Armenian Medieval Musical Culture and
"Nerses Shnorali" Ancient Armenian Music Choir

Armenia possesses one of the most ancient musical cultures in the world. Armenian music has had a history of more than 3,000 years. Various musical objects found at the excavations of the Bronze Age and Urartu burial places witness the rich musical culture and aesthetics of the pre-christian Armenia. From the fifth century A.D. there opened a second period of the Armenian song music - the Christian musical culture that absorbed and generalized all the valuable elements accumulated by the pre-christian music in the process of its evolution.

In the seventh century at Vagarshapat (now Echmiadzin) the first spiritual high music school was founded, and Catholicos Saak Partev invented a khaz notography. Khazes are ancient Armenian musical notes used to fix spiritual songs by ancient Armenian composers. At the beginning, there were 36 khazes, as many as the letters of the Armenian alphabet. However, in the process of further development their number reached almost 500. The specialized school of Armenian religious music had existed for more than a millennium - from tile fifth to fifteenth century. The khaz notography preserved in hundreds of manuscripts and kept in our days at the Matenadaran in Yerevan and in other world books deposits convincingly show its high artistic value.

The major fame among the medieval Armenian composers belonged to Partev, Mashtots, Khorenatsi, Syunetsi, Shirakatsi, Narekatsi, Taronetsi, and Shnorali. Due to the extremely difficult political and socio-economic situation that existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Armenian high music schools were destroyed and the khaz notographic system was buried in oblivion. Armenian spiritual music went on existing through its oral transmission from generation to generation. It helped save the main part of the spiritual song legacy which still underwent certain changes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a musicologist, Hambartsum Limondzhan, invented a new Armenian notography which gave the Armenian intellectuals a means to resume the transcription of thousands of Armenian songs. About 10,000 spiritual songs or their variants have been preserved, and most are now kept at the Mashtots Matenadaran.