Komitas was awarded a modest scholarship in 1896 to further his musical studies in Berlin. On the advice of Joseph Joachim, the renowned violinist, he enrolled in the private conservatory of Richard Schmidt and studied aesthetics at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University.
During his three-year stay in Berlin, Komitas was active in the city's musical circles. He played an important role in the creation in 1899 of the International Musical Society (IMS), the forerunner of the present day International Musicological Society. At four different conferences, Komitas delivered lectures on Armenian and Kurdish music.
After his return to Etchmiadzin in 1900, Komitas was engaged in field work, documenting the dance tunes and folk songs of the Caucasus and the Ararat Plateau and investigating the Armenian khaz (neumatic) notation system of the eleventh century. He also lectured extensively in Europe and wrote in local and international journals.
Komitas left Etchmiadzin for Constantinople (Istanbul), a city open to Europe and the Middle East, with an affluent Armenian community. In the relatively liberal environment of this cosmopolitan urban center, Komitas led a remarkably active musical life: In 1910, he founded the 300-member Gussan mixed choir which he conducted in concerts in the city, receiving critical acclaim. He also gave solo recitals. Komitas' gaze was toward Europe. He recorded a series of 78 rpm phonograph records in Paris in 1913 where, a year later, at the fourth meeting of the IMS he presented three different lectures which examined the modal, rythmic, and metric structures of Armenian music. A complementary concert followed the final lecture and he was elected chairman of IMS' newly created Middle Eastern section.
Komitas was welcomed in Constantinople with unprecedented popular acclaim. His train was met at the station by crowds of well-wishers. Plans were under way for a series of concerts. Komitas was invited to teach harmony and Western music history at the new conservatory which was to open soon. His continuing research into the musical traditions of the Middle East took him into the remote corners of the region. Wherever he went, he organized choirs with local talent. But in April 1915, at the height of the systematic destruction of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Komitas and other Armenian intellectuals and artists were arrested and deported to the interior of the country. While he was spared the fate of his friends, upon his return Komitas found his life's work--manuscripts, research findings on the Khaz system, and his library -- in total disarray. A full accounting of his research on the khaz system has so far illuded scholars.
The circumstances of Komitas's eventual mental breakdown in 1919 are not fully documented. He was first institutionalized in Constantinople and later moved to Paris where he spent the rest of his life fluctuating between moments of great lucidity and longer stretches of total mental chaos.
After 1919, Komitas produced no music. He fell into a protracted period of silence which lasted for fourteen years. He died in Paris in l935 at a hospital in the Jewish Quarter. His remains were taken to Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, the following year. In honor of his contributions to Armenian music, the then newly established Conservatory in Yerevan was named the Komitas State Conservatory.
Komitas' musical output is voluminous and diverse, encompassing liturgical chants, art and folk songs, choral settings all of which mirror, as no other composer's work has done, the Armenian ethos. This is why the songs of Komitas have a powerful, resonant presence in Armenian consciousness.
The human voice in song is the path which Komitas' compositional thinking takes. In the Divine Liturgy, the voices of the male chorus are woven into a layered, polyphonic composition. Similarly, in many of his art songs, the piano is treated as a singing instrument, in contrast to its traditional accompaniment role.
The solo piano makes its appearance in Komitas' mature work in 1902 in the form of Six Dances for Piano which he composed over a four-year period. The cycle was performed in Paris by the composer in 1906 and published in Leipzig by Breitkopf and Härtel in 1916. Six volumes of Komitas' works, edited by the late Komitas scholar Robert Atayan, were published in Yerevan between 1960 and 1982.
The titles of the dance cycle indicate the ethno-choreographic characteristics of various regions in Armenia. Here Komitas aims for a kind of abstraction where dance is transformed into choreography and song becomes a contemporary, polyphonic performance.
Although Komitas turns to a European musical instrument for his medium, the Dances does not follow European compositional conventions in form, harmony, and metro-rythmic structures. There is an intentional reduction of pianistic bravura and virtuosity. The identity of the piano is shaped by the vocal and folk instrumental idiom of Armenian music. The two-voice setting of Yerangi, with the percussive second voice accompanying the melodic line, displays an elegant female dance. Each of the two sections of Ounabi is made up four sets of six measures. The intensive modal constrasts of Marali complement Ounabi. An equally complex rythmic structure is also evident in the two male dances of Yet Ou Arach and Shoror.
In the Dances, Komitas departs from the Classical and Romantic piano & forte understanding of performance. His aim is to appropriate the piano not only to the human voice but also to traditional Armenian folk instruments. This is why he directs the performer to play in "the trumpet, drum, and tambourine style." What the piano loses in grandiosity is more than amply made-up in transparency, perspective, and texture. In this, the Dances has something in common with the piano works of Debussy, Bartók and Kodály. In fact, there is evidence that on one of his visits to Paris, Komitas met with Debussy who later spoke enthusiastically about the Armenian's work. Perhaps one of the reasons for Komitas' extraordinary scholarly and artistic success in Europe during the first decade of our century was due to the experimental, compositional possibilities which his work suggested.
These possibilities are further explored in the piano works of modern Armenian composers, such as Saradjian, Andriasian, Khachaturian, and Baghtasarian. In Saradjian, Andriasian and Baghtasarian, all of whom were faculty members at the Komitas Conservatory, the European and Russian pianistic traditions are pronounced. Saradjian's Habrban, Yerkingn Ampel Eh and Shogher Djan and Andriasian's Garoun A, Gakavik, and Dzirani Dzar retain the structure of Komitas' folk songs, while Baghtasarian's Humoresque and Khatchaturian's Poema and Folk Style are more personalized and stylized treatments.
- Ohannes Salibian