Kanon, contin'd

Shepherd Song

“Khachaturian took me from Kremlin and bring me to Musician’s Union.  He want me to play for Union members.   Shostakovich was there, Prokofiev, too.  Both them sitting there to watch me play.  After performance, Khachaturian came to me.  ‘Don’t go back to Armenia,’ he says.  ‘Russia praising you. Your door is already open.’  He want me to stay in Moscow.  But because I was stupid, I say, ‘No, I can’t live without my country.  I have to go back to Armenia.’”

* * *

Where you grow up has an effect on you.  If you’re a composer, it affects your music.  When I was about two or three years old I sometimes slept between my mother and father.  One night I woke up because the moon was very bright.  I heard a sound in the street and ran to the window to look out.  A drunk man was stumbling down the street singing a folk tune.  I was just a baby, but this song affected me.  When I got older and learned to write music, I turned that song into a love song for the kanon.

If a composer wants his music to be accepted, he must take it from his own beginnings.  Music bears the character of the artist.  Beethoven is German.  His works prove it.  It’s the same for other composers.  If you listen to Verdi, you know he’s Italian. Tchaikovsky’s music is Russian.  Ethnic character comes out in the music of each composer.

I had a happy childhood and impressions of it became part of my music. That’s what composers do.  They hear a song, they read a nice poem, they hear someone play a simple tune on a kanon or tar, and because they have training, they give the melody a new form.  That’s how I developed “Shepherd Song,” a piece in my program for the senior’s concert.  An instrumentalist in a folk ensemble I worked for professionally played a primitive Armenian flute called a tutak. He developed a little folk melody he named “Shepherd Song” and played it whenever we performed together. His audience loved it.   The man was about seventy years old and couldn’t write his music, because he lacked education.  I was already studying in the conservatory and had learned how to write music.  Because I feared that his song would be lost to future generations of Armenians, I asked him, one day, “Can you come to my house and play for me?  I’d like to write the music for your song.”

“Yes, I’ll be glad to come,” he agreed.  When he got to my home, I asked him to play the melody bar by bar.  In music, vertical bars separate phrases like periods separate sentences.  First, I wrote down each phrase.  Then, I added harmonies for the kanon, because I wanted to play it on the kanon.  This is what composers do.  They rework folk music, and give it back to the people in a better form.