A Spectrum of Cultural Memory—In Conversation with Lucia Kagramanyan of Panorama Yerevan

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A Spectrum of Cultural Memory—In Conversation with Lucia Kagramanyan of Panorama Yerevan

In January, Assistant Editor Aram Kavoossi sat down for a Zoom conversation with Lucia Kagramanyan, host of the bimonthly Panorama Yerevan program on NTS Radio. A resident DJ for the London-based NTS as well as for the Bethlehem-based Radio Alhara, Kagramanyan’s Panorama presents a kaleidoscopic soundscape of Armenian music from Armenia and its diasporas, reaching across social, historical, and musicological categories. Kagramanyan’s latest broadcast, “Armenian Liturgy for Palestine,” aired recently on Radio Alhara, “a sonic statement of grieving over the interwoven histories of displacement and shared histories of genocide and the ongoing, repeated genocide that needs to come to an end.”

ARAM KAVOOSSI

Before we begin, I want to express my excitement and appreciation for Panorama Yerevan and the breadth and depth of research that goes into each episode. To name a few, you’ve hosted specials on Armenian jazz, classical, rock, hip-hop, Christian hymns, work songs, duduk, rabiz, music of the Lebanese Armenian diaspora, and most recently, a transhistorical showcase of the eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour, or ashugh, Sayat-Nova. From what I understand, the show was inspired in part by archival work at the Public Radio of Armenia in Yerevan?

LUCIA KAGRAMANYAN

Yes, though I did not really work officially for the Public Radio. The project started as my initiative to dig more into my granddad’s music, because my grandfather is a composer, and my great-grandfather, Tsolak Vardazaryan, was one of the Armenian jazz pioneers. He founded the first jazz band in Armenia in 1936, which performed frequently at the recently opened Moscow Cinema in Yerevan. That is why I had a bit of this connection and legacy to dig into the archive, which is not very accessible. It’s kind of strict in this sense. One summer, I helped digitize records that were on tapes, reel-to-reel, and this is how I got into digging through these amazing recordings. I thought I would try making a show, and I pitched my idea to NTS back in the day. They really liked it, so I got into making Panorama Yerevan til nowadays.

If I recall correctly, that was back in 2019 when you released the first episode of Panorama Yerevan. And your grandfather you mention, that’s Martin Vardazaryan?

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

I’ve been listening to some of his piano recordings lately in advance of this interview. Incredible work, this beautiful blend of jazz and classical, haunting sonatas and improvisations. It’s easy to imagine how much inspiration that family connection must have given you toward music. On that note, what were some core memories growing up in Armenia that led you to the music you’ve covered on Panorama Yerevan?

I come from a very musical family. I think a lot of inspiration came from my granddad when I was growing up. My mom, Anna Vardazaryan, is also a musician, so I grasped along that vine because they were improvising together a lot at home, and classical music and Armenian stuff was always playing in the background. My personal musical journey started with digging for music online around the age of fourteen, but mostly for non-Armenian stuff. I spent hours looking for stuff on Last.fm, discovering niche music. This later developed into curating selector sets and working with radio format. My interest in Armenian music came along when I was already twenty-four or so, and it started with my granddad’s music. Before that, I didn’t really completely acknowledge his legacy as a musician. I knew something—yeah, it was cool, he was famous in Armenia, still is, kind of—but everything opened up for me when I actually started properly discovering and listening to his music. That sparked an everlasting interest in discovering Armenian music, contemporary and old.

That makes a lot of sense, that kind of realization happening later on. For many of us, it’s like, you grow up, you encounter these globalized commercial industry genres like pop, rock, hip-hop, and at some point you return to your own personal connections to music outside the core of this culture industry and you’re like, “oh, we’ve been doing our own thing on our own wavelength here this whole time, too. Let’s hear it out.” It’s awesome to see a program such as yours emerge from that sense of discovery, especially on a familial level.

Going back to your time at the Public Radio, something I’ve been curious about since I heard that the show was inspired by that research is, what was the day-to-day like when you were volunteering in the archives? Did you have particular projects, genres, or time periods that you were moving through? What was the direction of that research like?

