Composer and pianist John Hodian joins Cara Lieurance from Yerevan, Armenia, where he has lived for about 22 years. He’s speaking ahead of the Naghash Ensemble’s concert on Sunday, November 15 at 7 p.m. in Stetson Chapel at Kalamazoo College, presented by the Connecting Chords Music Festival.
Hodian had an American upbringing outside Philadelphia, without much talk of the Armenian genocide that had dispersed his family. He trained in composition and conducting, and Philip Glass produced his first record. His sound draws on medieval polyphony, Bach, the middle-period works of Steve Reich, funk and songwriters like Joni Mitchell.
“My music is really as much Armenian folk and spiritual music as it is Western classical music,” he says.
The ensemble started at Garni Temple, where Hodian heard soprano Hasmik Baghdasaryan singing Armenian spiritual music. “That voice, I really wanted in my pocket. I wanted my music to sound like that,” he recalls. While looking for texts, he found the work of Mkrtich Naghash, a priest and poet of the late 1300s and early 1400s. Naghash wrote his poems in exile after he refused to take down a church steeple that stood taller than the local mosques. Hodian spent 12 years setting every one of the poems to music.
Three female voices sing with oud, duduk, dhol and piano. The poems are sung in the original Armenian, and before each piece someone recites a stanza in the local language, which will be English in Kalamazoo. The group has toured Europe for 13 years and is now on its third North American tour, with stops at venues including Koerner Hall in Toronto.
Labels don’t always fit, and Hodian appreciates the presenters that take a chance on their unique music. The ensemble once headlined France’s Transmusicales festival at midnight in an airport hangar packed with thousands of listeners. “Everything that Naghash wrote about in the 1400s is so relevant now,” he says.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
