Every story has a spark. For pianist Hayk Melikyan, the spark that led to his exploration of the works of Gurdjieff wasn’t a grand design, but a quiet alchemy. It began in concert halls across the world, in the curious space that would open whenever he programmed a piece by the enigmatic spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. A stillness would fall, distinct and profound; in cities from Amsterdam to Tokyo, audiences would lean forward as one, drawn into the simple, transparent melodies. The music was doing something, and the question of what became a gentle insistence.
The path to an answer was not a straight line, but a wandering conversation that began years earlier with friends, tracing threads of Eastern philosophy. Inevitably, the trail led to Gurdjieff, and from there, homeward to the city of black stone that shaped him — Gyumri. A chance gift of Gurdjieff’s scores in the Netherlands felt less like a coincidence and more like a key.
To truly understand the music, Melikyan knew he had to follow the traces back to their source. His pilgrimage to Gyumri was a search for a soundscape, a memory, a texture, which he found in the city’s black tuff facades, in the stories of Gurdjieff’s ashugh father and in the warmth of a place that remembers its own. The music, once an abstract mystery, finally had a home.
That journey has now crystallized into “Laudamus: Secular & Sacred Piano Works,” a new album that is less a project and more a testament. The use of the word Laudamus, which is Latin for “We praise,” is an offering of gratitude: for a city, for a lineage of teachers and for the listeners who complete the circle. In this conversation, Hayk Melikyan unwraps this story, revealing how a quiet question became a profound quest into the very nature of sound, attention and home.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Milena Baghdasaryan (M.B.): Your new album, “Laudamus,” focuses entirely on the work of George Gurdjieff. What was the initial spark that drew you specifically to his music and inspired you to dedicate a full album to it?
Hayk Melikyan (H.M.): It didn’t start as a “project”; it started as conversations. Years ago, a group of friends, including my manager, Alexander Plato Hakobyan and our close philosopher friend Mamikon Gevorgyan, would gather and wander from Buddhist ideas to Sufi practices, to the ways Eastern philosophies treat attention and presence.
Inevitably, we landed on Gurdjieff, and, being Armenian, we also landed on Alexandropol (Gyumri), his birthplace and the cultural soundscape that formed him. That led me to his main written work, the first in a three-part series, “All and Everything” (Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson).
Then something unexpected happened: after a recital in the Netherlands, Hans Kramer, a master craftsman who restores historical instruments, handed me a bundle of Gurdjieff/de Hartmann scores as a gift.
I slipped a few pieces of Gurdjieff and de Hartmann scores into my foreign programs — the Netherlands, Canada, Japan — and noticed the same thing in every hall: people leaned forward; the room grew quiet in a particular way.
The music was simple and transparent, yet it worked on listeners. That reaction stayed with me.
In 2019, our team member, producer Erna Revazova, suggested we go to Gyumri and “follow the traces.” We met ashugh specialists, sat in the Gyumri branch of the Yerevan Komitas State Conservatory to trade notes with faculty, heard stories about Gurdjieff’s father, Ashugh Adash and learned more about his grave in Gyumri. We were told local recollections of a youthful friendship with Avetik Isahakyan; whether or not every detail can be documented, the neighborhood sense of memory around those names and that household tondir was very real.
We filmed a three‑part video cycle in 2020 (right after lockdowns eased) at the Avetik Isahakyan House‑Museum and in the city, Concert 1: Hymns & Prayers; Concert 2: Sayyid Chants & Dances; Concert 3: Songs & Rhythms of Peoples. You can hear the spoken introductions and see the context in those videos. The shoots weren’t easy, different crews, changing restrictions, long days, but Gyumri’s black‑tuff streets gave the music a home. Over time, audiences began associating Gurdjieff with my name, and I realized these lived experiences wanted to become an album: “Laudamus: Secular & Sacred Piano Works.”
Pianist Hayk Melikyan (Photo: Anton Senko)
M.B.: The press release mentions your wish to tell the “exceptional story of George Gurdjieff and his lifelong quest for spiritual wisdom.” How would you describe his work to someone who is not familiar with him?
H.M.: I tell them Gurdjieff’s work has three interlocking forms: the ideas (articulated early on with P.D. Ouspensky), the Movements (transmitted through Jeanne de Salzmann) and the music (realized in collaboration with Thomas de Hartmann).
This album lives inside that third form. For me, his music is attention training: a way of listening where wisdom appears in small things, a breath, an accent, the space after a cadence.
That’s also where Gyumri helped me: by seeing the place, I learned to hear character, ashugh inflection, modal color, an Orthodox cadence or a dervish turn, inside a single line.
