The Brooklyn Rail

I just made it to the last hour of the last day of a show I had been meaning to see, Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry is Everything at the Morgan Library. Friends recommended it, knowing of my interest in ekphrasis: the interpretation of one art form via another, as in a poem written about a painting. Cendrars, a Swiss-born poet of the early twentieth century who befriended the artist Fernand Léger and the composer Darius Milhaud, among many others during his years in Paris, took this a step further; in the case of the show’s centerpiece, a freewheeling travelogue and dreamscape called “La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France),” he inscribes a long, experimental piece onto a scroll bearing a series of watercolors by Sonia Delaunay-Terk, physically integrating the two.

The small show was completely enthralling to me, not only for its exquisite mashing together of art forms but its openness to experience. Cendrars sought to convey the blazing rush of modernity by all means available to him (his pen name is a play on fire and ashes), and he pulled the whole world into his mix. His role is one of action in the form of reaction. “All of life is only a poem,” he once wrote, “I am only a word, a verb, depth, in the wildest sense, the most mystical, the most alive.” The physical environment all around him, from pasted wall advertisements to railroad cars, is fuel for his fire, as are unruly thoughts and feelings. In that sense, the sub-head of the show can work equally well when reversed; for Cendrars, everything is poetry.

A young Armenian composer/pianist/vocalist named Astghik Martirosyan reaches out to incorporate poetry into several of the works on her impressive self-released debut, Distance. She does so as one of several strategies for engaging with the world around her. Martirosyan draws on the work of three women poets—Emily Dickinson, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Anna Akhmatova—in varying ways, from setting their lines to music to freely interpreting the message of their words. A single melancholy line from Dickinson, ”I many times thought Peace had come / When Peace was far away,” inspires her opening track, which floats like a dream seeking an elusive human accord. These songs were written three years ago, at the start of the pandemic, when a lesser-reported catastrophe was being visited upon Central Asia: a region of Armenia, the breakaway territory known as Artsakh, had been invaded by neighboring Azerbaijan, and the country was in turmoil. Sadly, the conflict is far from over, with a recent bombing of a fuel depot in the region causing grave loss of life and jeopardizing the prospects for peace. In fact, a recently issued decree announces that Artsakh will cease to exist in the new year.

Martirosyan was far from her homeland at the time of the invasion, studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, and she responded to the isolated conditions and terrible news from afar by composing the songs for this recording. She sought to close the persistent sense of distance she was feeling, and to convey some mixture of sorrow and hopefulness regarding the conditions afflicting her country. “Spring Is On Its Way” dares to imagine a future beyond the present situation, while also musically invoking the windy, mountainous landscape of her native country. Martirosyan sings two folk songs in her native Armenian, “I’m Calling You (Kanchum em ari, ari)” and “Summer Night (Amran Gisher),” conveying an ineffable longing, and her band stretches into the loose arrangement, the tenor sax and cello drawing plaintive parallel lines. Her strikingly responsive band, led by fellow Armenian pianist Vardan Ovsepian, and featuring bassist Darek Oleszkiewicz, drummer Christian Euman, saxophonist Daniel Rotem, and cellist Maksim Velichkin, is a perfect vehicle for the swirling, multihued compositions. Martirosyan’s voice is clear and bell-like, fully able to articulate the shifting, even swooping, melodies.

In her interpretation of Akhmatova, “Song of the Last Meeting,” Martirosyan takes on the somewhat riskier task of setting the poem’s lines directly to music. I remember a favorite teacher’s delineation between song lyrics and poetry: a lyric comes to life when music is added to it, while a poem already has the music it needs inside itself. But Martirosyan responds to the poem of the same name by having the music reflect the shifting emotions of the protagonist, who is caught between the despair of her situation—hearing the autumn leaves urging her to “die with me”—and a fierce will to live, experience, and remember. The title track incorporates her response to the Tsvetaeva poem “Distance (To Boris Pasternak),” a contemplation of a distant lover, separated by political circumstances: “How many,” the poet wonders, “how many days… of March / Since they scattered us like a pack of cards?” But her love is not so easily torn asunder: “They don’t know we’re… an alloy // Of inspirations, and tendons / Not disjoined…”
Amid the melancholy and tough-mindedness is one composition, “Heartsong,” with music by Fred Hersch and lyrics by Norma Winstone, that Martirosyan calls the “bright star” on the recording, with its invocation to look within, allowing that this sort of meditative attitude can meet any challenge, “giving you a glimpse of what’s beyond.” Winstone, a British jazz singer who is mostly known for wordless improvisation, provides lyrics that unabashedly embrace optimism, while Martirosyan and saxophonist Rotem engage in a mid-song duet that further lightens the atmosphere.

Martirosyan is a young musician, only twenty-six, but her work exhibits tremendous poise and range. Most impressive is her willingness to branch far beyond the simple sentiments of standard pop songs, and pull in experiences that may be bitter or at best unresolved. Which, in its way, goes back to Cendrars. In a poem called “Aux 5 Coins (At the 5 Corners),” he sings a kind of ode to his role as an artist, one who is unafraid to challenge, to investigate the darkness and the light, to burn:

To dare and make some noise
Everything is color movement explosion light
Like flowers at the windows of the sun
Which melts in my mouth
I’m ripe
And I fall translucent in the street

Astghik Martirosyan plays a show at National Sawdust on November 19 where she’ll debut this recording.