Who speaks for the Armenians?

This afternoon I attended my third Freep Film Fest event. This was the documentary Armenian Trilogy. Dan Yessian is the grandson of Armenian immigrants and is a part of the large Armenian community in the Detroit area. His grandparents came here for a particular reason – to escape the Armenian genocide that happened in 1915. Over 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Turks as the Ottoman Empire fell apart.

Yessian made a living as a musician, mostly in jazz and dance bands. He made a pretty good living writing jingles for commercials, the most famous one was for Dittrich Furs. Coming up to commemorating the 100th year since the genocide the leader of the local Armenian church thought a musical piece should be written. His wife suggested Yessian.

So we see how Yessian went about creating the piece. That was fascinating to me because Yessian doesn’t read music very well, so couldn’t put pen to paper (or operate a notation program on a computer). He could record the sound while he played his ideas on the piano, sometimes singing along. He then worked with someone to notate it for him, then worked with another person to orchestrate it. They had to figure out how to communicate what Yessian heard in his head and how to match it.

Yessian was put in touch with the Armenian ambassador in Detroit. The ambassador liked what he saw and heard and put Yessian in touch with the director of the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra in Armenia. He also liked what he saw and arranged a performance, which Yessian and family attended. Yessian talked about coming home to a place he had never been to.

The film includes excerpts of the performance. Yessian discusses writing each movement as we hear bits of it and as we see and hear the corresponding parts of Armenian history. The first movement is The Freedom, life before the genocide. In the Ottoman Empire most Armenians had a pretty middle class life. The second movement is The Fear, a musical depiction of the atrocities (though the music isn’t as far out there as some modern composers can manage). When the empire collapsed and modern Turkey was being formed the Turks were jealous of the success the Armenians had. Racial tensions spilled into hatred and genocide. The third movement is The Faith, what sustains the survivors after such horrific damage.

The film mentions Hitler saying, “Who speaks for the Armenians now?” This has been taken as inspiring Hitler and his Final Solution of the Holocaust. Afterward we got to meet Yessian and the team that put the film together. We also met a historian from University of Michigan who wrote a book about the Armenian genocide. He said Hitler’s inspiration wasn’t Armenia, but the way America treated its own native population – such a great way to eliminate the undesirables and make more room for the white race.

There is a recording on YouTube on Yessian’s page, though it doesn’t look to be the one by the Armenian orchestra. The orchestra isn’t named. It is 17 minutes long.

There is a puzzle that wasn’t addressed by the film. If the piece was proposed by an Armenian pastor in the Detroit area, was there a local performance? If so, what group played it?