Seventy Thousand Assyrians

Seventy Thousand Assyrians takes its title from a short story written in the early 1930s by Armenian-American author William Saroyan. In the story (and perhaps in reality, we suspect) Saroyan encounters Theodore Badal, a young Assryian man recently immigrated to America trying to forget the horrors of his former life in and around what is now eastern Turkey. There, his people, like Armenians at that time, are dying at the hands of the Turks in a holocaust that from the 1890s to the 1920s took the lives of a least a million and a half people (there is no fiction in this story to my knowledge, least of all this). Badal seems resigned to the disappearance of a whole culture that was once a numerous people. At first "seventy thousand Assyrians" might conjure an intimidating image of a conquering army (the image of Assyria familiar to anyone who has read the Old Testament) but we learn through Badal that instead, seventy thousand people is all he believes to be left of a formerly great race, dwindling fast with no hope of return. Badal is learning to be a barber (in the story he is giving Saroyan a haircut) and the conversation takes place at a chair in a barber school.

"We went in for the wrong things. We went in for the simple things, peace and quiet and families. We didn't go in for machinery and conquest and militarism. We didn't go in for diplomacy and deceit and the invention of machine-guns and poison gases. Well, there is no use in being disappointed. We had our day, I suppose."

I find that, ironically, much of my creative work over the last decade involves making "private" utterances in "public" places, sometimes loudly. In short, if this music has a message it is that at the close of the century of the refugee (a darker sort of centennial), it seems fitting to look both backward and forward to maintain, at least, an awareness of the plight of persecuted people in a shrinking world and our role in it.
The music contains two pieces of music from the Assyrian and Armenian part of the world. The first is an adaptation of a famous Armenian melody "I Will Not Be Sad in This World" which occurs near the beginning and end of the piece. The other is a song for men's chorus from neighboring Georgia, "Mirangula" which is a mother's lament for a lost son who has been taken away and killed. Significantly, it contains no traditional Assyrian music at all, that music having largely disappeared now except a type of popular commercial folk music. Fittingly, though, ancient Assryian music as we understand it was dominated by wind and percussion instruments, the only strings being various forms of the lyre.
Though this piece was commissioned for the centennial celebration of Penn State Bands, it is not itself celebratory, nor does it directly commemorate any numerical milestone. Having said that, it seems to me that a celebration of a significant milestone can also be a time for reflection and introspection, both "where we have been" and "where we are going". The wind band has clearly evolved in the last hundred years from a tool primarily for the rallying of martial spirit into a potential instrument of peace, joining Beethoven's orchestra and chorus of his 9th Symphony in this respect. It is in this spirit that this work is offered. I do feel that it is an attempt on my part to contribute a substantial work to the literature for wind ensemble in honor of the long tradition of bands here at Penn State, the best years of which are ahead of it. It has been a great pleasure to work with the fine musicians in this group and with their director, Dennis Glocke who has taken the wind ensemble here to an unprecedented level of excellence.

This work is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, George Kaspar Barsamian, once a young Assyrian refugee like Theodore Badal, humbly learning to become a barber and to forget.

Paul Barsom
April, 2000