ARTICLES OF KOMITAS ABOUT FOLK MUSIC

ARMENIAN FOLK SONGS AND CHURCH SONGS

What is national music? What provides the subject matter for national folk songs? Could it be the proud mountains, the deep valleys, the fields, the varied climate, the many historical events and happenings, the internal and external life of the people? Yes, indeed, all of these constitute the materials for a national music, in a word, everything that affects the feelings and the mind of that nation.
Our music is divided into two main categories: 1) liturgical, and 2) secular, or, more appropriately, folk.
Both liturgical and secular music have the common characteristic of one author for the tune and text, or music and poetry. They carry the imprint of a angle person's creativity.
Let us now move to our folk songs. These songs are divided into the following types:
     Children's songs, which have the simplest form.
     Dance songs, which are called yayli and are somewhat more elaborate than the former.
     Epic songs, which are dedicated to the praise of a hero.
     Funeral songs dedicated to the memory of victims of accidents and disasters. This type includes tragic laments, and wailing songs for the dead.
     Wedding songs, which are sung during various wedding rituals, after the marriage ceremony.
     Songs of nature, which are the most colorful and interesting.
Some people do not understand the spiritual and musical complexities of our music and are, therefore, only able to grasp the most superficial aspects of the songs. Without a full knowledge of the music, they are led to an incorrect conclusion that our folk songs and liturgical melodies are of completely different characters.
Our folk songs and liturgical songs have not developed in equal measure. The former have been repressed, restrained, and restricted due to external political circumstances, without losing their depth and their expressive force; while the latter have flourished, grown and prospered under the inviolable protection of the church.

ARMENIAN PEASANT MUSIC

There was a time when peasant songs were considered worthless. Even educated men of the past century wrote and declared that Armenian peasant does not have poetry or song. This notion soon became widespread, because the peasant himself does not think much of his everyday compositions, which are as routine to him as bread and water. The peasant despises most of his own song types; he ridicules the scholars who collect and write down with care these “hand-me-downs and effeminate ditties”.
When the folk song moved through the schools from village to town, and established its roots there, Armenian minstrels started to play and compose songs using folk idioms, in accordance with the style of the time.
Armenian minstrels have a school independent and distinct from folk songs. The minstrel schools are of two kinds. The first includes the educated minstrels, the second the self-taught. Self-taught musicians are the bridge between the genuine folk tradition and the educated minstrel school. They sing in foreign or native languages. Their renditions of foreign melodies are ungraceful and corrupt, whereas the Armenian folk songs that they sing, though quite clean, are full of crude, crusty, craggy, and tasteless embellishmemts. Unfortunately, this unpleasant declamatory style is used by the rural male also, from adolescence onward, whereas the women retain the purely national intonation.
Educated minstrels occasionally sing folk songs, but they are more interested in Arabic, Persian and Turkish music. They regard folk songs merely as music for entertainment rather than for serious performance, because they consider the songs crude, trivial, and styleless, and inconsistent with the spirit of their school.
The educated minstrels most often sing and play using forms of Arabic, Persian and Turkish minstrel writing, though occasionally their texts are Armenian. Often, they adapt new words to ready-made tunes. In such cases they use the Turkish sharki and turki melodies, because they do not normally listen to Arabic and Persian melodies, and the ones that they do hear are quite weighty and bardic, inappropriate to the lyrical style.

Ask an Armenian peasant the name of the place where a certain song originated; whether he knows it or not, he will give you the name of a village. Ask him the name of the person who composed the song, he will refer you to the well-known singer of that village. When you question the singer, he will give you the name of some other person or will shrug his shoulders. The name of the author is known in songs which have memorable subjects, such as the story of one mauled by a hyena, or drowned in the sea, or asphyxiated by a blizzard, or assassinated, or of a daughter abducted, and so on. Such songs are composed by the gousans, ordinary, wandering, or unlettered poet singers who, after narrating the incident, give their names in the last stanza. But in time, when the song gets older, the author is forgotten or mistaken for another singer, because the song itself is what interests the peasant and not the author; the author can be this person today, another tomorrow. The talent of composing is a natural gift for the peasant; all peasants more or less know how to compose and sing songs. They study the art of composition from nature, which is their unfailing school.
In the village everyone knows more or less how to sing, for they all participate in the creation of a song. But nobody knows who "concocted" the song, for they all take part in the creative process. Nobody knows where it is composed, for it could have been composed anywhere. Nobody knows how it is composed, for the creation of song is a spontaneous activity. Nobody knows when it appeared, for every moment brings with it a new variation.
The creation of songs for the peasant is as common as conversation. If one does not write down what is said, or if thoughts are not retained in our spirit, we will not remember them later. Villagers adhere strictly to the prescribed use of the different types of songs. Each song must be learned or sung in its proper place and time: They will sing work songs during work, and domestic songs while at home, and so forth. No villager will sing a threshing song when at home, for the place to sing the threshing song is on the threshing floor.
Each song is tied to a moment in village life and is related to just that moment. The peasant cannot comprehend, create, or utilize a song that is removed from that moment.
Armenian folk music is made up of solo and choral singing.
Even though Armenian popular music rejects polyphony, there are often instances that reveal vestiges of two-part singing.

