was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of the Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.
Orphaned at a young age, Komitas was taken to Etchmiadzin, Armenia's religious center, where he received education at the Gevorgian Seminary. Following his ordination as vardapet (celibate priest) in 1895, he studied music at the Frederick William University in Berlin. He thereafter "used his Western training to build a national tradition". He collected and transcribed over 3,000 pieces of Armenian folk music, more than half of which were subsequently lost and only around 1,200 are now extant. Besides Armenian folk songs, he also showed interest in other cultures and in 1903 published the first-ever collection of Kurdish folk songs titled Kurdish melodies. His choir presented Armenian music in many European cities, earning the praise of Claude Debussy, among others. Komitas settled in Constantinople in 1910 to escape mistreatment by ultra-conservative clergymen at Etchmiadzin and to introduce Armenian folk music to wider audiences. He was widely embraced by Armenian communities, while Arshag Chobanian called him the "savior of Armenian music".[
During the Armenian genocide—along with hundreds of other Armenian intellectuals—Komitas was arrested and deported to a prison camp in April 1915 by the Ottoman government. He was soon released under unclear circumstances and, having witnessed indiscriminate cruelty and relentless massacres of other Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, Komitas experienced a mental breakdown and developed a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The widespread hostile environment in Constantinople and reports of mass-scale Armenian death marches and massacres that reached him further worsened his fragile mental state. He was first placed in a Turkish military-operated hospital until 1919 and then transferred to psychiatric hospitals in Paris, where he spent the last years of his life in agony. Komitas is widely seen as a martyr of the genocide and has been depicted as one of the main symbols of the Armenian Genocide in art. Collection of Works of the Composer Komitas Vardapet is included to UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
"Seeking to bring appreciation of Armenian music to a wider audience", Komitas moved to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the Ottoman imperial capital in 1910. "There he trained a group of students in Armenian melody and formed a choir that toured Armenian communities and gave performances of the folk compositions that Komitas had arranged for four-part choir." He founded the Gusan choir (Hay gusan since 1912), made up of tens of musicians. With the aim to produce professional musicians, he taught musicology to Barsegh Kanachyan, Mihran Tumacan, Vagharshak Srvandztian and others.
On 24 April 1915, the day when the Armenian genocide officially began, he was arrested and put on a train the next day together with 180 other Armenian notables and sent to the city of Çankırı in northern Central Anatolia, at a distance of some 480 kilometres (300 mi). The Turkish nationalist poet Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, the writer Halide Edip and U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau intervened with the government, and by special orders from Talat Pasha, Komitas was dispatched back to the capital alongside eight other Armenians who had been deported.[30] Grigoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha offers details of his deportation, during which Komitas suffered tremendously and was afflicted with traumatic neurosis. In one passage Balakian recounts how:
The more we moved away from civilization, the more agitated were our souls and the more our minds were racked with fear. We thought we saw bandits behind every boulder; the hammocks or cradles hanging from every tree seemed like gallows ropes. The expert on Armenian songs, the peerless archimandrite Father Komitas, who was in our carriage, seemed mentally unstable. He thought the trees were bandits on the attack and continually hid his head under the hem of my overcoat, like a fearful partridge. He begged me to say a blessing for him ["The Savior"] in the hope that it would calm him.
In the autumn of 1916, he was taken to a hospital in Constantinople, Hôpital de la paix, and then moved to Paris in 1919, where he died in a psychiatric clinic in Villejuif in 1935. Next year, his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon that was named after him
In the 1950s, his manuscripts were also transferred from Paris to Yerevan.
Badarak was first printed in 1933 in Paris and first recorded onto a digital media in 1988 in Yerevan. In collecting and publishing so many folk songs, he saved the cultural heritage of Western Armenia that otherwise would have disappeared because of the genocide. His works have been published in Armenia in a thoroughly annotated edition by Robert Atayan. Lately, nine songs on German poetry, written during his stay in Berlin, have been excavated from the archives in Yerevan and interpreted by soprano Hasmik Papian.
The Yerevan State Musical Conservatory is named after Komitas. There also exists a world-renowned string quartet named after Komitas.
On 6 July 2008, on the occasion of Quebec City's 400th anniversary celebration, a bronze bust of Komitas was unveiled near the Quebec National Assembly (provincial legislature, Auteuil street) in recognition of his great input to music in general and to Armenian popular and liturgical music in particular. Previously, a granite and bronze statue of Komitas was erected in Detroit in 1981 in honor of the great composer and as a reminder of the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide.
Komitas' tombstone in Yerevan's Komitas Pantheon
In September 2008, the CD Gomidas Songs, sung by Isabel Bayrakdarian and accompanied by the Chamber Players of the Armenian Philharmonic and pianist Serouj Kradjian, was released on the Nonesuch label. This CD was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Vocal Recording category. A major North American tour by Ms. Bayrakdarian in October 2008 featured the music of Komitas, with concerts in Toronto, San Francisco, Orange County, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Boston and New York's Carnegie Hall. She was accompanied by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra conducted by Anne Manson, and pianist Serouj Kradjian. The Remembrance Tour was dedicated to victims of all genocides and sponsored by the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (a division of the Zoryan Institute).
The complete piano works of Komitas are recorded by Şahan Arzruni on Kalan Müzik label in 2010 and remain the definitive interpretation of these compositions. Among the other performers of his music are Evgeny Kissin and Grigory Sokolov.
Since 2018 Komitas appears on the 10000 Armenian dram banknote.
Komitas on the 2018 10000 Dram banknote
In 2019, the Gurdjief Ensemble debuted in New York City performing Komitas's folk songs on traditional instruments.
Modern performers, like Rewşan Çeliker and Pervin Chakar, reinterpret and promote his collected works, ensuring their continued relevance
