Other Sounds in Negotiating Cultural Denial: Armenian Performance as an Expression of 1970s Milanese Musical Trends

Identity negotiations by a diasporic community inherently connect with the urban context in which it settles. In the decades following the 1915 Genocide, Milanese Armenians proved a remarkable ability to integrate into the city’s sociocultural fabric, while preserving the performative practices foundational to their centuries-old musical heritage. This cross-cultural model, blending resilience with continuity in a dual effort to rework collective trauma, manifests in the intermedial project Ararat, conceived by Armenian painter Herman Vahramian and composer Ludwig Bazil, and performed in 1977 at the Church of San Maurizio. A total art performance that combined music, poetry, and painting, Ararat explored key aspects of Armenian culture through the format of a multimedia concert. Simultaneously, it engaged with the broader Milanese performance scene of the late 1970s. Presented as a minoritarian avant-garde during a period marked by increased inter-artistic experimentation, Vahramian and Bazil’s work resonated with the growing ethnomusicological interest of the time, and, notably, with the revival of ancient music repertoires, echoing the early music revival movement. My paper examines how Ararat interacts with the historical musical trends of the city, underscoring its symptomatic role in the processes of acting out and working through by which Armenian diasporic communities confront post-genocidal cultural trauma (LaCapra 2001). It further analyzes how a musical event rooted in the Milanese Armenian community reframes the cultural dynamics of the urban milieu in which the diaspora operates.