As part of our ongoing series highlighting Armenian-American musicians from the postwar era, this profile features the recording career of Boston's own "King of Armenian Swing," Artie Barsamian. We are also celebrating the release of a book by clarinetist, musicologist, and educator Hachig Kazarian, Western Armenian Music: From Asia Minor to the United States (available in the museum's bookstore.) 

For the third time in the Sound Archive series, we are exploring material from the Museum's collection of Soviet Armenian recordings. In previous posts, we've discussed a variety of artists representing the diversity of Soviet Armenian music, from folk styles to the Western classical tradition. We’ve touched on the conservatory and state ensemble structures (which codified aesthetic standards set from Moscow among state-affiliated musicians), as well as some individuals, like Tatul Altunyan, who formed and ran the state ensembles. 

As a recurring theme here on the Sound Archive, we've explored the cultural preservation undertaken by Armenians from Kharpert who built new lives in and around the Northeast in the early 20th century. Before arriving in the United States, these individuals were first driven from their homeland in Kharpert during the massacres of 1895-96, and ultimately deported during the Genocide of 1915.

Those who did survive and seek refuge abroad understood the acute vulnerability and preciousness of their cultural heritage. So It’s no accident that in the 1920s, several of these individuals personally invested in recording and publishing folk songs from the Kharpert region. We’ve discussed the most prolific of these musicians, Vartan Margosian. But here we would like to introduce the recordings of Kaspar Janjanian, who recorded on the Boston-based Yeprad Record Company, a label with only three known discs in its catalog.

Over the past year, the Sound Archive project has taken a step forward. In addition to the monthly posts here on the webpage, the Museum hosted two listening events under the Sound Archive umbrella this fall. Meanwhile, our web features are covering the full range of our collection. Along with more "conventional" musical recordings, we've highlighted sound recordings that touch on Armenian cultural, political, and educational history, as well as the history of recording technologies.

This month the Sound Archive turns to another canonical figure in the history of 20th century Armenian American recordings, Yetvart “Edward” Bogosian, affectionately referred to by friends as "Maestro Yetvart". His work is as comic, playful, and bawdy as it is profound and impactful. Like several of the post-war bands we’ve discussed before, Bogosian's music is often mentioned in reference to the modern Armenian American music known as Kef. But artists like Bogosian and his peer Hovsep Shamlian predate and exceed this classification.

NBC Radio of San Francisco produced a captivating 20-minute segment about Armenia in 1945, on the sidelines of the UN meeting of 50 Allied nations. It highlights the Armenian National Chorus and advocacy in pursuit of the Armenian Question led by celebrity chef George Mardikian and attorney Souren Saroyan of the Armenian National Committee.

As the “back to school” season begins, the Museum’s emphasis on language preservation and education continues. For this Sound Archive edition, we are sharing a recording not by a professional musician, but rather by a schoolteacher and community servant who only recorded one single disc. This unusual, one-of-a-kind record is a celebration of educators, and serves as an instructional resource for the Armenian language teacher.

Today, we’re revisiting Soviet Armenian recordings through discs produced by the Armenian Progressive League of America, headquartered in New York City. Active from 1938 to 1990, the League was one of many political organizations formed by Soviet-aligned Armenian Americans in the years after 1920, when the First Republic of Armenia fell. In addition to publishing Lraper (The Herald), which reported on news from Armenia, the League distributed reissued material originally recorded in Yerevan. The recordings presented here were published on a label called Yerker Hayastanen (Songs from Armenia). The League ran advertisements for these discs from 1949 into the 1960s, making these titles available to Armenians in the United States. The Armenian Museum of America is fortunate to have a nearly complete collection of the records produced on Yerker Hayastanen. Four songs from that collection are presented here.

This month the Museum is exhibiting two watercolors by the award-winning novelist and playwright, William Saroyan.To accompany these pieces, we are also highlighting sound clips from a homemade lacquer record featuring the iconic writer. In the 1930s and 1940s, we witnessed an explosion of people documenting all kinds of events using commercially available record lathes.These suitcase-sized machines were turntables with a steel needle that instead of playing back a record, etched sound onto a blank disc covered in a lacquer material. The sound quality was often poor but the technology was revolutionary in making home recording accessible for the first time.