Witnesses: Two nations’ lost composers – Komitas & FS Kelly, witnesses to, and victims of violence.

Dr Edward Neeman piano, Christopher Latham OAM violin

1:30pm Tuesday 3 Sept 2024.
Lecture Room 1, 5^th Floor ANU School of Music.

Program, 60 mins

1. KomitasrecordingKrunk (Crane) 3:30 mins
2. FS KellyA Coin for the Ferryman 3 mins
3. Komitas Alagyaz sarn ampel a (Alagyaz Is covered with Clouds)/ Khnki dsar (Incense Tree) A Maj2 mins
4. Gurdjieff / de HartmannArmenian Melodies from Asian Songs and Rhythms 8:30 mins
   Vol 1 #27 Armenian Song (Andantino)
   Vol 1 # 36 Armenian Song
   Vol 1 # 13 Duduki
   Vol 1 # 15 Armenian Melody
5. KomitasGarun a, dzun a arel (It Is Spring, but Snow has Fallen) 2:45 mins
   KomitasKele Kele 3:30 mins
6. FS KellyElegy for Rupert Brooke 9 mins
7. Komitas7 Pieces (from Seven Songs, Seven Dances & 12 Pieces for Children) 7 mins
   Seven Songs  1.Semplice
   Allegro non troppo
   Comodo
   Nobile
   Seven Dances 5. Shushiki
   12 Pieces for Children 7. Vivace
   Seven Songs 7. Allegrezza, energico
8. FS KellyGallipoli Sonata Movt 2 10:30mins 
9. Komitas recordingAntuni (Song of the Homeless) 3 mins 

Program Note

Komitas Vardapet, known as Komitas, was born Soghomon Soghomonian in 1869. A musician priest, he collected and transcribed over 3,000 Armenian folk works, more than half of which were lost or destroyed, with around 1,200 works being recovered and published in 14 volumes between 1960 and 2006, under the direction of the musicologist Robert Atayan. While he composed his own original works, Komitas’ musical legacy is based primarily on his transcriptions and arrangements of Armenian folk and liturgical material. But for his efforts, the Armenian folk music tradition would have largely been lost during the Armenian Genocide because most musicians were male and their musical tradition was transmitted orally. But for Komitas writing it down, the Medz Yeghern (great crime) or Aghet (catastrophe) would not just have been a vast slaughter of innocent Armenians, but also the loss of a vital aspect of Armenian culture.

The essential character in Komitas’s transcriptions of Armenian songs is the Wanderer, a pandukht, an exile who suffers, hoping against hope for the day he can return to his home in peace. Antuni is that archetype’s most famous expression. Sometimes the Wanderer is portrayed as a Crane (Krunk in Armenian), a bird that flies vast distances seeking a homeland, a safe place to build a nest for its young.

On April 24, 1915, Ottoman forces began by arresting Armenian leaders and intellectuals. One group of prisoners was sent to Ayaşh and killed en-route, while the other group, which included Komitas, was sent to Chankiri. As a ten year old boy he’d been abandoned by his alcoholic father (his mother having died when he was six months old), before he was saved by the church, and so he was already mentally fragile.

While in captivity, during a rest stop when just about to drink from a bucket, he was struck from behind by a policeman. This physical attack utterly stunned him. He went on to suffer a complete mental breakdown, before a surprise order arrived, likely due to US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s intervention, requesting he be returned to Constantinople.

Komitas wrote of the experience: “a flock without the shepherd, lost and knocked down... Invisible but rough surges shake the miserable history of the life of my people. The callous hunters have caught the naive fish in their net. The atmosphere is filled with poison. There is no escape. Breakup, horror and violence on one hand, indifference and dirty hearts on the other hand... Our bodies have rotted, our souls are desecrated, life is coated with corpses...

Nobody knows all the wounds of our national tragedy... This trouble will drive us mad !”

Komitas indeed suffered a permanent psychological collapse and spent the final 20 years of his life in psychiatric institutions, mainly in Paris, where he died in 1935. He was both an eyewitness to and a victim of the Armenian Genocide. In both his transcriptions and in his life story, lives a powerful symbol of the Armenian experiences - the Wanderer expelled from his own land, doomed to die overseas, and in Komitas’s case, sent mad by the world’s indifference.

George Gurdjieff (c. 1867 – 1949) was a mystic, born to a Greek father and an Armenian mother. He lived during a time of unprecedented conflict, and was wounded in three different conflicts. He survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915, the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian Civil War of 1918–22 and both World Wars. As he wrote in his final book Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' he felt he must ‘discover, at all costs, some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which causes them to fall easily under the influence of mass hypnosis’.

Thomas de Hartmann (1884 -1956) was a Ukrainian composer and pianist who was recalled back to military service when WW1 broke out in 1914. While serving in December, 1916, de Hartmann met Gurdjieff, who became his spiritual teacher. In November, 1917, Hartmann contracted typhoid and was released from military service so he could recover.

He then re-joined Gurdjieff and his followers in Yessentuki in Southern Russia, and then in February 1918 they travelled to Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia. While there, in 1919, de Hartmann published a paper on Komitas’s work to regenerate and preserve Armenian folk music. He described Komitas’s mental health breakdown, and his wish to help him by performing a series of concerts of his music.

