Lecture by Nouritza Matossian

Recollections on the Cyprus Music Workshop 1973

The Cyprus Music Workshop, organized in 1973 in Lapithos, was the first ever event in Cyprus to present contemporary music by Cypriot and visiting foreign musicians. The Workshop was documented on film, by Leandros Avraamides. Mattossian’s Lecture will be in English and will last approximately 90 minutes including the screening of the documentary.

As Nouritza Matossian remembers: “The Cyprus Music Workshop started as a dream - to bring together musicians from different countries to live and work in a genuine Cypriot community with Cypriot musicians. The idea that each person paid for his own travelling and living expenses, spent a proportion of the day swimming and getting acquainted with Cyprus playing music mornings and evenings without being paid, sounded too idealistic to those who first heard of it. ‘Impossible’, they said. It caught the imagination of 35 wonderful musicians however. And it became a reality. The workshop became a community within the first few days of starting. We were forced, owing to a limited budget, to share accommodation in close quarters, to cook meals in turn for the whole group and to take care of one another. Two beautifully situated schools were our home and workshop in Lapithos; the village people immediately embraced us, gave every assistance, came nightly to our rehearsals and showed us in every way that we were welcome. Every day a large volume of music was played in every one of the six rooms. Groups played orchestral works, string quartets, wind quintets, and improvised. The Electronic Studio was constantly visited and the first tape composition ever made in Cyprus was realised there. We opened our rehearsals to the public, played in Kyrenia Harbour, recorded for the CyBC. We listened to Cyprus Folk music and danced to it with our friends from the village. Many musicians from Cyprus joined us not only as guests but stayed to live with us as members, asking whether there would be a Workshop next year. The purpose of the Workshop was not simply to prepare a Concert programme but to create music in a collective situation where all living conditions were shared, where music was as natural a part of life as eating and sleeping.”

Nouritza Matossian is one of the world’s leading experts on Iannis Xenakis. She published the first biography and critical study of his work, Iannis Xenakis after ten years’ close collaboration with him. The book has become an essential reading for students and performers of Xenakis. Matossian collaborated with Dennis Marks on the documentary film on Xenakis for BBC2, Something Rich and Strange.

She studied and interviewed major avant-garde composers such as Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, Scelsi. Nouritza Matossian introduced live electroacoustic and synthesized music for the first time in Cyprus in 1973 with the Cyprus Music Workshop, Lapithos, which toured the island before the Turkish invasion of 1974. Matossian's 1998 book Black Angel, The Life of Arshile Gorky (1998, Random House) was written after twenty years' research. Ararat, the award-winning film by Atom Egoyan and Miramax, was partly inspired by the Black Angel. She acted as consultant to Egoyan who modelled the female lead role Ani on her. Matossian also wrote and performs a solo show on Gorky's life from the viewpoint of his four beloved women with images and music. It has been produced worldwide over 80 times at venues including the Barbican, Tate Modern, London, New York, Los Angeles, the Edinburgh Festival, Cyprus, Paris, Lebanon, Iran, Romania and Georgia. In Armenia she performed it simultaneously in two languages. Her film on Armenian editor who was murdered in Turkey in 2007, A Heart of Two Nations, Hrant Dink won the Public’s Prize in the Pomegranate Armenian Film Festival in Toronto. Matossian broadcasts on the BBC and contributes to several newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist, and The Observer. She was Honorary Cultural Attache for the Armenian Embassy in London from 1991 until 2000. Born in Cyprus of Armenian parents, educated in England, Nouritza Matossian read Philosophy at the University of London, studied music, theatre and mime in Germany, Dartington and Paris; she has a command of nine languages. She has also served as Honorary Cultural Attache to the Armenian Embassy, and is an activist in human rights.

The event is part of the 5th International Pharos Contemporary Music Festival