Vardapet Komitas

Vardapet Komitas (1869-1935) was an Armenian priest, musicologist, ethnomusicologist and composer and he is considered as the father of Armenian modern music.

Born on 29 September 1869 in Kütahya, in western Turkey with the name of Gevorgi Soghomonian, he had a difficult childhood: his mother died before his first birthday, and was raised by his grandmother while his father worked. Although he undertook elementary education, his school years were interrupted when, in 1881, his father also died. He had already begun to show significant musical skills - he was known as the "little vagabond singer" in his hometown. He became an orphan and was enrolled in the church seminary. The lessons were conducted in Armenian, which Komitas did not speak - Turkish was his native language - but he was able to sing an Armenian anthem, even if he did not understand the words, and the quality of his voice greatly impressed the Catholicos, Gevorg IV . He quickly mastered the Armenian language and was ordained a monk in 1890. When he graduated from the seminary in 1894, he was named Komitas and shortly thereafter, he obtained the rank of Vardapet, a doctor of theology. In the seminary, Komitas studied liturgical chant and the first Armenian notation of singing, also developing a keen interest in folk music.
After completing his studies, he went to Berlin in 1895, where he spent three years in the University Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm (the former name of today's Humboldt University), where he studied under the guidance of Richard Schmidt until he obtained the title of Doctor of Musicology in 1899. There he was able to study singing, philosophy, aesthetics and history; and was invited to give lectures on Armenian popular music and liturgical music from the International Musical Society.
The interest in ethnomusicology led him to travel many years, recording, analyzing and collecting about three thousand melodies and folk songs from Armenians, Kurds, Turks and Persians. Traveling from village to village in search of popular folk songs, he collects them systematically, saving thousands of them from oblivion, reworking them and making them known to a wider public.
Among his works the most relevant one for the s still today one of the most employed music of the Armenian apostolic church during the mass. Komitas ranged freely between sacred repertoire and profane repertoire and this did not find the support of the Armenian ecclesiastical hierarchy who did not see this "openness to the world”. For his work Komitas was overwhelmed by criticism from conservative circles who tried in every way to spread slander and falsehoods on his behalf making life impossible. This breakup led him to a decision that would prove tragic, the move to Constantinople in 1910. In the same year he founded a choir of three- hundred members whom he called "Gousan". Komitas and his activity that placed the Armenian people in the eyes of the world were a threat to the Turks so on April 24th 1915, when Armenian genocide started, he was arrested and deported at Çankırı, central Anatolia. Komitas, together with other eight deported, was released thanks to the help of the Turkish poet Emin Yurdakul Mehmed and the female writer Halide Edip Hanım. After being witness of the genocide and of the disruption of his ten- year work of re-composition and researches in the field of Armenian music tradition, he suffered intensely from post-traumatic stress and depression; the people whose spirit he had listened to by recounting their musical expressions were led to mass extermination, the memory of which he had so scrupulously collected was destroyed. He had dedicated his life to the Armenian people, to his spirituality, to his music, but also to the splendid reality of the contact between it and the Turkish culture and vanished was also the possibility of reconciliation between them. In 1919 he was transferred to the Vil-Jouif psychiatric hospital in Paris where he spent the last years of his life until his death on 22 October 1935. His remains were returned to the Armenian people to be buried in Yerevan.
Admired by many European musicians such as Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns, Vincent d’Indy and above all by Claude Debussy, Komitas was a central figure for the Armenian identity, thanks to his research work that a large part of Armenian musical and cultural tradition it was not lost forever.
He is considered a martyr of the genocide.