Hear/See – Ensemble Decipher

End of Year Fundraising Concert

Join us online on Sunday, December 7 at 4pm ET / 3pm CT / 1pm PT for a livestream of Ensemble Decipher and vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian’s performance of scenes from Joseph Bohigian’s I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment. The Ensemble gathered for one week in July 2025 to workshop this new piece and performed five scenes of the work-in-progress at the Paul Dresher Ensemble Studio in Oakland, CA. After the video of the performance, stick around to ask us questions about the project in a live Q&A with Joseph, Khatchadour, and Decipher. The world premiere will take place on October 8, 2026 at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco.

I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment is an evening-length multimedia work for solo voice, electronics ensemble, and video projection about the life of the visionary Georgian-born Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov. The multiplicity of cultures in his native South Caucasus region was essential to his work, which is reflected in the multilingual text for this piece by the 18th century ashugh (bard) Sayat Nova, the subject of Parajanov’s 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates. The work combines Sayat Nova’s existing melodies with newly created ones by Khatchadourian and Bohigian, along with music by folk musicians from across the South Caucasus.

Click here to watch the livestream.

Pretty Saro

‘Pretty Saro’ is a folk tune I first heard through a Folkways recording of Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson. I was immediately struck by the simplicity and power of both the performance and the music itself. I then heard Peggy Seeger do it on one of her albums, and it sort of catapulted the song onto my ‘desert island playlist,’ landing right next to another desert island record, ‘Music for Airports.’ I have tapped Eno’s procedure of orbiting tape loops in his wonderful album as a method to cope with the lack of precise synchronization of parts due to the limitations of our the telematic situation and our unstable home internet connections. The material, sourced from the traditional song, is presented with an open scoring, and is performed to a shared (albeit erratic) metronome, which remains silent to the audience. I am pleased by the way this project has allowed me to explore and remodel these two dear sources and make them my own.

—Sam Beebe