Project: The Art of Memory

In 2020, as I was beginning to think about writing a piece for duduk, string quartet, and percussion, I happened to read The Human Comedy, by Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, one of those books I’ve had on my shelf forever, but hadn’t gotten around to reading until then. There is a beautiful small scene where a young boy, four years old, named Ulysses, waves at a passing train, and no-one waves back at him until finally at the end of the train there is a black man singing a song, My Old Kentucky Home. The man and the boy wave to one another, and the boy carries the memory of the singing man waving to him, he remembers it for the rest of his life.

Given that the man is singing about returning to a much-loved place that is also the scene of many violent and difficult events for him and for people like him, I imagine the author is intimating how for people like Saroyan and me, singing about going home to, say, Van, for example, is similarly fraught. It is undeniably a beloved and longed-for home on an ancestral level, but it is at the same time a very difficult home to actually embrace.

(My grandparents were born and raised in Van, a town in what is now eastern Turkey. My father never saw the place; as he was dying, he asked me to go there. I finally visited eastern Anatolia, and Van in particular, with my friends Burak Çevik and Dil?ad Alada?, in September 2024. The photograph above gives a sense of what Van looked like before 1915, when the old city was razed as part of the Armenian Genocide.)

The music of We Will Sing One Song starts with an exploration of the melody of those five words in the Stephen Foster original, and grows into a curious, deeply un-traditional dance, which releases into a percussion solo that resolves into an Armenian version of My Old Kentucky Home.

We Will Sing One Song was composed for Apollo Chamber Players’ 20×2020 project, generously underwritten by Pamela Auburn. Many thanks to the Apollo players, Matthew Dedrick in particular; and to Arsen Petrosyan (duduk), and Pejman Hadadi (percussion), for their generous and thoughtful ideas and advice as we built the piece together.

You can hear the premiere recording of the piece by visiting 24 June in A Book of Days.

And you can download the performing materials by clicking below, with my thanks for supporting this informal way of publishing: