Lembit Beecher and Karen Ouzounian are a husband-wife creative team who balance their collaborative work with individual interests. Ouzounian is a founding member of the Aizuri Quartet and a member of Rhiannon Giddens’ Silk Road Ensemble. Composer-animator Beecher uses his interest in his Estonian folk culture to explore themes of place, migration, natural processes, and ecology. Two recent projects, Beecher’s Tell Me Again Cello Concerto and the duo’s co-composed “Dear Mountains,” engage with his and Ouzounian’s family histories and broader themes of displacement, culture, and belonging. Their newest project, Mayrig, continues this exploration.
Debuting on July 10 at the Morgenland Festival in Osnabrück, Germany, Mayrig ( “mother” in Armenian) is a one hour program for cello, electronics, piano and vocals and is described as “a deeply personal, intimate program centered on the human voice.” This intimacy rests on Ouzounian’s relatives who survived the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923). Words of Ouzounian’s mother and grandmother interplay with arrangements of Anatolian music, harkening to the Ouzounian family home; Lebanese songs and stories; music of French-Armenian singer/songwriter Charles Aznavour; and new music from Beecher, Layale Chaker, Nathalie Joachim, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh. Together, these composers touch on themes such as war, rootedness and uprootedness, resilience and rage, and passion and celebration.
We sat down with Beecher and Ouzounian to talk about Mayrig and more.
Your most recent collaborations have focused on migration and forced displacement that requires use of family histories and recollections. When did you begin realizing that these stories should be worked into the format of musical projects?
Lembit: My Estonian grand-uncle Ilmar gave me a number of tapes in the early 1990s, around the time of Estonian Independence, of himself singing and telling stories about his childhood and the Soviet occupation of Estonia. Ilmar was an architect by profession but also an amateur violinist and composer, and in the careful pacing of his stories and his combination of song and narrative, there was a sense of craft and drama that had a strong impact on me as I was growing up. In the early aughts I began recording my grandmother, Taimi, telling her own stories about Estonia, WWII, and her migration to the U.S. For the most part these were stories I had heard many times, and she imbued them with an almost operatic sense of theatricality and drama.
Though I began recording her initially out of a general desire to understand and preserve family history, I realized pretty quickly how much her storytelling, with her deeply musical voice, occupied a space between memory and performance that really intrigued me. It felt natural for me to try to reflect the spell of her storytelling in my own musical language, and in 2009 I wrote what I called a documentary oratorio, And Then I Remember, that wove recordings of her voice with solo soprano, solo double bass, chamber ensemble, male chorus, and video. Since then I’ve written many pieces incorporating interviews and personal testimonies, expanding to work with communities outside of my own (for example, my piece Say Home for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra wove the voices of almost 50 residents of the Twin Cities into an orchestral fabric), but in every project, as I develop my relationship to the storyteller or community, I have to re-ask the question, why music?
Karen: I grew up from a very early age understanding the context from which my family came, learning about the Armenian Genocide and feeling very strongly the cultural presence of Lebanon (my family’s post-genocide home beginning in the 1920s) in our Toronto home. But I also had a sense, as the youngest child of the family, of being protected from painful memories and stories by my sisters and parents. During COVID, my family was isolated in different parts of the world, and I found myself thinking a lot about them and missing them. I began reaching out to interview them in a deep, intentional way, which led to a series of moving conversations. Music is such a core aspect of Armenian identity, a glue that connects Armenians across the vast diaspora, that beginning to tell these family stories through music felt both natural and important.
At the same time, learning more about Armenian life and the specifics of my family history in Anatolia, present-day Turkey, has made my listening more urgent and intense. In our new show Mayrig I play a transcription we made of a 1917 Kemany Minas and Harry Hasekian recording of Eghin Havasi, an Anatolian Armenian song. This recording was made in New York City on Columbia Records and sung in Turkish, the day-to-day language of many Anatolian Armenians (including my grandparents and great-grandparents), except for the word “mayrig” (“mother” in Armenian), that Kemany Minas inserts into his vocal line. It was sung at the time the Genocide was unfolding across Anatolia and Kemany Minas’s voice sounds unearthly, a wail of sorrow that hits me to my core, perhaps even more so because of the more detailed picture I now have of my family’s roots.
Family histories can sometimes work like a game of telephone; as each storyteller renders their version, parts are added or omitted and the stories evolve. How did you navigate that in the creation of Mayrig?
Karen: Our goal with Mayrig was not to try to capture a formal recounting of family history or a performed telling of stories, but to try to evoke the fragmented way in which our family histories intersect with our present-day lives. I think of it a little bit like inviting the audience into the tangled living room of one’s life: there are multilingual soundscapes drawn from intergenerational family gatherings, stories told by my mother Lena about her childhood in Lebanon, folk songs from Armenia and Anatolia, a song by Charles Aznavour, a piece by the French Baroque composer Marin Marais, and pieces by friends Layale Chaker, Nathalie Joachim, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, and Lembit, who each in their own way invite us into their lives (some very explicitly and some more abstractly).
