The traditional ethnic hymns, chants and dances that the Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff collected around the turn of the 20th century, and later transcribed with the help of the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, are among the most entrancing works ever written for piano. Many are simple: a slender melodic line, curled here and there into arabesques, above a prayer-bead string of repeated notes in the bass. Each piece is brief — the length of a pop song — and powerfully hypnotic.
And yet the last thing Gurdjieff wanted was to put listeners in a trance. The worldview of this enigmatic seeker, who died in Paris in 1949 — The New York Times said he was 83, but he may have been over a decade younger — was that too many people went about their lives like automatons. They needed to bring their emotional, physical and mental intelligences into balance, and wake up.
This month, a group of Armenian musicians will present concerts in Chicago (Sept. 25), New York (Sept. 27) and Pasadena, Calif. (Sept. 29), that cast Gurdjieff’s music in a bold new light. By playing his works on the traditional instruments of their regions of origin, juxtaposed with piano versions, the Gurdjieff Ensemble offers listeners a chance to hear the music in a way that is ethnically specific, and in jolting bright color.
Levon Eskenian, who founded the ensemble and arranged the music, spoke in a Skype interview about the work that went into identifying the musical background of each piano miniature. In his youth, Gurdjieff had traveled throughout the Caucasus, Middle East and North Africa collecting melodies: shepherd tunes and songs for plowing, liturgical chants and funerary rites.
“These are real pieces that passed through Gurdjieff,” said Mr. Eskenian. “Music for work, for different rituals, for mourning. You can still find some of them transmitted orally in certain places.”
One reason the piano pieces sound so concentrated and pure is that they are the result of a double process of sublimation. First they were filtered through Gurdjieff’s memory, then through de Hartmann’s transcriptions. A 2011 recording on the ECM label gives a flavor of how the music is altered through Mr. Eskenian’s reverse transcriptions. A Kurdish shepherd melody takes on new wildness when it’s played with gusty exuberance on a ney (a Middle Eastern flute). Dances spin to life with the addition of nervy frame drums.
The undisputed star of the ensemble, though, is the duduk, a reed instrument with a malleable sound that can be porous and fragile or full-throated and uncannily human-sounding. In his transcriptions Mr. Eskenian uses it for mystical chants, as well as for the emotionally raw number called “Assyrian Women Mourners.”
Mr. Eskenian thinks that Gurdjieff chose the piano as the repository for his music collection for practical reasons. But in the course of his research, Mr. Eskenian came across a document from later in Gurdjieff’s life, when he lived and taught in Paris, that speaks of plans for a performance on traditional instruments.
“At one of his concerts it was announced that the following year they would perform the music of Gurdjieff on 40 instruments that he had collected on his journeys,” said Mr. Eskenian, adding that the project never materialized. But he saw it as a sign that Gurdjieff himself intended to reconnect the melodies to the colors with which he had first heard them.
Doing justice to the geographic specificity of Gurdjieff’s music also led to an unusual recording project by the pianist Frederic Chiu. In a phone interview, Mr. Chiu said he first encountered Gurdjieff through his writings, before becoming fascinated by the works for piano.
Reconciling the natural limitations of the piano’s fixed pitches with the rich variety of tuning systems that underlie Middle Eastern music became an obsession. “It’s not so much that this music came out of this particular region,” Mr. Chiu said. “Rather, there was a purity to it that pushed me to explore temperaments” — tunings — “something I had never even been sensitive to until that point.”
With the help of an expert in Arabic music, Mr. Chiu identified particular Gurdjieff melodies as, for example, Egyptian or Syrian, and created custom tunings for each. This means that certain key intervals, like fifths, ring out with crystalline clarity.
Mr. Chiu has more recently performed this program on a Yamaha TransAcoustic piano, which connects the instrument’s natural soundboard to a digital processor. This new technology allows him to create the illusion that the piano changes tuning for each piece in the concert.
On his 2016 album, “Hymns and Dervishes,” Mr. Chiu juxtaposes melodies inflected with Eastern and Western tunings in a way that echoes Mr. Eskenian’s efforts to highlight the ethnic diversity of the Gurdjieff canon. “I wanted to point out that even within the Gurdjieff work there is a meeting of cultures,” Mr. Chiu said.
He added that his play with the intonation of the normally fixed piano was one way to stop the listener from mindlessly blissing out. “It’s constantly changing the ground underneath you,” he said. “It’s like walking on those shoes that have the rounded sole: you’re never able to just stay there and relax.”
Gurdjieff Ensemble
Tours to Chicago, New York and Pasadena, Calif., this month; gurdjieffensemble.com.
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