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`My Heart Is Brazilian, but My Soul Is Armenian!'

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  • `My Heart Is Brazilian, but My Soul Is Armenian!'

    `My Heart Is Brazilian, but My Soul Is Armenian!'

    http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2012/12/29/my-heart-is-brazilian-but-my-soul-is-armenian/
    ARTS | DECEMBER 29, 2012 4:00 PM
    Interview by Artsvi Bakhchinyan

    YEREVAN - `It was beautiful: a smooth performance with very inspiring
    moments. All the result of preparation, an excellent orchestra, a
    great conductor, a gorgeous hall and an unparalleled feeling of
    representing Brazil at the home I've never been too - Armenia. And as
    a side note, the audience went crazy when, before the encore (an
    Armenian folk dance), still among echoes of bravo, I said, in
    Armenian, the following words: `I'm half Brazilian, half Armenian. My
    heart is Brazilian, but my soul is Armenian!'

    This is what the young Brazilian- Armenian guitarist from New York,
    João Kouyoumdjian, wrote on his Facebook page after his concert with
    the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra on December 14. It was organized
    by the Brazilian embassy in Yerevan and dedicated to the 20th
    anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between
    Armenia and Brazil.

    I first learned about Kouyoumdjian last year, when I was in New York.
    A friend gave me his photo which proudly announced his concert in the
    prestigious Carnegie Hall. Youtube videos and Facebook made the
    virtual acquaintance possible, until one day I saw this familiar name
    on one of the musical announcements of Yerevan and enjoyed his
    performance with our philharmonic orchestra conducted by Ruben
    Asatryan. The next day, at the home of a mutual friend, I ran the
    following interview with this young musician:

    Artsvi Bakhchinyan (AB): João, yesterday you turned 29 and you had
    your first concert in Armenia. What are your feelings?

    João Kouyoumdjian (JK): First of all, I feel very happy to be here in
    Armenia and I am also very content with yesterday's concert. I think
    it was a marvelous thing to have a concert bridging Brazil and Armenia
    here in Yerevan, and I am glad I got support from the Brazilian
    embassy in Armenia, that they could invite me here to have this
    wonderful concert and to be a part of this great event.

    AB: Was this your first performance with a symphonic orchestra?

    J K: Yes! This trip has been meaningful in many ways. First, of
    course, for me, being half Armenian and half Brazilian; my family
    always tried to preserve the culture, even though I do not speak much
    Armenian, but there were always family gatherings, big lunches at my
    Armenian grandmother's house, and I can feel a lot of things in common
    at my household and here in Yerevan. This is one thing on a personal
    side, but participating in this big event, representing Brazil at this
    anniversary of 20 years of diplomatic relations with Armenia, was a
    fantastic feeling as well and a great experience for me on the musical
    side. Even though I was very well trained to play the Vila- Lobos
    concerto and I actually did perform it quite often with piano
    arrangement, I never had the experience of performing it with
    orchestra. It was a quite different feeling to head an orchestra;
    there are many musical issues that come up when you have to deal with
    them. One of them is, as I said, the balance, but you also have sounds
    coming from different places on the stage and the attacks are
    different, so you have to be very sensitive there and obviously the
    conductor, the tempo, the gestures... Thus, it was a great icebreaker
    for me. I am happy I was prepared enough and able to come with a nice
    result at a beautiful event.

    AB: How long have you played guitar?

    JK: For about 15-16 years. It was a long journey. I started with
    electric guitar, and later on I switched to more popular styles, like
    bossa nova and other genres of popular music from Brazil, until I
    started to learn music scores and some pieces from Vila-Lobos.

    AB: Tell us about your studies.
    JK: First I studied in Brazil; my education is little bit all over the
    place. When I was 12, I studied in the conservatory at my birthplace,
    São José do Rio Preto, a town about five hours by car from São Paulo.
    There are more cowboys and farms, not a lot of intellectual activity
    or arts, but I had a really rich childhood and I am happy I grew up
    there. That's where my great-grandparents had a chance to establish
    stores and to survive. It pretty much meant me to understand who I am.
    First I had private instruction. I studied with a great guitarist and
    composer from my town, Preto Moreno, whom I admire very much until
    now, and who with I recently collaborated in a concert in my hometown.
    I felt very emotional at this concert when he stepped onto the stage.
    I chose to do it as an anchor, as a surprise for everybody. After many
    years of practicing, going to São Paolo and then to New York, then
    traveling around the world and coming back to my hometown and
    performing with my first guitar teacher side by side - it was awesome.
    Later, in 2003-2006, I got my bachelor's degree in music at the
    University of São Paolo and from 2007-2010 I studied at the Juilliard
    in New York City. Before finally moving to the United States, I had a
    very important classical guitar teacher, Paulo Martelli, who is still
    my mentor and whom I greatly admire not just because he is a great
    teacher, but because he is a phenomenal guitarist. He helped narrow
    down my choice to classical guitar and helped to perfect my skills in
    classical guitar playing.

