THE CONCEPT OF NATIONAL IN KOMITAS’S PERCEPTION

The emphasis on national identity in Komitas’s heritage determines his place and role in the history of Armenian music. His historical role of being the founder of the Armenian national school of composition is devised around this fact. National identity, as the creative and contemplative baseline, has two pivots of justification in Komitas’s heritage. While his numerous references to the rich layers of Armenian culture are evident, and in essence, the entirety of his creative and scientific heritage is anchored on them, the pure ideological orientation towards those layers, the fact of highlighting them on the theoretical level, considering them the baseline for his creations and emphasizing them in the field of his scientific interests is determined by other reasons ‒ by the influence of XVIII-XIX century European cultural environment. At the same time, the adoption of European approaches by Komitas could have been both mediated ‒ as an outlook, a principle already adopted by his predecessors that had been handed down to him from Kristaphor Kara-Murza, Makar Yekmalyan and others, and direct ‒ as a result of various perceptions of ideological bases of German romanticism that he could have inherited from his German teachers, German art, and theoretical arguments reaching Johann Gottfried Herder.