Live performance, May 2025 @ Lincoln Center - Concert Program

“Komitas and Friends” began as a cultural exchange project I led for five Juilliard peers to write five pieces for clarinet and piano, each one based on a different Armenian folk song I grew up with as a member of the Armenian diaspora. This personal project was meant to celebrate the interdisciplinary, ever-changing legacy of folk songs deeply rooted in Armenian culture even today.

These songs survive in a written form through music notated and transcribed by Komitas Vardapet, a pioneering ethnomusicologist, composer, and priest who gathered thousands of folk songs at the turn of the 20th century, immortalizing folk tunes for generations to come after much devastation and loss during the Armenian Genocide. After a back and forth with the composers in first getting to know these songs, their personal significance with me, and that of the larger Armenian community, each composer then chose one that resonated with them and transformed it into a piece of their choosing, finding a way for it to speak to their background and compositional language as well— focusing on the text, the harmonic language, and/or historical legacy and context of these songs. The resulting pieces celebrate the vast range of emotions and complex contradictions within and beyond this community, drawing on the universal darkness of glimpses into exile and profound loss, as well as the innocent joy of folk songs I recall singing in my school choir.

Each of these five work was premiered at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium in May 2025, through a larger program celebrating the past and future of these folk songs— including their original form for voice sung in Armenian, as well as in classical and jazz transcriptions that have kept these melodies alive in various communities throughout the last 100 years. In organizing these commissions, recordings, and performance, I was also honored to receive the 2025 Robert Sherman Award for Music Education and Community Outreach, and to speak about this project on WQXR’s Young Artist Showcase.

The five commissions, including the folk songs they were each based on, were recorded in 2025 at Oktaven Audio with pianist Lucas Amory— these recordings can be found below. The commissions and recordings were generously funded by grants awarded from The Juilliard School and Columbia University Armenian Center.