Remembering Armenian music in Bolis: Komitas Vardapet in transcultural perspective

Introduction

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935) in narratives of Armenian music history, or indeed in narratives of modern Armenian history more broadly. ¹ He is, as Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian (2001) christens him in her psycho-biography, an ‘Armenian icon’. Born in the town of Kütahya in western Anatolia, Komitas was orphaned at a young age and trained as a cantor in Ēǰmiacin (then located in the Russian Empire). ² In 1896, he went to Berlin, where he studied music theory and composition and became a founding member of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft. Komitas lectured and performed widely and published scholarly articles in Armenian, German and French. ³ While not renouncing his religious vows, in 1910 Komitas left Ēǰmiacin for Istanbul and soon became a prominent figure in the cultural and intellectual life of the Ottoman capital. His performances of polyphonically arranged folk songs and sacred music were widely discussed in the Armenian press. Although many commentators applauded his efforts to establish a new tradition of ‘national’ (azgayin) music, some members of the clergy objected to his staging of sacred music as a concert repertoire and to his deep involvement in secular public life.

On 24 April 1915, as war raged in Europe and the threat of Allied occupation loomed over the city, Komitas was arrested together with around 200 other leading figures of the Istanbul Armenian community (Andonian, 2010). The date now marks the official commemoration day of the Armenian genocide. Following their deportation to central Anatolia, Komitas was one of a handful of prisoners to be allowed to return to Istanbul. ⁴ The majority of the detainees were killed. Komitas had begun to exhibit signs of acute mental distress during his short-lived exile, which persisted upon his return to the capital, worsened by news of further deportations and massacres and an atmosphere of intense anxiety within the Armenian community. Komitas’s psychological crisis was exacerbated by his committal to a mental hospital run by the Ottoman military in 1916. Three years later, he was transferred to an asylum in Paris. Komitas was moved by his friends to a more affordable institution in the outskirts of the city in 1922, where he remained, alienated, depressed and plagued by a profound sense of persecution, until his death 13 years later.

Komitas’s status as an icon of Armenian identity rests not only on his activities as a musician and scholar but also on his close association with the genocide. ⁵ As a prominent victim of Ottoman state violence, his efforts to revitalise and reinvent Armenian music are remembered not only as an aspect of intellectual or cultural history but as a powerful emblem of collective trauma. In one influential view, Komitas’s doomed project to create a national music in the late Ottoman Empire encapsulates the tragic history of exile and foreign oppression that is deemed to define the Armenian people. At the same time, his works became the foundation of an institutionalised music culture in the post-genocide period, which, aided by years of Soviet cultural policy, has elevated them to quasi-sacred monuments to Armenian nationhood.

Komitas and his music thus play a central role in the political, cultural and affective work of remembering the genocide, which remains integral to the construction of Armenian collective selfhood. As scholars such as Melissa Bilal (2013) and Sylvia Alajaji (2015) have shown, discussing and performing music are modes of remembrance that can give voice to personal or collective trauma, bear witness to shared or antagonistic histories and bring silenced memories into public consciousness. Yet while it is essential to acknowledge the pervasive presence of the genocide and its aftermath in any discussion of Armenian identity, it is also important to attempt to move beyond what Sebouh Aslanian (following the Jewish historian Salo Wittmayer Baron) has termed the ‘lachrymose’ conception of Armenian history (Aslanian, 2014: 135). As Aslanian argues, this has perpetuated the notion of an autonomous history of the Armenian nation, which fails to take into account the wider context of historical events as well as the complex and shifting relationship between Armenians and their political, social and cultural environment.

In the present essay, I discuss Komitas’s musical and scholarly achievements with reference to the field of cultural memory studies (Assmann, 2006, 2011a, 2011b; Erll, 2011a; Erll and Rigney, 2009; Erll and Nünning, 2010). Drawing on the historiographical framework that underlies this special issue, I attempt to situate Komitas within the complex intellectual, social and political landscape of Istanbul – ‘Bolis’ in western Armenian – at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather than viewing him as an avatar of the Armenian national spirit, I suggest that Komitas is better understood as a political actor within overlapping intellectual and social networks that traversed the Ottoman Empire, the wider Armenian diaspora and western Europe. Consequently, the cultural memory of Armenian music that was shaped by Komitas and which continues to enjoy widespread acceptance today should be regarded not as the expression of an unchanging national essence but as part of a mutable and politicised discourse that was constructed by Armenian elites through their engagement with both local and transcultural developments.

Davidjants and Ross (2017), Adriaans (2016), Yıldız (2016), Alajaji (2015) and Bilal (2013) have all shown that shared musical memories are a potent means of binding widely dispersed and culturally diverse communities into an Armenian ‘transnation’ (Tölölyan, 2000). A recurrent theme in these studies is the tension between practices that are deemed to be ‘Armenian’ and those heard as ‘foreign’ (or, more specifically, ‘Turkish’), the latter often reflecting the complex historical pathways of the diaspora. While musical practices that are perceived to be foreign may be publicly disowned or assumed to be the result of oppression or corruption, they often form an important part of the aural memory of post-Ottoman Armenian communities and have flourished in non-official or private spaces. I approach these tensions from a historical and transcultural perspective, arguing that today’s memories of Armenian music need to be understood in relation to wider political and intellectual developments in the decades around 1900. Furthermore, I suggest that the cultural memory of Armenian music did not develop autonomously but emerged in dynamic interaction with other cultural groups and discourses both within and beyond the Ottoman Empire.

