THE SOFIA PROJECT
The Sofia Project will be updated periodically as more information about the life and music of Sofia Ganeshian comes to light. The Sharakan label plans to release a second recording of Sofia’s music in 2022.
Eva Lindal and Virg Dzurinko after a performance at Bollnäs folkhögskola, Sweden; May 21, 2019.
In 2012, by sheer chance, Eva stumbled across two hand-written music scores for violin and piano hidden in an old violin case. Signed “Sofia G. 1935,” the manuscripts included some unusual graphic symbols interspersed among conventional notation. The violin case also contained a leather identification tag that read “Sofia Ganeshian, Locarno, Svizzera.”
We were obviously intrigued by this radical and original music written by a completely unknown composer. And a woman! We became detectives. We returned to the shop in Locarno where the old violin had been purchased.
There we found a box of notebooks, ephemera, and additional scores written in the same hand. We followed these clues wherever they led us — civic archives, ships’ manifests, newspapers, internet ancestry sites. Our research, which is far from complete, has allowed us to construct the basic timeline of Sofia’s life and work.
Sofia Ganeshian was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1899. Her father was a schoolteacher and an amateur folk musician, and her mother was a seamstress. In 1914, with trouble looming on the horizon, Sofia’s parents sent her to stay with relatives in Switzerland, planning to join her there later. This would never happen because of the dramatic events hitting Europe and the Armenian people.
Fantasma, partial score
Sofia, circa 1928; photographer unknown
Sofia lived with her aunt and uncle in Locarno until the late 1920s, at which point she moved to Italy for a number of years. She had learned to play the violin in Yerevan, and entries in her early notebooks mention both piano and violin lessons in Locarno. She apparently continued her musical education in Milano, studying composition sporadically. The manuscripts we discovered are sprinkled with her own eccentric symbols — arrows, curves, jagged lines, black squares, circles. Almost every score contains some instruction for optional improvisation.
Performing Yerevan at Khimaira;
May 19, 2019, Stockholm
She returned to Locarno in the 1930s, living in the house her aunt and uncle had willed to her, and remained there until sometime around 1946. After she left Switzerland, she did some traveling, eventually making her way to the Greek island of Corfu, where she remained for the rest of her life. Records show that Sofia died on Corfu in 1987.
There is still so much that remains a mystery. She was not a faithful diarist, especially as she got older. Her notebook entries are sparse and there are years when she wrote nothing at all. In one notebook, she lists composers — Ravel, Bartok, Varese, Dallapiccola, Nadia Boulanger among them — but her opinions about them are few and far between.
The fragments of music she jotted down here and there appear to be just notes to herself. Among the few extended entries are references to her work on a collection of pieces based on The Odyssey.
There is no indication anywhere that Sofia ever tried to connect with the larger musical world. Was she content to compose music for its own sake? Was her music ever performed? Was anyone in the world even aware that she was an avant-garde composer? We don’t know! For now, we are left with the music — the best way to tell her story.