Nostalgia for Utopia, Reimagined: Armenian Children’s Songs in Venice

Which affective and political implications does nostalgia foster in diasporic music when addressed to youth—a group often associated more with aspiration than with reflection? This paper explores that question through an analysis of Venti canti per l’infanzia [Twenty Children’s Songs] (1980), a collection of Armenian choral pieces for young singers by Armenian Venetian composer Avedis Nazarian. Published in Venice, Venti canti fuses Armenian monodic idioms with Western compositional techniques. The lyrics span a range of themes, most notably a nostalgic longing for the Armenian homeland—as heard in the song Hayreni Karot [Nostalgia for Armenia]. Composed while Armenia remained under Soviet rule, the collection carries political weight, envisioning a future re-united diasporic community through the voices of children. The nostalgic affect acquires civic and temporal complexity, invoking a lost pre-diasporic past unexperienced by its performers, who are simultaneously positioned as the cultural future of the Armenian diaspora. By 1993—the year of Venti canti’s first performance in Venice—the recent establishment of an independent Armenian state had transformed diasporic understandings of the homeland, offering the community a renewed language for imagining a self-determined future. By reshaping the 1980s expectations, the forward-looking projection in youth music strengthened the developing national discourse while deepening the interplay between narratives of nostalgia and utopia. My presentation demonstrates that Nazarian’s Venti canti reveals challenging temporal tensions at the heart of diasporic nostalgia, bridging inherited memory and aspirational desire through the politics of futurity embedded in youth music. Situated in displacement, the collection articulates layered negotiations of Armenian belonging—revealing nostalgia not as simple retrospection, but as a generative, ongoing force within diasporic cultural production and its evolving reception.