The idea of ‘transcultural memory’ can be approached from a number of different perspectives in relation to musical practices and discourses in the Ottoman Empire. As recent scholarship has emphasised, memorial practices operate not within bounded ‘container cultures’ (Erll, 2011b) but across and between overlapping cultural formations that are in continuous interaction with each other (Bond and Rapson, 2014). Musical practices that are shared by different cultural groups or which are disseminated across time and space – even within the same cultural group – offer an example of ‘travelling’ memories, as they are continually recreated in new languages, contexts and media (Erll, 2011b; Erll and Rigney, 2009). ⁶ Yet as communication technologies improved and proliferated during the long nineteenth century, musical discourses and practices travelled not just between local communities but across empires and continents, creating a larger transcultural space of competing musical memories shaped by geopolitics and nationalist ideologies.

Cultural memory and the music of the Armenian church

The notion of ‘cultural memory’ is associated especially with Jan and Aleida Assmann and is differentiated from another mode of collective remembering which they designate as ‘communicative memory’ (Assmann, 2011a; see also Assmann, 2011b). ‘Cultural memory’ is used by the Assmanns to refer to forms of memory based on externalised objects or institutionalised practices, such as rituals, monuments or sacred texts. It relates to the distant or mythical past and is integral to the formation and maintenance of collective identity: that is, individuals are bound to society through their participation in shared memories. Jan Assmann describes this aspect of cultural memory as ‘connective’. Cultural memory is highly formalised and requires specialised media or technologies for its encoding, storage and retrieval (e.g. texts or rituals). It is therefore safeguarded by elites such as shamans, priests or scholars and is closely bound up with institutions of power.

By contrast, ‘communicative memory’ is constituted through informal interactions between different generations and deals with the contemporary or recent past (Jan Assmann argues that intergenerational memories are limited by a timespan of 80–100 years). Communicative memory is more loosely structured than cultural memory and is assigned less significance as a marker of social identity or a repository of collective values. It is associated mainly with oral modes of communication rather than more formal media of transmission such as writing, religious practices or physical monuments. For this reason, communicative memory is shaped and accessible by all members of society rather than being the exclusive domain of highly trained specialists or members of a ruling elite.

As several critics have pointed out, the Assmanns’ theory of communicative versus cultural memory is problematic in certain respects, particularly its reliance on a somewhat static, bounded and traditionalist model of ‘culture’ (see, for example, Carrier and Kabalek, 2014). Nonetheless, it offers a useful basic framework through which to analyse the relationship between music and memory in the late Ottoman Empire. Indeed, I argue that a discussion of this relationship can suggest new perspectives on cultural memory, by highlighting the interdependence of cultural groups or practices that are often assumed to be autonomous – that is, the ‘transculturality’ of musical memories. Furthermore, the construction of cultural memory is itself closely linked to the process of differentiating between ‘self’ and ‘other’ at the collective level. Yet, the continuous interaction between ‘cultural’ and ‘communicative’ (or ‘official’ and ‘vernacular’) modes of remembering destabilises the notion of a singular collective memory that forms the essential identity of a social group.

The Armenian Church provided the central institutional structures of communal life for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (Bardakjian, 1982; Hovannisian and Payaslian, 2010; Ter Minassian, 2005). The patriarch of Istanbul was the de facto head of the Armenian millet (religious–administrative community) and represented its interests to the Ottoman government, while local churches provided social cohesion through the enactment of confessional identity and through more practical means, including the provision of education and the management of communal affairs. In the Assmanns’ terms, the Armenian Church is a prime example of a carrier of cultural memory. It safeguarded and propagated a narrative of collective identity that was rooted in the ancient (mythical or biblical) past and transmitted in texts or symbolic forms (places of worship, iconography, ceremonial objects) by an educated elite. A central aspect of the actualisation of cultural memory and its transmission to the wider social group was the performance of the liturgy and ritual, of which music was an integral part.

As with religious knowledge in general, the performance and transmission of Armenian sacred music was dependent upon canonical texts – encompassing both ritual words and notated music – and their interpretation by specialists. (On the ‘canon’ as a key element of cultural memory, see Assmann, 2006: 63–80.) However, musical notation allowed for a greater degree of flexibility in its realisation than literary texts and was more subject to the exigencies of performance or the habits of individual cantors (Kerovpyan, 2012, 2014; Utidjian, 2017). The transmission of Armenian sacred music was formalised to a certain extent, involving the creation, preservation and interpretation of notated liturgical books in manuscript or printed form, as well as the instruction of cantors within the institution of the Church. Yet sacred music was not a reified artefact of cultural memory but existed in dynamic relation to a broader field of communicative memory, which in musical terms meant living practices that were conveyed orally between generations. ⁷

At the micro level, the music of the Church could be encoded in notation to only a limited degree and required continual reinterpretation by the performer according to his knowledge and ability. Musical knowledge was conveyed not only through texts, institutions or rituals but also through informal, oral modes of transmission that, moreover, drew on secular musical practices and repertoires. At the macro level, the wide geographical dispersion of Armenian churches and communities, which were embedded in diverse sociocultural environments, encouraged the development of local performance styles and lines of transmission (see, for example, Bžškean, 1997: 95). A singular cultural memory, embodied in a standardised and invariable musical realisation of the liturgy, was therefore a normative ideal rather than a reflection of reality.

