A Slow Week in Yerevan

As I mentioned, I’ve been in Yerevan for a while now, taking life a little slower, sleeping in (sometimes criminally late) and enjoying a more local life. What got me staying here for so long in the first place is that I, through a friend of a friend of a friend, have ended up spending several hours with a leading expert on Armenian folk music: Lusine Nazaryan. My time with her, as well as the other amazing things I’ve experienced this week (the folk dancing festival and Vardavar) have really helped me understand the soul of Armenia.

As I said, I haven’t done much this week—I’ve mostly taken time to walk around the city, become friends with my neighbor, and go on a few day trips. Among the things I’ve seen in Yerevan are all the different parks, the opera Anoush, the Mother Armenia statue, the Aram Khachaturian house museum, and the Matenadaran.

Those first things are pretty quick to cover. The parks here are all really nice, and as seems to be the theme with Yerevan, they’re rife with fountains, both of the drinking and of the decorative variety. They fill up especially in the evenings with kids on electric cars and with light up displays for family-friendly fun every night of the week. The Mother Armenia statue (much like the Mother of Georgia statue) is on a hilltop looking over Yerevan, and there’s a nice park around it with some amusement park rides.

The Aram Khachaturian house museum is a testament to the great work Khachaturian did in bringing Armenian folk tunes into a classical context, accessible to the entire world instead of just Armenians. It covers his childhood (he actually grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia), as well as his career as a musician, his notable accomplishments, and the work he did bridging the US and the USSR. He notably performed his last concert in Honolulu, Hawaii! The museum had several original scores and batons, and was blasting his greatest hits the entire time.

The Matenadaran is a museum that sits on a hill, at the very end of Mesrop Mashtots boulevard. Mesrop Mashtots is a hero in Armenian history, creating the Armenian alphabet in 304 so that the Bible could be transcribed, translated, and maintained now that Armenia was officially Christian. The museum is easily visible from the other end of the city, and sits as a black, basalt testament to the Armenians’ pride in their alphabet from anywhere along that boulevard. It houses thousands of manuscripts, all the way back to the 300s, of Bibles, scientific textbooks, and official documents, tracing Armenian writing’s continuous tradition back to its invention. You can see, throughout the history, how different scripts were involved and avoided, including the Arabic and Russian scripts most notably. The museum also houses hundreds of manuscripts in different languages, such as Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, Amharic (Ethiopian), Hebrew, or Georgian.  I enjoyed spending an hour or so just walking around, looking at all the writing and admiring the drawings on the illuminated manuscripts.

Something I’ve noticed is that simply barev dzez (hello) is enough to get the locals to think that I’m Armenian. I often find myself having to ask them to switch to English right away, because either not many foreigners even get to that point in their Armenian learning, or somehow, I pass more for Armenian that I thought. It’s just funny because I feel like anywhere in Europe, if you greet them in their local language, they’ll think it’s cute then switch immediately to English afterwards. Here, I have to clarify that no, I cannot speak Armenian, and that we need to continue the rest of this conversation in my very broken Russian, or of course, preferably, English.

But what's made this week has really been the interactions with some people I've met here: my music professor, Lusine, and my neighbor Mojtaba.

In terms of what I’ve learned in my lessons with Lusine: we’ve spent so far six hours together, discussing the basics of what makes Armenian music Armenian music, including how that has changed throughout time. For the majority of Armenia’s history, music has been monophonic—just a single melody without any accompaniment. This was for things like shepherd’s songs or even dances, which could be accompanied by a dhul (drum) or a drone from another instrument for effect. Each village, and each region speaks a different dialect of Armenian, and that dialect—that change in manner of speaking—leads to different melodies, different rhythms, and different tonalities. Therefore, you may find the same song across different Armenian regions with a very different sound. The tunes are classified generally by where they came from, and there was one type of tune typical to each place. For example, we discussed, at length, the “Artsakh Lullaby,” native to the region of Artsakh (nowadays occupied and ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan), which has a completely different mode, feel, and emotion than the Van or Erzurum lullaby from maybe only 100 miles away.

The different kinds of music we discussed were lullabies, working music, ritual music, and dance music. These are the major categories that folk songs in this region are classified into. Lullabies are sung by grandmothers exclusively, as the voice of a grandmother has the power to put a baby to sleep instantly. Working music may be like a shepherd’s song, or it could be something to pass the time as you are churning butter. Ritual music is mostly for Sunday mass, weddings, and the related festivities, and of course, dance music is for dancing!

The Armenian wedding rituals are incredibly deep. They last a whole week, and involve everything from how the groom picks up the bride from her house, how invites are sent using decorated apples, or even how bread is placed on the shoulders of the newlyweds. Lusine is incredibly knowledgeable on the topic, and I can just hear in her voice when she talks about it just how powerful it is to her. She feels these traditions deep in her soul, and that is incredibly evident. She gets emotional talking about the time she spent in Van—a town in modern-day Turkey, which is historically Armenian, and her eyes and her cheeks drop when she tells me that most Armenians no longer have a traditional wedding, choosing instead a more Western style wedding. Her voice breaks talking about losing Artsakh and Western Armenia to the Turks and Azeris, and her face lightens when she talks about her visits to all the villages around historical Armenia. She’s invited me to come back next summer, and though I’m unsure where my next 12 months will lead me, I would be honored to go on a little road trip with her through all the places that keep her blood pumping and her soul happy..

She says that anyone who loves Armenia and Armenian culture is instantly a friend of the Armenians. She has welcomed me so graciously to her country and introduced me so well to her culture, and I am incredibly thankful for all she has taught me this week.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a musician named Komitas took the monophonic, traditional music of Armenia and applied Western music principles to it—including adding harmonies and polyphony. Komitas, then, became the founder of Armenian classical music. He set up the pathway for Artiunian, Khachaturian, and Babajanian to write Western Classical Music in an Armenian style, not forgetting the roots, but rather, incorporating those to tell the whole world about Armenia.

