Joseph Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora, drawing on his experiences as an Armenian-American raised in the Armenian exile community of Fresno, California. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments of song lyrics and reviving ancient musical notations. Bohigian’s music has been performed at the International Computer Music Conference (Limerick, Ireland), June in Buffalo, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), New Music on the Point Festival, TENOR Conference (Melbourne), and Aram Khachaturian Museum Hall (Yerevan) by the Mivos Quartet, Decibel, Great Noise Ensemble, Argus Quartet, Fresno Summer Orchestra Academy, and Playground Ensemble. He performs as a founding member of Ensemble Decipher, a group dedicated to working with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies.
Compositions
performed by Catherine Sandstet, Heidi Schneider, Alina Tamborini, Rob Cosgrove, Kate Dreyfuss, Sophia Sun, and Tsung-Yu Tsai
“I became thrown away at that moment. I lost and found myself in this saying produced by Anatolian people. Indeed, the water had found its crack.”
—Hrant Dink, “The water finds its crack: an Armenian in Turkey”
performed by Ensemble Decipher
“Aylis is grey this time of year. Grey-colored mountains… Frozen stones, streets, houses hardly breathe in the cold awaiting the coming of spring. The Stone Church.”
“What was the reason, my God, that in Aylis, long-forgotten by you, your hills and your stones had come alive again?”
—Akram Aylisli, Stone Dreams