In the early nineteenth century, anxiety about the loss or corruption of ancient melodies led to the creation of a new notation system by a group of Catholic Armenian reformers (Olley, 2017). This was, in several senses, a crisis of memory. In practical terms, melodies were ‘forgotten’ due to the fact that the neumatic notation (xaz) in liturgical books was no longer adequately understood, leading to a proliferation of interpretations. The main purpose of the new notation system was to preserve and standardise sacred melodies and ensure, as Hambarjum Limončean (1768–1839) wrote, that ‘what is written today can be performed in an identical way 1000 years from now, without shifting one iota’ (cited in Hisarlean, 1914: 58; cf. Bžškean, 1997: 75, 147).

Yet in addition to the mnemotechnical problem (i.e. the mechanisms of memorisation) of transmitting melodies correctly, there were larger issues of collective memory at stake. If the inscription of the liturgy and hymnal in the reformed notation system, which began in earnest in the 1860s, was intended to reduce local variations and to establish a single canonical version, then which version was worthy of remembrance? And who had the authority to decide? Furthermore, how could it be ensured that the officially sanctioned version would be adopted by cantors and Armenian communities dispersed throughout the Ottoman and Russian empires? During the second half of the nineteenth century, the traditional guardians of cultural memory – that is, the educated clerical elite and their secular allies – engaged in polemical debates over the transcription and publication of the Armenian liturgy (K‘erovbean, 2017; Kerovpyan, 2003: 43–45; Utidjian, 2011–2012: 63–65). Several competing versions were proposed to the patriarchal music committee, reflecting different interest groups as well as varying musical styles or approaches to transcription. Although the committee proved ultimately ineffective, the indirect results of these discussions were the publication in Vałaršapat of the hymnal, breviary and missal in 1876–1878.

But despite these attempts to establish a standard musical realisation of the liturgy, inscribed in print and sanctioned by the highest spiritual authority, Armenian cantors continued to rely to a large degree on oral modes of transmission (see, for example, Aubry, 1901–1903: 136–137). What church singers ‘remembered’ derived not only from the officially approved texts but also from their lived experience of music-making in the Ottoman Empire. Hence, Armenian sacred music was transmitted at least in part by using the terminology, techniques and materials of secular Ottoman music (as well as, to a certain extent, those of Byzantine music) (Kerovpyan and Yılmaz, 2010; Olley, 2017).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, Grigor Gapasaxalean provided a list of popular Turkish songs as an appendix to his compendium of sacred lyrics, so that singers might know which melodies the texts were to be sung to (Gapasaxalean, 1803: 155–160). Indeed, sacred hymns in Turkish (ilâhîs) were performed by Armenian singers (ašuł; Tr. âşık) in the Ottoman Empire, albeit with some alterations to the religious terminology of the texts (Neubauer and Schulz, 2002). In 1872, the printer and musicologist Ełia Tntesean observed that Armenian cantors devoted more attention to composing Turkish-language art songs (bestes) than to sacred music and had adapted liturgical texts to well-known Ottoman compositions, such as the kâr-ı nâtık (a complex song-form) ‘Râst getirip fend ile seyretti hümâyı’ (Tntesean, 1874: 89).

Similarly, Komitas complained in 1897 that, before the transcription and publication of the Armenian hymnal,

celebrations of [parts of] the mass [were sung] to Turkish melodies such as [the song-forms] şarkı, türkü, mani etc., [and] carefully written down in notebooks with ornamented handwriting, [which] all the clerics, supposing themselves to be musicologists, bequeathed to their students and choirboys as if [they] were a priceless treasure; examples of the same are sung even today in all parts of Turkish Armenia, from the capital until the last village church. (Komitas, 1897: 224) ⁸

Furthermore, the names of the pitches in the reformed notation system were derived from Arabic or Persian, while the Ottoman modal system was commonly used as an aid to theorising or teaching sacred music (Bžškean, 1997). Although there were repeated attempts to root out ‘foreign’ (ōtar) elements, such practices were evidently still widespread in the early twentieth century. Indeed, Komitas himself was familiar enough with the ‘Turkish’ versions of sacred melodies, as well as their modal nomenclature, to be able to demonstrate them to a Parisian audience during a lecture in 1914 (Komitas, 2001: 167–710, 2005–2007, II: 182–188).

According to Tntesean, the notation of the Armenian hymnal prepared by Hambarjum Č‘ērč‘ean (1828–1901) was rejected by the patriarchal music committee because he had attempted to ‘correct’ (srbagrel) some of the melodies on the basis of Turkish (Tačkakan) music (Tntesean, 1874: 100; cited in Utidjian, 2011–2012: 63–64). Another cantor was commissioned by a local prelate to write a new setting of the Mass, which he arranged according to Ottoman modal practices. Komitas’s judgement of the composition (an excerpt of which he reproduced in his essay) was unforgiving:

the church music of this period is remarkable for its tasteless, not to say indecent, and above all haphazard accumulation of musical notes utterly devoid of musical fervour . . . While the words depict one of the most vivid moments in the life of the Saviour of mankind and the Great Doctor of the Church, and are an exhortation to the faithful to partake of salvation, the title of the melody (Čarkeah) [Tr. çârgâh] is already a disturbance to one’s mind and heart, representing one of those multifarious oriental modes that are sung only in coffeehouses and common eateries and are capable of enlivening only bard-minstrels (gusan-ašułner) and those who dance before them. (Komitas, 1897: 225)

There were, then, competing notions within the Armenian community of what constituted ‘Armenian’ music, and thus what should be inscribed as an official collective memory. This related not only to the musical content of the sacred repertoire, and the way in which it should be transmitted and performed, but also to the larger narratives of Armenian selfhood that were implicated in such choices.

