Aram Khachaturian The Music Pedagogue 2
Khachatryan's works include ballets, symphonies, concerts, film scores, etc. Music critic Edward Greenfield thinks that Khachatryan significantly shined in the circle of Soviet contemporaries, creating a distinctly recognizable style, something that his predecessors were unable to do. He created most of his works for 10 years, from 1936 to 1946, preceding and following the Second World War. After his conviction in 1948 and his official rehabilitation, Khachatryan created many internationally recognized works during the last 30 years of his life.
In 1962, composer Aram Khachaturian gave a concert in Egypt, and it was a major event in the country. It should be mentioned that at the time, President of Egypt Abdul Nasir presented Aram Khachaturian with the First Class Order of Art, which has not been granted to any other foreigner in Egypt."
According to James Baxt, what made Khachatryan stand out from other Soviet composers was his blend of national Armenian vocal and instrumental modern orchestral skills. Khachatryan's music is characterized by an active rhythmic development, which leads either to the mere repetition of the main formula or to the play of emphasis within this formula.
the nationalist project. James Baxt characterized Khachatryan's thoughts as follows:
"Music is a language created by people. People create international types of music that show the national elements of the art of the given nation".
-James Baxt
Composer Tigran Mansuryan said that Khachatryan's music incorporates American characteristics and called the USA his second homeland for his musical inspirations, especially for having a lifestyle full of optimism.
Armenian folk music
Aram Khachatryan entered the culture with a firm "claim", instantly and permanently imprinting himself in the history of music. He brought the real folk wealth of the East into a highly professional orbit. Khachatryan's creative work included a huge layer of Armenian folk music. Many of its pages were so deeply understood and reincarnated by the composer that they are perceived as Khachatryan.
-Eduard Mirzoyan
Other folk music
During his university years, Khachatryan transcribed (transliterated) Armenian, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, and other folk songs. Khachatryan used elements of Caucasian music in these accomplished works. His first ballet, "Happiness", contains Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, and Russian dances and Lezginka, an energetic dance of several Caucasians. The "dance" includes the Mazurka, a Polish folk dance. "Gayane" ballet, like its predecessor, is "Lezginka." The second act of "Gayane" is filled with Kurdish dances".
Russian classical music
Khachatryan is noted by musicologists as a follower of Russian classical traditions. According to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Khachatryan brings such 19th-century Russian composers as Dmitri Korsakov and Pyotr Tchaikovsky into the 20th century with a colorful, folk-song-inspired style. Like the five composers, especially Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose works served as examples for him in some cases, Khachatryan turned his attention to oriental materials in classical styles of various European origins. But Khachatryan's cultural identity and strict musical training in Soviet circles allowed him to penetrate deeper layers of Eastern and Caucasian music and incorporate them more fully in his mature works (including ballets). "Never moving away from the traditions of Russian music, Khachatryan, gathering together all the different traditions in one main generalization, began to be valued in Moscow as the mouthpiece of the entire Soviet East," concludes Maria Frolova Volker.
Acknowledgement
Khachatryan is considered one of the leading composers of the Soviet Union. Along with Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, he is consistently cited as one of the three greatest composers of the Soviet era. Back in 1957, Time magazine called Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachatryan "three modern giants of the Soviet Union". They are collectively often called the "titans" of Soviet music. "It is not known whether history will support the idea that Khachatryan was the third among Soviet composers during his lifetime, after Shostakovich and Prokofiev," wrote music critic Ronald Crichton in 1978. According to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, his works did not enjoy the same international reputation as those of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Apart from the previous two and Dmitry Kabalevsky, Aram Khachatryan was one of the few who became known to the wider international community" . According to music historian Harlow Robinson, "his proletariat origins, non-Russian ethnic background, and Soviet training made him a powerful symbol of the Soviet multi-ethnic cultural face, a face that allowed the artist to operate both at home and abroad." Unlike Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Khachatryan was the founder of Soviet music and dance.
Joseph Woodard notes in the Los Angeles Times that he "long thought of Khachatryan as a 'lightweight' composer of the 20th century, while classical music broadcaster Norman Gilliland describes him as a '20th century 'great' composer" . In a 2003 interview, conductor Marin Alsop expressed the opinion that Khachatryan is "a very underachieved composer; something is also underestimated." He said, "His music, of course, has a slightly irritating character specific to the sound of the 20th century; disharmonies appear." But at the same time, it combines wonderful neo-romanticism, rich orchestration, and a more formal approach, so I think Khachatryan can be relevant now. According to Tim Ashley, editor of The Guardian magazine:
Khachatryan's recognition mainly spreads in the West, probably because we think of him as a post-Soviet supporter of Soviet music. This point of view is clear considering that, in 1948, he was a big supporter of the authorities. It's also easy to see how he earned his bad reputation when you listen to a violin concerto from 1940. It is a very attractive work, full of symbols of Armenian folk flourishing, and the hypnotic andante is wonderful. But the unguarded optimism of the foreign movements seems ill-advised now, when we realize that this was when Stalin gave Prokofiev and Shostakovich hell.”
-Tim Ashley
