Norayr Mnatsakanyan

Who was Norayr Mnatsakanyan?

Norayr Mnatsakanyan was a Meritorious Artist of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.

As a renowned vocal performer of Armenian traditional and gousan music, Norayr Mnatsakanyan has become one of the most influential vocalists in the canon of Armenian national music. Owing to his dainty operatic baritone, profound knowledge of Armenian folk music, and his mastery of the Armenian language and Armenian literature, Norayr Mnatsakanyan was highly acclaimed among famous writers, musicologists, and Armenian folk music lovers.

Norayr Mnatsakanyan was the first among Armenian vocalists to introduce a new approach to popular songs, as well as to the musical compilations of historic and contemporary gousans. As an accepted convention of any national folklore, the works of Armenian popular and gousan music were performed in a crude, rustic, and provincial fashion. Professional performers of the opera and classical music also tried to render these works. However, their efforts to perform them alienated these works altogether from ordinary Armenian people, since the true significance of Armenian popular music could not have been properly represented by the artificially elitist operatic genre in Soviet Armenia. With his poetic approach to these great masterpieces of Armenian traditional and gousan music, Norayr Mnatsakanyan was the first vocalist to present them in a refined and natural fashion, granting them an unprecedented simplistic register of artistic sophistication. Unlike his predecessors, Mnatsakanyan attempted to convey these works with a deep sense of harmony and in a previously impregnable unison with the authors' characteristic mentality and sentiments reflected in their compilations.