Aram Khachaturyan , born in Tiflis, was a Soviet-Armenian composer whose works were often influenced by Armenian folk music.
Aram Ilyich Khachaturyan was born in Tiflis, Imperial Russia (now Tbilisi, Georgia) to a poor Armenian family. In his youth, he was fascinated by the music he heard around him, but at first he did not study music or learn to read it. In 1921 he traveled to Moscow to join his brother, the stage director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre. Although he had almost no musical education, Khachaturyan showed such great talent that he was admitted to the Gnessin Institute where he studied cello under Sergey Bychkov, and later Andrey Borysyak.
In 1925 Mikhail Gnessin started a composition class at the Gnessin Institute which Khachaturyan joined.
In 1929, he transferred to the Moscow Conservatory where he studied under Nikolai Myaskovsky (composition) and Sergei Vasilenko (orchestration), graduating in 1934. In the 1930s, he married the composer Nina Makarova, a fellow student from Myaskovsky’s class. In 1951, he became professor at the Gnessin State Musical and Pedagogical Institute (Moscow) and the Moscow Conservatory. He also held important posts at the Composers' Union, which would later severely denounce some of his works as being “formalist” music, along with those of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. These three composers became the so called "titans" of Soviet music, enjoying worldwide reputation as some of the leading composers of the 20th century.
Khachaturyan's works include concertos for violin, cello, and piano as well as concerto-rhapsodies for the same instruments. The piano concerto originally including an early part for the flexatone, and was his first work to gain him recognition in the West.
published: 2006-01-01 00:00:00 last updated:2010-01-28 13:13:13
