Eve Egoyan: Between Longing and Belonging

As I challenge myself as an artist, I challenge the piano, its history and the way it is traditionally heard. I want to release it from its past, and allow it to go on new journeys yet at the same time respecting and loving where it comes from.

In some of your performances you use your husband, media artist David Rokeby’s software into images projected on a screen above the piano. I remember such a combination done also by Belgian-Armenian pianist Laurence Mekhitarian. Contemporary music is proper for such experimental approaches – I wonder if the same can work with classic pieces?

It would be great if you could share Laurence’s work. We created Surface Tension to make a shift in the way image and sound usually co-exist. Most often, we witness image as pre-dominant and sound as an accompaniment. In Surface Tension both sound and image are created simultaneously and spontaneously. Surface Tension is a unique environment that allows for the absolute wedding of image and sound (https://vimeo.com/6154175).

At this moment, I am working on another project with visuals collaborating with animator Christopher Hinton. In it, both sound and image will be fixed in prior to performance but I will have freedom in time to shift both as I play. During performance of this new work, images will be revealed in layers at chosen moments. This visual layering mirrors the ability of the piano, an instrument with a huge range of pitch and dynamics, to layer sound. Significant moments and transitions, musical and visual, will be articulated in sound and image.

You are also a composer yourself. Is your Armenian heritage somehow reflected in your work?

So far I have woven together only one work based on Armenian folkloric songs, Ghosts beneath my Fingertips (for Viva). I allowed myself to go through many songs and pick, entirely subjectively, what I felt sounded “Armenian.” I wrote this piece before I visited Armenia. It expresses a longing of place, imagined and never experienced. Sounds of selected traditional Armenian instruments are also sometimes revealed as I play.

Now a new generation of Armenian composers gradually are being introduced to international circles – did you have any chance to get acquainted with their works?

I am in the process of getting acquainted with their works, both within Armenia and beyond. As an interpreter (not a creator) who is committed to performing works by living composers, it is my duty to look for artistic soul mates. I am not just a craftsperson who learns the work but also the communicator who presents new work to my audiences. Performing new works, pieces that have never been heard before, is a very delicate dialogue with one’s listeners. For me, my performance must be fully invested in order for my audience to feel ready and open to enter the language of an unfamiliar composer. This is unlike, for example, hearing a work by Beethoven whose musical language we are already familiar with.

For many diasporan Armenians visiting Armenia is a kind of pilgrimage. For some it is like returning home. For a few it is just a tourism. How was your experience?

My recent and first visit to Yerevan was only two-weeks-long. During that time, often alongside my dear friend — the remarkable musician and scholar Gascia Ouzounian — I combined meetings, musical and artistic explorations of Yerevan, and a few visits to exquisite historical sites. I had an amazing time. Everyone I met was beyond inviting and warm towards me, a stranger to their city. I loved my experience of Yerevan, its environs and the people I met. I am very grateful to the introductions that were made for me prior to my visit by the wonderful journalist Meri Musinyan and others.

I am intrigued by Armenia and need to return someday. I need to unravel what Armenia is for me, its past and its present. I am still finding my way between longing and belonging. I have the strong desire to walk. I want to experience the land more fully, its geography, the smell of the air, the sound of the place and allow myself feel whatever I feel.

And what are your plans after Armenia?

As a composer, I have just travelled back from Vancouver where I recorded an album with electronic musician Mauricio Pauly where my acoustic/augmented piano met his electronic sound world. We will be releasing a disc of this collaboration. I continue to work with the animator I mentioned previously. I have requests to create sound in collaboration with visual artists for installations and an invitation to write and perform a new piece for an ensemble in Montreal, Canada.

As an interpreter, I am developing programs mixing the music of Erik Satie and works by living composers who meet his aesthetic. Of course, I continue to refine my Armenian concert program with composers from Yerevan and the diaspora. I hope to perform this program in Canada and abroad.

While I was in Yerevan, I did receive invitations to improvise, create and perform.  I am not sure how to make these happen right now as my first visit was supported by funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

I wonder whether Armenians in Armenia would be interested in my work. I also wonder what context would be the best way for me to share my world if they were curious to experience it?

Armenia is very far away, geographically. If it were closer to where I live, I would be there again in a second.