Performed by the Fresno State New Music Ensemble: Cassandra Barnes (flute), Katie Winter (clarinet), Lianna Stuart (violin), Aimee Dockum (cello), Nathaniel Musso (piano), Joseph Bohigian (vibraphone



I wrote In the Shadow of Ararat to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. As a descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors, the centennial holds a solemn place in my family history as it does in the history of the Armenian people. The title is a reference to Mount Ararat, a national symbol for Armenians. Mount Ararat holds an important place in Armenian culture and dominates the skyline of Yerevan, Armenia's capital, yet today lies just beyond the border with Turkey. The piece has direct connections, both musical and extramusical, to Armenian traditional music, art, and culture. Structural and textural characteristics of Armenian music influence elements of my piece, the number three, referencing the Holy Trinity, prevails, and the form is modeled after Mount Ararat's two peaks.

In the Shadow of Ararat

Performed by the Argus Quartet at the New Music on the Point Festival


String Quartet is structured by the exponential growth and decay of certain musical elements including range, section length, dynamics, texture, and tempo. The work features a series of chords which change one note at a time, each new note forming a melodic line which moves around the quartet. As the piece progresses, this melodic line is overtaken by the other voices and rhythmic unity across the ensemble is lost.

String Quartet

Performed by Elaina Burns and Nancy Lease



Dzirani Dzar, which means Apricot Tree, is based on the Armenian folk song of the same name. The original melody is split between the two performers and spread out across the entire range of the piano. I wrote the piece while studying in Armenia and chose the folk song from a book of Armenian folk music I purchased in a Yerevan Metro station.

Dzirani Dzar

Performed by David Gazaille, Hoorig Poochikian, Phuc Phan, and Xin Ben Yu



Spiral is a series of musical ideas closing in on themselves until they become one.

Spiral

Performed by the FOOSA Philharmonic, Thomas Loewenheim, conductor, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall


The title Subnatural Delights comes from an episode of the podcast Gastropod which explores the concept of subnature as it relates to food. Subnature is an architectural term described by the podcast’s hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley as “the less desirable aspects of the built environment: puddles, pollution, and pigeons.” In the episode “Smoked Pigeon and Other Subnatural Delights,” they identify foods such as smoked pigeon, stinky cheese, and sturgeon with its roe, marrow, and collagen coated in a corn fungus crust as subnatural. In a similar way, certain elements of my Subnatural Delights are inspired by subnatural sounds in our environment. Noise pollution of various kinds, such as the subterranean rumbling of a subway or the repetitive hammering of construction serve as a jumping off point for the piece, which begins with a growling texture in the lowest reaches of the orchestra and moves to a place where these subnatural sounds become, I hope, a source of delight.

Subnatural Delights

Performed by Ensemble Decipher


On January 19, 2007, Turkish-Armenian journalist and political activist Hrant Dink was assassinated outside the office of his newspaper Agos in Istanbul. He was killed by a Turkish nationalist for his efforts to speak out about taboo issues in Turkish society, including minority rights, the reconciliation of Armenians and Turks, and democratization. After his funeral, two hundred thousand mourners marched through the streets of Istanbul chanting “We are all Hrant. We are all Armenians.” They held signs with this message in Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish, a powerful message of solidarity in a country with a history of repressing minorities and where the word “Armenian” is used by some as an insult. In this piece, the performers repetitively type this chant in Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish, and English, triggering the sounds of protest chants in all four languages. In between these chants is the text of the original 2005 version of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code which criminalizes the “denigration of Turkishness,” a crime for which Dink was prosecuted three times and eventually convicted of, leading to death threats and eventually his murder. Finally, the voice of Hrant Dink emerges from the cacophonous chants, a reminder of the power a single voice can have to change an unjust society and the work still yet to be done.

Hepimiz Hrant'ız

Performed by Joseph Bohigian, John Ling, and Ed Rosenberg


+-+-+-+-++++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+- is an open instrumentation piece in which three performers move through a single line at independent paces, sometimes in unison and sometimes in canon. The score is a mixture of traditional and graphic notations and some compositional decisions were influenced by the visual aspects of the score. The performers must negotiate different levels of freedom and control prescribed by the composer as they make their way through the piece. To avoid visual cues and require a reliance on listening, the performers must face away from each other. The title, which may be shortened to Plus Minus when speaking about the piece, is an unintentional homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen's open instrumentation work Plus-Minus.

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Performed by Joseph Bohigian, Rob Cosgrove, Alan Hankers, and Nhi Huynh


In Jump Cut, the four performers move through repeated phrases at independent rates, deciding in the moment how many times to repeat each one from within a given range. However, their freedom of movement through these phrases is limited by the restriction that they must always line up vertically with each other when they move on. This is complicated by the fact that the repeated phrases are of different lengths, resulting in a need to stop and wait to jump in when the start of the next phrase comes around again or cut the previous one short. The performers must negotiate this need for vertical alignment in real time as they perform the piece.

Jump Cut

Joseph Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments of song lyrics and reviving ancient musical notations. Bohigian’s music has been performed at the International Computer Music Conference (Limerick, Ireland), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), TENOR Conference (Melbourne), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), New Music Gathering, and Aram Khachaturian Museum Hall (Yerevan) by the Mivos Quartet, Decibel, Great Noise Ensemble, Argus Quartet, and Playground Ensemble. He performs as a founding member of Ensemble Decipher, a group dedicated to working with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies, and produces broadcasts of contemporary music for Music from Other Minds on KALW in San Francisco and interviews with composers on the Other Minds Podcast and the music/technology-focused series Decipher This!. Bohigian holds a PhD and MA in composition from Stony Brook University and a BA from California State University Fresno.

Joseph Bohigian

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