by Christopher Atamian
NEW YORK — When asked to describe the type of music she writes Kouyoumdjian defers to answer, offering that she is simply “a composer and documentarian.” Most would understand her music as a variant of classical or contemporary music, though not necessarily in the sense of Ravel or Debussy, although she grew up playing classical piano. Kouyoumdjian describes her compositions as “multimedia works that integrate live musical performance, electronic soundscapes and documentary components such as interviews and field recordings” and that she enthusiastically shares her admiration for the “structured chaos of the Beatles.”
Interestingly enough, the idea of a composition or phrase just popping into her head seems like a romantic conceit of some sort on the part of the listener. Instead, Kouyoumdjian undergoes a rigorous process before each project: “I start with an idea or theme, often related to a political or current event. Then I do copious amounts of research. I use a program called LOGIC to help me with the musical process and then only once I have everything time-lined do I sit down to write the music itself.”
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As to getting the final piece performed, this involves the sometimes-tedious process of applying for grants and workshopping: “After you have one grant, the others come a lot easier.”
Kouyoumdjian cites everyone from Kronos Quartet to the Beatles, to Radiohead and Steven Kazuo Takasugi as influences, though she also grew up playing classical piano, and is particularly fond of Béla Bartók.
To my mind, apart from these influences Kouyoumdjian’s music possesses a very deep, plangent quality to it and a definite modernist vibe. Her short, perfectly titled piece, I Haven’t the Words, displayed lovely tempo and perfectly spaced intervals as played by pianist Sahan Arzruni earlier this year, in front of a packed audience at the New York Arts Club.
But Kouyoumdjian’s work is also noteworthy for its range. In 2022-23, the Sheen Center in downtown New York City and Beth Morrison Projects staged “Adoration,” an opera based on the Atom Egoyan film of the same title, with music by Kouyoumdjian and lyrics by Royce Vavrek.
Said Kouyoumdjian, “I worked on Adoration for several years. The genesis of the project came from my collaboration with Vavrek, who like Atom, is Canadian and who, like myself, is a huge fan of Egoyan.”
The film follows Simon, an orphaned high school student. As part of a writing assignment Simon’s teacher encourages him to use details from a terrorist attack as an event perpetrated by his parents. After that, as is often typical in an Egoyan film, all hell breaks loose, one important detail at a time, as each character finds out that their version of the truth isn’t quite what they expected it to be. The story is a meditation on hate and the fact that hate is often portrayed as binary. Adapting any film to another medium is always difficult but staging a film adaptation is especially so as there is no editing or post-production involved to help portray emotions or events. Kouyoumdjian’s pared-down score perfectly accompanies the lyrics and the action that we witness on stage — experimental opera at its best. Adoration will be performed again at the LA Opera with Beth Morrison Projects, February 19-23, 2025.
Not surprisingly, much of Kouyoumdjian’s work relates back to her the events her family underwent in Lebanon during the Civil War and subsequent Israeli invasions. Her entire family was born in Beirut though Kouyoumdjian grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, once her family had already settled in the United States.
“I remember all that amazing music that my family played on vinyl with Armenian and western instruments, the way the voices would rise to meet the music in exciting ways,” she said.
Kouyoumdjian has been to Armenia three times already, the first in 2015 with the Kronos Quartet on the occasion of the Centennial commemoration of the Armenian Genocide to perform her piece, Silent Cranes, at the National Opera. It was a fantastic experience overall, she said, though after the performance Kouyoumdjian experienced the type of unintended silliness that many non-mainstream people or women still are subject to in Armenia. When being toasted, the opera representative thanked her for her dedication to music, and the “sacrifice she had made by not having a husband and children!”
Kouyoumdjian has several other exciting projects up her musical sleeves. She is a composer in focus at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a huge honor at the national level. She created to open myself, to scream in collaboration with projection artist Kevork Mourad. The work is a sonic portrait of the Romani painter and Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka and received plaudits from all those who attended its performance.
Kouyoumdjian is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her staged music-documentary Paper Pianos, created along with stage director Nigel Maister, and intricate hand-drawn animations by Mourad, to be performed at the Clarice in Maryland on May 10, 2025. Paper Pianos is a multimedia work which explores the dislocation, longing and optimism of refugees. The piece combines narratives from four refugees and resettlement workers: the Afghan pianist Milad Yousufi, Getachew Bashir (Ethiopia), Hani Ali (Somalia), and Akil Aljaysh (Iraq). Kouyoumdjian relates the amazing tale that when Yousufi arrived from Afghanistan he had no piano to practice on. In fact this brilliant musician has perfect pitch and in Afghanistan, after the Taliban had destroyed all the pianos in the capital city, Yousufi practiced using a paper reproduction of a keyboard. Kouyoumdjian generously granted him access to her piano at home so that he could practice. The story is telling of the composer’s personal qualities and convictions, but also underlines the sometimes-unimaginable harm done by the Taliban not just to women, as has often been highlighted in the press, but to all members of Afghani society.
Finally, Kouyoumdjian’s breathtaking collaboration Andouni with photographer Scout Tufankjian at the New York Philharmonic , commissioned by “Project 19” debuted to critical acclaim on May 10, 2024 at David Geffen Hall, also at Lincoln Center. Kouyoumdjian and Tufankjian created a new music-documentary hybrid that documented the recent genocide of Artsakh Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. It combined field recordings, interviews, photography, and live musical performance as part of the Project 19 commissioning initiative, which invited 19 women to create new works for the NY Philharmonic. To my mind I detected elements in the music that go back to modern greats such as John Cage and John Adams. Tufankjian has described the piece “a howl of rage and grief at the horror of what has happened to the Artsakhtsi people.”
Given the piece’s deep, strident and at times guttural resonance and its attention to the pain of the world as we know it, this may well be the best description of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s work. As terrible events unfold globally, we need more of that same rage, which the poet Alan Ginsberg expressed in verse in his 1955 classic “Howl.” Be that as it may, Kouyoumdjian is an important composer we are sure to hear more from in the future.
Alik Barsoumian photo
