Music and Silence in the Armenian Diaspora | Sylvia Alajaji

E461 | Music, at its best, can give us a reason to live. In this episode, Sylvia Alajaji discusses how in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, music not only served this function for Armenians, but also opened up broader questions about how to define what it meant to be Armenian. Drawing from her book Music and the Armenian Diaspora, she traces the Armenian musical cultures that emerged over a century from New York to Beirut to California. On one hand, the diaspora sought to preserve the folk music of Ottoman Armenian communities destroyed and scattered throughout the First World War and its aftermath. Meanwhile, in new homes like Beirut, Armenian artists began to create new musical forms in which the use of Armenian language was more crucial than the particularities of music style. At the same time, the memory of Ottoman Armenian music in the Turkish language that arrived in places like the United States with the first waves of migrant began to fade as the Armenian diaspora grew more distant from its origins in what is modern Turkey. For Alajaji these acts of preservation, creation, erasure, and recovery all are part of what music means to the Armenian diaspora. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/04/alajaji.html Sylvia Angelique Alajaji is an Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Franklin & Marshall College, where she also teaches in the International Studies program. She is the author of Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile, a multi-sited work that examines the construction of diasporic Armenian subjectivity in the years since the Armenian genocide (recently published in Turkish translation). Her published work centers on the relationship between music and exilic identity, focusing primarily on Armenian diasporic communities in Lebanon and the United States. In the fall of 2020, she will serve as the Dumanian Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago. Sam Dolbee is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His research is on the environmental history of the Jazira region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. CREDITS Episode No. 461 Release Date: 23 April 2020 Recording Location: Lancaster, PA Special thanks to Seçil Yılmaz Audio editing by Sam Dolbee and Chris Gratien Music: Adiss Harmandian, "Karoun Karoun"; Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route"; Haig Ohanian, "Bayati II"; Achilleas Poulos, "Neden Geldim Amerika'ya" Bibliography and music links courtesy of Sylvia Alajaji available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/04/alajaji.html