Komitas’s approach to this problem involved a number of related strategies. On a musical level, he transcribed and arranged the divine liturgy in multipart harmony (published posthumously as Komitas, 1945), breaking with the monophonic tradition that had hitherto characterised Armenian church music (though he was not the first to attempt this). He tirelessly promoted his vision through concerts and lecture-demonstrations, where he performed his own arrangements and interpretations of sacred music (alone or with a choir) for audiences in the Ottoman Empire, Europe and Transcaucasia. To justify his musical and aesthetic preferences, Komitas published scholarly articles in Armenian and other languages, in which he attempted to establish a scientific basis for the study and performance of Armenian sacred music.

Komitas asserted that Armenian music was based not on the ‘impracticable and senseless third- and quarter-tones’ of Persian, Turkish or Arab music but on the principle of conjunct tetrachords, whose internal intervals were rearranged on the basis of semitones (Komitas, 1898: 112). ⁹ Not coincidentally, this system was easily explicable in terms of European music theory, and moreover was ideally suited to the harmonic arrangement of choral music. During the course of the twentieth century, the aural memory of non-equal-tempered intervals and monophonic performance practice that was transmitted between Armenian church singers in the Ottoman Empire was displaced by the official memory of a westernised, equal-tempered tonal system based on vertical harmony. In the process, key sonic elements of the liturgy and of Armenian music history were silenced, leading to the creation of artificial musical memories (cf. Utidjian, 2013).

In addition to reconceptualising the tonal and theoretical bases of Armenian church music, Komitas stipulated that melodies should be purged of ‘superfluous trills, ornaments, turns and so on, which are inimical to the spirit of our national ecclesiastical music, and which need to be filtered and purified’ (Komitas, 1898: 112). Komitas maintained that Armenian music was differentiated from Turkish, Persian or Arab music by its simplicity: complex melodic embellishments or performance styles were therefore evidence of foreign influence. He supported this argument, first, by citing passages from medieval authors that emphasise the necessity of textual clarity and vigour in the performance of liturgical music. Second, he maintained that the sacred melodies he presented were authentic because they were based on transcriptions he had made while conducting fieldwork in remote Armenian villages and monasteries – they were, in fact, ‘identical to the folk songs that are the indisputable personal creation of the Armenian peasant’ (Komitas, 2005–2007, II: 185). As he sought to establish the authenticity of Armenian music, Komitas drew on intellectual models and scholarly practices that he encountered in France and Germany, illustrating transcultural contacts between the Armenian intelligentsia and the European scientific community.

Musicology, territory and legitimization

The idealised perception of Armenian music as ‘pure’ or ‘primitive’ – as opposed to the elaborate decadence of other ‘oriental’ musics – was shared by Komitas’s allies within the European scholarly community. Pierre Aubry (1874–1910), a French scholar who pioneered the application of philological methodology to the study of music, was an important supporter of Komitas and encouraged him to publish works on Armenian folk music for a European readership (Komitas, 2001: 24, 218). Aubry himself argued that both Greek Orthodox and Armenian church music, ‘like everything that emanates from the Indo-European genius’, had an essentially primitive foundation, but that they were ‘embellished with all the vocal ornaments of Semitico-Turanian art’ by cantors in the Ottoman capital (Aubry, 1901–1903: 330). Oskar Fleischer (1856–1933), one of Komitas’s mentors during his time in Berlin, was similarly concerned to establish a link between the music of the Armenian church and that of the ancient Greeks (or, more precisely, between their respective systems of accentuation) (Fleischer, 1895: 65–68).

The connection between Armenia and ancient Greece in the European imagination, while undoubtedly based to some degree on historical fact, was also reflective of a tendency to view the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire in isolation from the Islamicate society of which they were an integral part. In arguing that Greek Orthodox or Armenian church music was ‘Indo-European’ rather than ‘Semitico-Turanian’, scholars such as Aubry contributed to a narrative of continuity between ancient Greece, the eastern churches and modern Europe, which ignored (or lamented) the reality of Ottoman rule in the Middle East (Kasaba, 2003). The idea of a ‘pure’ Indo-European musical tradition that had subsequently been corrupted by foreign influences was thus an aspect of a larger ideological opposition between Greco-Christian and Islamic civilisations (Lingas, 2003).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars of medieval chant helped to shape the cultural memory of European music by emphasising (imagined) connections between classical antiquity and contemporary practice. At the same time, interest in medieval music drew on Romantic notions of a lost past that were intertwined with the religious revivalism of the post-French revolution era, exemplified by the restoration of Gregorian chant at the monastery of Solesmes (Bergeron, 1998). In different but related ways, Aubry’s and Fleischer’s constructed memories of medieval music were shaped by Romantic notions of cultural purity and the recovery of lost origins. For his part, Aubry aimed in his study of the music of the French Middle Ages to elucidate ‘those natural and primordial laws that are the basis of all literatures and arts, and which poets and musicians, before they codify them and follow them by imitation, obey instinctively’ (Aubry, 1897–1898: 88). Fleischer, meanwhile, was engaged in a quixotic project to establish the Germanic origins of neumatic notation, which was one aspect of his attempt to demonstrate the superiority and purity of the music of the Teutonic Volk (Fleischer, 1923, 1928; Ruf, 2017).