M.B.: Some consider George Gurdjieff the most dangerous spiritual teacher in history. What would you say about this?
H.M.: “Dangerous” usually means misunderstood or followed blindly. Any teaching is hazardous if you outsource your experience to someone else. What safeguards me is the musical reality: modes (what we Armenians call լադեր), the taksim‑to‑dance arcs, the way a drone underlines a line. Those are concrete, not ideological. Historically, Gurdjieff drew controversy; he could be severe; some students left (Ouspensky parted ways in 1924-25). I respect the criticism and keep the focus on testing the music in practice. That’s the opposite of cultishness: try, listen, verify.
M.B.: The album’s title, “Laudamus,” is Latin for “We praise.” Could you tell us why you chose this particular title and what it is you are praising with this collection of works?
H.M.: We found ourselves praising several things at once: Gyumri itself, its black‑tuff houses and the stoic warmth of that city; the heritage, a Greek father, an Armenian mother, the ashugh line. Further, the chain of transmission, from a sung or whistled fragment to de Hartmann’s piano language, to today’s listener. During the Gyumri video cycle, that feeling crystallized. The title acknowledges that entire web of gratitude: place, people, teachers and the listeners who complete the circle.
M.B.: Gurdjieff’s music is a unique fusion of Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, Persian and Central Asian traditions. As a pianist trained in the classical tradition, what were the main challenges and rewards in interpreting and conveying these diverse folk sensibilities on the piano?
H.M.: First, I recognize that Thomas de Hartmann already did the heaviest lifting: he took living materials — melodies Gurdjieff remembered, sang, whistled or tapped — and translated them into a piano language without erasing their origins. That set my baseline:
I’m not “civilizing” folk music; I’m protecting its edge while making it speak on a concert grand.
In practice, that means modal hearing (our Armenian լադեր), asymmetrical pulse and a left hand that can behave like a drone or daf while the right hand sings with speech‑rubato — closer to a duduk. Our album booklet goes into this arc by volumes (I–III), which is how I shaped touch, pedaling and timing across the program.
A missing piece in many summaries is the de Hartmann and Komitas link. Gurdjieff pushed de Hartmann to immerse himself in Armenian sources, and Komitas became a key reference in shaping the piano books. One account even states that Gurdjieff sent de Hartmann to Yerevan to study, lecture on and perform Komitas, after which de Hartmann helped advocate for Komitas’s music more broadly.
What’s documented beyond doubt is that while the Gurdjieff circle was in Tiflis (1919), de Hartmann published a paper on Komitas’s work to regenerate and preserve Armenian folk music, describing Komitas’s trauma and expressing a wish to aid him through concerts — evidence of a direct, studied engagement with the Armenian tradition that sits behind these piano arrangements. For me, as an Armenian, this matters a lot.
The broader music‑history frame also helped me: Komitas in Armenia and Béla Bartók in Hungary both show that “classical” can be built on fieldwork. Komitas founded a national style by collecting, transcribing and arranging village songs; Bartók and Kodály took phonographs into the countryside, then folded those materials back into piano sets and concert works.
So the reward is twofold: musically, the instrument starts to breathe like an ensemble: you hear daf, duduk and voice inside a piano; humanly, listeners from Amsterdam to Gyumri tell me they hear something of their own in these pieces. That’s when I know the bridge held — de Hartmann’s craft, Gurdjieff’s memory, Komitas’s discipline and my responsibility as a pianist all meeting in the same sound.
M.B.: The works are presented as being both “secular and sacred.” How did you approach differentiating these two aspects in your performance, and how do they interact to create the album’s complete narrative?
H.M.: We shaped the program in three arcs that mirror the Schott layout: Vol. I: Asian Songs & Rhythms (tracks 1-11), Vol. II: Music of the Sayyids & the Dervishes (12-17) and Vol. III: Hymns, Prayers & Rituals (18-26).
In general, one can feel that secular works (songs/dances) have tactile pulse, rustic ornaments and earthy swing. The Sacred (hymns/prayers) pieces are more restrained, have long lines, quiet pedaling and interior time.
The interaction is crucial: the “outer” (song/dance) prepares the nerves for the “inner” (hymn/prayer). By the time you reach “Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, Holy Reconciling” (Law of Three, track 21), the ear is ready to hear forces in counterpoise, not just melody.
Hayk Melikyan (Photo: Sevak Soghomonyan)
M.B.: These pieces were arranged for piano by Thomas de Hartmann. Can you speak to the nature of the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann collaboration and how de Hartmann’s arrangements translate these often mystical or folk-based melodies into the language of the piano?
