About this Recording

Komitas (1869–1935) was a priest, a musician and a pioneer of ethnomusicology, considered to be the founder of the Armenian national school of music. A significant part of his life was taken up with travel to remote villages, collecting thousands of traditional songs. These range from simple melodies and poetic sketches of Armenian landscapes, to dramatic lyrics expressing mournful tragedy. Komitas was enthralled by the way ‘a peasant learns this art in nature's embrace, with nature as his infallible school.’ Heard here in world première recordings, these idiomatic arrangements by Villy Sargsyan importantly preserve the composer’s modal-intonational system.