Komitas’s decisive contribution to the cultural memory of Armenian music was influenced by his personal contact with European scholars such as Aubry and Fleischer, as well as by the broader intellectual and aesthetic currents of Romantic nationalism. ¹⁰ Indeed, he was an admirer of Wagner, who, he wrote, ‘gave Germans a national music, [which is] truly a lesson for other nations’ (Komitas, 2005–2007, I: 312; also cited in Soulahian Kuyumjian, 2001: 52). In an obituary published in the Revue de musicologie, the author argued that Komitas had ‘resolved to do for the Church of Armenia what the French monks were doing for Gregorian chant’, by bringing the music of the liturgy ‘closer to its primitive purity’ (Anonymous, 1936).

At the same time, through his lectures, concerts and publications, Komitas shaped perceptions of Armenian music among European intellectuals and musicians. In his review of Komitas’s polyphonic arrangement of the Armenian liturgy, for example, the chant scholar Amédée Gastoué noted with appreciation that the Ter ołormea (Kyrie) was presented ‘in a state of remarkable austerity and purity, in accordance with the primitive charm of the Armenian melody’ (Gastoué, 1934: 48). Reviews of Komitas’s concerts in Europe were similarly enthusiastic and highlighted the power of Armenian music to evoke notions of ancient or natural purity.

Following a concert in Paris, the orientalist scholar and music critic Louis Laloy (who also happened to be the brother-in-law of Komitas’s close confidante Margaret Babayan (Soulahian Kuyumjian, 2001: 63)) wrote an effusive review in which he described Komitas’s performance in terms of natural phenomena – gentle sunlight, murmuring streams – that emerged directly from the Armenian landscape. The latter, he lyricised, was ‘Paradise on earth’:

The soul of men has remained dignified in this happy land; it has guarded, at the very core of itself, its native purity, its trust in the bounty of things and its love of light and of life. And this precious treasure of ingenuousness, which neither the Turks, nor the Kurds, nor the Russians, more barbarous still, have been able to discover or to ravish, is transmitted to us intact in these chants of beautiful lines, sparkling and perfumed flowers. (Laloy, 1906: 422)

Komitas’s presentation of Armenian music as an expression of the soul of the people, which was in turn an element of the natural landscape, can be viewed as part of a broader ethnographic movement during the nineteenth century. As Melissa Bilal has argued, early efforts by Armenian intellectuals to document folk songs or rural traditions served to forge connections between the Armenian people and their ‘native’ territory (Bilal, 2013: 50–94). Moreover, by publishing such ethnographies or anthologies in a diversity of languages and scholarly forums, claims to indigeneity were legitimised in the eyes of an international scientific community.

In the same way, Komitas adopted the intellectual tools of European musicology in order to inscribe a particular narrative of Armenian (musical) history. This entailed a significant shift in the dynamics of cultural memory. Before the late nineteenth century, cultural memory within the Armenian community was legitimised primarily by the Church (and, indirectly, by its mercantile patrons) and disseminated via its institutional, social and educational networks. Discourse about music was largely the domain of educated clerics, and while it may have made reference to practices that were shared with other sectors of Ottoman society, it was oriented towards members of the same confessional community. However, although Komitas was himself a learned priest, after 1910 he distanced himself from Ēǰmiacin and became closely involved with members of the professional, western-educated classes in the Ottoman capital and the wider diaspora (Soulahian Kuyumjian, 2001: 71–99).

Komitas’s construction of Armenian music thus derived its legitimacy not from the Church – indeed, the patriarchate and other clergy members were sometimes openly hostile towards his project (Bilal, 2013: 106) – but from the scholarly institutions of Paris and Berlin, and from the secular notions of Armenian identity that were promoted by cosmopolitan elites in Istanbul. In addition, Komitas made use of new media and public forums to disseminate his ideas. Whereas the performance and transmission of sacred music had previously been restricted to the church and the seminary, it was now presented in theatres and concert halls, discussed in the pages of scholarly journals or newspapers and published in western staff notation. The disapproval of such developments on the part of religious elites can be understood in part as a response to the erosion of their authority as the guardians of cultural memory, as the latter was now shaped by a much broader array of forces extending beyond the confessional community and was increasingly rooted in a modern, secular idea of national identity.

In an era of intensifying transcultural entanglement between Ottoman and European spheres, Komitas’s concerts and publications were oriented not only towards members of the Armenian community but also towards an international audience. European scholars endorsed Komitas’s portrayal of Armenian church music as essentially different from ‘Turkish’ music, which accorded with the nationalistic orientation of musicology and reinforced preconceptions of a fundamental divide between Christian and Islamic civilisations. Moreover, the contemporary geopolitical situation, in which the Armenian Question acted as a focus for debates about Ottoman despotism and the sovereignty of Christian populations (Suny, 2015: 91–140), influenced the reception of Armenian music in Europe. As the musicologist Guido Adler allegedly declared to Komitas in 1914, ‘if God does not hear the voice of the Armenians, then whose will he hear?’ (Gasparyan, 1960: 30; also cited in Soulahian Kuyumjian, 2001: 105). ¹¹ The narrative of Armenian music as an expression of rural ingenuousness and Indo-European purity – which was in danger of being ‘corrupted’ or ‘ravished’ by the Turks – thus encouraged sympathy with the Armenian cause and could easily be linked to the idea of territorial sovereignty.

