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Duduk player Jivan Gasparyan dies at 93
CULTURE
06.07.2021 | 13:44
Renowned duduk player and composer Jivan Gasparyan has died at the age of 93.
Born in Solak, Kotayk Province of Armenia, Gasparyan started to play duduk when he was six. In 1948, he became a soloist of the Armenian Song and Dance Popular Ensemble and the Yerevan Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1947 he participated in a concert in with the national amateur ensemble in Moscow, where after the concert he received a Pobeda watch from Stalin.
He has won four medals at UNESCO worldwide competitions (1959, 1962, 1973, and 1980). In 1973 Gasparyan was awarded the honorary title People’s Artist of Armenia. In 2002, he received the WOMEX (World Music Expo) Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a Honorary citizen of Yerevan.
A professor at the Yerevan State Musical Conservatory, he has instructed and nurtured many performers to professional levels of performance in duduk.
In 1998 he released an album with a unique duduk quartet he formed. Creating arrangements for four musicians with “new duduk tones, alto and bass, was an extremely difficult task” and challenge, but the quartet did become a reality performing and “there is no other like it in the world”, he witnessed in the lines notes of Nazeli.
He has toured the world several times with a small ensemble playing Armenian folk music. His music has been chosen on the soundtrack of several international films.
He has collaborated with many artists, such as Sting, Peter Gabriel and others․ He also recorded with the Kronos Quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
