ARMENIA – ART, MUSIC, DANCES
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ARMENIAN ART
Armenian art is the unique form of art developed over the last five millennia in which the Armenian people lived on the Armenian Highland. Armenian architecture and miniature painting have dominated Armenian art and have shown consistent development over the centuries.
Panos Terlemezian
Panos Terlemezian was an Armenian painter, a People’s Artist of Armenian SSR. Terlemezian was born in Aygestan, located in the vicinity of the city of Van, Western Armenia. He continued education and majored in fine arts. In 1909, Panos Terlemezian was elected as a mayor of Van.
Influenced by impressionism, Terlemezian became the author of industrial pictures. The contribution of Panos Terlemezyan in Armenian fine arts is invaluable. He was rated highly and the art works of Panos Terlemezyan were appreciated in Armenia. An arts school established in Yerevan in 1921, was named after him in 1941
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-American painter, who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent most his life as a national of the United States. Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian Genocide.
Gorky was born on April 15, 1904, in the village of Khorgom, situated on the shores of Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire.
In 1915, Gorky fled Lake Van during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky’s mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Arriving in America in 1920, the 16-year-old Gorky was reunited with his father, but they never grew close.
Gorky’s contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His paintings and drawings hang in every major American museum including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
“The Artist with His Mother” is one of the most popular works of Arshile Gorky. “The Artist with His Mother” reflects the artists’ pain and memories. Gorky presents his mother as a symbol of the lost motherland and its beauty.
Gorky’s art has always expressed the idea of the Armenian Genocide, lake Van, as well as the Armenian lost homeland. During the last period of his life, Gorky presented unique paintings with bright colors. The most significant ones among these paintings are “Agony”, “Waterfall”, “Parks in Sochi”, and many others.
Ivan Aivazovsky
Ivan Aivazovsky is known as a master of marine art and a Russian Romantic painter who was Armenian! His seascapes are true works of art, possibly inspired by his home in Crimea on the shores of the Black Sea. He was born Hovhannes Aivazian, in 1817 to Armenian parents, Konstantin and Hripsime Aivazian.
Aivazovsky began his painting studies in Russia where he was influenced by his teachers and classic Romantic era painters. He also traveled and studied in Europe, where he visited his brother at the Armenian monastery in Venice It was here that he studied Armenian art and lerned to incorporate Armenian elements into his works. His fame as an artist began to grow during the 1850s when he received many honors and awards from countries all around the world, including Russia, France, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. By 1865, he opened a studio in his hometown of Fedosia and was paid a salary by the Imperial Academy of the Arts.
The “Ninth Wave” is arguably Aivazovsky’s best work and is an amazing example of his unique capture of light and water movement. “Shipwreck” and “On the Storm” are two of his other famous seascapes, while “View of Tiflis” is an excellent example of one of his landscape paintings. What is even more impressive is that he painted almost exclusively from memory without the assistance of preliminary sketches.
In terms of Armenian themed paintings, Aivazovsky was the first Armenian painter to paint the famous Armenian mountain, Mt. Ararat, “Valley of Mt. Ararat”.
Martiros Saryan
Martiros Saryan is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, the founder of the Armenian national contemporary school of painting. Saryan was born on February 28, 1880 in New Nakhichevan. As a prominent public figure, he headed the Union of Artists of Armenia from 1945-1951. His works are mainly preserved and exhibited in the National Gallery of Armenia, as well as in the best museums of the CIS, the USA, France and other countries.
Saryan, due to his unique perception of the world, was unofficially recognized as a “Master of Color”. The artist’s canvases are literally imbued with warm colors and national motives of his beloved Armenia. Looking at the paintings of Saryan, you involuntarily feel a kinship with nature, so skillfully the master plays with colors. His infinite love for his motherland and people, the maestro used to express through art: he painted mountains, the sun, fields of gold and green, simple peasants, and in all of this there was an immense worship of Armenia. Saryan skillfully combined artistic traditions of the East with modern achievements of the European art, creating his own unique “Saryan style”.
Armenian Cross-Stones
Cross stones are trendy in Armenia. They are outdoor steles carved from stone, and the main element of them is the cross. Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion. So Christian symbols are widely used in the craftsmanship of khachkars. Khachkar is included in the list of UNESCO’s intangible world heritage.
The Art of Making Armenian Carpets
Carpet weaving is a traditional Armenian craft that has a history of thousands of years. It has been part of Armenian culture since ancient times. A carpet or a rug is a woven textile that is mostly used to cover floors. It is still unknown when the carpets were used first, but some archeologists proved that they appeared in 2-1 millennium BC. They were considered a necessity in all traditional Armenian homes and were used to cover floors, decorate walls. Due to their popularity and high-quality, Armenian carpets were successfully exported and sold abroad.
Historians noted that Armenian carpets had exceptional quality because they were made from high-quality wool and were dyed with natural colors, especially with “vordan karmir”.
Nowadays, rug making in Armenia continues to be popular. There are some private companies and individual weavers who keep alive the traditional craft.
The most widespread materials to produce carpets are sheep or goat wool, cotton, linen, silk, hemp. For coloring, only national dyes are used. Armenian carpets have different ornaments. They are very diverse and each one has its specific meaning. The design of Armenian carpets is very diverse. The ornaments reflect the traditions, rituals, and beliefs of Armenia. To understand the meaning of them, you must have knowledge of Armenian history and culture.