But although Komitas had a handful of European allies in intellectual and artistic circles, he was nonetheless a member of a stateless and, in geopolitical terms, weak nation. In 1913, he published a polemical essay entitled ‘Armenians have their own music’ in response to a public debate in the pages of Azatamard (‘Freedom Fight’, the organ of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation) about the omission of Armenian music from a recently published French encyclopaedia (Komitas, 2001: 206–209, 2005–2007, II: 83–88). Komitas objected to the view of some of his compatriots that Armenian music did not exist independently of ‘Indo-Persian’, Assyrian or Byzantine music. Indeed, Armenian music was commonly treated in European scholarship as a sub-branch of Eastern or Byzantine chant, rather than as a ‘national’ tradition in its own right. In the first volume of the Lavignac encyclopaedia, for example, Armenian music is discussed only briefly within the article ‘La musique byzantine et le chant des églises d’Orient’ (Gastoué, 1914). Yet a later volume of the encyclopaedia included a substantial article by the Muslim music scholar Rauf Yekta (1871–1935) on ‘La musique turque’ (which, tellingly, omitted any mention of Armenian contributions to the Ottoman musical tradition) (Yekta, 1922).

While European scientific institutions were integral to the construction of cultural memories by indigenous scholars during this period, such disparities highlight the centrality of political power to this process. As a besieged but still powerful state, the Ottoman Empire – increasingly synonymous with ‘Turkey’ – could claim a place in the pantheon of nations that formed the conceptual basis of early twentieth-century musicology. By contrast, there was a direct link between the statelessness of the Armenian people and the argument that ‘Armenian music’ did not exist independently of the surrounding music cultures. The exclusion from an authoritative, ‘international’ encyclopaedia resonated with the larger narrative of Armenia as a voiceless nation that had been promised much but was repeatedly disappointed by the Great Powers. As Komitas lamented,

Poor Armenian people! You are a nation, and as unique as other [nations]; nobody can refute that. You have your own tongue; you speak. You have your own brain; you judge. You have your own anthropological constitution (mardabanakan kazm), by which you are distinguished from other nations and their constitution. Yet your heart, which is the source of your feelings, is apparently not yours, but something that is apparently Assyro-Byzantine and Indo-Persian. (Komitas, 2005–2007, II: 88)

In the age of nationalism and western European hegemony, the cultural memories of different ethno-religious groups within the Ottoman Empire could no longer be fully legitimised through the linguistic, social or institutional structures of the communities themselves; it became necessary also to address an international audience by using the languages, media and institutions associated with western scholarship. Yet access to the latter, and thus the legitimation of cultural-mnemonic narratives, depended on the political position of individual actors and the communities they claimed to speak for.

Members of the dominant social group were able to identify with the Ottoman Empire in a way that Armenian subjects were not. Istanbul represented the centre of the courtly tradition of Ottoman music, which was appropriated by urbane Muslim musicologists such as Rauf Yekta, and perceived as their rightful heritage (Feldman, 1990–1991; O’Connell, 2005). By contrast, Armenian intellectuals, marginalised by the political order and increasingly alienated from the state, attempted to extricate their own ‘national’ music from a transcultural tradition of Ottoman music-making. In doing so, they turned away from the imperial metropole and towards the ancient homeland in the East.

Remembering rural music in the metropolis

As a non-Muslim subject who was born and spent much of his life outside of the Ottoman capital, Komitas had an ambivalent relationship to Istanbul. For Ottoman Armenians, ‘Bolis’ represented the largest centre of the diaspora and was a major hub of economic and cultural activity, in addition to being the seat of the most powerful ecclesiastic institution after Ēǰmiacin. It was therefore a point of attraction for Armenian migrants from Anatolia, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century (Clay, 1998; Quataert, 1993). For intellectuals such as Komitas, Istanbul provided an alternative centre of influence to the Mother Church, from where discourses could be shaped and disseminated within and beyond the Armenian community, assisted by the availability of print technology, institutional and social networks and connections with the wider world.

At the same time, however, Istanbul was the centre of an imperial system that was viewed by a growing number of Armenian intellectuals as hostile and oppressive (Libaridian, 1983, 2011). Although many Armenians continued to serve the Ottoman state, discussions in the Armenian press during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often focused on the injustices, poverty and violence endured by rural communities, which were perceived to stem from the policies of a distant and authoritarian regime in Istanbul and the callous indifference of urban elites. Moreover, as the city came more and more to resemble a modern metropolis, with all the existential malaise and challenges to social cohesion that this implied, the Armenian peasant was idealised as a pure and authentic incarnation of Armenian identity. Thus, although Istanbul was a dynamic centre of communal life until 1915, Armenian intellectuals dissociated themselves from the city in ideological terms, regarding it as a site of corruption and loss of identity and instead viewed the eastern provinces (‘Hayastan’) as the true homeland of the Armenian nation.

