Anahid Ajemian obit

SAD NEWS | American Violinist Anahid Ajemian Has Died - Aged 92

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Armenian-American violinist Anahid Ajemian has passed away - aged 92.

A student of Edouard Dethier at the Juilliard School, she was a former 1st prize winner at the Walter W Naumburg Foundation competition - and a founding member of the New York-based Composers String Quartet.

She served a long term faculty teaching position at Columbia University.

Ajemian was born in Manhattan on January 26, 1924, to Armenian immigrant parents. Her father was a physician and her mother a pianist. She began her music studies early at the Institute of Musical Art, which later merged with the Juilliard School. After graduating from the Lincoln School, Ajemian continued her education at the Juilliard School, studying violin with Édouard Dethier and chamber music with Hans Letz and Felix Salmon, and played in the Juilliard orchestra under Albert Stoessel and Edgar Shenkman.

In 1946, while still a student of Édouard Dethier at the Juilliard Graduate School of Music, Ajemian won the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation Award. In the same year, she made her debut at Town Hall and received the Distinguished Achievement Medal from Mademoiselle magazine as the Young Woman of the Year in Music. Among the many honors that have followed, the Order of St. James appointed her a Knight of Malta for her lifelong support of contemporary classical music.

With her pianist sister Maro Ajemian, she performed in Europe, Canada and throughout the United States in a wide repertoire including works which were written for them by such distinguished composers as John Cage, Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness, Ernst Krenek, Lou Harrison, Wallingford Riegger, Carlos Surinach, and Ben Weber. Together and separately, the Ajemian sisters recorded extensively for Columbia, RCA Victor, MGM and Composers Records, Inc. They were the first musicians to receive the Laurel Leaf Award of the Composers Alliance for Distinguished Service to American Music.

Ajemian and her sister were equally known for their interpretations of the standard classical repertoire. A unique feature of the many television programs they taped for NBC's Recital Hall and the National Educational Television Network was their series of programs comprising the complete cycle of all ten Beethoven Sonatas for Violin and Piano. They appeared as soloists under the batons of Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leopold Stokowski and Izler Solomon, and recorded with the latter two.

Also during the 1940s, Ajemian co-founded the New York City-based organization Friends of Armenian Music Committee, which did much to launch the career of fellow Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness, via a series of well-received New York concerts of his music. These concerts were repeated in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ajemian and her husband, George Avakian, started Music for Moderns, a Town Hall, in 1957.

Our condolences are with Ms Ajemian's family, friends, colleagues and students.