That’s a very interesting question, because there were other people who actually worked at the archive—I cannot claim the legacy of actually digitizing the archive. I was just basically a small helping hand. But they were bringing tons of materials, like tapes, hundreds of them, upstairs from the below-ground archives, basically digitizing them and saving the physical carrier, the physical material from time- and environment-related damage. The recordings were kind of forgotten in the post-Soviet era and were handled with little care. I am really thankful that they managed to preserve them in time, because some of it was damaged beyond repair. There was also a huge fire in the Public Radio archive, and the entire 1940s recordings were lost. Basically the first jazz recordings, also from my great-granddad, were lost. So the archival material begins from the 1950s.

I remember one of the first things I heard that made me really cry was not music, actually. Well, it was music. It was interviews with Armenian Genocide survivors in the US. There was one scholar, Richard Hovannisian, who actually did that. He traveled, dedicating his life to recording the memories of the genocide survivors. At work in the archive, the employee is digitizing them and then you hear it. They have the full volume up and you have to just go through the entire tape without skipping, just listening. It took a long time, but it was so beautiful because they were remembering the folk songs they were singing when they were kids, or throughout their lives, which they brought with them to the US. Basically, these recordings are the only kind of memory of what has happened, and they all came from different regions of the Ottoman Empire, nowadays Turkey. Every song was so special and so personal that it really made a huge impression on me. How beautifully and purely a ninety-year-old person could sing as if they were a child, or the child in them was reborn. That moment was so magical and it made a huge impression on me. I realized how important the work of documenting history is.

One hundred percent. Especially in light of the history of the Armenian Genocide, the more recent ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh, and as we witness and struggle against the ongoing genocide in Palestine, it feels prescient that keeping memory and testimony alive through archives such as the Public Radio of Armenia should allow those digitized recordings to live on forever, ostensibly. On top of that, folks such as yourself are not only preserving these materials, histories, memories, but you’re bringing them to wide-reaching, global platforms such as NTS and Alhara. I’ve been curious if you could describe the process of working through what must be this incredibly vast digital archive and then paring down and curating selections for online radio. What has that experience been like for you?

This is a very challenging experience. It’s also sometimes easy—I feel like I’ve developed some kind of intuitive attitude toward it. I already kind of feel how I should curate a show, and I think of ideas for different specials from now on because NTS kind of wished the show to be more focused on one particular thing from episode to episode. Because my two most recent episodes—which I love the most, to be honest—because they span both old and new, this becomes, like, doubly challenging. Having these different focuses helps show Armenian music in its spectrum, a “panorama.” Because I have this background where I was digging a lot, as I mentioned, and I was making some mixes, not club music but rather experimental listening or curatorial playlists or whatever, I kind of implemented this intuitive feel and this skill and brought it to Panorama, just doing it by feel. But also, some of the shows, not many, are chronological. For example, the jazz episode. I tried to give more perspective, like, “okay, this is where it started, this is where it is now.”

So we have that more linear chronological approach, but then, between the two latest episodes—most recently the Sayat-Nova special, and before that Armenian rap from the 2000s through today . . . Yes, very different historical periods and contexts, musical origins, contemporary influences, etcetera. The program has this effect of time being collapsed when you listen and scroll through the episode list. You’re creating this continuum, or the way you put it, a spectrum of cultural memory.

I want to make it really accessible. I want to make it enjoyable. I also want to make it informative. I want to encourage more research. I want people to go, check the track list, dig the artists, and so far from the feedback, I think I am achieving this. Someone recently reached out to me and said that they heard a song on the Panorama years ago, and they really loved it, and they implemented it in their theater piece or opera piece in Belgium, which is random. They were like, “I just love this particular song and I love your show,” and it was an absolutely non-Armenian-related theater piece. It’s just this particular song, this particular performance inspired that move. So I don’t know, trying my best.

Nah, that’s awesome to hear. I was thinking before this interview, too, “damn, I wish there was a public radio archive near me doing this same kind of project so I could do that kind of work too.” It sounds like incredibly rewarding research. But then also bringing that work to a popular and a public audience, it’s really an effective and accessible bridge we can see in music and sound archiving work between the history, the theory—why are we doing this, what is the significance—and then going into the direct material work of archival research. And then, because we’re working with these digitized files, now we can turn them around the next day and send in a mix and reach people on many other ends of the planet. Through time, too, they will continue to be resources. In that way, do you ever keep in mind how these programs might be received in the future?

