Diasporic Youth Music through Politemporality: Armenian Children’s Songs in Venice

Given the tendency to frame youth through the politics of collective futurity, children’s music emerges as a crucial site for investigating temporal epistemologies in diasporic contexts. My paper examines how Venetian-Armenian composer Avedis Nazarian’s Venti canti per l’infanzia [Twenty Children’s Songs] reflect broader transformations in the Italian-Armenian diaspora during the 1980s and 1990s, articulating a shifting present where historical inheritance and future aspirations intertwine. The publication of Venti canti in 1980 marked a broader shift among Italian-Armenians, who pursued greater public visibility through cultural initiatives from the mid-1970s. In this turn, Nazarian positioned his musical interventions within the diaspora’s politics of the present. Within Children’s Songs, utopian futurity resonates with political urgency, envisioning a re-unified community of Armenian children. Simultaneously, the compositions drew on a pre-diaspora imaginary that reinforced their engagement with the present situation of displacement, intertwining traumatic past with hope. By 1993—the year of their first performance in Venice—the recent establishment of an independent Armenian state had transformed diasporic understandings of the homeland, offering the community, in the view of Italian-Armenian historiography, a renewed language for imagining a self-determined future. By reshaping the 1980s expectations, the forward-looking projection evoked by youth music strengthened the developing national discourse. My presentation demonstrates how the politics of the present in Venti canti emerge from its polytemporal layering, connecting historical events central to the Armenian diaspora with future-oriented perspectives on childhood. The songs thereby reveal a diasporic sense of time in which music intertwines ethnicity with lived experience.