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Years ago, a young student at the Komitas Conservatory of Yerevan was searching the archives for historical recordings of traditional music when he came across something unexpected: audio recordings of one of his ancestors. Arsen Petrosyan listened, stunned as he realized he was hearing his great-grandfather playing the duduk.

“I was very emotional, and I had goosebumps,” says the now 32-year-old artist. Hearing his great-grandfather play the same instrument to which he had devoted his own life was a full-circle moment: “I realized that I was on the right path.” 

Music is part of Petrosyan’s family DNA: eight of his great-grandfather’s eleven children were singers. Like their father, they grew up in Javakhk, a region in southern Georgia where the majority of the population is Armenian. Rural life, where people often make music using only their voices, shaped the musical sensibilities of the generations that came before Arsen. 

Komitas, the father of modern Armenian music, believed the purest form of the traditional repertoire was vocal. Peasants working the farmlands were its custodians, composing songs to accompany folk dances. 

In Komitas’ view, foreign influences from Persia, the Arab world, and Turkey introduced superfluous embellishments: musical instruments dictated the tempo of the dances, while vocal melodies were adorned with trills. He believed both diluted the soul of Armenian national music. 

Today, the essence of the Armenian soundscape is epitomized in the duduk. However, in spite of the duduk’s contemporary status, Komitas did not write extensively about this double-reed aerophone, as it is technically classified. Nor did he compose original music for it. 

The reasons why Komitas did not include the duduk are unknown. What is certain is the lack of reliable pre-20th-century documentation of the duduk’s sound. Dr. Jon McCollum, a professor of music at Washington College and one of the world’s leading duduk experts, explains that the available sources are indirect and insufficient to draw conclusions. As a result, the history of its ancient sound largely remains a mystery. 

But there is something McCollum is sure of: “These sources consistently situate reed-pipe instruments within vernacular and communal musical life,” he says. Families such as Arsen’s great-grandparents played the duduk at weddings, seasonal festivities, funerary rites and dances, while it was absent from courtly patronage or ecclesiastical liturgies. 

Nevertheless, the instrument was more than a guitar around a campfire. Across the Armenian highlands, Anatolia, and the South Caucasus, similar practices developed and branched into the duduk, the Azerbaijani balaban, and the Turkish mey. Over time, a professionalized vernacular tradition emerged, and families and communities refined their skills across generations. 

In Armenia, duduk makers favored apricot wood; the timbre emphasized breath noise and vocality, and performances paired the main duduk with a secondary duduk, the dam (or drone) that continuously sounded a foundational low note. These evolutions made the duduk more than folk music, yet less than a professional performance.

In his search for what he considered the purest expression of Armenian music, Komitas looked to the traditional songs and instruments of village communities. He brought these melodies to the concert stage by arranging them for polyphonic choirs or piano. The ancient folk repertoire remained his North Star, while traditional instruments served mainly as points of reference. In his arrangements, aerophones appear only in passing: Komitas, for example, left specific instructions for imitating the shvi, a flute of the pastoral tradition, as well as the harmonies of other instruments he heard in the villages. 

Still, part of me feels that this association between the duduk and grief is too easy—at least to my foreign ear. When I listen, I do feel a kind of melancholic nostalgia, but not the gloomy, oppressive sadness that seems to have become its default description. It feels lighter, almost uplifting. It’s nostalgia for a place I have never been, for an ancient time I have never lived, for something more universal.

But there’s a dilemma: is our perception of the duduk’s music part of a universal grammar of human life, or just a consequence of how tragedies shaped 20th-century Armenian history?

Some aspects of the last century’s duduk culture argue against universality. 

Komitas was often critical of urban or foreign arrangements that imposed a sad, “minor” character on Armenian melodies. He believed they should be vibrant or energetic, reflecting what he saw as the vitality of the Armenian peasant. He criticized mournful arrangements of the Holy Liturgy, the principal Mass of the Armenian Apostolic Church, arguing that they “saddened the powerful news of the resurrection,” when they should have been a “beautiful major scale.” Arax’s Tears (or Araksi Artasuke) also came under criticism: Komitas objected to the coldness of its Northern Protestant chorale style, which he felt could not convey the lively energy of the Armenian peasant.

Yet the musical afterlife of this song took a different turn. In the early 2000s, Lévon Minassian and Armand Amar gave Arax’s Tears an intensely mournful reading, with the duduk deepening its sense of lament. Dle Yaman, a traditional song collected by Komitas as a love song, has likewise acquired a very different meaning over time. Today, often performed on the duduk, it has become a powerful vessel for memory, yearning and loss, a lament for a homeland that has come to stand for the pain of survival. Komitas was resisting the idea that Armenian music was inherently mournful. But the 20th century gave some of the very songs he collected a new emotional life, one in which grief became almost inseparable from their sound.

During the Soviet period, vernacular practices were transformed into concert ensembles. Conservatories created ad hoc curricula and institutionalized Armenian music. Pop culture carried it into every living room: recordings of Vache Hovsepyan, one of the first masters to bring the duduk onto major stages as a virtuoso, introduce Jesus’ personal torments in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 movie “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Jivan Gasparyan, whom many consider the Mozart of the duduk, used it to channel Maximus’ nostalgia for home in Ridley Scott’s “The Gladiator” (2000), as he seeks comfort in the wise emperor Marcus Aurelius. 

