I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment
Other Minds
Other Minds presents the world premiere of I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, by composer Joseph Bohigian, vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian, the music-technology group Ensemble Decipher, and artists Tara Baghdassarian and Karo Yagjian. The performance will take place on the first night of this year's Other Minds Festival at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, California.
I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment is an evening-length multimedia work for solo voice, duduk, electronics ensemble, and video projection about the life of the visionary Georgian-born Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov. Though he made significant contributions to film, Parajanov was repeatedly persecuted, censored, and imprisoned in his home country. The multiplicity of cultures in his native South Caucasus region was essential to his work, which is reflected in the multilingual text for this piece by the 18th century ashugh (bard) Sayat Nova, the subject of Parajanov’s 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates. This work combines Sayat Nova’s existing melodies with newly created ones by Khatchadourian and Bohigian, along with live electronic manipulation, by Bohigian and the members of Ensemble Decipher, of recordings by folk musicians from across the South Caucasus.
Ensemble Decipher has been performing with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies since 2017. I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment is the latest project in a long history of collaboration with Bohigian, also a member of the ensemble, as a composer, whose music focuses on memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora through the use of archival materials. This piece marks the first collaboration between Ensemble Decipher and Khatchadour Khatchadourian, an expert singer of traditional music from across West Asia in Armenian, Arabic, and Farsi.
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