The Armenian Weekly. On November 22-23, 2024, the world premiere of Lembit Beecher and Karen Ouzounian’s co-composed new work, DEAR MOUNTAINS, opened Cantori New York’s 40th season. This new work combines a 100-year-old story from Ouzounian’s Armenian family’s history with Armenian folk songs and liturgy and contemporary, imagined dances of a lost and distant Anatolian homeland.
Though Ouzounian and Beecher have collaborated extensively, DEAR MOUNTAINS is the first piece the two have written together. They both grew up with stories of family origin and migration: Ouzounian’s Armenian family immigrated from Beirut to Canada during the Lebanese Civil War, while Beecher’s Estonian grandmother and mother fled to the U.S. during the later stages of World War II, spending years in displaced persons camps.
Commissioned by Cantori New York and conducted by Mark Shapiro, this new piece features performances by Karen Ouzounian, cello, Ara Dinkjian, oud, and Philip Mayer, percussion. Presented along with the world premiere of DEAR MOUNTAINS was the Exaudi for cello and voices by the late Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock, as well as In the Beginning by Aaron Copland.
In this interview with Ouzounian and Beecher, we speak about the trajectory of DEAR MOUNTAINS, the wider message of the piece and future collaborative projects.
Milena Baghdasaryan (M.B.): DEAR MOUNTAINS incorporates elements from your family’s Armenian history as well as memories of a distant Anatolian homeland. Could you walk us through the process of how you managed to harmoniously integrate such complex themes into the composition?
Karen Ouzounian (K.O.): DEAR MOUNTAINS is a piece that mimics the fragmented experience of growing up in a diaspora, so the world of the piece is a mix of stories from my family, scenes of music-making across the Armenian diaspora as captured through archives (both written descriptions and recordings) and newly composed dances, which take traditional Anatolian Armenian rhythmic and melodic modes as a starting point for contemporary inventions. The piece is filled with a lot of different narrative and musical material, but we spent a lot of time thinking about the form and shape of the piece. We wanted to make sure that each movement would lead smoothly into the next, and that there was an overall dramatic shape that felt organic and rewarding.
M.B.: As a cellist, you often create deeply personal performances. How do you manage to make compositions such as DEAR MOUNTAINS both personal and also universal to touch international audiences?
K.O.: I think that the universality of artwork always comes out of the specific and personal. No matter where we are from, there is so much in common with all of our experiences of the world, and I believe that the more honestly I can share the emotions and experiences that are closest to me, my family and my community, the more chance I have of communicating with people around the world and affecting them emotionally.
M.B.: Armenian folk culture is very rich. How do you choose which specific Armenian folk pieces to include?
K.O.: I grew up hearing and singing and playing a lot of Armenian music, particularly the music of Komitas. But in writing DEAR MOUNTAINS, I was particularly interested in researching and learning more about the music of Ottoman Armenia where my ancestors were from. So I began my research with the towns and regions they were from: Gesaria, Konya, Marash and Sepastia, and much of the music of DEAR MOUNTAINS draws inspiration from these regions. Much of the piece also pulls from archives from the Armenian diaspora, so we started our research with recordings from places like Fresno, California, Worcester, Massachusetts and New York City.
M.B.: You and Lembit have collaborated extensively, but this is your first co-written piece. How did this new form of collaboration influence or even alter your working style?
K.O.: There was so much wonderful back and forth in this collaboration, but ironically, because we worked so much together in devising the large-scale form of the piece, I think the collaboration allowed me to have the space to discover new things by myself as a composer.
M.B.: Do you intend to present the piece in Armenia anytime soon?
K.O.: We very much hope to present the piece in Armenia, but we have no specific plans at the moment!
Karen Ouzounian
M.B.: Lembit, your family’s story of migration has found its unique role and resonance in the DEAR MOUNTAINS piece. Was it difficult for you to combine and parallel your narrative of the piece with Karen’s?
Lembit Beecher (L.B.): DEAR MOUNTAINS is only about Karen’s family story and the Armenian diaspora. However, there are a lot of resonances with my Estonian family’s story of displacement and migration. Karen and my experiences growing up within a diaspora mirrored each other, so I think I have some understanding of her relationship to family stories.
M.B.: Could you please walk us through the process of turning such personal stories, experiences and emotions into notes?
L.B.: There were two key sources of material for DEAR MOUNTAINS — archival records (both written and audio recordings) of music-making across the Armenian diaspora and stories from Karen’s family. For these stories, we began by conducting numerous interviews with Karen’s family members. Karen had actually begun doing these interviews in 2021 for a different project and kept doing them over the last few years. Interviews that deal with such personal and intense family stories can vary a lot depending on the circumstances of the interview, so it was important for us to ask about the same stories more than once. We then transcribed the interviews (which takes a long time but is really important!) and began to look for stories that stood out and themes that kept repeating. We then wrote out all of our possible ideas, both the family stories and scenes described in the archival sources, on a big sheet of paper and began to imagine the form of the piece — how the music for each story might sound and how one scene might lead into another. After spending so much time thinking about and internalizing these words and stories, the music in some ways came naturally. We wanted the music and storytelling to unfold smoothly, so we often improvised sections of music, repeating the improvisations many times before transcribing our improvisations.
1915 photo of Mihran Margarossian (third row), Karen’s maternal great-great-grandfather arrested in Kayseri, Ottoman Empire
M.B.: What did you learn about Armenian history and folk music from your collaboration with Karen? What aspect or feature of Armenian history and culture struck you the most?
L.B.: There is so much that I have been learning about Armenian history and music. For many years I have loved the songs that I have played and sung with Karen’s family, but working on this project has given me a deeper understanding of the regional differences of Armenian music. Armenian folk music feels like it is drawn straight out of the earth. It always surprises me. Rhythmically and melodically there are so many unexpected twists and turns, but at the same time, it feels totally organic and natural once I get to know it.
M.B.: From a composing perspective, did you encounter any challenges when incorporating the Armenian folk elements into the piece?
L.B.: I think the challenge for us in writing was to find ways of incorporating Armenian folk elements without being superficial. We didn’t want to take folk melodies and rearrange them for the choir to sing. Instead, there are several movements that include very careful transcriptions of archival recordings. For example, the third movement includes a transcription of Kemany Minas’s 1917 recording of “Eghin Havasi” which was very popular in the Armenian community. In the 1993 issue of the quarterly magazine Ararat, we found a deeply moving description of Armenian immigrants gathering in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx in the 1920s after the Genocide, listening to this recording and dancing away their grief. This park is not far from where we live in New York City, and imagining this recording being played in the same space a century ago felt sharply poignant. In the movement that we wrote, the cello plays an exact transcription of Kemany Minas’s original recording, and we wrote choral music that fit around this recording and tried to evoke the clouds over Van Cortlandt Park and the scene of Armenian immigrants listening to this recording 100 years ago.
M.B.: Mixing different musical instruments such as cello, oud and percussion within DEAR MOUNTAINS might be challenging. How did you manage to ensure that each preserves its unique qualities and nuances while maintaining the general harmony of the piece?
L.B.: In writing the piece we were careful not to have everyone playing all the time. The oud and percussion act as a unit, and so does the chorus, and the cello ties them together. In particular, we wanted to make sure there was space for the audience to hear the beauty of the oud by itself or with simple accompaniment. But in the eighth movement, all of the forces come together as the chorus sings a story from Karen’s grandmother, Sirvart, a story about becoming a dressmaker in Lebanon.
M.B.: What was the most memorable moment for you when working together on such a unique piece?
K.O & L.B.: Early in the process of working on this piece, we read an article in The Armenian Weekly written by Stephen Kurkjian in 2014. The article discussed a photo of 51 Armenian men standing in front of a Turkish prison in Gesaria in 1915. To our shock, we saw in the back row Karen’s great-great-grandfather (Karen’s maternal grandmother Sirvat’s grandfather) Mihran Margarossian. Known as Shekherji Mihran, he owned a candy factory in Gesaria before the Genocide. In the article, Stephen Kurkjian identifies him as “Mihran, candy maker.” The story of Mihran’s killing is one that Karen’s grandmother Sirvart tells often, and this story became part of our piece.
Ouzounian’s mother Lena in Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes in Beirut in 1974
M.B.: Does being a couple influence the creative process?
K.O & L.B.: Being a couple was a huge benefit for the creative process of this piece. It enabled the piece to be composed in a very organic way. We would sometimes work separately and sometimes work together, sitting at the piano together or just at a desk together. And as we worked, any time we had small questions for each other, we could discuss them immediately rather than waiting for a meeting.
M.B.: What message or feeling would you like to convey to your audience through this piece? In general, what’s your goal when creating musical pieces?
K.O & L.B.: Our goal in writing and playing music we think is always to put people back in touch with the reality of the world — its physical and emotional nature — to create empathy with the stories and emotional worlds of others and to create a sense of connection, a feeling that more is shared between us than separates us. With DEAR MOUNTAINS we also hope that we might spark a little bit of curiosity about Armenia, its music and history and the Armenian diaspora.
M.B.: In this work, you’re collaborating with renowned musicians Ara Dinkjian on oud and Philip Mayer on percussion. What did you gain from this collaboration?
K.O & L.B.: Ara and Phil are both such kind, generous and skillful musicians. And in particular, Ara is just an encyclopedia of Armenian musical knowledge. We are very lucky to work with them both!
M.B.: Are there any other projects that you’re currently working on that you would like to share with our readers?
K.O & L.B.: We have also just created a 60-minute show for solo cello, electronics and piano called Mayrig that journeys through the music of baroque composer Marin Marais, early 20th century Anatolian Armenian folk music, Charles Aznavour, re-imagined 20th-century popular Armenian tunes, and contemporary pieces by Lembit, Nathalie Joachim, Layale Chaker and Niloufar Nourbakhsh, while weaving the voices of Karen’s mother and grandmother in an intimate exploration of family, migration, war, trauma and memory. We are going to be touring it in the next couple of seasons.