This larger narrative was an important factor in Komitas’s understanding of Armenian music, which reflects the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the rural–urban divide. A key element of Komitas’s approach to sacred music was his insistence that it was essentially identical to, and ultimately derived from, the music of the ‘folk’ (žołovurd) (Komitas, 1894: 222, 1898: 112, 2005–2007, II: 185). The latter, in turn, was a spontaneous expression of nature and embodied the geographical, physiological and spiritual characteristics of the Armenian nation. However, the Turkification of Armenians residing in Ottoman cities had led to the corruption of ‘national’ (azgayin) melodies, which now obscured the connection between the music of the Church and the music of the folk:

In Turkey, the tirac‘us, that is to say the church singers, who would sing at the feasts of the notables, began to ornament the Armenian chants with Turkish embellishments, for the pleasure of these notables, because the Armenian liturgical chant, with its noble and pure character, was not of a nature that would amuse the guests and [because] these notables, [living] far from Armenia, in Constantinople or other large cities, had adopted somewhat the tastes and habits of the Turks. Hence, Armenian liturgical music gradually lost, in the large cities, its purity and its national character and acquired the Turkish lasciviousness. (Komitas, 2005–2007, II: 182)

Komitas sought to document the music of Armenian villages in order to ‘re’-introduce it to urban, cosmopolitan listeners, thereby fostering a sense of patriotism that was oriented away from the city and towards the rural homeland. At the same time, his publications and performances of folk music in Europe served to strengthen the notion of a scientifically verified musical tradition that was linked to a particular territory and ethnicity and which was perceived as fundamentally distinct from the musical practices of Muslim communities living in the same areas.

Like contemporary folklorists in Europe or the Americas (Bohlman, 1988), Komitas saw folk song as a repository of national spirit and a source of creativity that was in danger of passing into oblivion with the onslaught of modern life. Throughout his career, Komitas devoted a large amount of time and energy to travelling around the Anatolian countryside in order to notate the songs of rural communities, which he then published, either as collections of music (after arranging them with piano accompaniment or for choir) or in scholarly articles. ¹² It was imperative, he believed, to inscribe this repertoire in notation and to establish an institutional basis for its continued survival, so that it might serve as a means of national rejuvenation.

As Komitas noted, ‘folk song’ was regarded somewhat disdainfully by educated city dwellers, and even its rural practitioners were astonished that a learned priest would be interested in such trivialities (Komitas, 1907: 478, 2005–2007, I: 343). Since villagers did not attach any special importance to songs, which were an unremarkable aspect of day-to-day life, they were in constant danger of being forgotten. As Komitas wrote,

for the peasant, the creation of songs is an act as ordinary and natural as daily conversation is for us. If we do not note down what is said today, or if we do not take care to retain it in our mind, we will not remember it later, or at most, only the outline will remain. (Komitas, 1907: 479–480)

Songs were continually recreated, with new variations or settings of a text quickly replacing once-popular versions – a process that, to Komitas’s consternation, seemed to be of little concern to the villagers themselves.

Viewed from this perspective, the transmission of folk song can be understood in terms of ‘communicative’ memory. Songs had a relatively short lifespan, which depended on oral transmission between contiguous generations. They were the creations of non-specialists, were tied to a specific locality, and did not belong to a written canon that could be circulated across time and space to a larger community. Singing in the village was a form of communication and social interaction but was not formally institutionalised and did not (except in the case of epics) function as a vehicle for the transmission of long-term ‘cultural memory’. By contrast, the canon of sacred music, in theory at least, embodied the cultural heritage of the ancient past. It was codified and transmitted by specialists and could be translocally disseminated through a network of institutions and thus help to maintain a broader sense of collective identity.

By literally inscribing the songs of Armenian villagers, Komitas sought to transfer them from the realm of communicative memory to the edifice of cultural memory. Henceforth, they would be treated with the solemnity normally reserved for sacred music, and guarded not in the apparently unreliable medium of oral transmission, but in the form of authoritative anthologies and essays published in Istanbul, Tiflis or Paris. Moreover, folk song would now represent the essence of a united Armenian nation, rather than the peculiarities of isolated villages or individual singers. The new canon of folk song was accessible – in its notated, arranged and academic form – only to specialists, yet became a key element of larger narratives of collective selfhood, disseminated by elites through print technology, public discourse and educational institutions. In the post-genocide period, Komitas’s transcriptions and arrangements of folk songs became a cornerstone of Armenian national identity, performed with the hushed reverence proper to a sacred ritual or memorial monument.

The process of inscribing folk song as cultural memory entailed its purification from foreign influences and from traces of corruption by the modern, urban world. Thus, although Komitas transcribed songs in Turkish that were sung by his own parents (Komitas, 1924: 84), he maintained that the true Armenian folk song was always performed in the national language – and, indeed, was derived from the speech patterns and intonation of the latter (Komitas, 2001: 67–68, 2005–2007, II: 187). Likewise, he excluded from the canon of national music the songs of Armenian ‘minstrels’ (ašuł, sazandar, gusan) who performed in various local languages and musical idioms, influenced by the ‘corrupting’ conditions of small-town life, where they made a living as professional musicians (Komitas, 2001: 22, 24–25, 2005–2007, I: 339–340, 343–344).