By the following year, as the security situation became increasingly intolerable due to the Russian Civil War, Gurdjieff managed to safely guide his followers through the conflict zone, escaping first to Constantinople (1920), then to Berlin (1921), then Paris (1922), and that October to the Prieuré d’Avon in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, where Gurdjieff established his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

Gurdjieff and De Hartmann first worked together on a ballet The Struggle of the Magicians which, while some music exists, was never completed. However once safely established in France, the focus of their work changed to creating the music for an exhibition of Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dances and Exercises, to be presented first in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in December, 1923, and then in US cities the following year. The Sacred Dances and Exercises, similar to Sufi dancing or Tai Chi, were the physical manifestation of his teaching. De Hartmann would transcribe and arrange the music Gurdjieff remembered.

Hartmann wrote of the process: “I had a very difficult and trying time with this music. Mr Gurdjieff sometimes whistled or played on the piano with one finger a very complicated sort of melody ... While listening to him play, I had to scribble down at feverish speed the tortuous shifts and turns of the melody … There was no hint of conventional Western metres and tuning… Often he would begin to repeat the melody before I had finished writing it, and usually with subtle differences and added embellishments… When the melody was written, Mr Gurdjieff would tap on the lid of the piano a rhythm on which to build the accompaniment, which originally would be played on some kind of percussion instrument.

We will perform the four Armenian melodies contained in the Gurdjieff / de Hartmann collection called Asian Songs and Rhythms (Vol 1 #27, # 36, # 13 and #15) transcribed by de Hartmann in 1926 and 1927.

Septimus Kelly’s musical genius lies in his extremely fluent harmonic and polyphonic gifts. He composed in his head without paper, only writing it down when it was finished. He preferred not to read music when he played the piano and had a phenomenal memory – according to his diaries he died with around 3 hours of un-notated music still in his head. He is in many ways an oral musician working in a notated harmonic tradition, who had both a great fondness for rich supple harmonies and also for long pedal points.  

In his transcriptions Komitas creates interesting ways of re-creating the drones present or implied in the largely non-harmonic Armenian folk material. This gives the impression of harmony, but most of these works could be played over a didgeridoo drone.

Kelly’s music is split between the European harmonic tradition and an interest in resonance which sees him often using long pedal points / drones. His Monograph 16 from 1913, which seems deeply prescient of what is coming the following year, and the Elegy for Rupert Brooke written in the first half of the Gallipoli Campaign between late April and June of 1915 are good examples of this. The Gallipoli Sonata from the second half of 1915 is dedicated to Jelly d’Aranyi, who was in love with Sep and never married after he was killed in the Somme. It seems likely that Kelly was gay, and that his brief infatuation with Rupert Brooke richly informed his Elegy, a masterful musical portrayal of Brooke’s moonlit burial on the island of Skyros.

Three late works of Kelly’s: one an Edwardian premonition of War, written in 1913; the second a musical photograph of his friend’s moonlit burial the day before the Anzac landings; the last a love letter to the violinist he loved to play with, but was unable in life to reciprocate the depth of her feelings. Instead he wrote her the Gallipoli Sonata, in a small dugout in the rest camp of the Royal Naval Division’s Hood Battalion, half a mile north of Seddul Bahr, at the foot of the Gallipoli peninsula between October 3 and December 31, 1915.

He wrote to her “you must not expect shell and rifle fire in it! It is rather a contrast to all that, being somewhat idyllic.” However the 2^nd movement, a musical portrait of her Hungarian Tzigane style of playing, reveals a far deeper level of pathos, reflecting the state of his mind after six months of fighting in Gallipoli. 

All these works bear witness. Like an eternal unblinking eye, they remain as resources we can use to experience the past. They have endured long after the violence that surrounded their birth, and live on because of the power of their witnessing. 

Culture has a habit of remaining long after all else falls away, just as Kelly imagined when he quoted Callimachus on the title page of his Elegy for Rupert Brooke:

‘Still your works live on, and Death, the universal snatcher, cannot lay his hand on them.’”

 

Biographies

Christopher Latham, director of the Flowers of Peace was a violinist in the ACO (1992-1998) before becoming editor for Peter Sculthorpe and other leading Australian composers while working for Boosey and Hawkes (1998-2003). He directed the Four Winds Festival (2004-08), Australian Festival of Chamber Music (2006-2007) and the Canberra International Music Festival (2009-2014). He was Canberra’s “Artist of the Year” during its 2013 centenary. He was the music director of the DVA’s Gallipoli Symphony (2005-2015) and is currently Artist in Residence at the Australian War Memorial, the first musician in that role. He has produced the Diggers Requiem, Vietnam Requiem, Prisoners of War (POW) Requiem and soon the Holocaust Memorial. His work measures the cultural cost of War, often through cultural and he made the first recordings of the Australian composer Septimus Kelly, including the lost “Gallipoli Sonata,” which he tracked down in Florence. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Canberra for his work on the music of WW1, a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government, and the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his work on Music and War.

The Australian-American pianist DrEdward Neeman has performed across five continents. Critics have lauded him as a “true artist” with “an excellent technique” who “isn’t afraid to put a distinctive stamp on whatever he touches, without resorting to mannerism.” A top prizewinner of numerous international piano competitions, including first prize in the Joaquín Rodrigo Competition in Madrid, second prize in the Southern Highlands International Piano Competition, and third prize in the World International Piano Competition, Dr. Neeman has appeared as a soloist with the Prague Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, Kentucky Symphony, Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, and the American West Symphony with conductors including Andrey Boreyko, Alan Buribayev, Chen Lin, Ruben Gimeno, Enrique Perez Mesa, Nicholas Milton, Pascual Osa, and Vladimir Verbitsky. He is also a member of the Neeman Piano Duo with his wife Stephanie Neeman who have appeared at venues across the United States, Australia, and Asia including at Steinway Hall in New York and in the NOVA Chamber Series in Salt Lake City, the Canberra International Music Festival, and for Musica Viva Australia.