04/01/2026
"Delighted to announce that, further to the initiative and tireless efforts of Prof. Maria Alexandru, the very first volume of the journal Studies in the Music of the Christian East and Orient has just been published today, under the auspices of the International Musicological Society, Hellenic Musicological Society and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and is dedicated to the Blessed Memory of the Very Rev. Prof. Ivan Moody. I have been honoured to publish a seventy-six-page article therein, entitled Melismaticity in the repertoire of sacred Armenian chants. Indeed, the electronic format of this open-access journal permits the inclusion of a substantial number of examples, including recorded sound files sung by myself and (thanks to the kindness of Minas Lourian of the Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armenia in Venice) the late Mekhitarist Father, the Very Rev. Vrtanes Oulouhodjian of Blessed Memory, drawn from the Armenian Liturgical Chants Sound Archive Project - a separate article devoted to which will appear in the second issue of the journal.
My congratulations go to Maria Alexandru, Charles Atkinson and to all who worked to make the journal a reality, to my fellow contributors - including Giuseppe Sanfratello, Athanasios Delios and Gigi Garofalo; and I sincerely thank all friends and colleagues who assisted me in this research - listed in the acknowledgement section, but especially the Mekhitarist Fathers in Venice and Vienna, and the Czech composer Stanislav Posluลกnรฝ for his invaluable assistance with the music examples. The entire journal may be perused and downloaded at this address".
Haig Utidjian
All published articles and supplementary material of this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
