Karen Ouzounian and Lembit Beecher’s Armenian Ode: Dear Mountains

Though husband and wife team Ouzounian and Beecher have collaborated before, Dear Mountains marks the first piece the two have written together. The 35-minute new work for choir, distilled over a century of Ouzounian’s family’s history, stretching back to the Armenian Highlands now in Turkey, to Beirut and then the United States. Many Armenians will recognize this unfortunate pattern where each generation found itself having to emigrate from one country to the next, forcibly or by “choice.”

Ouzunian and Beecher have pulled off something remarkable, melding together Armenian folk songs and liturgy with contemporary but imagined Armenian dances (Imagined Anatolian Dance Nr. 2 Tamzara; Imagined Anatolian Dance Nr. 1 (6/8), Imagined Anatolian Dance Nr. 3 Curcuna) based on inherited melodies and rhythms.

For those not familiar with contemporary opera or choral work Dear Mountains may surprise for its use of transcribed conversations and biographical and other data used as lyrics, rather than the traditional texts written specifically for a performance, or more traditional liturgical sources.

Drawing from archival sources, documentary recordings and personal memories the piece “imagines moments of music-making and listening occurring across the Armenian diaspora (in Beirut, Toronto, Fresno, Boston, and New York) over the last century in the wake of the Genocide, juxtaposing these scenes with a story often retold by Ouzounian’s grandmother. Exploring the fuzzy lines between documentary, memory, and imagination, the piece reflects on the fragmented ways in which diasporic communities can understand the past, simultaneously holding the worlds of the past and present, of grief and joy together in rebuilding their communities and futures.” (Performance Notes)

These pieces include a 1917 recording of an Anatolian-Armenian song Eghin Havasi, recorded by Kemany Minas and Harry Hasekian in New York City for Columbia Records and transcribed for this performance by Ouzounian and Beecher.

In the 1993 issue of Ararat Magazine, Ouzounian and Beecher discovered a post-Genocide description of Armenian immigrants gathering in Van Cortlandt Park in the 1920s where the participants danced to this recording in public. As Beecher explained: “One of the movements, Listening to Eghin Havasi in Van Cortlandt Park, New York (1920s) becomes an evocation of this scene. These days, the two of us take the 1 train up from Northern Manhattan and run in Van Cortlandt Park from time to time; we love its wide-open grassy expanses and wild trails, an escape from urban New York City. Imagining this recording being played in those same spaces 100 years ago feels sharply poignant.”