A Deferred Primordial Sound: Resurfaced Musical Performance in the Milanese Armenian Avant-Garde

Can music transcend its initial performance, gaining heightened significance within diasporic contexts? How does the reception of a musical event reshape its meaning, spurring the production of new material artifacts that mediate cultural identity and intercultural negotiation? I explore these questions through the re-emergence of a flute score from Ararat, an Armenian avant-garde performance staged by painter Herman Vahramian and composer Ludwig Bazil at the Church of San Maurizio in Milan in 1977. The intermedial project Ararat featured a musical program that included string quartets, vocal arias, and an a-cappella composition. However, the event additionally featured an introductory flute solo that, unlike the other scores, was notably absent from the performance catalogue. Despite this omission, the flute piece received high praise from Milanese critics, who described its sound as possessing a “primordial” quality. Nine months later, I/COM—a Milanese Armenian publishing house founded by Vahramian and Bazil—issued the score. The accompanying critical notes emphasized the flute solo’s “primordial” character, echoing and expanding upon the media’s reception while subtly revisiting themes from the Ararat project. Focusing on the cross-cultural implications of the resurfacing performance within a post-traumatic framework, specifically the Armenian diaspora in Milan, my paper examines the deferred action of the Ararat music. I argue that the belated emergence of the flute solo in print vividly illustrates the entanglement of music and ethnicity within the evolving interplay of the Armenian diasporic community and the broader urban cultural environment in which it has settled.