Bisesi’s academic track is multidisci­plinary: PhD in mathematics and phys­ics, MA in piano interpretation and MMus in music theory and analysis (in progress). She works as a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive science at the In­stitut Pasteur in Paris. She taught music cognition at the Universities of Bratisla­va and Graz (Austria) and at the Con­servatory of Udine (Italy). She has been involved in several projects on musicol­ogy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Center for Systematic Musicology in Graz, and has been in col­laborating with universities and conser­vatories in Armenia, Canada, Finland, Ita­ly and Switzerland. Her research focuses on music cognition, the anthropology of music, music theory and analysis, music performance, expression and emotion. She regularly performs as a pianist, both as a soloist and in chamber music en­sembles.

THE THEORETICAL BASES OF ONE OF KOMITAS’S CONCEPTS CONCERNING ARMENIAN SECULAR AND SACRED MUSIC

At the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX centuries the Armenian musical thought became a part of the Armenian national self-identity paradigm as a re­sult of several fundamental principles presented by Komitas. One of his musi­cal-aesthetic and theoretical definitions suggests that the relationship between traditional Armenian secular and sacred music should be seen as relationship a between sister and brother. This seem­ingly simple definition was of great sig­nificance then and continues to be such today.
Until the second half of the XIX century the Armenian language, along with the other branches of Armenian culture, in­cluding music, were still considered as phenomena within the other Oriental cultures, often considered as having de­rived from the latter or lacking their own typical characteristics. The concept pro­posed by Komitas is extremely important for revealing the main features of the Ar­menian musical thought as well as the fundamental unity of the various areas of the Armenian music culture. The “Sister and Brother approach” primarily consid­ers various branches of Armenian music culture as manifestations of a unified system of musical thought, therefore, ex­cluding the assumptions about the latter having been borrowed or having a for­eign origin.
Komitas played an exceptional role in the history of Armenian music also because of his ability to use the results of his musico­logical and theoretical research as an es­sential foundation for putting forward and developing new concepts. Addressing those concepts with contemporary meth­ods of theoretical research can provide additional arguments proving the funda­mental nature of Komitas’s principles.
For the sake of revisiting that issue we present a comparative study of two re­search works of equal value: the first one conducted by T. Shakhkulyan and E. Bise­si, who examined the singing fragments of the Sasna Crēr epic recorded by Komi­tas, and the second one conducted by M. Navoyan and E. Bisesi, which addressed Komitas’s recordings of the tałs by St. Grigor Narekatsi.