    AB: Do you like Federico Garcia Lorca?

    JK: Yes, I do! I know he has some poems about the guitar.

    AB: Guitar as an instrument is not a frequent guest on our concert
    halls. For us, it was not just a nice discovery to find another
    talented compa- triot, but our philharmonic orchestra also had a nice
    experience to have a guitar in its program as a solo instrument. How
    do you appreciate this combination of guitar and classical music?

    JK: Guitar is an instrument that works by itself mostly, so we have a
    big repertoire of solo, classi- cal guitar without any type of
    accompaniment. We do have some chamber music, but works for guitar and
    symphonic music have been more fre- quently composed and performed
    only recently. A guitar has a couple of issues to work together with
    an orchestra, because it does not have much volume as any other
    orchestra instrument or the piano. So the combination gets a little
    tricky when you think about the balance, for instance, but nowadays
    with decent amplification you can easily solve those issues and have
    good performances of guitar and orchestra. I think that it works very
    well, and the orchestral musicians said it was also a good experience
    for them to be able to play with guitar and to control their
    instruments, to play in a soft and quiet way as much as possible to
    balance with guitar and obtain good results.

    AB: Is there a specific Brazilian guitar tradition or style?

    JK: Yes, if you think about guitar in general, you have, for instance,
    the bossa nova movement in the late `50s, early `60s. After bossa
    nova, it seems the guitar just boomed in Brazil way out of proportion
    for that time, and it is the major, most implemented instrument of
    bossa nova, and perhaps the most implemented instrument of Brazilian
    music. If you think about samba, for instance, more traditional samba
    pre-bossa nova, guitar is also the instrument you can just pick up and
    play or sing. We also have a very strong tradition in classical guitar
    playing, if you think, for instance, about Abreu brothers, who had a
    mete- oric career in the sixties too; they performed with great
    artists and major orchestras and recorded for major labels. Then, a
    couple of years later you had the Assad brothers, who are up until
    today considered to be perhaps the most well-regarded classical guitar
    duo in the world. There is a lot of guitar playing either popular or
    classical in Brazil, and I am happy to be a part of this tradition and
    to bring a little bit of it here to Armenia. Actually, Vila-Lobos is
    the most prominent Brazilian classical composer of all times, and he
    himself has a great output of works for classic guitar, often using
    folkloric material in any of his works and any instrumentations for
    guitar. Thus, we not only have excellent major performers, but also
    fantastic composers for classical guitar.

    Komitas. How much do you know about Armenian music? Yesterday the
    audience was very happy when you performed a small Armenian piece.

    JK: Armenian music is a territory I started to explore. I do not know
    much about it. I always wanted to connect to my Armenian side and also
    perform Armenian music, but I could never find nicely arranged scores
    for classical guitar until after graduation from Julliard School in
    2010. After learning the traditional classical guitar masterpieces and
    the milestone repertoire of classical guitar, you start to disconnect
    from the reality of being student and connect to the reality of
    searching for an artistic identity. Since I am half Armenian, I
    started exploring Armenian music immediately, so I kept looking at the
    Internet trying to find a book of Armenian pieces for guitar.

