Revisiting Komitas: On History, Provenance, and the Music of a Broken Nation

(journal article in progress)

Collective memory has entrenched Komitas Vardapet into the historical and cultural constitutionof modern Armenian society. Indeed, he has become a ubiquitous symbol of Armenia today. Much of the impetus behind this reputation stems from the tragic portrayal of Komitas as a martyr of the Armenian Genocide, with his descent into madness becoming central to this narrative. More increasingly, albeit slowly, Komitas has been the focal point of attention in Near Eastern/Caucasian music scholarship. Cultural historians of Armenian music, in particular, have grappled with the historical dimension of his musical and scholarly oeuvre, disproportionately portraying him as the architect of Armenian ethnic music studies, the torchbearer of a renaissance in Armenian medieval studies, or the very genesis of Armenian art music.

This article advocates for a “return” to Komitas’s creative and scholastic trajectory within the context of reconsidering Armenia’s tragic history. Revisiting Komitas through a decolonial orbit invites us to recognize and trace the unique contours of his intellectual and musical labors. Doing so, I contend, posits that his efforts were not merely to “purify,” “rescue,” or simply “preserve” Armenian music. Put more accurately, Komitas embarked on a grassroots odyssey of returning to the very origins of Armenian music and musical traditions. I argue that Komitas reclaimed what he himself called the “living weapon” and “cure” of a broken nation relegated by colonial-imperial entities to the threshold of inaudibility.