H.M.: The process was immediate and embodied. Gurdjieff would whistle, sing, tap or play harmonium/piano; de Hartmann would catch the line at speed, then harmonize/structure without encasing it in heavy notation. That’s why you find minimal bar‑lines, few instructions and a reliance on drones, parallel motion, chant‑like periods and Orthodox cadences, a hybrid, neither “Eastern” nor “Western,” but third‑space music. Their collaboration began in the Caucasus and matured at the Prieuré near Paris. It’s a composer’s craft in service of lived melody.
A historical side‑current matters too, as mentioned above: Komitas (and the broader Armenian collecting tradition) was an essential reference point for de Hartmann when he shaped the piano books, one reason the music sits so naturally on modal ground.
M.B.: As an “Honorary Artist of Armenia,” you have a stated goal of promoting the region’s musical legacy. How does the figure of Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher of Armenian heritage, fit into the broader story of Armenian culture you wish to share with the world?
H.M.: He’s a Gyumri story that expands outward. The Isahakyan House-Museum, the Conservatory branch, the city’s black‑tuff facades, this is the texture behind the music.
Through Gurdjieff, I can present Armenia as a crossroads, not a cul‑de‑sac: Armenian and Greek strands braided with Kurdish, Persian, Assyrian and other lines.
Our 2020 Gyumri video cycle was as much a civic gesture as a musical one — we wanted the world to associate the name “Gurdjieff” with an actual place and people, not only with an abstract “brand.” In truth, “Gurdjieff” often travels farther than Gyumri; “Laudamus” tries to let the city speak first, and the music answer from there.
There’s also a linguistic layer I find meaningful. Gurdjieff famously loved invented terms; yet, as an Armenian reader, I often hear echoes of Armenian cadence and roots in those neologisms.
I’m not making a philological claim — just describing a musician’s recognition of how a mother tongue imprints rhythm and phonetic color, then resurfaces across language, movement and music.
That resonance is part of why these pieces feel at once local and universal to me.
M.B.: Is there a particular track on “Laudamus: Secular & Sacred Piano Works,” that holds a special significance for you personally? If so, could you share the story behind it and why it resonates so deeply?
H.M.: Two always: “Armenian Song” and the “Greek Melody.” Every time I begin those, I flash back to Gyumri, to the smell of the room at the Isahakyan House‑Museum, the patience of our big team in 2020, the sense that we were filming in the city that formed him. It also quietly honors his Greek father and Armenian mother, two origins sounding together.
M.B.: This album is being released on the new Azure Sky label. What was the recording process like, and was there a specific atmosphere or sound you and the label aimed to capture to do justice to the meditative quality of Gurdjieff’s music?
H.M.: Although Azure Sky is new, I’ve known its founder, Astrid Angvik, for over a decade through her work in classical recording. There is trust and a shared taste for clarity. We wanted a sound that keeps the attack and release of each tone, intimate enough to hear fingers and air, but spacious enough for the music’s stillness. The label’s mission is to reimagine classical and jazz for contemporary ears; this resonated with bringing ancient materials into a modern sonic honesty. My manager finally met Astrid in London this year, after countless calls, also part of the story of trust.
M.B.: What do you hope an international audience, perhaps hearing Gurdjieff’s music for the first time, will take away from their listening experience with “Laudamus: Secular & Sacred Piano Works”?
H.M.: Start by not reading the titles. Let the music meet you without labels. If you do, something personal tends to appear: an image, a memory, a small quiet. The genius here is that anyone can find a way in: no initiation required.
M.B.: Beyond the music itself, do you feel there is a message in Gurdjieff’s work that is particularly relevant for audiences in 2025?
H.M.: I would say, “Peace begins with attention.” In 2025, that’s the call I hear most clearly in Gurdjieff. If we can keep steady attention, even for a few minutes, we exercise the same muscles needed for dialogue and restraint outside the hall. Gurdjieff names this inner equilibrium in the “Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, Holy Reconciling” — the Law of Three — and on our program, you can hear that balance in track 21. We placed it near the heart of “Laudamus,” so the album itself becomes a small practice in attention.
And looking ahead: in 2026 — the 160th anniversary of Gurdjieff’s birth (by the widely cited 1866 date) — I plan to live with this repertoire even more intensely. These pieces will anchor many of my recitals and festival appearances, and they’ll stay with me day to day as a practice of attention as much as a concert program — the music of Gurdjieff with me, on stage and off.
