Chapter 5: Music, Second Time Around

I was now 15 years old, and Garo was about 11 years old and was going to Tamaddon elementary. About a year before, I had recommenced taking violin lessons, having stopped some five years earlier due to my fathers death. This time I had a real good, full-size violin (about three or four levels below Stradivarious), called Steiner, built in Germany around 1780. Not as famous, but a very high quality violin. The violin cost 125 Iranian Dollars.That was a lot of money at that time, but a bargain for a violin of that quality. My mother bought it by recommendation of a distant relative, Nigol Galenderian. He was a second cousin to my grandmother Surpuhi and a very famous (in Armenian circles) choral composer of Armenian songs. He used to give two or three full choir concerts a year, which he personally conducted. He passed away in 1943. All his compositions (several hundred songs) were sent to Yerevan, Armenia by his daughter, per his will.

I started my violin lessons at 14 with Mr. Assadoor Abrahamian. I was taking two one-hour classes a week. I did like this violin very much. It had a great resonance, yet a very soft and melodic timbre. It took me quite a few months to get back up to speed, since I had not played for about five years, after which time things got a little easier for me and I was able to keep up, or even make a little progress. Parenthetically speaking, as I was referring to my grandmother's cousin, the composer, I should also mention another of her cousins, Adom Yarjanian, a very famous poet and author under the pen name of Siamanto who was murdered by the Turks during the Armenian Genocide, as part of their elimination of the Armenian Intelligencia. This was true of many others such as writers, intellectuals, judges, professors, and people of high positions in military and government offices or in business or banking.

The [music] teacher used to give yearly concerts for all his students parents, and the general public, where he featured each one of his students with a solo, and also some orchestral pieces where all students participated in the orchestra, for which we had several rehearsals prior to the concert. This was his way of showing their progress to the parents, and offering the public a night of good musical entertainment. Needless to say it gave us, the students, also a chance to show off, and may be even justify the cost of our lessons to our parents. The main point of all this being that, one thing leads to another, because several of the kids that were in the Armenian club were also involved in music, and furthermore some of them were going to the same school that I was enrolled in at this time. Now, this school, unlike others that I had been to, had a very unique extra-curricular activity. Every Thursday evening after the last class they had a meeting in the auditorium, where the student body would put on a weekly show of some cultural activity such as a stage show (serious or comedy), music, or poetry recitation. These programs usually lasted about 1-1/2 or 2 hours, and then everybody would go home for the weekend. In Iran the weekend was just one day, Friday.Then wed start school again Saturday morning. Most students looked forward to these evenings. The most popular was the theatrical group, particularly the comedy performances. Then there was the musical group. When I first enrolled at this school, there was only one musical group, performing the Persian music, local folklore tunes, performed instrumentally. This was the time when the school principal approached some of us (Armenian students), knowing that many of us played some musical instruments, to see if we would like to form a musical group for western (classical) music. Needless to say we all accepted the offer most gratefully, and for the next four years, the western music group was part of the Thursday night program, along with the other performing groups. Of course one of the conditions we had to agree to was that this in no way would interfere with our scholastic efforts.

In addition to Thursday evenings, we also performed on yearly graduation exercises at the girls' school auditorium (it had bigger seating capacity). We used a nice variety of beautiful overtures and other simple and easy to remember classical pieces which were very popular with the student body particularly the Strauss Waltzes which they always demanded for encore.

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