I was thinking about that as well. I just really hope that they survive through time. Public Radio of Armenia is also extending its own platform. They have a website and they also have a YouTube channel, and people listen. But I think with my show, it has a bit of a personal touch because it’s also me speaking, and sometimes I imagine maybe my voice, like in those old radio programs during war times or something when someone’s voice gets famous because of one line, you know? [laughs] I feel like my voice will survive time, that’s why I’m doing voice-overs.

Respect, respect. I mean, for real, it does feel like we’ve returned to a point where the radio host and the structure and curation of a radio program have become channels of learning and discovering music that make sense again. This rise of online radio also coincides with spikes in political consciousness we’ve observed on social media in recent years. Radio Alhara was founded in 2020 during COVID lockdown, months before the police murder of George Floyd here in Minneapolis, and then one year later, the 2021 bombardment of Gaza amid settler evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem. In that brief time, the station grew into a potent online voice and presence, insofar as I’ve witnessed artists and listeners from all walks of life come to encounter, share, and participate in Alhara programming and materials, people who may not have encountered these perspectives otherwise becoming enfolded in the community. They host the twelve-hour Until Liberation: Learning Palestine listening sessions compiled by the Learning Palestine Group, among other marathon broadcasts and virtual festivals. It’s like this ongoing public education, but it’s also really involved with our tastes and approaches to sound, listening, and community.

I think the case with Alhara is exactly that, because I developed enormous sympathy and empathy with what they did even back before 2021. In 2020, when Alhara was not so big as it is now, I just really loved it, and then we clicked and I got the show and we have been in touch. And yeah, it is deeply linked to our tastes because we develop this liking for the station, and then automatically we also want to know more about Palestine, about its history. While there is no centralized archive, my Alhara show is archived as much as I post on my SoundCloud, and the twelve-hour sessions are also archived and available online.

Available as resources, but not necessarily as part of a formal or permanent, museum-style archive. Maybe the idea of these platforms as permanent archives for this type of work might not be a realistic expectation.

Yeah, I think it’s hard. What is the future of archiving? Especially in the digital world.

Yeah, there is this tension between the notion of a digital archive being this end-all-be-all, but then also, necessarily, every archive is going to have holes and limits and borders to it.

Exactly, and the servers, and all of this discourse.

When the internet crashes . . . [laughs] That’s something I think about a little bit, because we sure are putting a lot of work into these online platforms, but if we don’t have those some day, how will we continue these efforts?

I don’t know, back to physical stuff, I guess. Yeah, there’s no answer to that yet.

You might need to start making reel-to-reels of your program.

Yeah, just making reel-to-reels of Panorama Yerevan [laughs]. “And back to the archives,” as they say. One aspect of the Public Radio that might inform this is that, back in the day, Public Radio of Armenia had relationships with many other radio stations across the region and around the world. Some recordings in the archive were received in tape exchanges with other stations. Some recordings were bootlegs, too, of concerts and broadcasts from the 60s and 70s, when there were not really enforced copyright laws. It was also common for singers to come from other countries and make recordings at the radio station itself, singers from places such as Iran, Russia, Georgia, and beyond. Many of these versions have limited information and nobody at the archive knows all of the details about them, but they provide evidence that long before the internet, people were transmitting music from place to place, context to context.

Are there any upcoming episodes or specials that you’ve been especially excited about? Not sure if that is confidential. Otherwise, any favorites from the past?

Sure, it’s definitely not a secret. I would be happy to announce it, actually. My next show is going to be on Armenian ashugh music—like the successors of Sayat-Nova—because I just recently interviewed this one guy from the Sayat-Nova Ensemble, like the ashugh club, so to say, like a collective, a cultural union. Ashugh, you know what it is, right? It’s like the troubadours, the minstrels, those singer-songwriters of a particular context. Sayat-Nova was one of them, and people usually also name him gusan, but gusan is the wrong term, the guy from the union told me, because gusan refers to people who were doing their job thousands of years ago, and ashugh is the right term for contemporary artists. So I’m doing an episode on ashughs because they still exist today. It’s a continuous practice, and there are still ashughs today in Armenia and beyond who perform. The oldest ashughs alive, I also met them, and it was very interesting because they are people who dedicate life to both poetry and music. When they perform, it’s always three musicians performing at once, one of them singing who is also the composer and songwriter. So I will talk about this practice and play some stuff from the archives, also from ashughs during the Soviet period, those were interesting.

