NEW YORK — On February 14, Phenotypic Recordings announced a new single, Groung, from Kronos Quartet’s new portrait album featuring the works of Pulitzer Prize-nominated Armenian-American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian – “Witness” – out Friday, March 14, 2025. The works featured on Kouyoumdjian’s first portrait album exemplify her use of the arts as an amplifier of expression, often integrating testimonies from resilient individuals and field recordings of place to invite empathy. Kouyoumdjian’s work seeks to humanize complex experiences around social and political conflict. A vinyl version of the release will be available in spring 2025.
Armenian-Canadian filmmaker (and Kouyoumdjian’s frequent collaborator) Atom Egoyan contributes the liner notes introduction, writing, “This collection is an open letter to the tragic hymn of transmitted trauma and the possibility of art and magnificently gifted artists to help create new life.” Cover artwork and design have been contributed by Armenian-Canadian photographer Osheen Harruthoonyan, who merges movement with themes of cultural heritage and renewal.
Phenotypic Recordings will donate all streaming proceeds from the album to Kooyrigs and the Lebanese Red Cross to support the Armenian and Lebanese communities.
Kronos Quartet also announced their annual Kronos Festival in San Francisco, on April 25-27, 2025 at SF JAZZ. With five events over three days and nights, this year’s festival is themed around Terry Riley’s Good Medicine, providing the healing music the world needs. The festival will include a performance featuring a Mary Kouyoumdjian work from “Witness.”
The Kronos Quartet, who have “broken the boundaries of what string quartets do,” (New York Times), discovered Mary Kouyoumdjian’s talent early in her career when David Harrington heard an early folk recording of the Armenian song Groung and was overwhelmed by the voice of Zabelle Panosian singing this plaintive call for a lost home.
Performing an arrangement written specially for the Kronos Quartet, Groung [Crane] is based on a recording of the Armenian folk song of the same name, which became an anthem for the Armenian diaspora. Of the track, Kouyoumdjian shares: “I still remember meeting with David Harrington for the first time, when he excitedly handed me his Discman and headphones, which had been carrying a recording of the Armenian folk song Groung [Crane]. I was deeply familiar with composer Komitas Vardapet’s version of Groung, which had become an anthem for the Armenian diaspora, but this version that David had shared was entirely new to me. It was a recording from 1917 performed by Zabelle Panosian (1891-1986), a relatively unknown singer who had moved to Harlem, NY from her village of Bardizag, now a part of Western Turkey. In this song, the singer calls out to a crane, pleading for news from their homeland. Panosian’s voice seems to carry the burden of her entire homeland with a heart-achingly beautiful interpretation of the melody, and in my own arrangement, the ensemble is asked to emulate her unique interpretation of the song. At the time Panosian recorded this piece in the United States, her family and the Armenians were going through genocide in Ottoman Turkey, and I find the timing of her recording to bring even more meaning to the music.
