New video: ‘Dear Mountains’ by Karen Ouzounian and Lembit Beecher

Dear Mountains is a 42-minute work for SATB chorus, solo cello, oud, and percussion (darbuka, frame drums, and riq). Written in nine movements, it juxtaposes stories told and retold in Karen Ouzounian’s family with scenes of music-making across the Armenian diaspora over the last 100 years, as seen through archival recordings and writings.

Sitting in a multi-layered space between memory, archive, and imagination, the piece is not intended to be a comprehensive portrait of the Armenian diaspora or its music; but rather, the flow of Dear Mountains mimics the experience of growing up in a diaspora: a fragmented world full of incomplete personal stories, deeply layered cultural references, and larger currents of historical narratives.

Orphanhood and exile are present throughout—Armenian communities have dispersed and reformed elsewhere, but remain forever tied to a homeland and the mountains they may never return to. Dear Mountains is a piece of memory and archive but also represents an act of present-day imagination, defiance, and survival, channeling an Anatolian Armenian culture that was systematically erased and no longer exists in its indigenous land, yet continues to live and evolve around the world.  

Dear Mountains arose out of an attempt to understand how a family’s experiences and stories fit into a wider context of displacement and diaspora. Karen’s grandparents and great-grandparents were born in the Anatolian cities of Gesaria, Akshehir, Marash, and Sepastia, in what is now Turkey, and were among those Armenians who survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917. Karen’s family fled to Lebanon where they formed a new life and community until immigrating to Canada during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s.

In combining family stories with a broader evocation of the cultural and emotional life of the Armenian diasporaover the last 100 years, Dear Mountains draws from three types of sources:

1) Scenes of music-making as captured through various archives: an essay depicting Armenian exiles gathering in a Bronx park to listen to Kemany Minas’s haunting 1917 recording of Eghin Havasi; a field recording made in 1939 by Sidney Robertson Cowell in Fresno; a 1927 Columbia Records recording of a father and son from Worcester, MA playing their own violin and piano versions of Anatolian dances; and the recorded voice of the composer and priest Komitas singing HovArek Sarer Jan in the Ottoman Empire before the genocide.

2) Interviews with Karen’s maternal grandmother, Sirvart, and father, Zareh, as they describe life and choral singing in Beirut. In movement eight, an additional story is revealed: a 100-year old family story about Sirvart’s grandfather, Mihran, that she keeps returning to in her later years.

3) Finally, Dear Mountains includes imagined versions of Anatolian Armenian dances, which take traditional rhythmic and melodic modes as a starting point for contemporary inventions. These dances draw inspiration from the Kef tradition that flowered in the Armenian American community, who played music of merriment and joy as a response to overwhelming sorrow and trauma.

DEAR MOUNTAINS

Composed by Karen Ouzounian & Lembit Beecher

Commissioned by Cantori New York

Premiered on November 22nd and 23rd, 2024 at Church of the Holy Apostles, NYC

Featuring:

Cantori New York

Karen Ouzounian, cello

Ara Dinkjian, oud

Philip Mayer, percussion

Mark Shapiro, conductor

Filmed on 23 November 2024

Audio: Swan Studios NYC Video: Jacob McCoy / Richard Berg