Sevana Tchakerian Is Fighting Back With Her Only Weapon: Music

Said Tchakerian, “There are kids that we see a couple of times, some we just visited one time, it really depends on what they want. There are some kids that we [originally] met in a big group of kids, and then they started coming [to the Nexus Center]. Because just recently [toward the end of October], we got funding to have daily classes at Nexus. So now we’re trying to understand and get organized and pay for transportation for individual kids who really want to play music, their [Nexus’] doors are opened and we want to do daily education.” She adds, “You have to know that a lot of these kids also don’t go to school – I don’t know, I’ve read some crazy statistics, like 30,000 kids have lost their right to education. I mean, it’s just too complicated right now to readjust.” As for funding? “Everything is free for the kids. Very quickly we had people who started donating, thankfully. We have a group of individuals in the diaspora, even non-Armenians who are donating, thankfully. And we have a little fundraiser. Obviously for us, the priority for every Armenian is to donate to the Armenia Fund, but if there are people who have donated to the Armenia Fund and they have a little more money, they want to give more for kids, and arts and music, they can give it to us, they can give it to our fundraiser.”

So, what does Nexus for Artsakh programming look like? “For the musical parts, we’ve done a couple of things. We go to meet with a group of kids. We sing, we bring musical instruments, we teach them songs, it’s very interactive. We do musical games, we do preschool music education, like ear training. Percussion ensemble, we do trash can ensemble with the bigger ones, teenagers. And kind of arranging Armenian folk songs.”

This experience has also revealed a ton of native talent.

“For instance, there is a kid, there is a 17-year-old girl from Stepanakert, Dina, who wrote a song about it, and she sang it for us, and we said ‘You know what, let’s record it, we will arrange it, we will produce it for you at the center, and we will also do a music video.’ Because it comes from her heart, she’s speaking about her reality, and it’s a very beautiful song, and we want to help, and we want to raise her voice. So, this is what we’re currently working on. We finished the audio recording, and I think today they’re going to shoot the music video,” she said.

Young Dina was not the only young person they met with blooming talent: “There are some kids we met who are very good musicians so we are getting instruments and sending them to them,” Sevana said, and continued, “There are some teenagers from Artsakh who are musically very talented, and they’ve been helping us, like as assistants. And so we’re providing them guitar lessons, so they can also then lead workshops and have an instrument to accompany themselves.”

Recently, a group of new arrivals at the center have filled Tchakerian with hope. They are 15 music students from Artsakh who had met up 2 days prior, and practiced a new song only 20 minutes before Sevana captured their moving, talented performance on film, accompanied by guitar played by a teenage girl from among the group.

“We want to train these teens,” she says, “so they also go and play for the kids. They are all students from the Music College of Stepanakert, though some of them enrolled this year and didn’t get to study yet,” she said.

When asked if music helps children deal with trauma, she replied, “For sure. You see, you feel, a difference. These kids, like I told you, their daily life is the war. Very often they have their fathers, their brothers, their sons, husbands, boyfriends, in the front lines. Friends, of course. And so, we act as psychologists, we are very careful, we cannot just show up and play. Sometimes they are not in the mood to play. They want to do like, origami. The kids want to draw. So we always have other stuff with us. Even though we’re professional musicians we also have other options. But very often, even if their parents, moms, are like ‘We don’t feel like it’s the mood now to play music,’ what happens is that we will start playing and there are some kids and then, gamats gamats (slowly slowly), they gather and they join and at the end they say thank you so much, this was great. You know, it’s just a change and you know how music is soothing for everyone…And I think it’s just a little breath of fresh air during their days because they have literally nothing to do in these hotels. Except checking the news and be worried.”

Tchakerian sighs, and our interview draws to a close. She is clearly worried, but the talented kids give her hope, as they should to all Armenians. “They are our next generation,” I say. Tchakerian concurs.