In the Folk Style - Aram Khachaturian

Hi there👋 I'm Noah Vazquez, a baker and collaborative pianist based in Cincinnati. I created the Program Notes Project for others to share their stories and help introduce classical music to more people. You can find my work on Medium @programnotes or follow the project @programnotesproject on Instagram.

Sounds of Childhood

Perhaps my earliest encounter with a piece I didn't quite know how to make sense of was when my first piano teacher introduced me to Aram Khachaturian's Children's Album, subtitled "Sounds of Childhood" in the German edition I was using at the time.

There's a certain irony to many such "albums for the young," infused with all the nostalgia of a mature composer looking back on life, yet intended for young musicians whose eyes are still firmly fixed on what lies ahead.

When I first picked these pieces up, they were not the sounds of my childhood, but glimpses into a foreign world I could only imagine, filled with the experiences of a distant culture (Armenia), by a composer whose name nobody could quite remember how to spell. These sounds of Eastern Europe were worlds away from the Haydn, Mozart and Bach works I had been surrounded by up until that point; this style of composition from 1947 "too modern" for my young ears to make sense of. Of course, I was not yet aware of the magic to be found in the output of so many great composers from Russia and beyond, or the vast contemporary color palettes I would one day fall in love with.

Yet in remembering all that initial foreignness, I now feel a deep sense of familiarity when returning to these pieces. My pick of the bunch, In Folk Style was the piece I had selected to perform at an early piano studio recital, and it never fails to transport me to that time, back when its harmonies were like nothing I'd ever heard and contained a whole world I couldn't wait to introduce to my audience.

I still say the word "Am-ster-dam" in my head as soon as I hear those first repeated notes - something once required to get the accent on the dotted rhythm just right. I remember my giddiness, arriving at that mysterious, bumpy bass passage with its once adventurous hand-crossing, and the careful choreography (and bold pencil markings) needed to keep track of when to reach for the pedal. I close my eyes and the harmonies still whisk me off to the same bustling alley, drenched in golden afternoon light and overflowing with the smells and sounds of a culture more vibrant than my own: tapestries, spices, gold coins, mules, haggling, music, voices, all blurring together in the dizzying folk dance of daily life.

Perhaps it's in my experience of this music today that the irony of such works is at its richest. As a young boy, there was nothing familiar, nothing childish about the undertaking of playing this piece, no nostalgia I knew to imbue in my performance of it. Yet playing it conveyed a sound of childhood that only I could dream up, a novelty that I can neither recapture nor reproduce sitting down to play it today. The excitement of getting to hold the pedal down that little bit longer than I would have in Mozart, the exhilaration of painting a picture with colors I never knew existed.

I can't hear this piece today without these memories rushing back in, and I suspect this feeling isn't so different from the fleeting nostalgia we young musicians all unwittingly conjure in the parents attending our first studio recitals, or in the teachers holding our hands as we embark on these great adventures into worlds we've only just discovered.