I have so, so many more notes, but I think I will save that for a dedicated research paper or presentation. I am also working on a composition, inspired by Komitas, to bring many folk melodies to the context of a string quartet written in the German Sonata Form. We’ll see how far it goes, but I’ve been enjoying the exercise, nonetheless.

I also befriended my neighbor, Mojtaba. He's Persian, and has been living in Yerevan just for 7 months. He grew up in a small village outside of Esfahan, Iran, and when he was 16, founded a blog chronicling the history of his village and its important sites. With the encouragement of family friends, he went to school to be in hospitality and tourism. He didn't quite enjoy working for tour operators or hotels, as he saw his freedom limited by what he was told to lead. To solve that, he founded WeGoPersia, which, truly, is a tour operator that I've heard of before. And I'd heard quite wonderful things about it at that—they were highlighted by National Geographic as their go-to Iran tour operator. When I told him about my musical studies here, he told me I simply had to go to Iran to experience it there. His brother is an artist and knows several musicians, and has encouraged me to come to visit his brother and his friends to dive deep into Persian musical history and tradition. He did mention that, of course, now would not be the time to come, and we should wait for peace and some semblance of stability. He was working in Georgia for a while, but felt done with that job, but didn't want to go back to Iran because of the instability there. So, he settled in Yerevan, working to bring Iranian tourist groups to Armenia for short stays. Armenia is one of the few countries Iranians can enter visa-free for 90 days, and walking around Yerevan, you'll see an amazing number of Iranian license plates on cars and buses, tons of Farsi written at tourist sites, and many Iranian restaurants scattered around.

Armenia is stuck in a weird geopolitical situation, where they hate Turkey and hate Azerbaijan, are friendly with Iran, but also secretly friendly with—or perhaps better described as sympathetic towards—Israel due to their shared history of persecution and cultural erasure on the hands of the Ottomans and Muslim caliphates at large. This comes in spite of Israel's rather overt cooperation with the Azerbaijanis. I feel like they're a weird acception—a place that can make its allies without the greater context of international relations getting involved. Iran isn't seen as scary here—the Iranian people help form modern Yerevan. But at the same time, all those Iranians here secretly wish for a major change where their Iran can be happy and free again.

We first met in the elevator of the building, when he asked me where I was from. He apologized when he said he was from Iran, but I gave him a warm welcome and wanted to make sure he didn't feel uncomfortable around me. On Vardavar, I had taken my phone for the morning but wanted to leave it at home for the rest of the day so I didn't ruin it. On my way back, I got shot in the back with water and heard "This one's for my American neighbor!" I paused to talk for a second with him, which is when he offered me to just leave my phone in his office right off of Republic Square. I graciously accepted, and we headed in that direction. Though he had to work that day, he'd still brought several water guns to shoot passers by on his occasional breaks. When I came back for lunch to grab my wallet, he offered me some dates, and we stood, both dripping wet, eating the dates and sharing our experiences from the day's events.

Last night, I ran into him for a third time. I was coming back to the apartment but the elevators were broken. He was just sitting on the bench outside, texting his girlfriend. He invited me over to talk to pass the time until the elevator got fixed. We ended up talking more seriously—more than just superficial conversation, but rather, about ourselves and our lives. This is when I learned his life story, as well as the fact that he was the founder of WeGoPersia. This is also when we discussed my music lessons, and eventually, discussion faded to the current events you would expect that any Jew would discuss with any Iranian. Primarily, we both wished for peace. Because what we were doing was beautiful; it was a friendship, based on kindness and shared interests. I know that the Iranians would be great friends with the Jews—we're both hard working, deeply in love with our cultures, and have a spirit, driven into us historically, of science, reason, and intelligence. He was certainly not uncomfortable when I told him I was Jewish, and we continued on our conversation about the state of the world with no hard feelings nor disagreement. We talked about how he, as well as the majority of Iranians, greatly disapprove of the current government, though they're too scared to do anything to change it. He would welcome an Iran—or possibly Persia—that is free from war and from fear, a place where culture and history can continue to live and thrive. Somewhere like Uzbekistan, but in his eyes, the motherland of it all. Like Uzbekistan on steroids.

I'm looking forward to going with him for coffee tomorrow, as we say not goodbye, but see you later.

Both my time with Lusine and Mojtaba have really informed me with the identity of this region of the world. They are people who are strongly in love with their traditions and with their histories. They love their country and want to see it prosper. They want to see it at its greatest, as a shining beacon of culture, knowledge, craftsmanship, and art. Lusine is noticeably affected by the loss of the Armenian homeland to its neighbors, and the loss of the Armenian traditions to western ones, and Mojtaba just hoping for the day that he can show the entire world his beloved Persia. Despite these pains they feel, they do what they can to spread the word, to educate who they can. Lusine is refusing to even give me an answer with how much I should pay her, and Mojtaba has dedicated his entire life to reviving the history of Iran and sharing it with everyone who is interested. It's so honorable what the two of them are doing, and without their tireless and philanthropic work, their beloved cultures would fade into relics of the past. They are the ones who keep me traveling—the ones who keep traditions alive and make sure they stay relevant in an ever changing, hostile, and globalizing world. I could not have thought of two greater mentors, who i have the honor of calling both my friends, to guide me through my solo week in Yerevan. To them, I am greatly thankful. I fully plan on seeing both in the future, whether it is continuing my studies in music or just back in this region as a tourist. They have both said they'll be eagerly awaiting my return.