Komitas

Komitas was an Armenian priest, composer and musicologist. He was born Soghomon Soghomonian on 8 October 1869 in Kütahya in the Ottoman Empire, and he died on 22 October 1935 in Paris.¹ The Komitas website gives 26 September, the same day by the old-style calendar then in use.²

Early life and training

He lost his mother as an infant and his father by the age of eleven. At twelve he was chosen from about twenty orphans to go to the seminary at Etchmiadzin, where he learned Armenian and later taught music.² He took the name Komitas in 1893, when he was ordained a vardapet, a teacher of the Church.²¹ A wealthy Armenian patron paid for his studies in Berlin, where he studied composition from 1896 to 1899, at Richard Schmidt’s private conservatory.¹²

Folk songs and church music

On his return he began to collect Armenian folk songs in earnest. He traveled through the regions of Armenia and recorded thousands of songs, Armenian, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish, and he gave concerts of Armenian music in western Europe.²¹ His liturgical chants remain popular among Armenians.¹

He also studied the medieval notation of Armenian church music, the khaz (see Khaz notation). He counted 198 kinds of khaz, and in 1910 he wrote that he would soon solve the problem of reading them. His research was lost when he was deported in 1915.³⁴

1915

In April 1915, during the campaign against Armenians that began the Armenian Genocide, Komitas was arrested with other Armenian intellectuals and deported into Anatolia. He was later brought back to Constantinople, but the experience deeply affected him.² His health declined in 1916 and he was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and from 1919 until his death he lived in a hospital in Paris.²¹ His remains were moved to Yerevan in the spring of 1936.²