ARMENIAN MUSIC
The Armenian music originated in the 2nd millennium BC. The Armenians had a unique musical tool, called “Pandir”. Pavstos Buzand mentioned that Armenians had already pipe, lyre, trumpet, and drums already in the 5th century.
The music of Armenia has its origins in the Armenian Highlands, where people traditionally sang popular folk songs. Armenia has a l ong musical tradition that was primarily collected and developed by Komitas, a prominent priest and musicologist, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Armenian music has been presented internationally by composers Aram Khachaturian, Alexander Arutiunian, Arno Babadjanian, Karen Kavaleryan as well as by pop musicians and performers such as duduk player Djivan Gasparyan.
Sayat Nova
Sayat-Nova was an Armenian poet, musician and ashugh, who had compositions in a number of languages. His songs are in Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Persian. The name Sayat-Nova means “King of Songs” in Persian. In Armenia, Sayat Nova is considered a great poet who made a considerable contribution to the Armenian poetry and music of his century. Although he lived his entire life in a deeply religious society, his works are mostly secular and full of romantic expressionism.
Komitas
Komitas, was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.
Komitas lost his mother when he was less than one year old, and then at the age of ten he lost his father.“He was a frail, weak, pale boy, always thoughtful and kind. He was dressed poorly,” one of his classmates recalled about Komitas.
Twelve-year old Soghomon was selected out of the other 20 orphans to study at the Seminary.
He travelled all over the country, villages to search for various folk songs and dances. So he collected some 3,000 songs.The majority of his manuscripts were destroyed or lost all over the world…
On April 24, along with other Armenian intellectuals, he was sent to be killed. Through the intervention of US Ambassador Henre Morgenthau and some Turkish friends, he was saved – but only physically. His personal experience, along with knowing that many of his contemporaries had been murdered, forever changed Komitas. After a time in Constantinople, he left for Paris and was admitted into an insane asylum, where he died.Today the Yerevan Music Conservatory is named after Komitas.
Arno Babajanian
Arno Babajanian was an Armenian composer and pianist during the Soviet era. Much of Babajanian’s music is rooted in Armenian folk music and folklore. In 1971, he was named a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. Babajanian was also a noted pianist and often performed his own works in concerts. He has several piano works, chamber works, orchestral works, ballet pieces and film scores.
Aram Khachatryan
Aram Khachatryan was an Armenian composer and conductor. His first major work, the Piano Concerto popularized his name within and outside the Soviet Union. It was followed by the Violin Concerto and the Cello Concerto. His other significant compositions include the Masquerade Suite, the Anthem of the Armenian SSR, three symphonies and around 25 film scores. Khachatrian is best known fo his ballet music — Gayane and Spartacus. His style is “characterized by colorful harmonies, captivating rhythms, virtuosity, improvisations, and sensuous melodies.
Djivan Gasparyan
Djivan Gasparyan is an Armenian musician and composer. He plays the duduk, a double reed woodwind instrument related to the orchestral oboe. Gasparyan is known as the “Master of the duduk”. He has won four medals at UNESCO worldwide competitions. In 2002, he received the WOMEX Lifetime Achievement Award. He has toured the world several times with a small ensemble playing Armenian folk music. His music has
been chosen on the soundtrack of several international films.
Duduk
Duduk is a musical instrument made from aged apricot wood. That’s why Armenians call it “Tsiranapogh.” It is a magical instrument which touches a person’s soul. You can feel the grief, the painful past of the Armenian people through the duduk. This national instrument is registered in UNESCO’s intangible world heritage list.
ARMENIAN DANCES
Armenian National Dances are one of the oldest ones in the area of Caucasus. They reflect the entire story of the country by making one the part of it. When watching these dances, you feel like reading a poem about the history of Armenia. By dancing them yourself, you feel what Armenians felt – all the struggles during wars, strong belief in God, enormous power, love toward the country and family and happiness of the victory.
The Armenian dance heritage has been considered one of the oldest and most varied in its respective region. From the fifth to the third millennia B.C., in the higher regions of Armenia, the land of Ararat, there are rock paintings of scenes of country dancing. These dances were probably accompanied by certain kinds of songs or musical instruments.
Kochari
Kochari is a very well-known dance in Armenia. It is a category of dance, and each region dances it with its individual style. The word Kochari means “knee, come”
Yarkhushta
Martial dances are also very common in Armenia. One of the most popular ones is called Yarkhushta, originated from historical Armenian region Sasun. It is from a category of Armenian “clap dances.” The most important part of the dance is when dancers who are facing each other clap onto the palms of each other. Traditionally soldiers were dancing Yarkhushta before the war to feel more powerful and to awake the battle spirit in them.
Berd
Another well-known Armenian martial dance is called Berd. The dance originated from an old Armenian city called Vaspurakan. In the beginning, this was a game called Gmbetakhagh when people were making a fortress by standing on each other’s shoulders. After some time, the game transferred into a dance. The dancers are usually men who show the process of building a wall for the defense of territories during the battle.
Shalakho
One of the most famous and energetic Armenian dances is called Shalakho. There are different versions of the dance, but the most spread one is where two men dance-fight to win the heart of their loved woman. Nowadays, both men and women dance Shalakho during various events in Armenia. Women have slow and lyrical moves as in the most Armenian dances. Men’s moves are very different from women’s ones. They dance faster and more energetically.
Published: Apr 6, 2020
Latest Revision: Aug 8, 2020
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