    After many days of research, in a very obscure Greek or Russian (I am
    not quite sure) web site I found a book, by a certain Kolanian, of
    Armenian traditional dances transcribed for classical guitar. I said
    to myself: `This is just perfect, I am going to buy it.' By that time,
    I was invited to give a con- cert for a couple of weeks for the
    Armenian club in São Paulo, that's why I was even more driven to find
    fine material to perform. Sadly, the book came in just one or two days
    before the concert, so there was no way to prepare the dances. After
    that concert, I had more time to look at the pieces. I was just very,
    very impressed not only with the content of Armenian music, but with
    the craft of the arrangement itself by Iakovos Kolanian, a
    Greek-Armenian guitarist. I picked three Armenian dances to perform:
    Noubar- Noubar, Yaman yar and Nazeli bar. It is funny how things
    unfold at a certain time because one or two months after, when I was
    starting to play those pieces, there was an opportunity to apply for a
    concert in New York City at the Carnegie Hall, promoted by an Armenian
    organization, the Armenian Prelacy. They organize one concert at the
    Carnegie Hall, featuring one or two Armenian-born artists, like
    myself, and one of the requirements was. of course, that one or two
    pieces from the program should be from Armenian composers. And I was
    right there per- forming Kolanian's works. When I remember it, it
    sounds so providential, because I think that the deadline had passed,
    but anyway I called desper- ately to the Armenian Prelacy and I said
    that I really want to submit my materials, if it is still pos- sible.
    I rushed to record a video and get all the paperwork done, and I was
    accepted. It was one of the great joys in my career. First, it was my
    first concert at Carnegie Hall; second, performing Armenian music and
    performing the sonata by Bach, that I was preparing my entire life,
    and other major works for classical guitar. A lot of good stuff
    happened afterwards (just fast forwarding a little bit); today, I am
    represented by a world music management, an agency run by Raffi
    Meneshian. Then I found out that Raffi was also producing and managing
    Iakovos Kolanian. And it does not stop there. When I started to work
    with Raffi as my producer and manager, he put Iakovos and me in touch
    directly, and now I am about to go to Greece to record my first CD
    with Kolanian in his private studio. So suddenly everything in one
    point fits in your career, and even after that I got an invitation to
    come here through the Brazilian embassy.

    AB: Tell us about your Armenian roots.

    JK: My grandfather's family was all killed dur- ing the Genocide when
    he supposedly was 3 years old. So, we do not know the real surname of
    our family. As an orphan Aris, his name, was adopted by the Kouyumjian
    family, Ohannes and Zartar. Zartar and Aris came to Brazil before
    Ohannes and in Marseille, France, the surname became Kouyoumdjian.
    Aris passed in 1989. My grandmother's family, Darakjian, came all
    together from Albistan and then from Aleppo. Sarkis and Arustiek, my
    grandmother's parents came to Brazil in 1926. Parouhi Darakjian
    Kouyoumdjian, 92 years, is still alive with good health apart from
    arthritis.

    AB: What about your parents? Are they artists also?

    J K: We always joke about it, as we do not know about the ancestors of
    my paternal side. Who knows? Maybe there were great musicians among
    them. Actually, my grandfather, Aris Kouyoumdjian, used to play violin
    just for fun. Perhaps I inherited some of his musicality. As about my
    parents, they are physicians. My father, João Aris Kouyoumdjian, is
    active in Armenian life of São José do Rio Preto, and organizes vari-
    ous gatherings. My mother, Nivia Canile do Valle Kouyoumdjian, is
    Brazilian, but pretty much Armenian at heart. She embraced the culture
    very generously and she is very passionate about it. She told me that
    when I got here, she could not even sleep because of excitement,
    remembering when she came here with my father about 30 years ago, when
    it was still Soviet Union here, she felt very emotional and felt even
    more emotional now that I am here.

    AB: What have you seen so far in Armenia?

    JK: I have not seen much. My routine until today was to go from the
    hotel to the opera and from the opera to the hotel for rehearsals and
    all the concert preparation. I am an artist who is very focused on
    major engagements like this. Even though I am very excited to go out
    and see and connect to as many Armenians as pos- sible and learn a
    little bit the language. It just started today!

    AB: So, we hope that you will soon have your first CD recorded along
    with Armenian music and we would like to regularly enjoy your
    performances in our concert halls.

    JK: Well, I hope to be back. I hope I can reach my goal of being here
    at last once a year, luckily with a couple of good engagements here in
    Armenia. I liked here already, the facts that Armenians were so kind
    to me and I had a beau- tiful concert yesterday; the opera is
    fantastic, the food is great. I am sure there are many things I will
    love and will certainly miss when I am back to New York City. Another
    goal of mine is study- ing Armenian to be a more proficient in the
    lan- guage and be able to connect more with my Armenian side.

    AB (in Portuguese): Obrigado!

    JK (in Armenian): Shnorhagaloutyoun!




    From: A. Papazian
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