One of my favorite episodes is the rabiz special. Rabiz is an urban pop folk genre of music, characterized by 6/8 time, dance motifs, and elements of Armenian folk music. Can be heard at weddings and in restaurants, usually accompanied by post-heavy-meal dancing. I love rabiz, and when I made this episode it was well-received but it also yielded a critical reception because rabiz is really looked down upon in Armenia. It’s something you “do not want to showcase as your culture.” You don’t want to say, “I’m part of it,” because it’s seen as so . . . low-key, bad, I don’t know, cheap, not “high culture.” A lot of people also say that it has Turkish roots, which is not entirely true. Ashughs also sang in Turkish, because of the colonial history, the empire, etcetera. There is nothing that you can fight there because it is a part of history, you know, we cannot just deny it. But on the other hand, a lot of rabiz music’s roots come from Arabic music, too. It’s not so easy to just dismiss it as Turkish, which I also don’t find to be an appropriate argument. Some discount rabiz because it’s “just restaurant music,” or something that not so highly educated people listen to, and also because it does not sound Western enough.

A lot of Armenian classical music has had blends with Western music. The Armenian priest, composer, and musicologist Komitas, he started in Berlin. Similarly, the composer Makar Yekmalyan began his career in Russia before publishing his seminal work, “Surb Patarag,” in Leipzig. This piece incorporated Western elements, introducing organ music into Armenian Christian chants, which were traditionally monadic. So it was like a breakthrough that was initially met with skepticism by the Armenian Apostolic Church, but when it was published in Leipzig, they were like, “Okay, let’s do it, it sounds cool,” and it became accepted. This intersection with Western music poses an interesting dichotomy for Armenian music. While some may champion Armenia’s rich cultural heritage, others recognize the value of embracing diverse influences. A nuanced understanding requires us to acknowledge both perspectives, as exclusivity can breed this classist attitude and a sense of elitism that I really don’t like. My exploration of rabiz music prompted some reactions of astonishment, but ultimately it fostered appreciation for the music once its merits were recognized. People were shocked . . . But then they liked it!

Dang! See, so from my perspective I would not have picked up on any of that controversy. I really appreciate your elaborations. Before we hop off, I have one final question. I wasn’t able to find this online, but I read in another interview of yours that there was a short film version of your Armenian rock documentary?

Yes, I did this short documentary, but I’m not so proud of it, to be honest. It was the first thing that I tried doing. My initial plan, and my plan still, is to extend Panorama Yerevan to a platform, to have it also feature video material, articles, and more radio shows, because NTS still keeps my show bimonthly, which is only six episodes per year, and I actually have a lot more I want to do. I have another episode on Armenian folk love songs. There are many episodes that I have in mind already, but this limitation is kind of a bummer, so I want to extend the platform and also make video material. This rock thing was one of the attempts.

So kind of a prototype of what’s to come?

Yeah, kind of. Now I’m working on one—I’ve gathered material, footage of a duduk master, the guy who actually crafts duduks. I want to publish that, and put together videos about instruments, ensembles, and stuff.

So, beyond music plus commentary, you’re thinking explorations into the making of the music, actually getting to know the people and contexts of Armenian scenes and subcultures.

I would love this way, because I think the visual language is a bit missing. I like that Panorama Yerevan is also just a radio show, though, so I thought maybe the platform could be an addition or maybe even have a different name. I want to extend the practice from a radio show six times a year to something more. I am also already working on post-production for a full-length experimental documentary about rabiz and Armenian restaurant musician culture and lifestyle, urban folk pop music, and the public attitude toward it. I have been filming together with my friend Yervand Vardanyan. It’s called Haverzh Kiraki, or Everlasting Sunday, and I really hope it will also shed more light not only on the Armenian scene but also on mentality beyond the national context, an existential rhapsody on music and people.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Lucia Kagramanyan is a Vienna-based artist and DJ, also known as the host of the NTS radio show Panorama Yerevan, which is showcasing solely Armenian music in its huge variety. Lucia is researching Armenian music and making it accessible via one-hour episodes that focus either on different genres or moods, mixing old and new recordings. She is also a resident at Radio Alhara, where she is hosting a monthly late-night show every first Tuesday of the month. Lucia is currently studying fine arts and critical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Aram Kavoossi is an artist, writer, and editor currently living in Minneapolis. He works as Assistant Editor and Literary Programs Coordinator at Mizna.