When pieces of narrative do appear in the program, I did not want to question them or explain them, but have them appear unfiltered, like a natural part of one’s day. When I worked with Lembit on his piece Green Line, which was based on one of my mother’s memories, we made sure to record her twice telling the same story to capture the extemporaneity and variance of her storytelling and to work against the feeling that there was a single, concrete version of the story.
Another movement of Mayrig begins with an extemporaneous recording I caught on my phone of my mother and grandmother singing an Armenian tune they’ve known forever called Mardigi Yerke (we were sitting on the couch on my grandmother’s 95th birthday). Their singing is initially interspersed with talking and laughing but what I found so powerful about it was the strength and passion of my grandmother’s voice, and the way our three generations were singing together, saying “keep going!” and “bravo!” in Armenian. In Mayrig, I gradually join this recording with live cello and voice, harmonizing with my mother and grandmother and continuing their song. I hope this moment carries with it both a sense of cultural and familial continuity (as Aznavour sings in La Mamma: “a travers toi, la mamma” / “through you, la mamma”), and a sense of transformation and evolution.
Do you feel there are significant differences in performing something very close to your personal experience versus performing something a bit more abstract at its core? If so, how does a work like this inform your performance when you relate to it on a deeper personal level?
Karen: The experience of sharing family stories is intense in ways that feel vulnerable emotionally and not contained or defined. Adding testimony and personal context to a performance can feel both disorienting and heightening: things feel like they are vibrating at a really beautiful and intense frequency.
It is important to note that performing music that is more abstract does not feel any more emotionally or spiritually detached for me. Part of my goal as a performer is to totally embody the music I am playing, to allow it to live through me, because all music contains humanity and the personal. However, with most pieces, I develop a powerful relationship to the music in my gut and my imagination over time. With music that comes directly from my family stories, the emotional spark is there from the beginning and I have to work to direct my emotions.
A unique challenge with this program is to be able to balance “performer me” with “daughter and granddaughter me.” The arrangement I mentioned above of the song Mardigi Yerke begins with the recorded voices of my mother and grandmother and the first few times I rehearsed the piece it was hard to get my voice to come out! In Green Line, capturing the particular emotional and sound world of the piece feels different, because I hear my mother’s voice (perhaps the voice I know best in my life?) in my head even when I practice without the audio playback; the flickering intensity of the memory driving the music is different, because it’s hers. We previewed this program for my mother and understanding in the moment what some of the music meant to her (like Charles Aznavour’s La Mamma) made performing incredibly intense!
In Green Line, Karen’s mother, Lena Ouzounian, is heard speaking about stability and wanting continuity. Can you tell us more about the meaning behind this piece in the context of the program, and its historical reference to events in Beirut?
Lembit: In Mayrig, we wanted to create a musical world where there were layers of history, waiting to be discovered, that sit right below the surface of the music. In a few pieces in the program, this history becomes foregrounded. In my piece Green Line, I worked with interviews Karen and I had conducted with Karen’s mother, Lena, weaving Karen’s cello and Lena’s voice tightly together. The piece tells the story of a day in 1980 during the Lebanese Civil War, when Karen’s mother Lena had to cross the Green Line—a demarcation line between East Beirut and West Beirut—in order to reach the Canadian embassy. Karen’s family, survivors of the Armenian Genocide, had come to Beirut in the 1920s along with hundreds of thousands of other Armenian refugees. During the Lebanese Civil War in the late 1970s and 1980s, many of these Armenians rediasporized, beginning from scratch once again in a new country.
Karen and I hope that a piece like Green Line (and some of Lena’s other stories that are a part of Mayrig) will inspire listeners to learn more about Armenian and Lebanese history, but our goal with Mayrig was not to focus on these details, but to create, through the specifics of family history, an intimate atmosphere of memory and association that leads the audience to an experience that is universal and shared. We hope this immersive and absorbing world allows audiences to think about their own family histories and the twisting roads that have led them to this time and place.
And we hope that the program inspires a curiosity in the audience about all of the music on the program, including the music of Layale Chaker, Nathalie Joachim and Niloufar Nourbakhsh, all of which contain traces of different stories and histories, waiting to be explored.
Music For The Passing of Days sounds like a very contemplative work, as it marks the individual days of a year through a collection of miniatures. Can you provide a bit of background on this work as a whole, and why you chose the 8th movement for the Mayrig project?
Lembit: Mayrig constantly moves between storytelling and the abstract, centered around the idea that our family histories are always with us, resonating with our lives in ways that are both subtle and overt. Music for the Passing of Days was begun in 2023 as an ongoing series of meditations: I composed each movement primarily in one day and the piece is quite consciously not “about” anything.
Both Karen and I have written a lot of music that draws directly from personal memory or family history, but including two movements of Music for the Passing of Days (Mvt. 1 and Mvt. 8) in Mayrig felt like the right complement, allowing space for the rest of the program to breathe as it travels through different times and places.
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