A famous Armenian musician died on Tuesday, July 6, at the age of 92 Jivan Gasparyan… On the death of a musician reported his grandson on his Facebook page.
Jivan Gasparyan. short biography
Born on October 12, 1928 in a small Armenian village called Solak, near the town of Hrazdan. When Jivan was still quite a boy, his mother died, and his father went to the front. So he ended up in an orphanage.
At the age of six, he began to independently play the duduk, an Armenian musical wind instrument. He also played zurna and shvi.
“Why I started playing the duduk, I don’t even know. My family had no musicians. Except that my father sang old songs well. His voice was very good. But that’s all. And when I heard the duduk for the first time, I was very I liked how this instrument sounds, what a beautiful timbre it has. And I began to learn to play. Duduk is the soul of a person, his story, his prayer, “said Jivan Gasparyan.
Little Jivan learned the basics of the ancient Armenian instrument alone. The boy simply listened to the play of the old masters and tried to repeat something. His first listeners were comrades from the orphanage.
In 1948 he became a member of the national song and dance ensemble. In the same year, he made his first professional performance with the Yerevan Philharmonic Orchestra as a soloist.
In 1946, Gasparyan, as part of an amateur ensemble, performed in Moscow at a show of masters of arts from the republics of the USSR. Stalin himself was sitting in the hall of the Bolshoi Theater.
In 1956, Jivan Gasparyan received his first ever prize at the duduk competition.
In 1957 Gasparyan, together with the “Birch” ensemble, went on a foreign tour to America for the first time.
Since the late 1980s he worked in the United States, where he wrote a duduk theme for the film “The Last Temptation of Christ”, in the 1990s he worked in the United States with his grandson, the successor of the business, Jivan Gasparyan Jr. In 2000 he became one of the music performers on the soundtrack to the film “Gladiator”.
In 2003 Gasparyan wrote the music for Alexander Gutman’s fictional film “Fresco”, which tells about the life of Armenia after the collapse of the USSR and the terrible earthquake that followed almost immediately. Gasparyan’s music from this film was later released on the album of the same name.
He toured several times around the world with a small ensemble performing Armenian folk music.
He has worked with many musicians including Serge Tankian, Andreas Vollenweider, Lionel Richie, Peter Gabriel, Hans Zimmer, Brian May, Boris Grebenshchikov, Irina Allegrova, Vladimir Presnyakov, Roman Miroshnichenko, Igor Krutoy, Michael Brook and Derek Sherinyan.
In recent years, he lived in the United States, then in Armenia.
He died on July 6, 2021.
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