“Hers is a compositional style in which neo-classicism and neo-romanticism meet, along with an ethnic flavor—the influence of Armenian, her first spoken language,” said one critic about the music of composer Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee, who over the years has created a large and diverse body of works for piano solo, orchestra, instrumental ensemble, percussion, and voice.
A first-generation Armenian American who teaches piano privately at her home in Belmont, Mass., Goolkasian Rahbee keeps busy giving workshops, lectures, and master classes internationally even while her various compositions are being performed in settings all over the United States and Europe.
Her “Urartu Rhapsodie” received its United States premiere in May at Jordan Hall in Boston. In late August, her song for tenor solo “Infini” and her piano work “Bagatelle” will have their world premier at the Centre Artistique of Piegeon, France. A few days later, several of her works for two pianos will be performed in Varennes, France.
In October, a commissioned “Song Cycle” will be performed at Carnegie’s Weill Hall in New York by soprano Karol Carroll, and later in the month, Guild Hall School of Music in London will be the setting for the world premiere of a piano work for four hands, “In Memoriam: Carola Grindea.”
Despite her fame in the classical music world, both nationally and internationally, Goolkasian Rahbee is little known in the Armenian community. To draw attention to her accomplishments, the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA) will sponsor a concert celebrating her music on Sun., Sept. 26 at 3 p.m. at the Armenian Cultural Foundation (ACF) in Arlington, Mass. Compositions for piano, voice, and violin will be featured.
Daughter of genocide survivor
Born in Somerville, Mass., Goolkasian Rahbee is the daughter of an Armenian Genocide survivor, Peter Aharon Goolkasian, a pharmacist who was active in the local Armenian community. At age 84, Goolkasian decided to commit his life story to paper and wrote a frank memoir, My Life, dedicating it to “all those people in the family of humanity that have suffered from man’s inhumanity to man.” Goolkasian Rahbee notes that her father was unusually candid about his experiences with human brutality, but was never defined by it. “He was a great lover of life, never bitter, and despite losing almost his entire family, he was one of the most optimistic people I knew,” she explains.
Goolkasian Rahbee says that her early love for music was sparked by her talented violinist mother, Zabelle Yeshilian. Dianne began her piano studies in Boston with Antoine Louis Moeldner, who had himself studied with Helen Hopekirk and Ignacy Paderewski. Hopekirk, a respected composer as well as pianist, served as an early role model for Goolkasian Rahbee.
After continuing her studies at the Juilliard School in New York as a piano major, Goolkasian Rahbee went on to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria to study chamber music.
Goolkasian Rahbee returned to Boston and engaged for several years in teaching piano privately before deciding to concentrate more seriously on composing. Her earliest compositions consisted of pedagogical works for young piano students, but she rapidly broadened her attention to encompass different forms of music for piano, orchestra, instrumental ensembles, percussion, and voice. In 1985, she was elected president of American Women Composers, Massachusetts Chapter, and founded its annual marathon.
Since then, the long list of her compositions range from five piano sonatas (the most recent being the “Kiss of Peace,” commissioned by St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., and given its world premiere there last February), several concertos (for violin and orchestra, piano and orchestra, flute and orchestra), tone poems, bagatelles (for flute, mandolin, wind instruments), fanfares, toccatas, trios of various combinations, and even a wedding march.
It is said that her pianistic writing follows a style of the traditional keyboard repertoire using an idiom akin to Prokofieff, Scriabin, and Khachaturian. “Her neo-tonal musical language is wed to a strong sense of rhythmic drive, creating highly communicative and effective concert pieces,” according to Wikipedia encyclopedia.
Armenian accent
Regarding the influence of her Armenian roots on her music, Goolkasian Rahbee explained in a recent interview, “My musical language is indicative of everything I’ve experienced—it’s a mixture.”
She said that at times she is consciously aware of Armenian influences on her work, but often she is not. “So often people say to me, ‘It sounds very Armenian,’ but I don’t hear it,” she went on. “It’s like having an accent. Armenian was my first language. I grew up first learning Armenian, and had to learn English before I went to school,” she said. “So it’s like an accent in everything I do, but my musical training was the typical classical training,” she pointed out.
Goolkasian Rahbee’s fame is firmly rooted in her pedagogical compositions, and she is popular with teachers and students alike. Typical are the comments from a recent young pianist (Will Bristol, 17) upon winning first prize in “From the Top,” National Public Radio’s program profiling talented young musicians, by playing one of her works. “Dianne Rahbee’s ‘Toccata’ from her Sonata No. 1 is a very satisfying piece to play,” he said. “It’s not a controlled, refined piece, but rather a wild and crazy outpouring of emotion. This is the most appropriate piece I’ve ever come across for letting out anger. You get to let your anger out on the piano in the same way some people let out frustration on a punching bag.”
Quite different in mood are the “Phantasie Variations,” described by a New York Times critic as “postserial in its persuasion, but its lovely feeling for piano color and its often lazy, lyric quality never sounded didactic or oppressive.”
The highly acclaimed young flutist Mimi Stillman continues to include in her performances Goolkasian Rahbee’s “Bagatelles,” written for her when she was a young girl of 9 or 10. To suggestions that she might play more sophisticated compositions, Stillman insists that playing “Bagatelles” is fun—and isn’t that what music is all about.
One of the compositions most frequently performed in recent years is Goolkasian Rahbee’s “Ballade No. 2: Nine/Eleven World Trade Center Flashbacks,” a piece inspired by the 2001 catastrophe in New York City. One section of the piece, “In Memoriam,” is dedicated to a former student, Ted Hennessy, who perished in the conflagration.
It is a career studded by highlights, one of which was surely the October 2008 concert at Aram Khatchaturian Hall in Yerevan, when son David Alexander Rahbee conducted the Yerevan Philharmonic Orchestra in the “Urartu Rhapsodie” for piano and orchestra. That concert also featured the premier of the piano concerto dedicated to Diane Andersen, the Belgian pianist known as an especially fine interpreter of Goolkasian Rahbee’s work.
Son David is beginning a conducting career in Europe and the United States. Formerly director of the “Fidelio Chamber Orchestra in Boston,” he has been living in Vienna for the past eight years. Younger son Adam Rahbee, a transportation engineering graduate of MIT, plays organ, clavichord, and harpsichord.
The Sept. 26 concert will include a performance of the “Kiss of Peace,” Sonata No.5, played by pianist George Lopez, who premiered the piece earlier this year in New Hampshire; a one-act mini-musical drama “Robbery,” based on a text by poet Diana Der-Hovanessian and performed by soprano Noune Karapetian, accompanied by pianist Nune Hagopian; Sonata Breve with violinist Magdalena Richter; and various solos performed by pianists Miriam Gargarian and Lilit Karapetian Shougarian.
For more information about the concert, contact AIWA by calling (617) 926-0171 or visiting aiwainc@aol.com.
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