Musicologist, folklorist, researcher at the Folk Music Department at the Institute of Arts of the National Academy of Scienc­es of the Republic of Armenia. Sargsyan graduated from the Department of Mu­sicology at the Komitas State Conserva­tory. The main components of her ac­tivity are folk music collection fieldwork, their transcription, systematization, no­tation and analysis. Sargsyan’s research is focused on the study of the correlation between the melody and the dance in traditional Armenian dance-songs and dance melodies. She is the author of a number of articles and three published volumes in the series of “Traditional Ar­menian Music”.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC COLLECTING ACTIVITIES FROM KOMITAS TO OUR DAYS

The activities on the collecting, system­izing and the preservation of tradition­al Armenian music began as early as in the mid XIX century. While the first at­tempts were to some extent superficial, they were important from the point of view of founding the field. Consider­ing the experience of his predecessors, Komitas approached the issue very seri­ously. After Komitas, the collective work has never ceased, but on the contrary, many scholars engaged into this activi­ty, among whom musicologists, ethnol­ogists, choreologists, performers and even non-specialists. In various institu­tions archives of the collected samples were created. A huge portion of the col­lections has been systemized and stud­ied, and a portion has been published. There are also private archives that con­tain folk music recordings, but only a few of them have been studied. During various years various problems, issues, approaches, contradictions emerged re­lated to the collective work. Whilst re­sulting from technological development, year by year the possibilities and tools for song recording increased, but as the traditions retreated, the number of infor­mant singers and performers decreased. In this work we are attempting to out­line how music collecting activities de­veloped after Komitas.