These examples reinforce a central idea: our perception of duduk music is shaped by cultural scripts. As McCollum notes, “Contemporary reception is heavily mediated by film music conventions, recorded performance traditions, and historical awareness of Armenian twentieth-century experience.” 

Science echoes this view. Leading experts have long been skeptical of music’s universality, arguing that each listener forms a personal interpretation. Shaped by social and natural environments, these interpretations help determine how societies receive and develop harmonious compositions of sounds. George List, one of the founders of modern ethnomusicology, epitomizes this widely shared position: “The only universal aspect of music seems to be that most people make it.”

However, modern duduk artists such as Artak Asatryan and Arsen Petrosyan reject this view. They frame the duduk’s sound as a kind of secular pain, a mirror of Armenian mentality and history that stretches far beyond the last hundred years. Displacement, wars and foreign domination that have shaped hearts and minds for millennia seem to flow through the duduk’s reed in emotion, vibrato and a specific feeling. “It’s not sadness that is shouting, it’s all inside. You can smile but be sad at the same time,” says Asatryan.

Petrosyan argues that the duduk’s material largely determines its timbre. The grain of the apricot wood uniquely produces its frequencies. One entrepreneur specializing in duduk production is Vardges Melkonian, who founded Vamelo, Armenia’s first duduk manufacturing company. Melkonian knows that “producing ethnic musical instruments comes with complications. Blending together elements like cultural roots and psychology requires several masters.” After drying the apricot wood for one year, Vamelo’s artisans, working under Melkonian’s guidance, use the inner, darker, and older part of the trunk for premium instruments. With the help of modern machines, eight masters each focus on a specific step: bore cutting, wood selection, glossing and sanding the surface, making holes, coloring, and tuning. At full capacity, Vamelo produces 100 duduks a week. 

But one crucial step is still entirely handmade. Mounted on top of the instrument’s wooden body and placed directly in the player’s mouth, the duduk reed takes a day to make. It is the soul of the instrument. Made from a thin, flattened piece of cane, the reed forms a tight seal that controls airflow into the bore and vibrates to produce its expressive sound. Melkonian says it is the most expensive part. Arundo donax, the giant cane species that fits the duduk’s body because of its large diameter, was harvested from Artsakh until 2023. Now it is an expensive import from abroad.

Players like Petrosyan and Asatryan have their favorite duduk, an instrument that feels like a natural extension of their fingers, lungs and souls. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Armenian or not,” Petrosyan says. Describing its sound, he emphasizes its unique ability to stir basic human expression and evoke emotion: “It’s a mystical heritage to all humans.”

This mysticism, they suggest, may come from something shared among all living beings. As Asatryan explains, musical time signatures like 2/4 or 4/4 do not define the rhythm of duduk melodies. Breath does. Each melodic contour is played as “one breath, one phrase,” mimicking a heavy exhale associated with different feelings. In sad songs, it becomes a sigh; in happy songs, the breath turns into quivering gasps. Expressions that transcend cultures and languages, such as sorrow, suffering, excitement and surprise translate into breathing patterns that give life to the melody. “At the end, the meaning of music is that whatever you have at that moment: celebration, sadness, love, nostalgia, loss—it’s all expressed with singing, with playing. That becomes part of the human soul,” Petrosyan says.

A growing body of scientific research supports the idea that music evokes similar feelings regardless of culture. No one has conducted experiments centered on the duduk. However, McCollum notes that listeners associate its common acoustic features—slow tempo, sustained tones, descending melodic contour, low variation in loudness, and breath-inflected timbre, with sadness or introspection.

By studying diverse populations, from industrialized societies to isolated tribal groups in Cambodia or Cameroon, researchers made a strong claim: humans share an emotional code regardless of society. Across cultural backgrounds, listeners show a relatively uniform recognition of basic emotions such as happiness, sadness and fear in music they have never heard before. Moreover, our species can infer a song’s social purpose simply by hearing its melody. In other words, listeners can associate a lullaby with soothing a child, a dance with coordinated motion, a healing ritual with curing the sick, or a love song with a partner.

Despite ongoing debate, the idea that music emerges from universal features of human nature is gaining more traction. 

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If music didn’t arise solely for entertainment but evolved to address social needs, then the duduk’s acoustics resonate with a particular mood. “It generates a timbral profile that is frequently categorized cross-culturally as introspective or plaintive,” McCollum explains. The aftermath of genocide, large-scale displacement, and the formation of a global diaspora intensified these affective associations. The duduk became an emblem for Armenians, both within Armenia and across the diaspora.

But Armenian music has historically included older genres of lament (voghb), exile song, and lyric poetry, forms that match the duduk’s qualities perfectly. “It is therefore inaccurate to posit a purely modern ‘assignment’ of melancholy to the instrument,” McCollum says. 

So there has been a convergence. In our time, popular sentiment and history have blended into music, and the duduk gives voice to what might otherwise remain unheard.

From Armenia’s overlooked perfume heritage and the invisible border between Eastern and Western Armenian to Vanadzor’s quietly flourishing creative scene and the enduring voice of the duduk, this month’s SALT reveals the many ways that identity is expressed and preserved.