Hovik Sardaryan

Art speaks to us and makes demands. With his works of radical individuality, Hovik Sardaryan leaves no room for doubt about this. Only 32 years of age, he has been active as a composer for sixteen years already. He has gone quite some way in this period, a path without interruptions, with an open horizon. Sardaryan grew up in Armenia, where he composed his first works and completed his bachelor’s degree at the capital’s conservatory in 2014. The music he composed at the time was linked to Armenian traditions and experiences with Central European music since the Renaissance, his professional training being based on this canon of works. He fused characteristics of Armenian monody into the genre of the piano song. He also enticed from Western instruments sounds reminiscent of traditional Armenian musical instruments; combining such divergent elements opens up new perspectives for him. A work that stands out is Acht Ornamente from 2013. While he usually creates his works in expansive, resonant temporal arcs, he kept these pieces succinct. Concentration is here realized as a complement to the development of musical ideas; the dialectic between the two, the primary question of modern Western composing, also plays a central role in his works. They often grow from minute, microtonal differences.

Hovik Sardaryan has lived in Germany since 2015; a DAAD fellowship enabled him to study with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe. The two artists had one thing in common: they drew on a reservoir of learning that surpasses music, extending to the other arts and humanities. The inspirations that they thus receive fuse in their thought, finding its highest expression in music. Sardaryan composed this communicative appropriation and transformation in pieces such as Simulacres, for example. In doing so, he draws on traditional melos, avant-garde gesture, and historical works and techniques to bring new perspectives on the notional original into view. While studying with Rihm, he composed the string quartet uprooting, graft in, branch out, a key piece not only for his further development, but also regarding his convictions as to art’s existential content. As Sardaryan puts it, “For me, ‘uprooting’ means ripping ideas and thoughts (in musical terms: motifs, figures) from their context in order to examine them more closely. ‘Graft in’ means changing something about it—sometimes only minimally, but potentially with a great impact. And ‘branch out’ points to a new, other life, which in turn creates new contexts and new values.”

Rihm did not provide any concrete advice, but inspired Sardaryan to find his own solutions, just as Arnulf Herrmann did in the young composer’s later years as a student. Both teachers fostered the most important authority besides self-confidence: a critical-sensitive view of the self. A finding that proponents of modernism like Olivier Messiaen and György Ligeti first had to work towards—that questions pertaining to their aesthetic found their answers in cultures from the margins of Europe and beyond—this realization is part of Sardaryan’s biography. Experiences that he collected in developing Armenian traditions coincided with trends in Western new music. Since the early twentieth century, operating with scales that do not repeat after an octave and the use of microintervals have been constants in the theory and practice of new music. The spatialization of a melos through its deferred multiplication finds parallels in live-electronic arrangements (Sardaryan returns to these experiences in Agni). The ability to have the horizontal (melos, time), vertical (harmony), and depth engage with one another in a fluid space is a capacity that modern music acquired in exchange with the sciences.

Sardaryan composes his works using several lines with their own shape and their own pulse: this “polymonody” allows him everything, from monophony to heterophony and polyphony with gradual transitions. Lines can emerge from sounds, culminate in them, or form from their sequence, they can change over the course of the piece or persist in their shape. With incommensurable length and possible time delays, even their strict repetition generates no recurrence in the overall process. The harmony that emerges in this way cannot be analyzed by any theory of chords, but forms a sonic flow in which the horizontal and the vertical, time and space interact with one another in their own specific ways.

In the acoustic event, the individual lines are often difficult to follow, especially when, as in quellen from 2023, we are confronted with the homogenous sound of the same instrument, here two pianos. In the middle movement of Agni, also composed in 2023, eight lines begin as if from nowhere, build up to a moving agglomeration, swell and shrink back individually, thus generating the impression of a breathing space from which melodic fragments emerge. Despite all its metamorphoses, it still appears as a unity: like a monolith with a furrowed form and striking grain. The polymonody encompasses all conceivable suggestions of space, from a sparse pointillism to a tsunami-like surge of sound. They quintessentially include a historic depth that is not limited to direct musical insinuations, but becomes effective in various echoes, reflections, and structures.

Recent works that Sardaryan was able to conceive for a large ensemble provide examples for the transformations that lead from the inspiration to the actual form of the work. Ikone, an orchestral piece eighteen minutes in length, was inspired by the art theoretical writings of Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) and their impacts on Soviet avant-garde painting, especially Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Sterligov. Sterligov’s notion of the dome-like shell-formed space in which art takes place and of its spherical forms is musically fulfilled by Sardaryan’s composition.

Its structure, with several sections flowing into one another that move as a network of lines with sound impulses, might be reminiscent of the “reverse perspective” that Florensky found realized in icons. It does not narrow from the beholder to a virtual vanishing point in the distance, but the reverse, from a distance towards the beholder. The beholder’s ego is not central, but transcendence: icons combine both as a portal. Although it inexorably pulsates, the piece seems virtually static: as if the music didn’t move, but our perception, which always captures only a single part. This, too, is a play with “reverse perspective.”

The triggering idea in Agni is the flame in its physical, symbolic, and erotic dimension. It changes constantly and yet remains the same. It persists in its location and moves upward like a river. Emblematic for such a paradoxical unity, the outer movements touch on the same material; they are audibly linked to one another and yet are quite different. Sardaryan also explores the dialectic of order and chaos in his latest work …and the Sun was Green… The piece’s second movement Reigen shares the same material with the fourth movement, Wildwuchs, but not its character. In the five-movement composition, these two movements do not form a frame, but rather serve as pieces that are complementary to the others. Despite the microtonality and all the interventions of the impulse instruments, the opening Gloria is composed from the gesture of singing, the reflection of classical vocal polyphony. The third movement, Schmelzende Zeit, flows in pulsating movement from a massive sound. The Pax finale recalls the polyphony of the beginning, before it concludes its sound and fades away. The composer took the title from an archaic Armenian wedding song; the “green sun” also appears in the Egyptian myth of Osiris as a symbol of love, which, earthly and cosmic, physical and enthralling, unites the moment and eternity, joy and profound intimacy.

Hovik Sadaryan has taken on key desiderata of (post) modernism, developed them further and transcended them. Schönberg describes the musical space as a space without gravity where the content—sounds, noises, and figures—react to one another in manifold ways. For Alfred Schnittke, each work revealed a small extract from the endless cosmos of musical possibilities: in his polystylism, the awareness of the presence of history becomes concrete. With his polymonody, Sardaryan creates a breathing, multi-perspectival space that also encompasses history. He recognizes in art a way for the transcendent, the transgressive to have an impact. But it also must remain uncompromising, not only speak to us, but also make demands.

Translation: Brian Currid