The City that Bleeds Music

I’ve set up shop in Yerevan here for a while for a few reasons. First, I was getting to the point where I was tired, and frankly, this traveling thing wasn’t fun anymore. I wanted to settle for a little bit, unpack, and maybe stop wearing the same clothes every day. I figured that spending a while in one place, really milking as much as I could out of it, would be a noble way to ride out my few weeks alone, and so far, I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it.

Yerevan is a deceptive city. At first glance, it looks like a big, modern, European city. It’s got the boulevards lined with luxury stores of Paris, the ring roads of Moscow, the monuments of Madrid, the grid of Barcelona, and the cinderblock apartments of any former Soviet city. But lurking just beneath the surface of Yerevan, easily accessible as long as you are out and about enough, is a deeply rich cultural scene that is uniquely Armenian. Something I should note, though, is that most of the buildings here are made of this pink stone that so iconically grounds you in Yerevan. Despite it feeling, in many ways, like many other cities, one could never forget that they are in Yerevan.

Now, the reason I’ve set up shop here for so long is that the arts scene in Yerevan is so robust. The city practically bleeds music. What I’d heard is that there’s a significant jazz scene in the city. I was walking around, talking to a friend I’d met about this on my first day there, and as soon as someone I was walking by heard me mention that, they pointed out that we actually walked right past a jazz club. I won’t claim that there’s a jazz club on every block, but I will say that Jazz forms an artery, connecting Yerevan’s musical side to its general, non-ethnomusicologist population. We went to that jazz club that night, and I was surprised to hear, in addition to what sounded like Armenian jazz tunes, the tango classic Oblivion by Piazzola, as well as the Bossa classic Água de Beber incorporated so smoothly into the rest of the program. This group saw Armenian jazz as a member of this international community of ethnic music, and played it alongside, not in spite of, these other classics. The group did truly an amazing job with the music, in particular with Oblivion, putting an amazing spin on it that I’d never even imagined before.

I also was able to attend the Armenian National Opera twice, once to see Khachaturian’s Gayane, and second, to see Tigranyan’s Anoush—two works which form the backbone of the Armenian classical tradition. They both take folk songs and combine them with classical idioms. Gayane also incorporates Socialist Realism, with its plot on a collective farm and in the portrayal of the hero being a hard-working common man.

Anoush was very good, despite me never even having heard of it nor its composer before arriving in Yerevan. The opera eschews any traditional notions of the genre, with each scene being through-composed to one long piece of music instead of several shorter arias. It’s set in a village and covers the tragic story of Anoush, whose lover is killed by a friend, who turns into a foe throughout the course of the opera. It portrays many traditional aspects of Armenian life, especially Ascension Day and wedding traditions.

A scene from Anoush

But let’s get to the meat here…I want to shift focus to the most spectacular celebration of Armenian arts I encountered: the folk dance festival.

On the last Friday of every month, the Karin Folk Group hosts large public dance gatherings, where thousands of locals (and dozens of tourists) gather at the Cascade for a celebration of Armenian traditional dancing. I, upon learning about this a week in advance, was sure as hell not going to miss it. Despite the thunderstorm canceling the event after 2.5 hours, it will go down as one of the best, if not the best, thing I did all summer.

I dove into each dance with no shame, being part of the circle from the start. Though I felt bad for those next to me at the start, stumbling through the steps. But after a few repetitions, I was at least able to get a hang of the movements. By the end of each dance, I was doing it just as well as the rest. I had a few people reassure me that nobody knows what they’re doing, but I’d highly doubt that as it seemed like everyone was a professional from the first beat. Regardless, there’s some feeling unlocked when you finally figure out one of those dances. It fills the heart with warmth, and the brain with culture. When you know what you’re doing, the movements are effortless, and you can start having fun. You focus not on yourself, but on the group. On the beautiful synchronous movements of the mass. You see the group from the third person, admiring the movement of the circle instead of the movement of any individual. If humans are pack animals, this kind of dancing is a perfect display of our natural behavior. In the final minute of each dance, I lost all identity of someone from outside Armenia—just for a bit—as I too felt at one with this mass.

Armenian folk dancing is, inherently, similar to other folk dancing traditions from near and far. Like its cousins, for example Jewish Hora, Bulgarian Horo, Lebanese Dabke, etc., it primarily takes the form of line dances where everyone’s in a circle. The music and dance is repetitive, and the steps may range from pretty easy to wickedly difficult. The differences start, though, when you start looking at the dances with a little more scrutiny.

