is a testament to the vitality of Armenian musical culture in Armenia as in the diaspora. 

Araxie Altounian

Tigran Mansurian was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1939 and moved with his family to Armenia in 1947. He studied composition in Yerevan, first under the Moscow-trained Armenian composer Edvard Baghdarsaryan, later at the Komitas State Conservatory in Yerevan. He taught at the Conservatory beginning in 1967 and served as its rector from 1992 to 1995. Active in classical and film music genres, he has created a large body of orchestral, chamber, choral, and vocal music that has been played around the world. Lullaby for the Knight is a spare, meditative piano work marked “In memoriam Andrey Volkonsky,” commemorating the Russian composer and harpsichordist (b. 1933, d. 2008), a key figure in the Soviet-era early-music revival and an artistic ally of Mansurian. Its quiet, chant-like gestures and carefully shaped silences create a timeless quality, reflecting Mansurian’s late style of restraint, introspection, and spiritual depth.

Mary Kouyoumdjian is a first-generation Armenian-American composer who was born in 1983 in the San Francisco Bay area and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her work spans concert music, multimedia performance, and film. Drawing upon a family history shaped by the Armenian genocide and Lebanese Civil War, she blends experimental composition with documentary sound. Her music often integrates recorded testimonies and field recordings to humanize social and political conflict. Recent notable pieces include Paper Pianos, described as “an evening-length multimedia work exploring the dislocation, longing, and optimism of refugees” (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024), and the opera Adoration (nominated for a Best Opera Recording Grammy this year). Aghavni (Doves), composed in 2009, reflects Kouyoumdjian’s interest in memory, fragility, and resilience. Inspired by the dove as a symbol of peace and endurance, the work unfolds with a quiet intensity, blending lyrical stillness and tension.

Boghos Gelalian (1927–2011) is the subject of Araxie Altounian’s book Boghos Gelalian: l’homme, le musicien, l’oeuvre (2002). A Lebanese-Armenian composer, pianist, and teacher based in Beirut, he was born in Alexandretta, Syria (now İskenderun, Turkey), and absorbed Armenian, Middle Eastern, and Western traditions from an early age. He worked as a performer, accompanist, and collaborator with leading Lebanese musicians, including the celebrated singer Fairuz. His music blends Armenian and Middle Eastern modes with a modern chromatic idiom, forging a distinctive style that seeks to transcend cultural boundaries. Tre Cicli (1969) is characteristic of this synthesis of Western musical modernism with Armenian and Middle Eastern musical thought. Its three compact movements (cicli, or “cycles”) explore dense chromatic textures, driving rhythms, and moments of stark lyricism, reflecting a composer deeply engaged with modern expression while remaining rooted in cultural memory.

Vache Sharafyan, born in Yerevan in 1966, graduated from the Komitas State Conservatory in 1990. A prolific composer, he has created hundreds of compositions in all the major genres of Western art music, with commissions from leading organizations such as Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and the Hilliard Ensemble. His international postings have included stints teaching in Jerusalem (1992–96) and at UCLA (in 2011); in 2023 he became the head of composition at the Komitas State Conservatory. His music blends Armenian spiritual and folk traditions with a contemporary harmonic language noted for its expressive intensity and ritualistic character. Goat-Rite, written in 2014 for the Yerevan State Pantomime Theatre, is a 12-movement piano cycle that evokes the idea of a pagan ritual. It may be performed complete or, as this evening, in selected excerpts. The music draws upon archaic rhythmic patterns, incantatory repetition, and resonant silence to conjure a pre-modern ceremonial world. The goat—long associated with sacrifice, fertility, and transformation—is invoked here as a metaphor for ritual itself, where collective action and rhythmic invocation embody the tension between violence and renewal.

Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935) was an Armenian priest (vardapet), composer, singer, choral conductor, ethnomusicologist, and teacher. One of the first Armenians to receive a Western classical music education (he studied in Berlin for three years), he fashioned a truly distinctive Armenian musical style, creating a body of art music and sacred choral repertoire influenced by the folk and liturgical traditions of Armenia. He is recognized as a pioneering ethnomusicologist as well, through his work collecting several thousand Armenian folk songs. Tragically impacted by the Armenian Genocide, he was arrested and traumatized in 1915, was transferred to France in 1916, and spent his final years in a psychiatric hospital near Paris. Seven Dances for Piano (1906) draws on Armenian folk melodies and dance rhythms that Komitas collected. The work transforms village dances into refined piano miniatures, balancing earthy vitality with clarity and restraint, exemplifying Komitas’s gift for preserving folk material within an art-music framework.

Narine Khachatryan (born 1979 in Yerevan) is an Armenian composer based in Munich. She studied piano and composition at Yerevan State Conservatory with Eduard Mirzoyan and later completed advanced studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. Her music spans chamber, vocal, choral, and orchestral genres, and is widely performed internationally. On her website, she writes “Armenian sacred music is, for me, an invaluable and unbreakable foundation upon which I seek to build my musical language and style.” 4 Monodien für Klavier unfolds as a sequence of solitary, inward-focused statements. Khachatryan treats the piano as a lyrical, breathing voice, shaping each monody with subtle gestures and resonance. The spare musical language invites close listening, blending a contemporary musical idiom with echoes of Armenian melodic and contemplative traditions.

Ghosts beneath my Fingertips (for Viva) for augmented acoustic piano is a meditation on touch, memory, and inheritance. The work layers live acoustic piano with subtle electronic extensions. “Viva” refers to the work’s dedicatee, Egoyan’s daughter, Viva Anoush Egoyan-Rokeby, whose recorded voice is woven into the musical texture. Drawing upon fragments of Armenian folk material associated with Komitas, the piece allows ancestral songs and personal memories to surface gently and disappear again, creating a sound world where presence and absence, novelty and lineage, coexist beneath the performer’s fingertips.

BIOGRAPHIES

Eve Egoyan is an internationally celebrated Armenian-Canadian pianist, renowned for her strong advocacy of contemporary music. She has commissioned and premiered works by many leading composers and performs worldwide as a soloist and interdisciplinary collaborator. Her 12 acclaimed recordings—praised by The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and The New Yorker—have established her as one of Canada’s foremost interpreters of new music. In 2016, she was named by the CBC as one of the 25 greatest Canadian classical pianists of all time.

Araxie Altounian holds piano diplomas from Beirut National Conservatory and Conservatoire Régional de Val-Maubuée (France), and a PhD in musicology from Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik. She is the author of Boghos Gélalian: l’homme, le musicien, l’oeuvre and a contributor to Armenian cultural periodicals. Based in the Toronto area since 1992, she maintains an active piano studio and served as Music Director of the Markham Music Festival from 2003 to 2018.

The recital this evening is generously supported by funding from the Jackman Humanities Institute. Eve Egoyan has been Artist-in Residence for the 2025–26 academic year at the Jackman Humanities Institute in partnership with the University of Toronto Faculty of Music.

The Global Musical Modernities and Local Agency conference and related events are supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.