Pardy Minassian finds lost songs in Shoah Foundation archive
USC Thornton Classical Guitar program graduate certificate alumna Pardy Minassian was featured on USC Shoah Foundation’s website for discovery of lost Armenian testimonies and songs from the Armenian Genocide.
Last year, the Armenian guitarist was awarded a project grant from the Calouste Gyukbenkian Foundation for her multimedia series focused on unpublished Armenian folk songs that were materials from her father’s collection of interviews with Armenian genocide survivors.
Minassian searched the Visual History Archive at the USC Shoah Foundation to find audio and video testimonies from the Richard Hovannisian collection and the Armenian Film Foundation to find forgotten musical pieces related to the Armenian genocide. Her plan is to make the songs she has transcribed publicly available.
Minassian said: “If nobody had collected these songs, they’d have just been forgotten. These songs are a major part of Western Armenian culture. I’m just trying to bring them back to life.”
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