From Westwood to Yerevan: UCLA’s VEM Ensemble a Friend and Ambassador for Armenian Music

Last month, I followed five young musicians, each of them UCLA students, and all of whom but one were embarking upon their first trip to Armenia: Danielle Segen, Ji Eun, Aiko Richter, Morgan O’Shaughnessey, and Jason Pegis. Together they formed the latest iteration of the VEM Ensemble, the brainchild of violinist Movses Pogossian, who serves as the director of UCLA’s Armenian Music Program. Founded in 2013, the program and its flagship musical group is dedicated to performing and disseminating the Western classical music of Armenia. Over the past six years, VEM alumni have presented Armenian music in locales across North America and Europe. On this particular journey they will be taking a handful of days to prepare for and present a performance of music by Schubert, Webern, Komitas, Tigran Mansurian, Artashes Kartalyan, and Avanesov in Yerevan at the Aram Khachaturian Museum. The Kartalyan score, Tekeyan Triptych, was commissioned by the Tekeyan Armenian Cultural Association, which was founded in 1947 to preserve the Armenian diaspora’s link to the heritage of its homeland and to promote its culture.

“Being here in Armenia makes me [feel] this music a lot more,” Pegis, the ensemble’s cellist related to me one morning while we all were heading to the Temple of Garni. “Seeing the country, visiting [Tsitsernakaberd], I feel this music, its duality of joy and sadness, in a way that I could not before.”

“You realize when you’re here that the suffering of the Armenians wasn’t just a story,” added mezzo-soprano Segen, who was seated just ahead of me. “You can face the sorrow of their past in a very personal way.”

Driving a few days later along the winding roads of Vayots Dzor, our vehicle clutching tenuously to the reddish, rough-hewn cliffs which overlooked the verdant valley below, my eyes were drawn time and again to the grave markers that dotted the side of the road. The neophyte traveller soon realizes that the memory of death, an experience often compartmentalized and sealed off from quotidian life in the United States, is never very far away in Armenia. Pogossian tells us over dinner one night his own harrowing legacy of loss, his grandfather being the sole survivor among his family who perished under the sword of the Ottoman Turks. The next morning, I pulled into Khor Virap in Ararat Province. At the foot of a hill, beneath the gaze of this ancient church whose chapel dates back to the seventh century, lay a small graveyard with an Armenian flag somberly flapping overhead. In this arid patch of land, fenced off from the road that leads to the monastery, were about two dozen tombstones, some of them etched with the portraits of the departed; they were soldiers who had died in the line of duty during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. An old woman in black, her mourning veil blowing over her face, fluttering in the air as if greeting a figure that was just out of sight, stood alone silently over one of those black markers, a clutch of fresh flowers resting next to it.

“I lived among all this history, these people, I knew the ones with names, without names,” Mansurian said through his assistant, Chaghik Arzrouni-Chahinian, one windy afternoon inside his modest Soviet-era apartment, gesturing passionately as he spoke, surrounded by portraits of his wife and friends, now gone. “I loved all these people who are no more with us. Each one who contributed even one stone to [Armenian] culture. Unfortunately, it is a history that is vanishing more and more. One must always be attentive to the truth of our culture, our music, and to its memory.”

The night of Thursday, June 13 was a warm one in Yerevan, crossed over as it was by a heat wave and the lingering humidity of a thunderstorm that had passed through earlier that week. It tends to be the case that people in Southern California stay home during such weather, preferring to sit before the blast of their home’s air conditioners. The audience in the Hall of the Khachaturian Museum, however, were made of hardier stuff, packing the space in anticipation of that night’s program, fanning themselves vigorously with flyers and program notes before the concert began. In the days of rehearsals leading up to that night, the VEM Ensemble had painstakingly worked to realize these scores, bringing them into focus, cleaning their textures, until they finally emerged in the performance like a noble portrait swept free of centuries’ encrustation of dust. Their playing was alert, pliant, and deeply expressive.