Ghazaros Martirosi Saryan

Ghazaros Saryan (Rostov-on-Don, 30 September 1920 – Yerevan, 27 May 1998) was an Armenian composer and pedagogue whose work moved between the folklore of his country and the techniques of twentieth-century music. The son of the painter Martiros Saryan, he moved with his family to Yerevan in 1921, and it was there that he trained as a musician.

He studied composition with Barkhudarian and Talian at the Yerevan Conservatory between 1934 and 1938. He then completed his training in Moscow, at the conservatory there, between 1945 and 1950, under Anatoli Aleksandrov and Shostakovich. Back in Yerevan, he taught composition and orchestration at his conservatory, where he became a professor in 1972 and served as rector from 1960 to 1986. Among his students was Tigran Mansurian. He also chaired the board of the Composers' Union of Armenia from 1955 to 1956.

His music has a programmatic character. In his early works he combined national colour and folk elements with a picturesque, at times austere, mode of thought; the orchestral suite Panno Armenia musically recreates his father's paintings, although its sonic result is at times rather abstract. With the Symphony of 1980 he deepened his exploration of timbral gradation and spatial perspective, creating dense, sometimes pointillistic textural landscapes. In some scores he employed the twelve-tone technique, as in the Violin Concerto and the Second String Quartet, but he also drew on pre-Classical procedures such as the ostinato or monothematicism; in his Passacaglia for orchestra, the traditional form is reinterpreted through a pantonal harmony.

He received numerous official honours, among them the Armenian State Prize in 1983 for his Symphony and the title of People's Artist of the USSR in 1990. His music was performed abroad, and his legacy endures above all through his teaching influence on the Armenian school of composition.