In a period of increasing rural-urban communication, facilitated by new technologies and modes of transport, Komitas portrayed the Armenian village as a haven of innocence that was isolated from contemporary developments in the towns and cities of the Ottoman Empire. Yet it was precisely the increased interaction between urban centres and rural hinterlands, an aspect of the ‘time-space compression’ that is a defining feature of (post)modernity (Harvey, 1990), which enabled Komitas and other intellectuals to write and publish folk-song anthologies or similar ethnographic works. Indeed, while they ostensibly disowned the city and idealised rural life as the essence of nationhood, such endeavours were a quintessentially urban phenomenon, made possible by the technological, social and intellectual conditions of modern metropolitan life (cf. Bilal, 2013: 89–90).

The cultural memory of ‘Armenian music’ as a pure expression of the rural homeland continues to shape popular and scholarly discourse alike. Yet this imagined site of memory was created mainly by city-dwelling intellectuals and was disseminated in media and forums that were dependent on modern urban and interurban infrastructures. That is, the ‘Armenian folk music’ that is today remembered as a core element of national identity, thought to be rooted in an ancient rural homeland, is in many ways a product of the salons and theatres of late Ottoman Istanbul. Furthermore, this understanding of Armenian music achieved the status of a cultural memory not because of an organic connection between song and the Volksgeist but because it was consciously created and disseminated by local elites, legitimised by European scholarly institutions, and subsequently integrated into the nationalist-communist ideology of the Soviet era.

In making the rural homeland the heart of Armenian musical identity, Komitas contributed to a broader social change involving the marginalisation of the Church as a guardian of cultural memory. In 1867, Tntesean had argued that it was only in the music of the Church that one could discern a distinct national character, reflecting the fact that Armenian selfhood was deeply rooted in confessional identity (Tntesean, 1874: 49–50; cf. Bilal, 2013: 125). However, by arguing that sacred music ultimately stemmed from the music of the folk, Komitas inverted this narrative, making confessional identity a derivative aspect of the ethnic-national collective self. Hence, while earlier writers such as Gapasaxalean or Bžškean had taken for granted that the origins of music were divine or supernatural, Komitas posited a natural origin, which was inextricably tied to the homeland and its autochthonous inhabitants (cf. Gelbart, 2007: 40–79; Head, 1997). The cultural memory of Armenian music was thus uncoupled from the institution of the Church and was harnessed instead to a secular narrative of national emancipation.

Conclusion

Komitas’s largely successful mission to create a national Armenian musical tradition illustrates how cultural memory is actively formed by institutions and individuals through public discourse and media, and how its legitimization became increasingly desacralized and internationalised during this period. At the same time, his perpetual struggle against ‘foreign’ influences points towards the transcultural nature of musical memories in the Ottoman Empire.

Memories of Armenian music were always transcultural in the sense of containing traces of interactions with other cultural groups in the various localities in which Armenians were dispersed. Musical memories that were shared between Armenian, Turkish, Greek or Kurdish communities (among others) in the Ottoman Empire were reflective of a kind of local transculturalism, which was the product of long periods of cohabitation in both rural and urban areas. During the nineteenth century, however, such transcultural memories became problematic for intellectuals like Komitas, as political circumstances and scholarly conventions demanded that music, like other cultural practices, should express an unadulterated national essence. But although Komitas attempted to erase or negate traces of transcultural memory in his construction of Armenian music, in doing so he was participating in other, newer transcultural configurations.

Komitas’s project was not an isolated or unique endeavour and should be viewed in relation to similar developments among other communities both in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. Greek-speaking intellectuals, for example, were engaged in intense debates during the nineteenth century about the cultural memory of Byzantine music and Greek folk music (Erol, 2014, 2015). Like debates about Armenian music, they were tied up with imagined memories of classical antiquity, fuelled by geopolitical concerns, and profoundly influenced by the views of European musicologists. To give another example, the cultural memory of Jewish music that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was similarly built around the notion of a lost homeland, depended on the idealisation of rural life by an urban intelligentsia, and reflected growing tensions between confessional and national identity (Bohlman, 2008). The reinvention of collective musical memories was thus a widespread phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, precipitated by increasing contacts between diverse peoples, technological and social changes related to urbanisation, and the global circulation of ideas concerning the connection between music and nationhood.

The creation and legitimation of national musical memories depended on the transcultural transfer of knowledge between cosmopolitan intellectual elites, grounded in political alliances or cultural sympathies, and on the global spread of ideological constructs such as irredentism, evolutionism or ruralist romanticism. So, while Komitas emphasised the uniqueness of Armenian music, which he attributed in part to the geographical and cultural isolation of rural communities, similar beliefs were shared by nationalist intellectuals throughout Eurasia and the Americas and were the product of transcultural networks whose nodal centres were the burgeoning metropolises of the modern world.

The circulation of such ideologies, and conversely the dissemination of collective musical memories, were facilitated by the time-space compression that was a consequence of advancing technologies of communication and transportation. Through the media of print, rail, steam and sound recording, ‘folk’ musics were transplanted from their immediate local contexts and communicated – in an altered form – across vast areas of time and space to become the basis of cultural memories that continue to lie at the heart of nationalist politics. This new global configuration, in which ‘Armenian music’ became a way of remembering a timeless national essence rooted in an ancient homeland, largely displaced the earlier local transculturalism that had allowed for the intermingling of musical memories between diverse communities in the Ottoman Empire. The process of constructing a collective musical memory that would be viable in the modern, globalised world of nation-states thus also involved the active forgetting of the lived experience of music-making in a heterogeneous empire.