ARMENIANS HAVE A UNIQUE MUSIC

What music on earth is unmixed and pure? Only that of animals, which vccalize the same sounds and the same intonation, for they do not have the gift of borrowing.
The mutual influence of national styles is an undeniable phenomenon, and there is no nation that remains isolated from such merging of idioms. Each nation appropriates a thing it does not possess from one that does and integrates it into its national style.
Any nation's language and literature assimilates elements of language from other nations as it develops. But, if a nation has a unique language and literature, it has a unique music as well.
…Poor Armenian people! A nation you are, as unique as other nations; nobody can deny that. Yours is a distinct tongue: you speak. You have a distinct mind: you judge. You have a distinct physionomy, through which you are distinguished from other nations and their physical make. But your heart, which is the source of your feelings, is allegedly not yours, it is merely Assyro-Byzantine and Indo-Persian.
There may be one manner and there may be another. From the mouth to the ear is a short distance; but from hunch to proof is a long way.

ARMENIA’S NATIONAL CIRCLE DANCES

Dance is perhaps one of the most significant manifestations of human existence. It expresses the particular traits of a nation, especially its customs and the level of its civilization. For through its manifold movements dance unconsciously exposes the workings of the spirit.
The tempo of Armenian dances does not remain the same from start to finish. They begin slowly, and gradually go to medium speed and then to the lively, from which they slow down gradually, going from the lively to the medium speed, to the slow.
Ethnic Armenian dances are circle dances. This type is deep-rooted mainly among the Armenian peasants, who safeguard the old and invent new forms; thus the national dance becomes ever richer. Here is how the dance is organized: the dancers choose a chorus leader who is well known as a singer and dancer. This position can be occupied by either a young woman or a young man, while the dance group can be mixed or of the same gender.
Ordinarily instruments are not involved in genuine Armenian folk dancing. Even though the use of instruments has been introduced, it is still a foreign influence. Dancing with the accompaniment of musical instruments is done only among the urban population, in cities and nearby towns, which have come in contact to some degree with foreigners. The non-foreign-influenced Armenian dancing is done only to singing.
In the vicinity of the village (rural areas) it is customary for only unmarried and newlywed girls and men to dance. We have never seen old people dance. However, in the cities, where the peasant songs and dances have penetrated since 1860’s, young and old, married and unmarried, old men and women, in a word, everybody dances. But here the poetic content of the innocent and natural folk dance becomes more entertainment-oriented.
The Armenians, especially those who live in the cities, also enjoy foreign dances, European dances are, as well as those of the Caucasian peoples. The Caucasian dances are customarily solo dances or duets; the foreign dances are performed especially at weddings and other festive occasions. However, they do not have the naturally naive character of the Armenian folk dances.

DANCE AND THE CHILD

Dance is a phenomenon of quintessential significance, for it combines all the other arts. Dance, as movement, has a very important role in education, for all the arts – music, sculpture, architecture, and the others – are made of movement. There is dance in all of life. Is not the life of the entire universe a dance? In the life of man there are two types of dance: one is joyful, the other, sorrowful. Even though nowadays people employ the former, in ancient times the sorrowful dances were danced as well, as exemplified in the funereal dances of our ancestors, which they performed during burial ceremonies expressing physical movements commensurate to their grief. Among civilized nations, dance, like song which developed into tragedy, has found its culmination in opera.
The sophistication of dance is directly related to the degree of mental sophistication of the population, and, consequently, the development of indigenous dance is linked to the development of a nation's civilization.
Ladies and gentlemen of the teaching profession, approach the task of education with care and reverence. You are called upon to educate the generation which will be tomorrow's nation. With a wrong step you could bring harm to the nation.