Cosmopolitan Politics of Sound: Musical Canons at the Crossroad in the Milanese Armenian Diaspora

How can diasporic performance practices disrupt cultural boundaries and transform the politics of identity? Can engagement with multiple musical canons serve as a political intervention that engenders spaces for marginalized voices while reimagining cultural sustenance? I explore these questions through the heterogeneous program of a 1983 concert organized by Milanese Armenian artists at the Saint Bartholomew Dominican Centre in Bergamo, Northern Italy. Part of the exhibition Ararat: Images for an Armenian Contemporary Art by Milanese Armenian painter Herman Vahramian, the concert’s program—supervised by Armenian diasporic composer Ludwig Bazil—featured Bazil’s own work alongside Paul Hindemith’s youthful sonata and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suites. Far from a neutral anthology, the programming juxtaposed disparate musical repertoires to articulate a multilayered Armenian diasporic identity. The integration of a contemporary diasporic composer with European masters simultaneously claimed space for Armenian resilience and critiqued the exclusions from the dominant cultural debates. Drawing on the notion of musical cosmopolitanism as an active cultural process, I argue that the Ararat performance functioned as a multidimensional strategy in self-enactment, redefining alterity by creating a transformative platform where identity, politics, and cultural continuity converge. By combining seemingly contrasting musical legacies, the Milanese Armenian community not only facilitated the recognition of their overlooked heritage to a broader audience but also nurtured a culture-specific epistemology that, intriguingly, embraces a cross-cultural perspective.