Komitas

Before Madonna or Midori, before Liberace, nearly a full century before any of the one-name artists with whom we today feel so comfortable, there was Komitas, very possibly the first one-name musician in modern times (ancient and Medieval times were, on the other hand, full of one-name people). The man who went by the name Komitas was an Armenian composer, conductor, and folk music collector who was born Soghomon Soghomonian in 1869. He died in Paris in 1935, having in his 66 years of life collected (literally) thousands and thousands of folk songs and authored many dozen chor...