Komitas

Who is Komitas?

Komitas, born Soghomon Soghomonian, was an Ottoman-Armenian priest, composer, and musicologist widely regarded as the founder of the Armenian national school of music and a pioneer of ethnomusicology. Orphaned young, he was raised and educated at the Gevorgian Seminary in Etchmiadzin, Armenia's religious center, and was ordained a celibate priest, or vardapet, in 1895, becoming known thereafter as Komitas Vardapet. He traveled through Armenian villages transcribing thousands of folk songs sung by peasants, who affectionately called him the "note-taking priest," and in 1903 he published one of the first collections of Kurdish folk melodies. After further study in Berlin from 1896 to 1899, he composed original works based on Armenian folk motifs and led a choir that performed across Europe, earning praise from Claude Debussy. He relocated to Constantinople in 1910 to reach wider audiences, but in April 1915 he was arrested and deported along with hundreds of other Armenian intellectuals at the start of the Armenian Genocide. Though released, the trauma of what he witnessed left him with a severe breakdown from which he never recovered, and he spent his final two decades in psychiatric care near Paris, where he died in 1935.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Komitas" · Armenian Sacred Music Project, "Komitas Vartabed" · Asbarez, "Komitas: A Biographical Sketch"