“David Haladjian and his "Missa de Lumine".

Abstract

The artistic content of the processes in Armenian music in recent decades in no small part is due to the new names of composers, whose works have influenced on concept of national art. There is a revision of both the stylistics, the system of expressive means and the genres and compositional ideas. Not without connection to the global developments the former aesthetic canons are changing and the new cultural trends are taking shape. The process is noteworthy in the field of vocal music - the most orthodox in Armenia, where texts in other languages are used in addition to Armenian poetry. Foreignlanguage vocal production is clearly formed in the sphere of contemporary sacred, primarily choral, music. Its authors tend to choose spiritual verses and prayerful prose. The expansion of "verbal" interests brings lexical nuances to modern Armenian music, as well as a new interpretation of religious genres. Despite the cases of reference to German and Englishlanguage texts, for a number of Armenian composers the Latin writings (both liturgical and paraliturgical), canonical in the European spiritual tradition, becomes preferable. As before and now, genres with paraliturgical texts are characterized by an individual "textual-musical form" (Yuri Kholopov's term, proposed by analogy with the English version "musico-poetic form"; Musical Encyclopedia. Vol. 5, Moscow, 1981), where the musical constructions proceeds from the textual structure of psalm, monody, Gregorian chant, religious poetry, and other sources. In the light of the above, current article focuses on one of the representatives of the new sacral music, the Armenian-Swiss composer David Haladjian (b. 1962). The author of the article sets two tasks for herself. The first one is to trace the evolution of Haladjian's artistic work since the period of his life in Yerevan (1962-1991), when he studied at the Yerevan Komitas State Consrevatory as a composer in E. S. Hovhannisyan's class and as a conductor under H. M. Voskanyan's supervision and established his individual position; and the period in Switzerland (since 1991), when his stylistic interests has broadened, new music projects and European acclaim were being implemented. The second task is related to the theoretical comprehension and analysis of one of Haladjian's important works, "Missa de Lumine" (1996), which, on the one hand, incorporated the previous experience of the composer, and on the other hand, opened the horizons for composer's future activities.