First, I have found these dances to be significantly more reliant on physical contact than any folk dance/line dance that I’ve seen. Sure, there’s the do-si-do where you swing your partner round and round, but I feel that most eastern line dances mostly treat the other dancers as individuals, not relevant to your own experience in the dance. That is certainly not the case for Armenian dancing.

The first kind of contact you have is with the people next to you. I feel like most folk dancing I’ve ever done has had you just hold the hand of the person next to you. Nearly each dance had its own way of forming the circle. Some dances you’d hold the hand like normal, but others you locked pinkies. Some you put your arms over the shoulders, and others, across the back. Even one dance you locked hands in a way so that everyone is facing forwards instead of inwards. It made my breaking into each circle as a new dance started difficult because I never knew that kind of circle would form next.

As the dance goes on, the hands are not idle. They swing, make circles, break, and clap to a point where your focus cannot be purely on the steps, but rather also on your hands. Letting either slip from your attention would surely lead to the person next to you messing up as well. I mostly let my hands be passive, having the people next to me control them, but by the end of each dance, I’d gotten the hang of my hands as well. I always focused more on the steps first.

Then there’s the much more striking physical contact. Both all-male dances had this kind of contact—dances for the military. In one of these two dances, the circle was split in two, making two lines. We danced around counterclockwise, with those gaps staying quite wide and moving as we did. At the end of every phrase, there was this cool and complicated series of steps inwards, towards the other line, concluding in a jump into the shoulders of the person across from you. Regrettably, I don’t have a video of me doing this dance, but it’s called shatakh. Here it is on YouTube. Another dance I found to be quite cool was also a military dance for just the men. In this one, there was no line. Everyone was divided in half, moving either from front to back to front, or back to front to back. At the center of each phrase, you’d pick a partner, give them a roaring double-handed high five above the head, and move on. That clap moment is powerful, I have to say. It reminds me almost of the haka—a display of force. These high fives are not weak; they echo. They’ll knock you back. In addition, if you are in the mood, you both could drop to a squat and jump up and down for a little bit too. This one was fun because there wasn’t much order to it. It’s based more on communication than it was on a repetitive formula, provided that you stay within the limits of the 8-bar phrase. That being said, I went in for a few high-fives with some people, only to get “rejected” and instead everybody clapped, so maybe there is some sort of order that I never picked up on.

The music is cool as well. For many, but not all songs, it started out quite calm and chill. The steps were deliberate and small. The music would gradually pick up volume and energy, until all at once, it would explode. At this point, it was really loud, markedly faster, and the dancing went from calm and precise to swinging and loose. What used to be a step is now a jump, what used to be a walk is now a run. That’s really the core of these dances—the exciting, energetic, exhausting, sweat-producing portion that gets the blood pumping and the endorphins up.

The instruments for these dances were a reedy flute called a zurna, as well as the dhol drum. This gives a primal sound, almost similar to a snake charmer in Morocco. It’s a uniquely Eastern sound, which again, despite Yerevan’s appearance of a European metropolis, cements the culture as firmly east of Europe. I’m studying next week with a professor in ethnomusicology, so I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about instruments when the time comes.

As I briefly touched on, each dance had its own meaning. Some are military dances, one we did is an homage to the Virgin Mary, and though I would know what the meanings behind the others were if I spoke Armenian, I don’t!

After each dance, I almost always had a person or two come up to me to talk. Their first question was always “Are you Armenian?” to which my answer was always “no.” They then asked what I was doing in Armenia and where I was from, because seemingly Armenians are completely unable to comprehend the fact that an American would come to visit if they don’t have any sort of family connection. They usually all made a comment that I was doing the dances well, and many also offered to show me the next dance, bringing me back to the center of the circle.

The Armenians, I’ve seen so far, are so, so welcoming towards me. They’re always asking what I’m up to, giving me recommendations for places to go and things to do, and wanting to make sure that my time in Armenia is as good as it can be. Some countries, I’ve found on this trip, really go above and beyond with their treatment towards guests, and Armenia is certainly on this list (making it great for my first proper solo travel experience).

I have so much more to say about Yerevan, especially its art scene, and so much more I’m sure I’ll have to add in the future, but for now, this is a brief crash-course into the city that bleeds music.