Hagop Goudsouzian: Documenting Armenian music at its source
Why would anyone who isn’t Armenian want to watch a documentary about Armenian music? Canadian film maker Hagop Goudsouzian doesn’t try to answer the question. Instead, he corrects it.
“My films are really about preserving a culture,” he says. “People from all backgrounds can relate to that. Music is a direct expression of the culture. It’s the universal language.”
Goudsouzian completed his fourth documentary on the musicians, singers and composers of Armenia in October. Most have aired on PBS stations. He’s now at work on a Blu-ray compilation that he hopes will be “a trampoline to a wider audience.”
Born in Egypt, Goudsouzian made his first trip to Armenia some 20 years ago during the early days of the republic’s independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country was still dealing with the economic and human impact of a 1988 earthquake that killed more than 25,000 and left as many as a half million people homeless. It was also at war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
He wondered how people struggling through such trying circumstances would react to a Westerner of Armenian descent asking questions about his roots. “Really, I was nervous,” he says. His trepidation vanished, however, as one stranger after another greeted him not as an intrusive visitor but as a countryman being welcomed home.
Goudsouzian returned repeatedly to further explore his cultural and emotional connection to those people, resulting in a documentary called Armenian Exile. Everywhere he looked, he saw reasons to be hopeful despite the struggling economy and tenuous international situation.
He didn’t have to look for the most encouraging sign of all, or even open his eyes. He could hear Armenian music all around him. “I’m not a musician, but I love music,” he says. “Something about Armenian music touches me. It speaks to my heart.”
In Minstrels, the first leg of his four-part musical journey, Goudsouzian showcases contemporary Armenians practicing the centuries-old tradition of writing as well as performing poetic love songs. They are not simply carrying on this tradition but reviving an art form that nearly died out along with the oldest minstrels during the Soviet era.
The credit for this revival belongs to Professor Tovmas Poghosyan, artistic director of Sayat-Nova Minstrel Song Ensemble, who pairs master minstrels with young proteges. His program began with federal funding but the support ran out in 1999. Poghosyan has managed to keep it alive since then through donations.
In the film, the professor speaks with obvious pride about his students but lowers his head as well as his voice when he addresses the challenge of moving forward. “Our efforts to find sponsors are somewhat like begging,” he says. “But you cannot maintain a nation’s culture by begging.”
Instead, as Goudsouzian illustrates, the nation’s culture is being nurtured through the dedication and discipline of talented artists who fulfill their obligations with little expectation of monetary reward. None expresses any complaint about this reality, and many offer thanks for the opportunity to contribute.
The depth of this motivation is a theme of the three-part Armenian Echoes series, which continues Goudsouzian’s musical exploration. “We have nothing,” says choirmaster Sergey Harutyunyan. “We have no wealth. Our wealth is our culture.”
Goudsouzian takes viewers on a tour of what may be the world’s most unlikely concert venues—farm houses, barnyards and ancient, stone churches on remote hillsides. At each stop, we hear voices that would be at home in any concert hall.
Armenians appear to sing everywhere while doing all the things that life in a rugged countryside demands. Men sing while tending animals or roasting meat. Women sing while baking bread or sewing clothes. Children helping in all tasks sing folks songs that their grandparents were taught by their grandparents.
“The beauty of this doesn’t just come from sophisticated individuals,” Goudsouzian stresses. “Everyone from the farmers to the social elite are joined by music.”
At the same time, he shows that there is indeed a sophisticated effort to resurrect a unique musical culture that flourished through the Middle Ages but faded during successive foreign occupations. For example, we learn that Armenians had a written musical notation system that was employed to preserve melodies dating to the pre-Christian era until its meaning was lost in the 17th Century. Now the mystery has been solved and scholars are working to translate and recapture those melodies.
What does this music sound like? All the Western cliches come to mind—ethereal, transcendent, evocative—and they all apply. Instruments such as the saz, the tar and the kamancha are as unfamiliar to Americans as the melodies. Only the mournful, reedy duduk will sound somewhat familiar from its occasional appearance in soundtracks such as The Last Temptation of Christ.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the instruments in the film is that so many were made by the musicians who play them. “The amount of talent in Armenia is incredible,” Goudsouzian says. His films make that abundantly clear, and he expects this to surprise Armenians in the diaspora.
“We’ve been distracted with other issues and we’ve lost the focus on the beauty of our culture,” he says. “I think that the social issues that have dominated the Armenian experience of the last 100 years have distorted our perspective on where our true beauty lies.”
Hagop Goudsouzian’s trailers and contact information are available at HagopGoudsouzian.com.